Village of the Damned (1960)

APRIL 11, 2016

GENRE: ALIEN, KILLER KID
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

Since it was bought at a Big Lots, which I only go to on Black Friday, I would put it in November of 2012 that I picked up Village of the Damned and its sequel on a cheap double feature disc, for the sole purpose of watching it for Horror Movie A Day before the site ended a few months later. And tonight, in April of 2016, over three years after the site ended, I finally opened it and watched it, for no other reason than to strengthen my defense of John Carpenter's unfairly maligned remake, which hits blu-ray today from Scream Factory (you can read my thoughts on that one at BMD). Since JC's film has always been kind of raked over the coals (even by the filmmaker himself), I figured the original had to be a minor masterpiece, at least within the sub-genre, so imagine my surprise to discover that it's... pretty good?

I mean, it's a perfectly enjoyable movie and all, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't think Carpenter's improved on it a little, or, at the very least, certainly didn't do to it what Rupert Wainwright did to him a decade later. I prefer the 1995 version's completely robotic, in-sync army of children to this film's slightly less tight-knit group, and since Carpenter's film was in color (which existed at the time this one was made, so it's a legit point of comparison) his choice to have the children appear in "black and white" (with their bleached hair and ugly gray attire) set them apart in a way this film doesn't quite convey as well. Also, despite Carpenter's penchant for cynicism, his film is actually warmer and more humane, with more of the townsfolk in their element before the blackout that spawns the pregnancies - in this one, it occurs in the first two minutes (!), after we've only met a single character.

But seeing his film first (I don't usually watch the remakes first, but come on - I was 15 when Carpenter's came out!) gave me appreciation for both in a weird way, as it was fun realizing how he had "remixed" certain elements of the film while retaining some of its iconography, however random. Like, he reprised the idea of a character who was overseas when his wife got pregnant (and thus clearly isn't the father) and both films even have that character looking distressed as someone attempts to take their picture, but in Carpenter's film he's the one that accidentally almost runs one of the kids over and is mind-controlled to his fiery vehicular death as a result. Here, it's that character's brother, and then he tries to take his revenge by shooting them, only for the children to force him to use the gun on himself - the way Mark Hamill's unrelated character is offed in the 1995 version. If you're a fan who can keep an open mind with remakes (i.e. not get angry at the slightest deviations), it must have been fun to see Carpenter sticking to the material but changing the specifics to keep it fresh for them.

One thing I wasn't expecting here was the heavy military presence. Nearly all of the primary characters are in or very connected to the local military, which is another way to say that there aren't nearly as many female characters here - odd considering that it's about a bunch of recently born babies (most of the moms we only see once, in fact). Not that a film focusing on how the men deal with their "children" being so off wouldn't be intriguing and possibly even more interesting (at least for dads in the audience), but this isn't that movie - they talk a lot about the other colonies, perform their tests, etc., but don't really seem like "dads" in the slightest (in fact, like the moms, we barely see many of them anyway). Hero George Sanders says something to the effect of "I know it's her child... but I don't know that it's MINE" (which his wife overhears; harsh, dude), but that and the guy who thinks his wife two-timed him are pretty much the extent of the film's exploration of paternal psychology. There's a five minute scene of Sanders showing his brother-in-law how the kids share a brain, by letting one solve a puzzle box and then giving it to the other kids (who can now solve it instantly), but only 10 seconds about how conflicted they are as parents.

But: 'splosions! In addition to the car wreck, Michael Gwynn (the aforementioned brother-in-law) basically kills some poor pilot by telling him to fly into the infected area and "just pull back up if you feel strange", which of course the guy can't do since it knocks him out instantly and he steers his plane directly into the ground. And the ending is pretty much identical, with the hero bringing a bomb into the school and using the image of a brick wall to keep the children from knowing what he's up to. The movie is only 77 minutes, so considering its age it's kind of relatively action-packed once you add in the other dangerous moments spurned on by the evil kids. However, as with Carpenter's, there's a lot more going on that we never really see, including the other areas where a bunch of babies were born simultaneously, various "accidents" around town, etc. I tweeted earlier that I think this story (meaning the original novel by John Wyndham) would be well-suited for a season-long mini-series, which would allow us to see those other areas (think Game of Thrones' multi-national production with characters who never have/presumably will share scenes) and flesh out some of the elements that the two movies didn't have time for, i.e. what parents must go through when they realize that their child is an evil alien. In both versions this gets skipped over, basically; there's a flash forward to the point where the parents are already kind of resigned to their fate, leaving that middle part up to our imagination. Given the differences in cultures, it would be interesting to see a variety of nations dealing with this problem (i.e. cultures where the fathers don't play any real part in a child's birth/raising anyway) as long as it stayed within the confines of those small infected areas.

Because that low-key approach is key to the film's success, ultimately. There isn't much of an attempt to find out the hows and whys, no one goes into outer space or whatever to find the aliens that sent these children down, or anything like that - it's a fantastical concept with a very (occasionally TOO) narrow focus, not unlike the recent 10 Cloverfield Lane. I mean, yeah, I want to see the other colonies, but only for the smaller, more personal differences they might offer - I have no interest in ever seeing the children wiping out humanity (or, god help us, a goddamn prequel about the aliens coming up with this plan in the first place), or even other genre type settings at all. I just want to see the look on the dad's face when he's rocking what he thinks is his baby to sleep only to realize it has glowing eyes - and how that affects his baby-rocking routine the following evening. Maybe it's just my hyperactive dad gene talking, but to me that's kind of a fascinating thing to explore, and for years I assumed Carpenter's film had trimmed some of that stuff down in favor of more horror-y set-pieces (like Buck Flower's death, a sequence with no counterpart in the original). I'm actually kinda stunned that if anything, his had more of it.

The disc has Children of the Damned as well; I ASSUME it won't take me over three years to get to that one but with me who really knows. I have been told that it actually does explore the other colonies a bit (my friend Jared described it as "United Nations of the Damned") so that's certainly intriguing enough to keep it in mind. As for Village itself, I enjoyed it, but again, the frequent jabs at Carpenter's version had me thinking he had somehow desecrated a classic - the irony is that the original is the equivalent of his, in that it's a pretty good movie that could be better.

What say you?

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The Boy (2015)

MARCH 16, 2016

GENRE: KILLER KID
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Now that it's finally finished, for the foreseeable future the highest compliment I can bestow on a movie is "I wish I could have put it in my book". Since it took a little longer to write than planned ("little longer" = over a year past my original idea of a release), I often wished I hadn't set a cutoff date for applicable entries (March 31st, 2013 - the last day of daily watching/reviewing), as it kept me from including gems like The Canal and Lords of Salem in the chapters where they would be perfect matches. And now here we are again with The Boy, one of the best evil child movies I've seen in years and almost the very definition of the kind of movie I wanted to highlight in the book: under the radar gems that were maybe imperfect but ultimately DIFFERENT enough for that not to matter.

And it doesn't help that it shares a title with the film that is, for now, the year's most successful horror movie. Normally when two movies share a title, one's bad and the other is good (Alone in the Dark - Uwe Boll's being the bad one, obviously), and/or they're spread far enough apart that it's fine, but THIS Boy is hitting Blu-ray only a few weeks after the other one hit theaters, so even saying "the new one!" doesn't help. I will probably using "the creepy doll" or "NOT the one with the creepy doll" to differentiate (actor names are useless for some people, so "The one with David Morse" might not be enough). I don't do top 10 lists anymore (thank Christ), but if I did I wouldn't be surprised if both Boys ended up on it, and for some reason that annoys me. Like I'd almost rather one of them sucked and was forgotten than have to keep explaining which one I'm talking about if I was using general terms (i.e. "The Boy has a great score!"), because I would obviously like to talk about both.

One key difference is that the other Boy had a twist that changed the sub-genre on us, but that's not the case here. If anything, I wish it DID, because the cover gives away the ending (spoilers ahead for those who haven't seen the cover yet! If you plan to VOD, don't read any further!), showing the kid standing in front of the burning motel where the entire movie takes place. I guess we can hold out hope he just sets a fire with no one inside (the place is empty throughout most of the film, after all), but around the film's halfway point his father (Morse) mentions that a bunch of kids coming from prom will be staying there that weekend, and when they show up they're a bunch of jerks, so it's zero surprise that they're goners - seeing the nice girl survive a Friday the 13th movie is more of a shock. I mean, I guess it's nice that they don't puss out like in The Good Son*, but I can't help but wonder if they would have been just as successful going with a subtle image, enticing as many buyers/renters but without showing us a still from its climax.

Then again, promising mass destruction (and presumed mass death along with it) might help, as the film is a whopping 110 minutes. As I'm a sucker for this kind of material (and uncharacteristically having trouble falling asleep the night I watched it - I figured I'd only see about half and finish it in the morning, but I watched it all AND the making of featurette!), I didn't mind the length too much; there were a couple of things that probably could have been cut or at least trimmed, but the slow, methodical pace is one of the things that I liked about it. Director Craig William MacNeill (who also edited, and co-wrote with Clay McLeod Chapman) favors long takes and slow zooms, giving it a very '70s feel that I very much enjoyed (the score also screamed 1970s, specifically Texas Chain Saw Massacre), and if the movie was whittled down to 88 minutes it wouldn't have that same luring effect. Still, when someone can watch nearly three episodes of something on Netflix in the time it takes to watch the film, I would be shocked if I didn't read a lot of "too long!" and "I shut it off before anything happened, how did it end?" type posts.

So what fills up that time, if he's not going on a killing spree in the first five minutes? Mostly, a lot of scenes that perfectly illustrate the kid's sad and lonely existence. There are long stretches that don't even really have dialogue as he wanders around the motel grounds, finding little things to do, watching the roads for signs of life, etc. The motel that he works at with his father is more desolate and under-populated than Norman Bates', and he wants nothing more than to go to Florida to be with his mom, who ran away with one of their few guests some time before. His dad isn't much of one (we learn he was raised the same way, which explains why he doesn't know any better) and the very occasional guests can't really count as friends since they come and go. When he disables a family's car to force them to stay another day, it's the rare moment in a killer kid movie that works as an act of the sinister things to come, and as a rather heartbreaking moment, as he's doing it so he can spend more time with their same-aged son.

But that's nothing on the film's most wrenching moment, when Ted is beaten up by the prom kids after one of them catches him sneaking into their room and trying to murder a passed-out girl (the jerk teen assumes he was copping a feel). He's left on the ground outside, and starts crawling his way to the office, screaming for his dad - it's the only time in the movie (I think) that he actively asks for his father's help, as despite the fact that he's obviously a budding serial killer he's also still a little boy who needs his dad. But Morse is drunk and takes the opportunity to scream at him for bothering the guests, which is pretty much the straw breaking the camel's back as far as Ted's humanity goes - you get the idea that if Morse had just comforted him and acted like a father, maybe he could start readjusting into a normal kid (or he'd recognize that his son needed help and get him some before it was too late). As a dad, this scene devastated me, and again - it was so unique to see the "Oh shit now everyone's gonna die!" moment in one of these things also act as one that was truly sad; I legitimately felt terrible for the kid even though I knew he was about to immolate a bunch of other people's children.

The 3rd main character in the movie is Rainn Wilson as a mysterious widower, carrying a box of his wife's ashes and the possible guilt of being the one who killed her in the first place. His character is meant to act as a sort of surrogate father to the kid, but it falls a bit flat since we never really know his intentions. There's a local cop played by Bill Sage (from the great We Are What We Are remake) who is suspicious of him, and some really clunky dialogue to set up Wilson as a potential arsonist (which Ted never hears, so how he's able to use that to pin the fire on Wilson later is beyond me)... it was necessary to give Ted a way out at the end, and their scenes together are good in and of themselves, but it felt like it was missing something. I don't want to get too cynical and suggest they had to work in a role for another name so that they could sell the movie, but that's honestly what it felt like. His attachment issues were made clear by the other guests (and like them, Wilson has to stick around until his car is repaired of the damages Ted caused), so they were slightly redundant as well as underdeveloped. Not a crippling flaw, but when the storyline concludes I couldn't help but wonder if I had missed something.

Though if I did, I wasn't missing as much as the people who watched the movie when it showed on Chiller, as it was cut down to around 90 minutes to fit a two hour block with commercials. The IMDb boards have explained some of what was missed (including one of the scenes I alluded to being something I could cut), but the ones they mention don't add up to twenty minutes, so if I had to guess they either trimmed those great long takes throughout, or worse, sped the movie up (I've seen them do it on other movies, running a film at something like 120% speed, just enough to make it run a little faster but not make everyone sound like a chipmunk). That sort of presentation, along with the commercials breaking up the atmosphere (it was shot in Colombia, but they fake the lonely southwest very well) must have made for a very unsatisfying viewing, so thank Christ I missed it when it aired and saw it properly. Obviously if I knew there was a killer kid movie featuring David Morse (one of my all-time favorite character actors) on a channel with a pretty good track record for their originals, I would have sat down and watched the premiere, but it went completely off my radar until Scream Factory announced it was coming to their lineup.

But like their other Chiller releases, it's got the logo but it's not a full blown traditional SF release - the only extra is a rather shoddy making of piece (nope, not even the trailer - which is surprisingly true to the film's tone!), where none of the actors are mic'd and some of it looks like it was shot with a cell phone. Worse, Wilson pulls that obnoxious "it's not a horror movie, it's a psychological thriller" bullshit on us, so you can feel free to skip the whole thing, or at least fast forward to the end, where the producers explain that they have two sequels mapped out (!) and hope to be making them soon. As of this writing they don't seem to be doing that, but I guess the plan is to show Ted at different stages of adolescence, so maybe they enjoyed Jared Breeze's performance enough to wait until he ages a bit so they don't have to recast? I'd be down with that. Horror Boyhood!

What say you?

*An easy film to compare it to, since not only is David Morse in it (does he not age? How can he STILL look like a guy who could be the dad to a 9 year old?), but it's produced by Elijah Wood. I like to think they were making it up to us killer kid fans for that copout movie.

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Sinister 2 (2015)

AUGUST 21, 2015

GENRE: KILLER KID, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I was a pretty vocal champion of the first Sinister, and when I tallied up my favorite genre films of that year it came in behind only two others (and this was back when I saw 365+ horror movies a year, of course). One of those two films was Citadel*, so you can imagine I was pretty damn excited when the director of the latter signed on for Sinister 2, which would retain the writers of the first film. I didn't think it particularly NEEDED a sequel, but I figured the creative team and new characters (obviously) would give it enough of a spark to warrant a pass, especially in a year that's been painfully short on R-rated horror. Alas, as the saying goes: if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. The trailers didn't excite me much, but I still went in optimistic... only to leave disappointed. At best it felt like a DTV sequel (one that would have a much higher number than "2") that I'd watch at home and say it wasn't bad for a DTV sequel before forgetting that it existed, but that's hardly a ringing endorsement.

It's got a couple things in its corner, so I'll get to those first. The home movies return, and while none of them are as good as the original's "Lawn Work", there's a pretty good mix of pretty evil shit on display, including one family who is killed by the kid doing the "rat and bucket" torture we saw in 2 Fast 2 Furious. You almost get the impression the writers sat around coming up with crazy scenarios, not unlike the Saw guys coming up with the new traps. And while I originally groaned at the use of Night of the Living Dead on a TV (way overused in horror films due to its public domain status), it's the rare case of it actually making sense - the scene they're watching is of the little girl killing her mom. Sure, it's foreshadowing something we already know is gonna happen since this is a sequel to a movie where a little kid killed their parents, but for those three or four people watching this without having seen the first, it's a fun little throwaway clue.

And while I missed Ethan Hawke (and his fantastic sweater), James Ransome's Deputy So-and-So returns and takes center stage, so I was kind of charmed that this awkward, kinda goofy guy not too much unlike myself was the hero in a horror movie. When I heard he was returning as the lead I figured they'd shed him of his quirks and make him more of a traditional hero, but nope! If anything he's even more skittish, so it's kind of fun seeing that kind of character reacting to the usual horror movie nonsense (jump scares, reveals, etc). There's a scene where he has to stand up to some crooked cops, and when he actually succeeds he lets out this huge gasp, as if he was shocked it actually worked - I loved that bit. Even during the big climax, he's kind of a goon, pitifully hiding behind a desk and almost instantly getting trapped when the ghosts push it against the wall.

But his expanded role also hurts the movie in two ways. One is that they continue the "So-and-so" joke to a distracting degree. In the first he was a supporting character who only really dealt with Hawke's character, so it was a harmless, amusing little gag. But not so much here - he shows up at Shannyn Sossamon's house (she's the single mom with two boys who serves as this movie's main family) and she never asks his name, nor does her ex or the cops he brings with him when they show up later and try to get the boys back from her (it's the rare movie to present a nasty custody battle between two characters we don't really know). Like they have no idea who he is, and no one bothers to ask (even after he confronts them! Not even a rhetorical "Who the hell are you?"), which is absurd. A friend even calls him on the phone and calls him "Deputy" (even though he's no longer a deputy, having been fired for his transgressions in the first film), and while text messages from Sossamon's phone play a minor role, we only see his screen, never hers (which would almost assuredly have his name listed). I mean, Christ - was it really that important to retain this "detail" that they had to go out of their way to avoid giving him a damn name?

The other is more damaging - he's way behind the audience, even though we're supposed to be seeing these events through his eyes. An hour into the movie (more?) he visits a colleague of the Vincent D'Onofrio character from the first film (who sits this one out, he's mysteriously disappeared but left all of his research to this guy), who plays him some recordings from Norway (!) and we learn that Boogie always needs some sort of physical record - not necessarily film as we've seen so far (audio, artwork - anything works as long as it's evidence of his existence, which allows him to continue it). That's fine, but the movie then adds to the exposition dump and stops cold to inform So-and-so (and thus the audience) that Boogie... uses kids to do his deeds! You know, something we learned in the last movie and have been watching 60+ minutes of this one fully aware. The scene is shot/written/edited as if it should be just as big of a surprise to us at it was to him, and it was only at this point I realized So-and-So hadn't actually known that all along. I assumed all of his research (he's got one of those big boards, with red yarn connecting spots on a map and everything!) and the fact that he's been traveling around burning down "Boogie houses" to try to stop the cycle had informed him of the obvious link that the kids were doing it - never even crossed my mind he wouldn't have been aware of it by that point.

But at least his scenes are still entertaining in their little way, unlike the ones with Sossamon and her kids, which are tiresome and weighed down by a sub-Lifetime movie storyline about her one-note, abusive ex. There's a kernel of a good idea about Boogie's target being a dysfunctional family instead of the seemingly all-American normal ones we see in all of the home movies, but the husband's cartoonish villainy (he beats So-and-So to a pulp for no real reason, slaps one of the sons around for not eating his mashed potatoes, etc - it's about one step away from William Forsythe's stepfather asshole in Rob Zombie's Halloween) keeps it from ever being remotely interesting, because it's too simplistic and cliched to register. The original had the fine subplot of Hawke's declining career (and accompanying financial struggles), giving him (and his wife) some three-dimensional qualities you aren't always going to find in horror, but this mustache-twirling tyrant is seemingly the only thing that gives Sossamon's character a personality at all. She restores furniture, and hides a smoking habit, and... uh, that's it. If the husband hadn't found her it's possible she'd just be fixing up her old chairs and not really noticing that her sons were in some serious need of counseling.

See, the other key difference is that this time we're seeing Boogie work his "charms" on the kid, focusing on the would-be killer instead of his eventual victims. And the boys are twins, so the filmmakers get to have some fun with the idea that either one of them might be Boogie's next disciple (or, even cooler, maybe they'd fight over who got to be the chosen one). This means we get a lot more of the ghost kids that everyone hated in the first movie (that scene where Hawke walks around his house as ghost kids jump around like assholes all around him is the only part of the movie I didn't like), as they visit the more obvious kid (the quieter one) every night and make him watch another home movie. They even load the film for him! But he keeps resisting their attempts to recruit him, so finally his brother - more aggressive, like his dad - takes his place. But again, while this may be exciting to someone who hadn't seen the original (or even the trailer for this one, which focused heavily on its final reel), we know where it's headed, so watching them stretch it out, crawling to its inevitable conclusion, is far from riveting cinema. The only question is whether or not this kid will succeed - will he kill his family, or will someone stop him this time? As you might expect, waiting for the final 5 minutes for the movie to spring its only real source of suspense at us isn't really that great of an idea.

And that's the thing about the movie as a whole - there's no sense of surprise. The new details about Boogie aren't that exciting (he's... been to Norway?), the characters are all way behind the audience's knowledge of what's going on, and (spoiler of sorts) they don't really have the balls to do anything crazy. The R rating is mostly earned from the 8mm movies of people we don't know being killed and Sossamon's potty mouth, and I sincerely doubt the MPAA would have given it an R simply for being too scary like they did with The Conjuring. The jump scares aren't that effective (the best one was spoiled in the trailer) and there's no impending sense of dread like the original offered - I almost started to wish one of the boys suffered from night terrors. With the audience already likely to show up they should have used the opportunity to go even darker this time, taking the risk they can certainly afford (it's a Blumhouse movie, after all - profitability is guaranteed), but instead they went the other way - it felt tamer. Hell, they couldn't even trigger my over-reactive dad mechanism - normally over the past year I'd be bummed out/worked up with so many dead kids, but if anything I just felt bad that I brought my son to daycare early this morning so I could get to the theater and see this almost shockingly half-assed affair. I'd rather listen to the goddamn Alphabet Song for the millionth time (it seems every other toy he owns will play it) than watch a horror sequel go through the motions so soon in a would-be franchise.

What say you?

*Attack the Block was the other. No connection to Sinister 2, far as I can tell. Though I DID momentarily ponder how interesting an inner-city, apartment complex setting might be for this sort of thing.

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