The Disappointments of 2013

10) The Canyons 

Blech. This movie is gross and dumb and not fun at all. Paul Schrader owes Stephen Rodrick a fruit basket for that piece in the New York Times. Lindsay Lohan is one of entertainment's most tragic figures, painted in front of hundreds of millions of faces as a child star too weakened by her own vices to function, and Rodrick was wise enough to pour that narrative into a greater piece about failure in the film industry. Schrader, who once wrote with Scorsese, unable to get funding and forced to make micro-budget smut with Lohan and James Deen! It would be easier to feel sympathy for him if he hadn't chosen to film a Bret Easton Ellis script, or if the movie itself wasn't lit like a dive bar and completely lacking in even a single distinctive image. Ellis' script is overwrought hokum, as always, his gallery of drug-addled amoral nudes doing and saying nothing of interest. As for La Lohan herself, it's a bad performance, its marginal trainwreck appeal mostly drowned in mawkish amateurism, but it's fairly low on the list of things wrong with The Canyons. It would probably be easiest to list what's not wrong with it: it has boobs, and Deen's dead sociopath eyes are just right to play his menacing Hollywood wannabe role. And that's it. Any other compliments might cause you to actually watch the film, because admittedly it's quite a curiosity. I would recommend reading Rodrick's article, far more generous to the movie than it deserves, and then never thinking about this sorry black mark on the name of independent cinema again.

My Favorite Films of 2013

10) Computer Chess

Period pieces have an unusual burden. They must present a series of values and customs that are antiquated enough to appeal to an audience's historical curiosity, but they also can't be completely unmoored from contemporary framework, for fear of alienation. In that regard, Computer Chess is an anomaly. Shot on analog video cameras and improvised from an eight-page treatment, the film is formally vexing. Dry as a bone, rhythmically uneven, and laced with complex computer jargon, Andrew Bujalski doesn't transport you to the 80s so much as strand you in it, shooting "actors" on obsolete technology as they interact with obsolete technology. To call this niche would be charitable. But Bujalski's fourth feature is more relevant than its creaky exterior lets on, and once this tournament of competing computer chess programs sneaks in plot threads about a budding romance and a government sponsor, you're suddenly smack in the middle of an allegorical story about the birth of a new technological era. The film's freewheeling structure and casual engagement with genre elements allows it to bounce between the intersection of scientific growth and militarization, the human urge to reject new experiences, and the first inkling of a computer's capacity for intelligence, chillingly rendered through a series of simple messages. And this is to say nothing of the fetus or the prostitute or the army of cats. Difficult to watch, not for everyone, but unique enough to really stick.

La residencia (or The House That Screamed): Quasi-Lesbian Fascist Hijinks

This entry comes to you courtesy of Final Girl's December Film Club. Viva Ponder! Spoilers for the whole movie.

Yesterday I was given the opportunity to watch La residencia, a slice of late-60s Spanish-produced horror that has exerted considerable influence on the genre despite its cult status. The film is excellent, calling on antecedents from earlier in the decade such as The Innocents and Psycho; it is a delicate (if not soapier) depiction of the madness that germinates in isolated, sexually repressed minds. Its brutality is minimal but perversely poetic, and although its unconventional structure owes a debt to Hitchcock's earlier masterpiece, writer-director Narciso Ibanez Serrador's invocation of Fascist imagery and methodology gives his work a critical charge all its own. Produced and released during the twilight hours of Francisco Franco's dictatorship, Serrador's flirtation with strategically deployed nipples and incestuous kissing speaks to the crumbling of Spain's heavy cultural censorship, a product of an authoritarian environment quite like La residencia's titular boarding school. The moral is universal, though: save for its noticeably vintage fashions, La residencia is atemporal, and thanks to its spirited English dub and multicultural cast, the movie, although it takes place in France, could ostensibly be staged anywhere.

The 2013 Horror Digest, Part 3: The Killer Inside Me

I was really busy this week and I only wrote four entries instead of the typical five. I'm sure you are all beside yourselves about it. If you're curious, the omitted film was World War Z, which is probably my favorite blockbuster of the year. Who would have thought?

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane will probably be remembered more for its nightmarish release history than its content, a seven-year cautionary tale that catches Bob Weinstein in one of his more tone-deaf moments. Unshackled from the horror trends of 2006, a year glutted with remakes, sequels, and cheap torture flicks, Mandy Lane was cursed with a negative box office prognosis and bounced from studio to studio until the Weinsteins inexplicably purchased it again in 2013. That the film went on to double its budget in a limited international release may be a result of this sensationalized hype, but wouldn't it be nice if we could shelve the drama and give credit where credit is due? Mandy Lane, directed by the same Jonathan Levine behind this year's Warm Bodies, is a stylish and intelligent teen slasher sensibly rooted in the insecurities of its youthful cast. Mandy Lane (Amber Heard, better here than ever) is a stunning high schooler routinely hounded by boys, one of whom dies trying to impress her. Her enigmatic charm tarnished, she becomes something of a recluse, breaking out of her shell only long enough to attend a remote countryside party with a few acquaintances. As horror dictates, most of these teenagers are raging assholes, but Mandy Lane is sensitive enough not to fully place the blame on them. Their maladaptive behavior is instead shown as an extension of their self-hatred, manifested through body image issues and challenged masculinity; the film at large is a treatise on the corruptive influence of sexuality, and how complex the lives of the young grow when conscious attraction is introduced to them. Levine's emphasis on failed flirtation and body-shaming creates an embarrassed, uncomfortable atmosphere, one that the film only escapes during the moments where the gang forgets their sexual agendas and just has fun. The script is pitched a bit feverishly so as to facilitate the horror elements, which has led to reviews decrying its generic nature, most of them ignorant of the fact that this is a genre film and thus created in service of the aforementioned elements. It would be a different story if the ideas were stale (which they're not, as few teen horrors have such capably explored empathy for their victims) or if the execution was botched (which it wasn't - the movie looks gorgeous and the kills are solid). In their defense, Mandy Lane's greatest failing is that it can't fully reconcile the medium and the message, most noticeable in its clever but wobbly ending. Levine more than acquits himself with excellent craftsmanship, a talented cast, and the best damn soundtrack I've heard from the genre in years. Where else are you going to get a spread like Peaches, Beethoven, "Sister Golden Hair," and this lovely Bobby Vinton cut? Cool in 2006, cool in 2013. B+

The 2013 Horror Digest, Part 2: Beasties/Boys

Berberian Sound Studio

Since horror is so dependent on culturally recursive imagery, often scaring us with things that we know we'll be scared of, it proves itself a fertile ground for namechecking, parody, and homage. None of these intrigue me more than the giallo homage. Despite the fact that Italy's wackiest subgenre is characterized by arrhythmic narrative structure, unpredictable editing, and shot after non-sequitur shot, films attempting to pay their dues to such a singular cinematic phenomenon often employ these techniques too academically. Berberian Sound Studio, arriving three years after staid but enjoyable Amer or Dario Argento's God-awful Giallo, mostly manages to avoid this. Toby Jones plays a sensitive introvert who, having only designed sound for nature documentaries, finds that his new overseas gig producing gory sound effects for an Italian horror movie exacts a high emotional and mental toll. This movie has no aspirations toward true giallodom, instead borrowing giallo's delightfully squishy sound design (what do you think that produce is for?) and baroque low-key lighting to grant style to a mostly conventional narrative. Berberian Sound Studio is a far cry from generic shock horror, though, instead a sinister character piece as portrayed masterfully by Jones and facilitated through a series of increasingly oppressive interpersonal encounters. The problems set in during the final fifteen minutes, when the house of cards finally collapses and our protagonist finds himself in a set of alien circumstances that do little to illuminate what we've already seen of him. Far from the Berberian Sound Studio that wet its hands playing in the blood of giallos past, the ending swings wide and fails both in the typical and atypical realms the rest of the movie bounces between. It has its own intrigue if you're into random things (see also The Lords of Salem), but thrust like a knife into a carefully written screenplay, it makes sadly little sense. B 

A Friday the 13th of Friday the 13ths

Friday the 13th has a well-earned reputation as one of the most venerable horror franchises in history, but despite its formidable box-office success, its entries were mostly derided by critics and treated as slasher movie junk food. That junk-foodiness is so much of the appeal, though: this is a series of incredibly low density, even less than contemporaries Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street. They are intellectually disengaged, basally pleasing movies, providing all of the notorious bottom-of-the-barrel thrills that the genre trafficks in. They're always short, always ridiculous, and typically entertaining on at least one level, with some really unfortunate exceptions. Ascending from "fucking dreadful":

Jason Goes to Hell (1993)

This is how Jason Goes to Hell makes me feel. It is pure profiteering garbage, a desperate bid from New Line to wring a few more dollars from Friday the 13th's corpse after acquiring it from Paramount. Not a drop of passion or talent went into crafting this cheap, muddy, incomprehensible mess, a movie that is often so poorly lit that you can't even see who's getting killed or how Jason's doing it. Aside from one technically impressive but overlong scene of a face randomly melting, this is 100% skippable. The theme song is hilarious, though, a sure sign of Harry Manfredini's complete disinterest in the franchise:

The 2013 Horror Digest, Part 1: I'd Sell My Soul for a Good Opening Weekend

I don't know if you guys have noticed, but 2013 has been pretty good to horror so far! At least to its box office - the quality of this year's offerings have been a mixed platter, typical of any studio slate, but the real revelation is the genre's renewed, almost instantaneous bankability. The Conjuring had one of the highest opening weekends for an R-rated film of all time; the only other R-rated horror film to make so much money so quickly was Paranormal Activity 3. The Purge multiplied its budget by thirty. Evil Dead nearly broke $100 million. And those are just the R-rated flicks alone - World War Z took in major bank overseas, for instance. Mama did well, Dark Skies did well, Warm Bodies did well even though it shouldn't have. Maybe my 2011/2012 prognostications about the future of adult horror were preemptive, or maybe there's been some kind of worldwide attitudinal shift that's gotten mainstream audiences so interested in all this depravity. Could it be a growing notion that our world is falling apart?

There's been a noticeable preoccupation with economic decay in many of the movies released this year, almost certainly a reflection of our nation's dire straits. This isn't a new trend to film, cropping up as early as Great Depression musicals in order to pair common audience anxieties with a gleeful, utopian worldview. To see these fears interlaced with the horror genre, however, is particularly exceptional. Three of the films below deal with financial crises, at least in passing, and the other two feature protagonists overcoming major drug addictions. The prevalence of such heavy subject matter in a genre with few escapist tendencies is strange, but as with any regularly employed cultural trend, its incorporation is livened or worsened by the skill of its creative team. The movies below, for the most part, depict these issues thoughtfully enough to merit their inclusion. Except for Evil Dead. Fuck that shit.

Antiviral [Netflix]

You would have to be a lunatic to desire fame in the 21st century. Paparazzi may seem intrusive enough as it is, but images of an otherwise average person going about her routine don't cut it anymore. Social technologies like Twitter have entitled millions of people to a feeling of constant connectivity to their idols; such an increased degree of exposure is a double-edged sword, because now any teenage shitheel can anonymously slander or threaten you whenever his shriveled heart desires. The Internet has left us all living in public, but to many, the life of a celebrity is hardly a life at all. Antiviral ups the ante on these already sad circumstances by depicting a near future where celebrity culture is the only kind of culture, a world in which the ultimate expression of adoration is paying hand-over-fist to be injected with the viruses of these beautiful people. These "celebrities" don't even sing or act, simply serving as proprietary pathogenic vessels for corporations to make money off the unwitting. Huckster Syd March (Caleb Landry-Jones of X-Men First Class, deliciously cold) peddles these germs for the omnipotent Lucas Clinic, but unsurprisingly the big guys aren't paying their workers too much in times like these, so occasionally he'll steal viruses and sell them on the black market. Unfortunately, Syd never accounted for this society's insidious idea of copyright protection, and so begins his great adventure. Brandon Cronenberg, inspired by an offhand remark in a Sarah Michelle Gellar interview, has created a world in the image of his father's work that is populated by obsessions entirely his own. This fame-forged dystopia is brimming with hardship, but its citizens are too doped up on entertainment to understand what a hard life entails except by relating to celebrity "Ordeals," manufactured traumas like having a camera zoom up your rectum (broadcast on the news as, of course, the Aria Noble Anus Ordeal). Beautifully shot and conceived, Antiviral nonetheless betrays its director's inexperienced hand, as the clever concepts and shifts in understanding are occasionally explained more closely than they need to be. Nonetheless, Cronenberg delivers a portrait of manic devotion that is not only contemporary (Miley, One Direction, Lady Gaga, et al.), but indicative of a society suffering a much greater structural disease than any one human might carry. B+

Fear is Fascinating: Clock Tower and the Gnarled Evolution of Survival Horror

A work of horror art most always calls upon a collection of familiar, archetypal anxieties, sculpted into worst-case scenarios with sinister faces. Cabin in the Woods says it best when it labels its retinue of monsters as "remnant of the Old World," all of them nightmare visions continually filtered through the collective conscious. The ingredients remain the same; the alchemy is volatile, subordinate to the aesthetic and cultural trends of the time, the artist's command of his or her subject, and perhaps most critically, the medium in which it is presented. Video games have had an exceptionally difficult time nailing down the formula for a variety of reasons that only seems to multiply as their technology develops.

Horror in gaming is often described as "survival horror" because, well, it falls on You the Player to survive. Easier said than done when the games of this genre deliberately leave you understocked and unprepared for whatever threats are waiting to bury you. Combat and restorative items are either nonexistent or in short supply, an emphasis is placed on spatial awareness and puzzle solving, and danger lurks unrepentant at every turn. These design principles can be found in games as early as the NES's 1989 Sweet Home, a tale of madness and infanticide Nintendo found too gruesome for their delicate American players, and were popularized by Capcom's 1996 Playstation hit Resident Evil. The problem is that the ludic cornerstones of the genre - deprivation, helplessness, resource conservation - run counter to what a vast majority of contemporary gamers now find satisfying in their virtual experience, and as such survival horror has significantly dwindled in popularity. There have been a few attempts to resurrect it, such as breakout hit Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but recent entries in old-guard franchises Resident Evil and Silent Hill have been met with disdain or disinterest.

"You Wanna Suck a Brontosaurus Dick?", or How is American Horror Story Good?

There's a huge difference between horror comedy and horror camp. The names alone should leave this division apparent; it's all a matter of intention. As a positive example of the former category, let's look at Drag Me to Hell, by far the genre's most successful entry in the past few years. It's goofy, but it's also sad and sinister, with a really cruel perspective on karma informing the story. The comedy works because it supports the absurdity of the horror. Horror camp, meanwhile, is often produced as a result of singular horror elements that are not executed well enough but are treated as if they are. Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp delineates the relationship between two oppositional creative impulses in a camp work: "the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice." And as Sontag says, "intending to be campy is [probably] always harmful" - look at the repetitive, tedious deluge of Z-grade failures produced by SyFy, who are content to throw us paint-by-numbers shittiness and have the temerity to pass it off as a good time. Troll 2 is an awesome example of unintentional camp, a prime example of why bad horror movies brought us so joy in the first place and why intentionally bad horror movies are usually just desperate in comparison. It clearly meant something to the people creating it, but their complete lack of talent rendered it "artificial" to anyone watching.

The 2012 Horror Digest, Part 3: Twixts and Turns

The Tall Man

(Why does it feel like half of the pictures I select for this feature are people lying down and looking upset?)

You can catch this one on Netflix Instant, and it's quite the strange movie (if not often troubled), so I would recommend it.

The Tall Man is the most recent of Jessica Biel's many, many, many feints at serious acting, and to her credit, she is very good in it. The role is a challenging and unhinged one, and a committed performance is required for the film's insane plot to actually work. She doesn't fail director Pascal Laugier, best known for the absolutely fucked-up Martyrs, but his continued commitment to the horror genre does. The Tall Man has a complex, unpredictable plot, which makes for a pretty delightful first hour. Unfortunately, certain efforts must be made to keep the film planted in the realm of horror, which means preserving its titular "tall man" conceit and thus obscuring important details until much later in the story. Events unwind in a very confusing fashion, and though it did keep me guessing, eventually all the guessing led to frustration. The mysteries just weren't paying off with enough frequency or quality to justify all of the narrative face-heel turns. As the movie finally morphs from a kidnapping horror film into a social polemic, any sense of rhythm or clarity is lost, and you're left with little more than an awesomely feverish Biel monologue and a really pretentious ending. It crumbles under its own weight pretty spectacularly, but it is unique and impressive in its own strange ways. C+

Twixt

Why are Japanese movie posters always so awesome? I don't know what it is. Maybe I'm just a sucker for pink fonts and girls looking wistful. Anyway, I used this image because a) the poster is cool and b) the movie is visually a complete piece of dogshit, which is horrifying because FRANCIS FORD FUCKING COPPOLA directed it. You know, the guy responsible for a few Godfathers. Apocalypse Now. Dracula, if you're into the whole "style over substance" dealio. But one must remember that Coppola's done some serious garbage, and he's hit an especially awful slump lately, of which Twixt is the absolute nadir. The man seems to have forgotten everything he's ever known about lighting, framing, editing, and cinematography in general. Shot on dirt-cheap digital near Coppola's house, the movie looks about six million dollars shabbier than its $7 million budget, almost to the point of unwatchability. If that doesn't kill it enough for you, please also note: the atrocious acting, led by an obese ponytailed frog that bears a suspicious similarity to Val Kilmer; the senseless editing; the complete lack of scares; the lousy goofy plot, limned with a dash of autobiographical detail that's somehow meant to justify all the cheeky self-reflexivity; and an ending that renders the whole bloody affair a wash. Occasionally the movie actually looks kind of cool in still shot, and you remember why Coppola became successful in the first place, but it left me wondering why he didn't just make a graphic novel out of his dream-inspired ideas and call it quits. This is just an embarrassment, a further sullying of an already questionable auteurial empire. D

Silent House

Cheers to Elizabeth Olsen, whose meteoric rise to critical fawning is entirely deserved. Getting all of this right in "one take," which is actually anywhere between three and seven takes poorly disguised as one, surely took an enormous amount of focus. Even aside from the fact that she pulls off a fairly lofty technical feat, she's also excellent in her own right, expertly conveying delirious fear. Shame about what she's stranded in. The setting, which we're led to believe is important because it's the name of the fucking movie, is treated like dirt by Silent House's all-in-one-shot concept. An intuitive sense of space is never established, which undoes the movie on a plethora of levels. The scares are sluggish because the camera, without the benefit of editing, rarely moves quickly enough to capture a sense of energy, and Olsen often finds herself moving awkwardly to accommodate the cameraman, like closing the door slowly enough to let him in even though she's being chased. Olsen's performance is also threatened by both her costars, who are uniformly amateurish and clearly uncomfortable, and the ridiculous ending, where even her unerring commitment wobbles a little bit. There's a great deal of compositional accomplishment to be admired here, but it's ultimately a gimmick and it doesn't work and that buries Silent House right out of the gate. C-

Killer Joe

Okay, this isn't a horror movie, but it's liable to make you feel more nauseated than anything else on this list. William Friedkin has a gift for tactical provocation, which he brings out in rare form in Killer Joe. A trailer park Greek tragedy, no man, woman or child escapes Matthew McConaughey's dark grasp unscathed. The film is a torrid NC-17 trip into a family conspiring to kill their estranged mother for her $50,000 insurance premium, all with the help of crooked cop Joe Cooper, and naturally things don't go exactly as planned. It plays out like a morbidly violent, sexual Coen Brothers film, although it trades in their dry ingenuity for a dollop of unashamed trashiness. Killer Joe is a heap of raunchy trash given shape by both an expert filmmaker, whose lensing is thoughtful and gritty, and his universally stellar cast. This makes a hell of a one-two punch for McConaughey, who exploits a sort of warped charisma that we saw only in small doses in Magic Mike but which he plays to the nasty hilt here; Juno Temple, playing opposite him, is also hypnotically good as a sort of spaced-out Lolita. There are certain suggestions of seriousness here, a department where the film doesn't particularly excel; it's at its best when it's reveling in gnarly grodiness, rather than affecting depth with cryptic conversations. Too much joy, though, and the film would have pushed too far across the already dizzyingly thin line between exploitation and pitch-black humor. It's a tough watch, but worth it to watch an actor of disposable beefcake status like McConaughey plumb through some seriously dark material. B

I've Fallen and I Can't Wake Up: Daymare Town 3

Every year, when summer turns to fall and the weather gets cloudier, I set aside a few hours for myself and run through Daymare Town 3. I can't remember how or where I learned of it (as is common with these apocryphal little Flash games), only that I found it at some obscene hour of the night and played it until I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore.

It's the sort of game that lends itself to obsessive, almost hypnotic play. Your objective seems straightforward enough: you've crash-landed your hot air balloon in a surreal village and need to escape. But the game is shot through with the logic of its titular daymare. Characters speak cryptically and issue indecipherable demands. There's a slew of items, many useless, most bizarre. Puzzles have elements that make sense on a pragmatic basis, but cohere in especially unusual ways. One notable example: feeding the captain of the guard a sleeping pill in order to steal his hat and fool his lackeys into letting you through a gate. Sure, but why did he accept medication from a stranger so readily, and why would you have known to steal the hat, and why are his guards stupid enough to forget what their superior looks like? Convoluted causal dynamics are no new thing to pixel-hunting adventure games, but only in this daymare do they feel acceptable, even organic. The puzzles never feel like cheats, but merely require some unconventional thinking, which leaves the solutions enormously satisfying. There's also a handful of achievements to unlock, and a unintuitive economic system, but they both feel like window dressing thrown in to disguise the game's true roots.

The mechanics and design of Daymare Town 3's gameplay work in exceptional tandem with its aesthetic. Daymare Town is ripe with heavily stylized Expressionist angles, rendering the interiors impossible and menacing. A kindergarten seems a hundred feet tall, and one ray of light illuminates next to none of a pitch-dark basement. Most of the lines are uneven, drawn freehand and with little regard to symmetry - every building looks off-kilter, groaning at its foundations. Music is almost entirely piano, with muted percussion thrown in on a couple of tracks, and a vast majority of the time you spend in the town is soundtracked by howling wind. Sound effects can be slightly jarring, notably the low electronic tones that sound every time you pick up an item or move from location to location. The game gives you the option to turn them off, which I would recommend. Daymare Town 3 lives and dies by its composition; without its schizoid images and minimal, minor-key sound, most of its impact would dissipate. The Submachine games, which strive for a similar atmosphere but fail to reach it because of undistinguished, unfocused art, are good examples of this.

This is not to marginalize the writing of the game. Mateusz Skutnik is careful to paint Daymare Town as an unusual place, but not aggressively so. Much of the quirk in the game is subtle, and the game approaches a wide variety of tones: humorous, sinister, ominous, even a bit melancholy. There's an undercurrent of dry wit to Skutnik's presentation, between locations (a populous graveyard is called a "memorial park"), items (a catheter bag becomes "some liquid"), and dialogue (The Nurse: "Do not try anything stupid. I will put you down."). If this slightly daffy composure appears to stand at odds with the game's more human moments, like when you return an old widow's baby to her, they actually come together with surprising grace. All of these voices are reasonably accommodated by a world so foreign that the player is not entirely sure how to feel while exploring it. 

Daymare Town 3, customary of its medium, is fairly slight. If you're not a naughty cheater you'll probably finish your first play in about five hours. There's a pronounced mystery about it, however, that has kept me compelled even during my third trip through the village. Every consecutive replay feels fresh, rewarding, intriguing. With each new session, I find myself surprised by how few of the puzzles I remember, or how eerie the music actually is, or the double entendre tucked into a line of dialogue that once seemed like a toss-off. The details melt away over the course of a year, which is a quality to any linear adventure game's credit, but the feelings linger.

B+

The 2012 Horror Digest, Part 2: Whatchoo Know About the Ladies?

V/H/S

For those unfamiliar with this odd little bauble of a horror film, V/H/S is a horror anthology shot entirely through lo-fi recording devices: handheld cameras, miniature cameras stuffed into inconspicuous places, webcams, and the like. If this sounds exhausting to you, it occasionally can be, and I must admit that the last half hour or so felt to me like the longest, most hellish Skype session in the world. Also disappointing is the movie's terrible treatment of women, each one of whom becomes a slut, an idiot, a depraved murderess, or all three. If you can hurdle past these admittedly damning issues in ideology and construction, however, there's a lot of V/H/S that actually works really well. The cryptic, muddled nature of the visuals often makes what's happening on screen indecipherable and, in pairing with the strong sound mixing, quite frightening. Terrible things are constantly lurking where these obsolete, low-end cameras just can't seem to capture them, and that spirit of suggestion is deceptively powerful. Most of these stories, each assembled by a different director, are pretty compelling, and despite a tendency for them to end with resolutions as unsurprising as "and then the evil killed them," they held my attention consistently (short of a couple of dogs). Recommended with hesitations; it leaves a bad aftertaste. B-

The Woman in Black

There's a really excellent period in the middle of The Woman in Black where Daniel Radcliffe, staying the night in a spooky house while examining some sort of important legal document, is besieged by a series of supernatural occurrences. The scene takes place over the course of about five minutes, but in almost complete silence - no music, no dialogue, just the creaking of the house and whatever cackling apparitions fall upon him. Five minutes doesn't sound particularly impressive, but the scene's impressive momentum packs more horror content into those five minutes than probably any other period in the movie. I have long loved haunted house movies like a child, and that's probably why I stuck with this otherwise fairly cut-and-dried genre effort as long as I did. It's not that the movie is bad at all, but there's very little here to get excited about. Radcliffe offers little as a sad lawyer-dad with mutton chops, the plot came from The Innocents' fifty-year-old ghost matron afterbirth, and a majority of the scares are admirable for their reservation but typically fall flat. Nothing here is offensive or incompetent, but in an almost totally undistinguished Gothic horror, it might have given me something to talk about if there was. C+

The Loved Ones

Australian horror is a blip of a subgenre, but one that I feel deserves more attention. My experience with it, admittedly minimal, extends to the harrowing Wolf Creek, the mournful yet potent Lake Mungo, and this bizarre little teen movie. (Also Black Water, but the less said about that bullshit the better.) The Loved Ones is at once a dysfunctional family story, a teen film replete with rejection and angst, and a nasty, inventive horror/torture film with some really fun campy acting. The film embraces both its brutality and its slight goofiness, creating a satisfying middle ground where it's both in on the joke and taking it to unexpected places that make you feel a bit uncomfortable. The music and its uses thereof are especially interesting - music in teenage-centric films is often underutilized or ignored as an expressive tool, but The Loved Ones employs it exceptionally well. The only real problem here is that the ending is bunk, an unfortunately predictable note that doesn't offer anything particularly new or insightful to the film. Kudos for showing the restraint to not write an over-the-top twist ending, but a little bit more would have gone a long way, you know? B

Mother's Day

This is nasty schlock, the sort of controlled and quietly self-aware dumbness that I feel the overwhelming need for every once in a while. I can't really claim this as anything other than a gratuitous, violent, kind of shitty "and then there were none" body count flick, but the execution and cast are committed and the gore is great. It runs for nearly two hours, which is absolutely unnecessary and by far the biggest problem with the movie; you could trim twenty minutes off easily when you take the redundancy of certain scenes into account. Pitting two friends against each other in a duel to the death is intense, sure, but definitely loses a lot of the punch the second time you see it. Kind of diminishes the creativity of the villains, you know? Not that they have much: three of the main baddies are brainless lackeys, barking like dogs and flexing ruthless authority without the aid of the titular Mother herself, played to the hilt by Rebecca de Mornay. She's MIA for the first half hour of the movie, and upon her arrival, it changes from a conventional prisoners-in-their-own-home horror story to a psychological, neurotic, gendered power game. The sexist implications of the monster mom trope are present and arguable, but Mother's Day at least attempts to say something interesting about them. Whether or not it succeeds, though, is ultimately auxiliary to the trope's role as a conduit for carnage. And carnage there is. B

The Hole

Joe Dante has been making odd, fun, mostly youth-oriented films for the better part of three decades now, but nearly all of his output remains firmly rooted in horror. The Hole, his first theatrical release in nearly ten years, was finished in 2009, trapped in very limited circulation, and finally dumped into cinemas with minimal fanfare or attention. It's easy to see why it received this treatment, as the movie is low-budget, the effects are cheap, and the movie is too tame for adults yet too menacing for younger children. It hits a really satisfying spot for young adults, though. What separates it from the similarly intentioned but far less competent The Moth Diaries is its careful synchronization of theme and character. Manifestation of latent fear is by no means an original horror concept, but The Hole demonstrates a surprising amount of restraint about it by exploring the most superficial one at first (the youngest character's fear of clowns) and then slowly layering on elements that point toward each other character's fears until the time comes to actually implement them. The movie is paced with pinpoint accuracy, and handsomely crafted despite its obvious budgetary limitations. This is personally not for me, but it might have been eight years ago, and if you have any younger siblings with an interest in horror this will definitely hit the spot more satisfyingly than The Moth Diaries. B-

SHOCKtober 2012, Day 1: Sunshine

This is an entry for Final Girl's SHOCKtober 2012 blog event. As always, thanks to Stacie Ponder for being such a creative inspiration/badass! 

Minor spoilers. 

It can sometimes be hard to be a science fiction fan when you know so little about science. I love when sci-fi explores setting, and character, and ethical ramifications through the prism of ever-expanding scientific knowledge, but when it comes to actually analyzing the veracity of the material itself I am hopelessly lost. Maybe someday I'll teach myself enough to crawl through a movie like Sunshine and either be able to validate the basis of its plot or find myself horrifically disappointed by it, like this guy.

I was gearing up to write a gushing, effusive piece about the movie, mostly because I really do enjoy it and I think it remains criminally underseen and mismarketed. And then I went ahead and read that, which is so detail-oriented and thorough to be nearly psychotic, and all of a sudden the seeds of doubt have been planted in my timid little soul. Not that I need the validation of some angry man on the Internet to like or dislike something - the hive-mind mentality of popular criticism is awful enough as it is - but Sunshine repeatedly employs fact as a scaffold for narrative and to be told that those facts do not hold water makes me a little nervous. And though I don't agree with all of his myriad complaints, I have to give him credit for some pretty keen-eyed speculation on the contradictory nature of the technological future the film creates. His analysis of the film's internal logic, predictive though it might be, cannot be reasonably challenged by someone like me who just doesn't know these things. Ignorance is bliss, after all.

If you're science-oriented, and you have the wherewithal to really dismantle what you see in this terminal voyage to the sun, I recommend viewing the film as a sort of cautionary parable. "What Can Go Wrong in Space?" or "Don't Let the Crazy Dude Be Your Navigator." The crew of eight that Danny Boyle puts together is a doomed lot, and befall them doom does; shield malfunctions, inopportune fires, inter-crew drama, and then a completely unexpected wrench thrown in during the last half hour. The movie takes a hard left into science fiction horror at this point, like a competent version of Event Horizon, and a vast majority of the people who watch it are dissatisfied with this. I think it represents a logical capstone to a journey where not only does everything that could go wrong manages to, but things that could never have conceivably happened at all still manage to happen and fuck them the hell up. It is horror at its essence: being confronted with the incomprehensible. I don't expect everyone to buy this justification, but it works for me. 

Even if the film ends up disappointing you in its final act, the first hour is taut, eventful, and full of beautiful imagery and sound. Made on a relatively modest budget ($40 million, which it couldn't even make back internationally), Sunshine nonetheless looks and sounds fantastic, embracing its slightly over-the-top space opera status with booming orchestral music and blown out golden light infused into nearly every scene. If self-importance is detrimental in the face of incompetence, then I suppose Sunshine would be a grievous offender to reviewers like the above: the movie does, indeed, make itself feel important. I can't even say that I consider it particularly important, despite being a fan. It is a flashy, engaging little trip down the mortality rabbit hole, however, and ninety minutes of that will satisfy more than its share of sci-fi fans. 

B

 

The 2012 Horror Digest, Part 1

Horror is a genre that has seen varying levels of success over the last forty years. Action films can always be counted on to make a pretty penny, short of the occasional bomb (though to be fair, they haven't been so occasional this year), and comedies often turn decent grosses on much smaller budgets. Horror has never been so reliable. It's difficult to track what audiences find scary at any given point in time, and even if some studio has tapped into the zeitgeist, they can't always translate that into a good movie. This decade has proved to be one of the rougher patches for horror, save for new installments in the Saw or Paranormal Activity franchises. 2012 hasn't seen either of these come back around yet, and much of everything else that has come out so far this year has been low-profile and fiscally disappointing. Cabin in the Woods did okay, but the only two breakout successes were The Woman In Black (surprising but not totally undeserved) and The Devil Inside (ugh, fucking kill me).

No matter how poorly it does, though, I love horror. I love it at its best and worst, at its most brainlessly shitty and at the height of innovation. No other genre is as compulsively watchable to me, and since I've seen so few movies overall this year, I want this set of posts to act as both a catch-up for myself and a series of capsule reviews in case y'all are looking for something scary to watch. There's no real connection between whatever I review at any given time, just the ones that are itching to get out of my brain and onto the empty Blogger page. With that:

Cabin in the Woods

Easily the best horror film of the year so far, if not the best film period. Its role as a conventional teenagers-adrift slasher is questionable since there's very little conventional about the movie at all; some may find it a disappointment in that it simply isn't very scary. The film completely subs out fear, not really its strong point, for a pervasive sense of dread by the third act, which ends up being a much better fit for its nihilistic message. Likewise, the humor operates at a comfortable 70:30 hit to miss ratio, as it has in everything good ol' Joss has ever laid his hands on. Cabin in the Woods earns its keep with a thoughtful, confidently asserted premise, rich with an understanding of the horror genre that positions writer Drew Goddard as both scathing critic and diehard fan. Superb pacing, anarchic fun, and a surprising undercurrent of sadness make this an exceptionally unique offering to the genre canon. A-

RIP Silent Hill (1999-2012)

The Batshit Charms of Deadly Blessing

This entry was written for the superlative Final Girl's August Film Club. Thanks, Stacie! Spoilers for low-budget thirty-year-old horror ahoy!

Deadly Blessing is Wes Craven's fourth film - or his fifth, if you count Angela the Fireworks Woman, an incest porno he wrote and directed under a pseudonym. I don't, but brought it up anyway because this is intriguing trivia that you can now share with friends and...well, maybe not family. The movie is ostensibly about a woman fighting off some unseen evil forces and the judgment of the mysterious Hittites (???) after her husband is killed by his own magically animated tractor, but the story flies totally off the rails after half an hour so I'm not terribly concerned with discussing it. Rather, there are three things Deadly Blessing is obsessed with that are much more interesting:

1) Ernest Borgnine looking creepy