Dabbe 5: Zehr-I-Cin: The Devil’s In The Details

When I wrote up Dabbe: The Possession about seven months ago, I observed that by all rights, I should not like it. It was a found-footage film about demonic possession, and the second in a series of seven films. I’m really picky about found-footage films, stories about demonic possession can get very cliched very quickly, and I am not at all fond of sequels or (ugh) franchises And yet, I really liked it. It had a real energy and sharpness to it, and coming from a culture fairly different from my own, it felt fresh in a number of ways. It wasn’t perfect - the translation was pretty clumsy and there were some pacing issues, but overall I thought it was a solid effort, intense and spooky in equal measure.

So I was genuinely curious to see if lightning would strike twice, and I have to say, Dabbe 5: Zehr-I-Cin (Dabbe 5: Curse Of The Jinn), an eerie and tense account of the sins of someone’s past, makes a good case for itself.

The film opens in voiceover, with an account of something that happened in the village of Viransehir in 1979. It’s the last recorded testimony of a mullah who lived in the village, alluding to something terrible that he warned the villagers against trying. The villagers didn’t heed his warning, and terrible discoveries were made there. Black magic, human sacrifice. The mullah vanished, leaving behind only some notes and audiotapes. We cut to a cave, a woman giving birth surrounded by other women. As soon as she’s delivered the child and the cord is cut, the baby is whisked off someplace by a group of men carrying rifles. The woman screams in anguish, begging to have her baby brought back to her.

Meanwhile, in present-day Istanbul, Dilek and her husband Ömer are asleep in their home, when Dilek is startled awake by the sound of someone in their house. She tries to wake up her husband to see what’s going on, but he just rolls over and pulls the covers over himself even tighter. Not exactly the picture of chivalry. As she moves carefully through the house, she can’t find anything. The next morning, she’s fighting exhaustion while getting Ömer off to work. The noises in the middle of the night didn’t help, and when she tries to settle down for a nap she’s plagued by nightmares.

Strange noises, nightmares, and soon enough, doors slamming shut by themselves, glassware smashing onto the floor. There’s something very wrong going on in their house.

So this is the fifth in a series of seven movies, which let’s face it, if these were being made in the U.S., would mean we’d be faced with a stale retread of something that might have been good the first time around, but is now just a bunch of motions through which everyone is going, with a storyline as contrived and convoluted as Godzilla is tall and irritable. But in this case, based on the two that I’ve seen, what we have instead are distinct, unrelated stories that share a number of broad narrative beats. They’re more like variations on a theme than anything else. Which means, on the one hand, that we don’t have to navigate the tiresome rationalizations for why this particular monster/demon/serial killer is on the rampage yet again, which is nice. On the other, the similarities mean that some things that should be a surprise end up being less of a surprise, and afterward I realized just how many of the same notes both films hit. I suspect that if I watched a bunch of these films back-to-back that they’d get formulaic pretty quickly.

But in the moment, it works, and that’s largely because it’s also as much its own thing as it is a riff on the same themes as the previous film It’s not a found-footage film like Dabbe: The Possession was (and thank goodness for that), and it’s more visually inventive as a result. The color grading runs from warm tones to sickly, grainy, greenish pallor, many shots are slightly distorted with fisheye or tilt-shift effects and vignetted, giving even mundane moments a sense of unease or unreality. Points of view change regularly - there’s some SnorriCam work, shots framed like they’re from surveillance footage (even though they aren’t), shots that are surveillance camera footage that glitch and stutter to good effect. So things seem slightly unreal, but there’s also paranoia, a feeling of being watched. Sound design is very good as well, using slamming doors and sudden crashes to keep things feeling tense. The tools are all pretty simple, there’s not a whole lot in the way of special effects (which is good, because some of what there is ends up being sort of dodgy), just knowing what looks and sounds creepy, and it goes a long way. And when things really start to pop off, it can have the same kind of frenetic intensity that reminds me of The Evil Dead, which goes a long way toward giving what could otherwise be fairly simple conceits some real edge.

Like the previous film, it’s a story about curses and djinns, not demons or devils, so it’s something a little more complex than your usual “demon possesses young woman for reasons” story. Again, there’s a past at work here, the culmination of something that happened a long time ago, so on top of the horror there’s something of a mystery element to it that keeps it from descending into an assemblage of scares. It’s not an especially character-driven film, the performances seem fine, though again I think stuff gets lost in translation and though none of the characters are really obnoxious, nor are they especially developed. It doesn’t really hurt the film, and you don’t have any unintentionally comic translations this time around, fortunately, but I wonder if a little more subtlety would have helped. It does share pacing problems with the previous film - for most of its running time things move along at a nice clip, but the end drags on a little too long and threatens to lose focus.

And I think this is ultimately my biggest concern with the film - all of the ways it is broadly, structurally similar to the previous film. The characters are all different, details are different, how the story gets told is different, and this is all to the good. But in both films, you’ve got an opening alluding to something terrible that happened in a small village years ago, passing references to apocalyptic events, a young woman suffering under a curse, a betrayal, a return to where it all started, and a framing that suggests this was based on true events. None of those things are by themselves problems - some of it is a little hackneyed, maybe - but it meant I was able to anticipate some things that would have been better off as surprises. It’s still a formula, even if it’s not the one I usually find tiresome. But on their own, both films in this series that I’ve seen have been very well-executed, enough that I’m genuinely interested in seeking out the others. But I’ll probably give myself some time in between them, in the hopes that maybe I will be surprised the next time around.

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It, Chapter Two: Second Verse, Same As The First, A Little Bit Louder And A Little Bit Worse

Two-part horror movies are a rarity. I don’t mean a movie and its sequel, in horror those are a dime a dozen, not including prequels, reboots, remakes, “re-imaginings,” and every other dead horse you could beat into the ground, well-assured it would rise from the grave in a fortnight. No, I mean a story so big that it gets told across two movies as an ongoing narrative. That’s far more common in science fiction or superhero films.

And that really is a big part of the problem with It, Chapter Two. It’s got more of the characteristics of those sorts of films than it does horror. I talked about this in my write-up of It, Chapter One, the way that blockbuster elements work against horror’s strengths. But Chapter One had its moments, and Chapter Two is just a mess. It manages to take all of the weaknesses of the first film and turn them up, magnifying them in every direction. And I think a lot of it is due to the requirements of big-budget, major-studio blockbuster films and a need to adhere to the source text even when it doesn’t really serve the film.

Picking up 27 years after the end of It, Chapter One, we return to a Derry that hasn’t changed much in all this time. Same picturesque park in the town center, same annual fair, and the same lurking rot and seething undercurrent of violence that’s been there since the town’s inception. In short order, we’re introduced to a young couple, the intolerant bullies who harass them, and then beatings, and a death. There is still something dark at Derry’s heart, and it’s waking up again. Of the seven kids who stopped its (or Its) predations back in 1989, only one stayed in Derry. Mike Hanlon works at the Derry library, lives upstairs from the library, and has spent the last 27 years researching the town’s history and looking for a way to stop the cycle for good. And when his police radio scanner goes off, reporting the horrible, senseless death that’ s just taken place, Mike goes to check out the scene…

…where he finds a traumatized young man muttering about a clown, and COME HOME scrawled on an underpass in blood.

So yes, the other six people responsible for shutting It down back in the summer of 1989 have to return to Derry to finish things once and for all. All the ones who’ve left Derry have done quite well for themselves. Richie Tozier’s a high-profile stand-up comedian, Eddie Kapsbrak does well for himself as a risk analyst, Bill Dembrough is an author whose books get made into films, Beverly Marsh is a well-known fashion designer, Ben Hanscom is a successful architect, and Stan Uris…well, Stan doesn’t take the news that It’s back up and around very well. He doesn’t make it back to Derry. Their time away has made them forgetful, has put the events of that summer in the rear-view mirror, to the point that Mike has to remind all of them who he is and what happened back then. Mike never left, so Mike never forgot. It’s sort of how adulthood gives us a chance to leave the horrors of our childhood behind. But Mike, as one of the few Black children in Derry, never had that luxury.

But the longer they’re in Derry, the more things come back to them, The things that happened, the terrors they faced, the friendship forged in shared adversity. They wonder how they could have ever forgotten each other. And soon enough there are reminders - dark, terrible reminders - of what brought them back, and so Mike tells them that his research has uncovered a ritual that might end the threat for good. So after establishing the adult versions of all of the characters and getting them all back to Derry, the film sort of shifts into sort of a fetch-quest mode where each of them has to retrieve something for the ritual, along with flashbacks to the rest of that summer throughout. The interposition of the present and past is mostly pulled off skillfully, and there’s potential for some interesting stuff about the things we remember and the things we wished we could forget, especially relevant to people whose childhoods were marked by bullying, trauma and abuse. They pretty much have to go home again and to varyingly literal degrees go right back into those places that held such horror for them then. But it’s just potential because you only get glimpses of it, fitfully, around all of the other stuff the film is trying to do.

And that’s a big problem with the film - it’s trying to do so much in the time it has that none of it gets the attention it needs. Like Chapter One, it’s really long (just shy of three fucking hours) but it still manages to feel cursory. There’s a lot that could be explored here - the idea that Derry was a corrupted place from its very start, something black and rotten at its heart, visible between the lines in the town’s history, the way that many of the protagonists sort of brought their trauma and dysfunction with them into adulthood. Eddie’s wife is just as smothering and encouraging of his hypochondriasis as his mother was, Beverly has an abusive, controlling husband, and Richie has pretty much just turned the humor he used as a defense mechanism into a career. There’s definitely the idea that no matter where you go, there you are, but all of it is just briefly alluded to before moving on to the next set piece. Secondary characters turn up and then are sort of gone with little fanfare in either direction, there’s little character development (except for Richie, who was always the most opaque of the group and here we get some hints at why that might be the case) and there are moments of real dread, but they’re few and far between. The film needs restraint, and there’s certainly evidence dotted throughout that the filmmakers are capable of it, but instead we get lots of slam-bang moments with frenetic scoring and lots of yelling. The climax is especially guilty of this, a drawn-out barrage of special effects and running around and screaming that takes entirely too long to get where it’s going, without any real tension. It’s just loud.

Like the first film, there’s still a good horror story in here somewhere. This film also has its surprisingly vicious moments (the damn film opens with a hate crime, for pity’s sake), but the comic elements are also ratcheted up considerably - the adult Richie wisecracks just as much as he did as a kid (though now it’s more funny than grating) even at what are supposed to be tense moments, and it tends to kill the mood. And again, there’s some nice attention to detail and willingness to let creepy things sort of happen in the background, but even more than the first film these moments ae drowned out by thick layers of CG creature effects which are often more cartoony than anything else, draining any ounce of subtlety out of it. So it’s not just loud, it’s also even more tonally jarring than the first film, and the whole thing isn’t so much paced as it is just one thing after another. It feels much less like a story and much more like an assemblage of scenes.

I think another part of the problem is that with any popular adaptation, there’s going to be the sense that certain things “need” to be included, and so instead of an organically developing story you just get a bunch of “that part where” moments chained together, whether they make sense or not, whether they make for a good narrative flow or not. And on top of that, there are things that work absolutely well in the novel that just look silly on screen, though this and the previous film don’t suffer so much from King’s very specific authorial voice making everything sound stilted. It’s very much a matter of, “you can write this stuff, but I sure can’t say it.” It happens a little here and there, but the much larger problem is that everything that would make this good horror is sacrificed for everything that the film is expected to be, and by the big-budget major-studio tendency to turn horror films into action films played in a different key. 

The director has talked about doing a massive supercut of both chapters, and if it were handled episodically, that would be a good start, but then there’s all the ropy CG and the possibility that no, the interesting, personal stuff wouldn’t actually get explore much, so at this point I think all I can be is disappointed. So far, adaptations of King’s longer epic works have suffered in translation, and this is no exception, unfortunately.

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It, Chapter One: One Crazy Summer

There’s something about the term “blockbuster horror” that rankles me. I try not to be a film snob and I have enjoyed my share of blockbuster movies, but I just don’t know if multiplex bombast really plays all that well with horror. Mass-appeal horror films tend to play it safe, rely on easy scares and well-worn cliches. It’s less about horror than just startling people.

But here’s the thing - it’s really difficult to adapt the work of Stephen King, perhaps the most monolithic writer in the genre over the last several decades, and not bring blockbuster expectations to the table. He’s easily the most prolific writer in the genre and easily the most successful. He’s pretty much an institution at this point. People who don’t like horror like his stuff. So an adaptation of one of his most popular books is going to be a big production. And on top of that, King is one of those rare writers in horror who writes absolute epics - sprawling stories that cover miles and years. So an adaptation of one of his most popular epic novels is going to be an even bigger production. And honestly, when it comes to film, I think “big” works against horror in a way that it doesn’t for other types of film.

And so this is the primary problem with It, Chapter One. It is a big story, and it covers a lot of ground, and although it definitely is less compromising than I would have expected, it’s also sort of three movies at once, and it suffers in places as a result.

It’s a rainy day in the Maine town of Derry, and Bill Dembrough, laid up in bed sick, is making a paper boat for his little brother George to take out and sail in the streams made by the rainstorm. He writes “SS Georgie” on it, waterproofs it with wax. George goes out into the rain to try out his new boat, and no sooner does it set sail than it gets washed into a storm drain. Despondent, George kneels down to see if he can get it back, but there’s something there in the storm drain. Something that has his boat. And then there is blood, and screaming, and that is the last we see of George Dembrough alive.

There is, and always has been, something very wrong with Derry.

The film really is kind of a mixed bag - like the King adaptation Doctor Sleep, it really falls somewhere between horror and dark fantasy, and where that film had some genuinely unnerving moments early on before ultimately settling into something more of a fantasy adventure story (albeit one set around the location from The Shining, which does add its own undercurrent for fans of that adaptation), this one suffers more from tonal shifts that don’t quite reach jarring, but make it difficult for the film to really settle into a groove. At some points, it’s a coming-of-age story similar to something like Stand By Me, following a group of friends old and new as they try to navigate the perils of pre-adolescence. At others, it’s a reasonably understated examination of the real-life fears that accompany childhood, especially among kids doomed to be outsiders, and then at others it’s a more straightforward supernatural horror film. It doesn’t have the same kind of sprawl that Doctor Sleep did, being set in one place over the course of a single summer, but it does feel like it would have worked better as a more personal, intimate story. It’s not that it does anything really badly, but there’s so much that even with a running time well over two hours, nothing really gets explored in depth. It’s sort of one thing, then on to the next.

At its heart, it’s a story about what it’s like to be a kid in a world where there are dangers of one sort or another all around you. All of the protagonists are outsiders in one way or another. Bill has a stutter, Ben Hanscom is overweight and the new kid in town, Mike Hanlon appears to be one of the only Black people in Derry, Stan Uris is one of the few Jewish kids in Derry. Eddie Kapsbrak has asthma and an extremely overprotective mother, Richie Tozier is scrawny and spectacularly nearsighted, and he compensates for his insecurity by using humor as a defense, and Beverly Marsh is being abused by her father and has somehow garnered a reputation for being “easy.” These are kids with all the usual kid worries, but also all the worries of any kid who’s ever been singled out as a target, or victim, or just as Other. And on top of that, they are witnessing horrors all around them in their hometown, horrors to which the town’s adults seem almost willfully blind. The moments where we see what they have to deal with, how few places they have where they really feel safe, work. The occasional idyllic moments they have, just hanging out and shooting the shit or swimming at the quarry., really do feel like a momentary respite from the dread that follows them around all the time in the form of bullies and the dread facing them at home. 

And they’re all depicted pretty realistically, for better or worse. It’s easy to make child characters into cartoons, but for the most part they feel like regular kids. That said, it does mean that Eddie, with his finely honed hypochondriasis, is kind of defined almost entirely by that at the start of the film, and Richie, easily the most insecure of the bunch, is a nonstop fountain of wisecracks and mom jokes and the kind of desperate overcompensation that you only get when you’re aware of just how awkward you really are. And honestly, he’s pretty grating all the way through. But I also knew kids like this. Fuck, I was a kid like this. It doesn’t make it any easier to sit through (fun drinking game: take a shot anytime someone says “shut up, Richie,” and then die of alcohol poisoning), but it does ring true to life. These are kids who walk through their days like they are minefields, and that comes across very well.

The supernatural stuff is more of a mixed bag, though, mostly in the execution. There are lots of great little details and bits of business happening in the background, content to let you notice them without calling attention to themselves, and there are moments that are genuinely nasty, like Stranger Things with the gloves taken off. For a film that could easily turn into some kind of wistful nostalgia trip with some ghosts, it does not fuck around. But over time it leans a little too much into creature effects and as is often the case, the more the creature is on screen, the less frightening it becomes and the more it just feels like you’re looking at special effects. I think this is endemic to pretty much any big-budget major-studio horror film - it ends up being kind of as much of a spectacle film as something like Jurassic Park or one of the eighteen million Marvel Universe film-type products coming out in any given week. And those aren’t really scary, they’re ultimately just action films using a different vocabulary and the film finally sort of gives in to this in the third act, all hectic yelling and action when a defter touch is needed.

Again, a lot rides on the kids at the center of the film and fortunately, they aren’t saints. They get angry at each other and don’t want to do the right thing and that helps give the film some gravity, but the further away it gets from the very specific, personal horrors of this cursed town, the effects it has on the adults, and the nightmares lurking behind any doorway and the closer it gets to CG effects pieces and big showdowns, the less effective it is. I didn’t feel like my time was wasted by any means, but I do feel like the popularity of the story (and of King as an author) gets in the way - it’s not enough to make a solid scary movie, it has to please the fans (and the author, who has been critical of adaptation in the past the further they stray from his text) and bring in big enough crowds to justify the budget needed to bring the story to life. And that’s not where horror does its best work, in big flashy hero moments. It does its best work in dark corners and behind the door nobody opens and in the house that has been abandoned for decades and the things in the between the lines of a house’s history. There’s still Chapter 2 to go, but honestly, I think this would have probably worked better as a limited-run series.

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Historia De Lo Oculto: We Interrupt This Broadcast

There’s this short story by Charles Stross that I really like, titled “A Colder War.” It posits a world where U.S./Soviet relations were still just as tense as they were in our world in the period from about 1947 onward until the early Nineties, but also a world in which Lovecraftian beings with their strange magics and even stranger technologies and sanity-warping enormity exist. Instead of ICBMs, satellite footage shows trailer trucks moving through Russia carrying huge impossible shapes under tarps covered with protective sigils. It’s an intersection between cosmic horror and political thriller, and I am here for it.

Historia De Lo Oculto (History Of The Occult) isn’t exactly this, but it’s also not dissimilar either, and it makes for an interesting mix. It’s hurt by a spotty translation and pacing issues early on, but it picks up and comes good in the end.

It’s late at night in Argentina, in a house somewhere out in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Four people are hunched nervously over a stack of binders and folders, staring at a television. They’re producers on the investigative news show 60 Minutes Before Midnight, and tonight is their last broadcast. After they aired a piece on the current president’s business ties, suddenly almost all of their advertisers pulled out of the show all at once and the station decided not to renew their contract. So they’ve got one last shot at it, and things are appropriately tense. They’ve gone to the mattresses after receiving enough advertising money from one last sponsor to air one last show, holed up in this house in what could be described as an “undisclosed location,” taking a huge gamble on exposing what they believe is massive corruption in the current presidential administration. It’s a time of considerable political unrest, and there’s a massive protest rally planned to start at midnight, exactly when this program ends. So everything is cloak-and-dagger. There’s a minimal crew at the studio along with the host and the program’s three guests for the evening. They’ve sent one of their reporters to another house far outside the city limits on a tip that they’ll find something important there, though nobody knows what. And their last remaining sponsor, the ones who bankrolled the last episode, send over a box with materials they think might be useful. It all has to come together exactly right.

And this is where it starts getting weird. One of the guests for the evening is a self-proclaimed warlock, and the box they receive contains a powerful hallucinogenic root and instructions for a ritual.

The president has some very powerful friends.

Right off the bat, this film reminds me of stories like All The President’s Men, where the majority of the action is people on the phone or sitting in a room poring over files and documents. Which may seem like an odd choice for what is ostensibly a horror film, but there’s a sense of urgency communicated right up front - it’s the last night of this investigative journalism program, which appears to be getting taken off the air due to covert government interference, they have an hour to get information out that could potentially topple the current regime, all leading up to a protest rally at midnight. So even though it’s a bunch of journalists holed up in a house somewhere in the suburbs, there’s tension there. Adding to this is a film-noir feeling that comes from it being shot almost entirely in black and white (the “almost” is very important - color is used to striking effect in places), ramping up the feeling of intrigue. A lot happens in shadow in this film, and it reinforces the idea that this is all furtive, clandestine, covert.

So it could just be sort of an Argentinian take on Good Night, And Good Luck, but there’s all the weirdness around the edges - the mysterious murder of a John Doe, his body discovered surrounded by signs and sigils, the current administration’s ties to a mysterious corporation who once numbered someone called “Brother Darkness” among their ranks, some strange inconsistencies in people’s memories. There’s a repeated television advertisement for an initiative to protect the nation’s children, describing them as “the fuel on which our future runs” that becomes more sinister the more it is repeated. There’s the sense of something about to happen, something about to be revealed and you aren’t getting more than snatches of it, that largely works when the rest of the movie doesn’t.

I don’t know that it’s entirely the film’s fault - the translation job seems a little sloppy and clumsy, and I suspect some of the meaning and mood is lost as a result. Of greater concern is the pacing, which becomes sluggish and unfocused in the second act, so even though it’s not even 90 minutes long there is some feeling that it’s sort of spinning its wheels. After a pretty strong opening, it really starts to sag and occasionally strange things will happen, but there’s not much to connect them or give them a context, so they don’t have the impact they could. There are a lot of questions and possibilities raised to maybe not as much effect as they could be, and the television interview sequences especially suffer from the clumsy translation, making some characters feel less sinister and more like cryptic blowhards.

But in a lot of ways, the sense of desperate isolation helps carry it even at its weakest moments, and things really start to come together in the third act as the tension starts to ramp up, things start to connect, and a lot of what came before pays off as everything converges - documents, official confirmations, revealed identities, a mysterious object in an even more mysterious house, and a hallucinogen-fueled ritual that lays reality bare. The whole thing ends on a really strong note that to me almost - not quite, but almost - entirely makes up for its weaknesses. If you’ve got the patience to wait out the slow, confusing parts, this is a pretty good one.

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Paura Nella Citta Dei Morti Viventi: Rinse, Repeat

As someone still in the process of familiarizing myself with classic Italian horror, one conclusion to which I’ve come so far is that although much of Dario Argento’s work is easy to appreciate (and certainly creates a template others have followed), Lucio Fulci’s work is, to me, more interesting. It’s less sophisticated - actually, in some ways it’s downright primitive - but that gives it a sort of gonzo verve that I don’t really get from Argento’s films. Even Suspiria, which is admittedly pretty bonkers, takes a bit to really spool up. But from the very beginning of The Beyond, it felt like “strap in, this is gonna go places.” And it did. There’s something I like about a film that’s just willing to go berserk, I like the feeling of having no idea what’s coming next.

And so I have to say, I was looking forward to Paura Nella Citta Dei Morti Viventi (City Of The Living Dead, also screened in the United States as Gates Of Hell), the first in Fulci’s “living dead” trilogy, of which The Beyond was the second film. I was looking forward to it, but it ended up being kind of disappointing. It’s as gonzo as I expected, but it’s also oddly meandering, which makes for an overall frustrating viewing experience.

This film gets right down to business. Plain, stark opening titles over a tracking shot through a cemetery. A priest wanders through the cemetery, as if lost in thought. The location is Dunwich, Massachusetts, where as we will learn later “all those witches were burned.” Elsewhere, in New York, a group of people are holding a séance with a psychic named Mary Woodhouse - a séance that starts to go awry when Mary has visions of the priest we just saw hanging himself. Cut back to the priest, who has in fact just hung himself. Mary screams and falls to the ground, convulsing. Then she dies. Perhaps it’s a slow news day, because a reporter named Peter Bell notices all the commotion outside the brownstone where Mary died, and figured there was a story there - especially after the police are really evasive about what happened.

So Peter sneaks into the hospital, trying to figure out what happened to Mary, when she sort of just…wakes up again? Maybe she got better? It’s never really explained. The important thing is that this priest committing suicide in a cemetery in a town where witch trials were once held ends up being some kind of supernatural hat trick, opening one of the gates to Hell. Now the ghost of this priest is wandering around and the dead are coming back to life. This is less than ideal, and Mary, along with Peter, sets off to find the cemetery where this priest hung himself, because if they don’t close the gate by All Saints Day (the day before Halloween), the dead will flood out of their graves and overrun the planet.

That’s pretty much it, and the rest of the film alternates between Mary and Peter trying to find where this cemetery is based on her visions and everything going really, really badly in Dunwich in assorted ways to assorted people. So, to start, it has a lot of the same hallmarks as the film that would follow it. It’s got the same wooden acting (almost nobody in the film seems especially fazed by anything that happens, at least, not until it starts getting really gross) and dialogue so awkward and clumsy that it’s almost surreal. The approach to storytelling isn’t so much storytelling as it is just things happening without much rhyme or reason. About the best way to describe it is that it’s crude. But, like The Beyond, this is one of its virtues as well. The limitations mean that some things end up being communicated via interesting shot composition or elements just blinking in and out of existence, and the extensive effects work is simultaneously cheap, novel, and tactile. This is a very…gooey…movie, and there were a couple of points where my feelings were exactly balanced between “well, I’ve never seen that before” and “oh god, my lunch is really restless at this moment.” It’s pretty inventive on that front, and I have to say, having to rely on simple optical and practical effects make it visceral, both figuratively and literally. This is what I like about Fulci’s films - they are very much experiences and they’re far enough out of my comfort zone that I never know where they’re going to go, even if I’m kind of queasy as I take the ride.

But those are the strengths. The weaknesses are, unfortunately, just as compelling. I don’t know that I can call this an ensemble film so much as it is a film with a bunch of characters in a few separate locations, but the end result is something less like a single movie and more like a collection of side stories without a single actual story to hold it all together. This gives the whole thing a meandering feel, where it just sort of moves from one set of characters and locations to another without much in the way of urgency or singular driving action. Sure, Peter and Mary are theoretically the main protagonists, but they don’t get any more or less screen time than any other group, so it just sort of feels like they’re over here, doing some stuff. There’s also Sandra and her therapist Gerry, Gerry’s suspiciously young girlfriend Emily, then Emily’s younger brother John-John (yes, “John-John”), Bob, who appears to be the town pervert, a couple of lovebirds who come to a nasty end, some dudes in a bar, and a man in whose garage Bob takes refuge, and his teenage daughter. The film bounces back and forth between all of these groups, and a lot of the film is similar action playing out in each group - characters are confused, something spooky happens, something disgusting happens right afterward, and somebody generally dies - so it feels repetitive as well as highly mechanical. Open scene, establish people, introduce creepiness, introduce gore, lather, rinse repeat.

The result is a movie that’s only an hour and a half long, but feels like two and a half hours, and on top of that, the end is a baffling mess- the film doesn’t so much end as it does just…stop. It’s not so much anticlimactic as it is nonsensical. I’m glad I watched The Beyond first, because I suspect if I’d started here, I wouldn’t have gone any further with Fulci’s filmography. At least I know he managed to pull it together (relatively speaking) for his next film.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon 

The Deep House: Keen Insight Into The Obvious

Imagination is a powerful thing, and there’s a school of thought that says that nothing you put up on a screen can be as frightening as what the audience imagines is happening. Suggestion’s a powerful tool, understatement is a powerful tool, inference is a powerful tool. On the other hand, it’s possible to hint and tease too much and never pay things off. In the words of Stephen King, “sometimes you have to put on the mask and go ooga-booga.” And scary movies can live or die on this. You can set up a ton of atmosphere and dread through suggestion and then the instant you reveal whatever it is, its shortcomings undo all the goodwill you’ve built up. Monster movies are especially vulnerable to this, since it’s so hard to do a good, convincing monster. But for that matter, a movie like Skinamarink, in all of its opacity and unwillingness to really go ooga-booga, plays a dangerous game. I think it succeeded, but it’s certainly a polarizing film and I think that’s part of the reason why. It relies almost entirely on inference.

The Deep House definitely has the opposite problem. It’s a haunted-house story with a mostly-effective new spin on things, but a lot of what it does well is undone by an irritating inability to trust its audience.

We open on blocky, low-res camera footage of two people hiking through a forest toward a large abandoned building somewhere in Ukraine. They’re Ben and Tina, a couple of urban explorers who run a YouTube channel where they document all of the abandoned places they visit. They met in grad school, Ben’s from England, and Tina’s the daughter of French immigrants who landed in Illinois. The YouTube channel was Ben’s idea. On the one hand, it’s because he likes the idea of getting out there and seeing the histories of forgotten places for himself, instead of through the dry expanse of academia. But on the other, he really wants to go viral. He wants millions of views. He wants to be Internet famous, whether he admits it to himself or not. Tina doesn’t really share his passion either for urban exploration or Internet fame. She’s come to enjoy the exploration part, but she mostly tolerates it, for his sake. So she gamely traipses through the abandoned ruins of a hospital in Eastern Europe while Ben jump-scares her for clicks.

The hospital ends up being sort of a bust, but they’ve got something big planned - Ben’s gotten a line on a lake in France that’s isolated and out of the way and has the ruins of an entire village on the lake bed. Never mind abandoned hospitals and factories and whatnot. This is something nobody’s ever explored before, totally undiscovered. So they secure a bunch of diving gear, an underwater camera drone, and plane tickets to France. Tina practices holding her breath underwater.

And when they finally get to this little village in France near where the lake is supposed to be, they find instead a thriving tourist spot, lots of families out on the lake swimming, boating, just having a day by the water. Not at all undiscovered. Tina relaxes a little, suggests they just play tourist for a bit, drink some wine, chill out. Ben sulks. This isn’t how you go viral. But he warms to the idea that they’ll just have a nice little vacation…until a local tells him about a remote branch of the lake deep in the woods, off any road or trail.

One with a single, perfectly preserved house at the bottom.

It is not spoiling anything to say that the house is more than it appears to be, after all, we came here for a horror movie. And yes, it’s basically a haunted-house story, but setting everything underwater does add something to what could have been, on dry land, a pretty stock haunted-house story. This kind of story thrives on atmosphere, and setting the whole thing underwater (and it was shot practically, no cheap CG effects here) means there’s a gloom and murk to it that you wouldn’t get otherwise. The light is fitful, and floating, drifting objects help give it a feeling that’s simultaneously otherworldly and kind of oppressive. There’s also a ticking-clock urgency to it, since they’re diving deep. They have a limited amount of air and will need time to decompress on their way back to the surface. Combined with making their way through what ends up being a sprawling, fairly labyrinthine house that only has one way in or out, and there’s a tight simmering tension to the whole thing.

There’s also a definite, though lower-key, tension to the dynamic between the protagonists. Ben’s a bit unlikable, not especially respectful of Tina’s feelings and overly focused on making his channel a hit. It’s not to the point of obsession or unrealistic, he just comes across as shallow and opportunistic enough that he’s kind of a dick and he’ll probably get them in trouble. Tina cares about him, but you get the sense that she puts up with a lot and has for some time. She wants to be supportive, but he doesn’t make it easy. This isn’t dysfunction on the level of Dani and Christian from Midsommar by any means, but there’s a definite tetchiness that comes up. It’s really played out in asides and sidelong looks and in the way she slips back into French when she says something she doesn’t want Ben to be aware of. It’s easy to infer.

But that’s really the biggest problem with this film - it does do inference and environmental storytelling pretty well, but it’s also unwilling to rely on that to carry the story. It cannot let what we see speak for itself. Once they dive and begin exploring the house, the amount they talk to each other strains credulity, given how limited their air supply is. And this is only made worse by the fact that most of what they’re saying is just describing things both we and they can see for themselves. As they’re swimming through especially murky water, Ben will say “the water’s murky here.” Like, no shit. “There’s a door here.” Yes, we can see that. So can you, so can Tina. So can anyone looking at your footage. It’s almost like the filmmakers didn’t think we could understand what was going on right in front of our faces, so they had to have the characters tell us what we were seeing, and for most of the film it’s pretty grating and works very much against its strengths.

And yes, the alternative would be a film largely devoid of dialogue, but I really do think it could have done with more silence. And it’s not like it would have been an entirely silent film. But it feels like that person who just talks incessantly because they’re uncomfortable with silence. And in the final act it gets worse, with a denouement that just spells out exactly what’s happened in this house, and it’s to the story’s detriment. The important parts have already been figured out by an attentive viewer, and the details they fill in don’t really add anything. It gives us just enough to imagine the worst, and then shows it to us anyway, in case we didn’t get it the first time.

It all serves to mar a film with some really good atmosphere, a nice sense of mounting dread as further exploration of the house reveals an increasingly discomfiting history (spelled out nicely through detail and environmental storytelling in ways that don’t require the protagonists to tell us what we’re seeing even though they do anyway), and a suitably bleak ending.  I don’t know what it is about horror that makes so many filmmakers feel like they have to spoon-feed their audience, but fuck it gets tiresome.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Ang-Ma-Reul Bo-At-Da: Fucked Around And Found Out

Last week I expressed a certain amount of disappointment with Cerdita for taking a pretty sharp riff on a specific type of revenge film and ending it in the most obvious and cliched way possible. And now this week I find myself with another type of revenge film that has very, very few surprises to it, start to finish, but executes what it does so well that I honestly don’t mind all that much. And I think the difference lies in restraint, or the lack thereof. Cerdita kept a lot of its violence off-screen, which I think was the right choice for that film, but Ang-Ma-Reul Bo-At-Da (I Saw The Devil) puts everything right up front, and there’s something about its relentlessness and unwillingness to look away that takes a pretty by-the-numbers story and gives it a fair amount of heft.

It's a cold, snowy night, and a bus, empty but for its driver, heads down the highway, soon encountering a young woman stranded by the side of the road. She has a flat tire, and so the driver stops to offer her help. She declines, saying she’s already called a tow truck. It doesn’t matter. Things turn ugly, and soon enough she is dragged off to a dismal garage someplace and butchered. The driver dumps her remains into a stream, where they’re discovered the next day in what can only be called a shitshow of a search. She was Joo-yeon, the daughter of the local police chief, and her fiancée, Soo-hyeon, is an agent with the National Intelligence Service.

Sure, there’s going to be an official investigation, but they’re going to have to outrun Soo-hyeon, who only has one thing on his mind.

So this is the setup. Soo-hyeon is a man with a particular set of skills, who has lost someone dear to him and knows some people in the police department. This could easily be something similar to a Korean take on Taken, but it isn’t. First of all, it’s not dour monologuing broken up by explosions, slick and glossy in its mayhem. It’s something grubbier, more raw and tough to watch than that. It depicts Kyung-chul - a school bus driver who satisfies his hatred of women through kidnapping, torture, and murder - as crude and angry, something oafish and not especially clever. And Soo-hyeon doesn’t waste a lot of time on angst. He’s a professional, used to tracking people down and setting his feelings aside until the job is done. And we know this not because he tells us, but because he shows us through his utter calm, his impassive face, all while he’s doing terrible things to the man who murdered his fiancée, things to which he displayed grief and horror before he decided to make it his mission. Because he isn’t just content to track him down and make a big speech and shoot him. No, this is catch-and-release, where Soo-hyeon finds Kyung-chul, takes something away from him, and then lets him go, all to wonder when he’s going to pop up next. Soo-hyeon doesn’t just want Kyung-chul to die, he wants him to suffer.

The result is an excruciatingly violent film, simultaneously graphic and dispassionate. It doesn’t feel gratuitous - as much happens off-camera as on - nor does it feel like the camera is leering at violent spectacle. It hurts to watch what’s happening to people, even the ones we don’t like, because it’s unflinching and there’s visible suffering. Women are constantly, routinely victimized in places and ways that suggest that Kyung-chul isn’t some kind of criminal mastermind, but rather some barely controlled id, heedless of getting caught, so intent is he on satisfying his appetites how and when he wants to. Scenes where he hurts others and ones where he is the one being hurt play out exactly the same, which suggests that violence is violence, no matter the justification or context. There’s more than a whiff of Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer around it in that respect - everything around Kyung-chul seems to happen in sort of a shadow world of petty criminals and criminals with bigger, stranger appetites, a world that comes out late at night, where everyone is a predator as bad or worse than him. It feels like the violence he brings into Soo-hyeon’s life is not an aberration, but just what lies out there in the dark, once everyone else has gone home. It’s what lies behind closed doors in remote areas, on the streets, in cabs and buses. It’s been there the whole time, now he’s just aware of it.

It's a long film, and it feels long, though it doesn’t drag much. The length makes itself known in shots that stretch out just a little longer than you expect, pacing that takes its time (until it doesn’t - this is a film where not much happens until all kinds of horrible shit happens all at once). It does feel a little padded in places, but not too much, and in its climax it sews everything up tight, bringing it full circle back to a dark road at night and a lonely ramshackle building out in the middle of nowhere, paying off early details. There are long stretches of silence - music only makes itself known at the height of especially intense moments, otherwise the rest of the film, stylishly shot for the most part, just lets things play out, however long that takes, so even scenes that just require someone to respond to a question develop a certain feeling of tension. It’s a film where we’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Subtitles mean a couple of moments come off more humorous than I think was intended, though there is some effective black comedy as well. Settings are generally squalid - garages, abandoned hotels, apartments as filthy as they are tiny, and a lot of the film takes place at night, in the dark. Again, until it doesn’t and everything is laid bare by the light of day. In that sense it reminds me of Se7en, a film that feels more lightless than it actually is, one where having the antagonist show up in broad daylight feels a little obscene.

There’s definitely a formula to revenge films - how far is too far, don’t fight monsters unless you want to become a monster, revenge carries a terrible cost, etc. And this film definitely hews to the formula, though it saves the most on-the-nose stuff for the third act. But it also doesn’t descend completely into cliché. It never really felt to me like Soo-hyeon’s humanity was ever in question, and Kyung-chul wasn’t really redeemable in any way. Repellent, sadistic and utterly unapologetic, it’s difficult even at the film’s worst, when he is brought lowest, to say that maybe this is too much. His humanity is never in doubt, he's just someone for whom only his own life has value and everyone else exists to sate his appetites. And the end, as fitting (and in some ways typical) an end to a revenge film as you could ask for, also highlights the cost Soo-hyeon has paid, as the feelings he’s been burying to focus on the mission finally crash down on him all at once. You get the sense that Kyung-chul learned nothing, and Soo-hyeon learned too much. Either way, they both got involved with something much bigger than they expected. They fucked around and found out.

IMDB entry
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Available on Tubi (dubbed)