Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Black Christmas: The Nightmare Before Christmas

As was the case with Halloween, I find myself sitting down to watch the movie I’m going to write about for the coming week on the day after a holiday - this year that happened to be the day after Christmas so, well, ‘tis the season and all that. And like Halloween, Black Christmas is an early example of the slasher film, a type of horror film of which I’m generally not very fond - I don’t find the prospect of a bunch of unwitting teenagers getting mowed down by a silent, hulking presence with some kind of gimmick all that compelling. 

But I do feel I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least look at seminal examples of the type. That’s usually where you’re going to find the most interesting films, before they’ve been codified into some kind of genre with rules and clichés and expectations to be met. And, though I don’t know that Black Christmas works as well overall as Halloween does, there are some really interesting choices here alongside early examples of the sort of things that would become slasher film cliché.

The film begins sort of in medias res, as the young women of Pi Kappa Sigma sorority are throwing a holiday party before Christmas break. There’s drinking, conversation, the mood’s mostly festive and relaxed, though one sorority sister named Barb is having a tense phone call with her mother, and another sister, Jess, seems to be considering breaking up with her boyfriend Peter for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. Meanwhile, outside the sorority house, we cut to a first-person perspective of someone walking around the house, looking in the windows, trying the doors. 

Inside, the party is winding down as most of the sisters begin packing up to leave for the holidays, and then there’s a phone call. An obscene phone call, by the sounds of it. The caller breathes and grunts and moans, as the young women gathered around the phone listen with something between bemusement and numb resignation. The grunting and moaning escalates to surprisingly graphic ranting obscenity, and just before the caller hangs up, one last thing, almost whispered…

“I’m going to kill you.”

In some ways, Black Christmas really does create a lot of the template for future slasher films - even apart from setting the film during a holiday, which would go on to become a staple of the genre, we have a group of young people -in this case, young women - in a fixed location being stalked and murdered by an impersonal killer. The use of first-person perspective, which figured heavily into Halloween and shows up as a device in many other slasher films as well, is a big part of this film. Law enforcement is largely ineffectual and doesn’t really take the protagonists’ concerns seriously, and people get picked off one by one leading up to the climactic confrontation between the last protagonist and the killer. 

But there are some important departures as well, things that future copycats wouldn’t include in the formula. Like Halloween, it is a much more deliberately-paced film than its successors would be, with a fairly large stretch of the film given over to the reactions of other characters to the disappearance of the first victim and efforts to locate her. It isn’t immediately clear what’s going on, and because they aren’t in an isolated location, there’s a sense that life continues to go on around this young woman going missing. There are subplots as well, which you generally don’t get in slasher films, about the first victims’ father, who came to campus to pick her up and then stayed to assist with the search effort, and Jess’ relationship with her boyfriend. They’re somewhat tangential to the main story, but end up becoming part of it as well, sometimes in surprisingly effective ways. For long stretches, it feels more like a mystery and how this group of people reacts to it than it does a horror film, except we know right off the bat what’s happened and are sort of waiting for it to happen again.

It’s also a lot less graphically violent than the films that would follow it - a number of people do die, but the murders are rarely lingered upon and in at least two cases occur entirely off-camera. Almost all of the action takes place in the sorority house, an actual house rented and remodeled for the film, which gives it a tremendous sense of geography. It gives the film a real feeling of…not claustrophobia, exactly, but confinement. There’s someone in the house with these young women, and all it would take would be opening a certain door or climbing up into the attic of this sprawling, labyrinthine house to reveal everything, but because there’s no real reason to, people don’t. A lot turns on small details - open doors, the sound of heavy breathing - to cue what’s about to happen, and much more than the films it inspires, this film really leans into the power of suggestion and imagination. There’s something nightmarish about it, this idea that there’s a maniac up in the attic, creeping down when people aren’t looking and lurking in the shadows, just watching. And what a maniac he is. One thing that Halloween does seem to be responsible for is the killer as a silent, implacable hulking figure. That is definitely not the case in this film. We almost never see the killer at all from anyone else’s perspective - just a hand or eyes peering out from the shadows. But we do see a lot from the killer’s perspective, and he rants, babbles, makes strange, inarticulate animal noises, speaking in multiple voices like a man possessed. There’s a horrific energy to this that exists in counterpoint to the fairly restrained depictions of murder. The obscene phone call that begins the film is surprisingly nasty for the time in which the film was made, and it continues in a way that best describes the killer as unhinged. The violence is in the killer’s portrayal, not in his actions, and because the killer is never really revealed in a meaningful way or explained at all, it’s really unsettling. 

It’s also interesting to observe how the subject matter of this film interacts with the time in which it was made. It came out in 1974, and mid-70s ideas about gender are very much on display here in a way that communicates with the film. There’s the weary resignation the sorority sisters exhibit at yet another obscene phone call, the way that most of the men are occupied with dictating the lives of the women in the film, from the father’s prudish disapproval of his daughter’s fellow sorority sisters to Peter’s callous narcissism, the way the police dismiss the protagonist’s complaints about obscene phone calls and even the first sister going missing, or even just total strangers acting creepy. These women exist in an environment where they’re constantly under siege as it is from the men in their lives, never mind an unseen killer. And the men in this film mostly exist on a continuum of arrested development, from the police sergeant flustered by the word “fellatio” to the fraternity brother who can’t help but play Santa Claus while spouting obscenities, to Peter’s utter failure to consider anyone’s needs but his own, to the way the killer keeps regressing to a child as he rants and raves. Almost any of the men in this film could be a monster, it’s just a matter of degree.

So even though there is an interesting, almost theatrical feeling to this film (I really could see this being adapted for the stage if it hasn’t been already), it also makes a number of mistakes. The use of first-person perspective is pretty clumsy, and especially overdone at the start, where we basically know about the killer’s existence before we’re even properly situated with the characters and the setting. It burns off some of the suspense, and continually reverting to it throughout the film threatens to take us out of the story since it feels so artificial. Characterization in this film isn’t especially deep across the board, sometimes bordering on caricature, but there are occasionally some exchanges that feel pretty real, especially in the back half of the film when it becomes clear that there’s something going on. But the housemother is almost played for comic relief, and the protagonists aren’t really so much fleshed-out people as they are either a single personality trait or their relationship with another character.

This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem in a film that moved along at a faster clip, but because the whole second act consists mostly of people talking to each other, things start to drag quite a bit. The tension does start to ramp up in the last act, accompanied by good use of long shots of empty hallways from different perspectives, which accentuates how big the house is and how many hidden nooks and crannies it has. I think more of that and less of the first-person stuff would have made it even better, and to its credit it ends strong on a creepily inconclusive note, something a lot of horror films fail to manage. 

On its own, this is an idiosyncratic film that does slightly more right than it does wrong, but for as much as it’s contributed to a thoroughly overdone style of horror film, it’s also very much its own thing, and something about it has stuck with me ever since I watched it. That doesn’t happen all that often. 

Wednesday, December 22, 2021

Creep 2: Collaboration

(Note: This is going to be mildly spoilery for the 2014 film Creep, and if you haven’t seen it - well, you should, it’s really good and it’ll inform how you see this film. So maybe go check that out and then read this.)

If you’ve spent any amount of time reading this thing of mine, you’ll know I don’t like sequels to horror movies. If you haven’t spent much time reading this thing of mine, well…I don’t like sequels to horror movies. I think horror works best when there’s mystery and finality to it, and sequels (and prequels, for that matter) undo both of those, diminishing what made the original so powerful. Plus, there’s a tendency to reprise the original - another group of campers come to the cursed summer camp, another group of people with dodgy pasts get snared by the evil mastermind, another family moves into the haunted house. It tends to be more of the same, and again, no finality or mystery. We’ve seen this already. There are the occasional exceptions, as there always are, but as a rule, I don’t do sequels.

Creep was one of those films that made me consider an exception, mostly because it falls so far outside of conventional horror filmmaking in so many ways that I was genuinely curious what another story by these people in this world would look like. And in a lot of ways, Creep 2 doesn’t disappoint, primarily because it elaborates on the first film, rather than reprise it. It’s like variations on a theme, or someone improvising on an existing riff, and it goes some places the original film didn’t. It does have the problem inherent in any sequel in that some of the surprise is lost, but what replaces it works more often than not. 

We open on a young man named Dave, who’s just received a package in the mail - we can’t see what it is, because our perspective is being shot from inside the box. He pulls out a DVD, and though we can’t see what’s on it, it has Dave pretty rattled. So he calls his friend Aaron to come over. We’ve seen Aaron before - the last time we saw him, he was calling himself “Josef.” There’s a conversation, there are revelations, there’s a knife, and soon enough, Dave is dead.

Cut to Sara. Sara is a video artist, sort of a documentarian. She’s making a web series called Encounters wherein she answers Craigslist ads put up by lonely men and documents herself spending the day with these men, finding out how they got to this point in their life. It’s very raw, very honest, and pretty much nobody is watching it. She’s losing faith in her ability to do this, in her ability as an artist. She needs something to really push the boundaries, something really compelling.

And then she answers a Craigslist ad from someone named “Aaron.”

Initially, then, we’re sort of working from the bones of the original. An unsuspecting videographer is invited out to a house deep in the woods on the pretext of spending the day filming the person who hired them. That’s not entirely where the similarities end, but it’s where most of them end. One of the things that I thought made Creep work so well was how it gave the audience a first-person perspective on someone gradually realizing that this person they initially thought was just sort of needy and awkward is actually something much worse, and how grounded that was in actual human behavior. It was very much about someone coming to realize too late that they were in over their head, and that’s not exactly what’s going on here - well, it’s not not what’s going on here, but it’s a very different dynamic.

The dynamic in this film feels much more actively collaborative, insofar as both Aaron and Sara are trying to get something out of each other. Aaron’s trying to meet his needs, as in the first film, though here he’s depicted as someone headed into middle age, realizing that he doesn’t have the same joy in his work as he used to, and he’s wondering what’s happening to him. He wants Sara to tell his story. But Sara’s also trying to meet her needs as well, and it’s something more complicated than just a day’s filming for hire - she wants her show to work, she wants something really challenging and maybe even dangerous to make for a compelling episode. She’s already in a place where she’s accustomed to walking alone into potentially dangerous situations, so she’s not naïve, but you get the sense that maybe she has a little more confidence than she really should, based on all of the previous times she was able to handle herself. From what we see of Encounters, she’s mostly been dealing with sheep, and we know (from the first film and from the prologue) that now she’s dealing with an actual wolf, and so the simmering discomfort at all of the boundary violations from the first film are replaced with a simmering discomfort at us knowing exactly how much trouble she’s really in and wondering how it’s all going to play out. On that level, we’re watching a predator toy with its prey for a little over an hour. It’s more nuanced than that, though, as Sara both acknowledges how dangerous it is for her as a woman to walk into a strange man’s house in the middle of nowhere, but also at the same time recognize how well this could pay off for her, paired with an immediate dismissal of the idea that this guy could actually be dangerous. It’s like a much more grounded version of the feeling you get in more conventional horror films right before one of the protagonists opens a door that you absolutely know they should not open. It’s not so much blithe ignorance as you being able to see Sara talking herself out of her better instincts in real time. 

But on top of that, there’s the way that Aaron continues to weaponize the idea of intimacy as one of his ways of manipulating his victims. Just as in the first film, he’s extremely confessional and open, affectionately demonstrative and given to SoCal touchy-feely psychobabble as gestures toward vulnerability. And as in the first film, he pushes Sara to be just as revealing, a way of brute-forcing the trust he’s going to exploit eventually. But because Sara essentially has an agenda of her own, she gives as good as she gets, and her fearlessness serves her well. She’s more assertive and directive, she challenges Aaron, she doesn’t back down. She’s someone who’s also used to using intimacy as a tool, used to using trust and vulnerability to her own ends. So there’s much more of a back-and-forth there than in the first film. 

Another advantage to this film is the way it makes our antagonist more of a mystery, rather than less. One of the problems I have with sequels to horror films in general is that they tend to reveal more and more about the antagonist until there’s no horror left because it’s all choked out by the backstory. Here, though, we can never, ever trust anything Aaron says or does as being true. As in the first film, he uses intimacy as a tool, not just to lull his victim but also to maintain his own distance. When you choose what to reveal to someone about yourself and how, it’s still a process under your control. If Aaron wants to share an uncomfortable incident from his past he can, and it will seem as though he is being vulnerable, but if it’s a total fiction then we’re no closer to knowing him than we were before. It isn’t playing fair, and as in the first film, those violations of the interpersonal contract of disclosure are uncomfortable. But now that we see Aaron’s entire narrative with Sara is very different from the one he has in the first movie, it means he’s still as much a mystery to us at the end of this film as he was at the end of the first film. All we know is that he kills, and all the rest is up for grabs, If anything, he’s even more of a mystery than he was in the first film. At least in terms of the details - there’s a very clear vocabulary around intimacy and interpersonal connection and specific imagery and ideas to Aaron that provides a through-line, but there’s no myth-making here, no lore to bog down the story. At whatever level he’s consciously revealing things, he’s still a cipher, and that’s chilling.

There’s a pretty strong metatextual undercurrent as well - we are watching a film about the making of a film, and in some ways that makes us, the audience, collaborators as well. Sara’s complicit in helping Aaron to memorialize his killings, and we’re complicit in watching her do it. As in the first film, the majority is shot from the perspective of a single camera, we’re watching footage as it’s being shot, we’re seeing when it works and when it doesn’t work, and when there’s artifice, it’s captured both as part of the film Sara’s making and the film we’re watching. So where the first film felt more immediate, like we were watching everything unfold as it happened, here there’s a bit more of a remove to it, it’s a little more self-conscious, which takes some of the immediate tension out. I don’t think it really harms the film, because it’s an expression of the dynamic between these two people, but it does rob the story of some of its immediacy. It’s more of a head film, and less of a gut film, if that makes sense.

And on top of all that, the performances continue to be very strong. They have to be, since it’s really just two people talking to each other for most of the film. As in the first film, the dialogue was improvised from an outline, so it feels very natural throughout, and Sara’s more proactive, directive role here means we see sides to Aaron that we didn’t see in the first film. In some ways, this is as contrived a depiction of a serial killer as any other serial killer film (man invites someone with a camera to his home so he can have a record of both his attempts to bond with him and then their murder), but the character of Aaron really nails a lot of the real psychological ingredients of serial murderers here - there’s an underlying emptiness or vacuity and constant need, an intense desire for control, and a harmless, unassuming persona that slips when nobody’s looking. We don’t know the facts of his life, we don’t know how much (if any) of the things he revealed in this film or the first one are true, but we see what happens when he and Sara have trouble filming a sequence and he completely loses his cool, we see how Sara’s unflappability and willingness to take charge of the situation puts him on his back foot, and there are moments where the friendly, open, good-vibes persona drops and the darkness underneath, the rage, are clearly visible, if only for a moment. Again, it’s chilling when it happens. Just like the first film this is not an especially gory film by any stretch of the imagination. The horror here is in what people say and do, in the details carefully observed. 

It’s not as intensely minimal as the first film - the production qualities are higher, there’s a prologue and an epilogue, which gives it a more conventional feel, but not to a degree that hurts it. The last thing you want to do (and the first thing so many filmmakers do with horror sequels) is just make the same movie again. The settings are similar, again it’s mostly set in someone’s vacation home, and apart from the credits all of the music is diegetic, so it still feels pretty naturalistic. As in the first film, the firs-person perspective sometimes feels a little weird, but not to a degree that pulls you out of the movie. The first film wasn’t really a conventional horror film and neither is this one, they both mine pretty conventional horror-film territory in unconventional ways, but even though this one’s maybe a little more distant than the first, underneath there’s still that constant hum of unease and discomfort, wondering when the other shoe is going to drop, and the characters are acutely enough observed that it’s painful to watch in many of the ways the first film was. It ends on a suitably messy, complicated note, underscoring the idea that there aren’t many neat, tidy answers to be had, and that we’re as much a part of this as Aaron and Sara were. Apparently there’s a third one in pre-production, and I gotta say I’m at least curious.

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

Creep (2014): This May Seem Weird Now

When you think about horror movies, the horror of new relationships probably doesn’t come to mind immediately. Sure, there are films like Honeymoon that use monstrous transformation as a metaphor for the realization that maybe you don’t know your brand-new spouse as well as you thought, or thrillers like Fatal Attraction that describe how a casual encounter can have horrible consequences. But, broadly speaking, embarking on any kind of new relationship - not just romantic or sexual ones, even just friendship - can be scary, because it entails revealing things about yourself to another person, making yourself vulnerable. And there’s always an element of uncertainty there. How are they going to respond? Being intimate with someone is scary.

As is the case with Creep, a strange, persistently uncomfortable film that doesn’t really look or play like much else, and that’s very much to its credit. This is not to be confused with the (somewhat misogynistic) 2004 film of the same name that told the story of a young woman trapped in a disused part of the London Underground with something extremely nasty. No, the monster here, while certainly nasty enough, is something entirely plausible, which makes the whole thing hit just that much closer to home, to great effect.

It’s the story of a young man named Aaron. He’s a videographer by trade, and we pick up with him as he’s traveling out into the woods of what is presumably northern California, though it’s never really made clear, for a private gig. “Discretion is appreciated,” the ad said. And when he gets where he’s going, to an isolated vacation home, there’s nobody around. Nobody answers the door, nobody answers his calls. He’s just about to leave when the client, Josef, shows up. He’s very friendly…very, very friendly. He pulls Aaron in for a hug, saying “this may seem weird now, but by the end of the day it’ll be totally normal.” Josef explains to Aaron that he’s terminally ill, his wife is pregnant, and there’s every chance that he won’t live to see his child born. So he wants to make some video diaries of himself so his unborn son can get to know him after he’s gone. Aaron’s going to spend the day following him around, recording him, as a keepsake.

“This is a partnership,” Josef says.

To start, this film isn’t so much scary as it is, well, really creepy. And it’s not really the creepiness of your garden-variety horror film - Josef’s vacation house is bright and airy and modern, and there’s nothing strange out in the forest. This is the creepiness of a certain kind of person who actually exists in the world. Josef is uncomfortable to watch almost from the first moment he’s on screen, combining the bland amicability of a youth pastor or children’s program host with glimpses at some deep-seated psychological issues and a talent for ignoring social and interpersonal boundaries. There’s a real weaponization of intimacy at work here - Josef shares too much too quickly, and encourages Aaron to do the same. He asks uncomfortably personal questions and makes odd remarks. There’s a childlike quality to him, a vulnerability that suggests he was wounded very badly at a very young age and maybe he’s never really known how to relate to people.

So right from jump, something feels very, very off, but in a way that doesn’t necessarily feel like a horror movie. You hear stories of people who strike up friendships, acquaintances, work relationships, or even just passing encounters with people who don’t seem to know where and when to stop, who call at all hours, who keep asking if you like them or not, who share embarrassingly personal things about themselves and pressure you to do the same. That happens in everyday life all the time, and the effectiveness of this film lies in how it takes those kind of uncomfortable, but highly relatable encounters and spins them into something much worse. Most of the heavy lifting, then, is in the persistent uneasiness that accompanies really awkward, uncomfortable social situations with people you realize might not be totally stable. There are some jump-scare moments but they’re sort of….not exactly telegraphed, more like they’re integrated into the story in a way that makes sense so they’re as much a part of the character as they are jump scares. Josef’s the kind of guy who thinks it’s funny to leap out at someone as they walk through a door, so you get the jolt in a way that feels narratively plausible. And it suggests a certain meanness, the way certain types of teasing are presented as being all in fun, but sting nonetheless. Or how you can tickle someone until it stops being funny and starts being genuinely distressing. They’re all violations of trust, of intimacy.

The importance of intimacy to the story comes through in the cinematography as well. It’s shot almost entirely in the first person, using a commercial-grade video camera. So it’s nominally a found-footage film, at least in terms of its perspective, but it’s not really presented as such. It feels more like a film that’s just shot mostly from a first-person perspective, as if we’re privy to a video diary. Maybe now and then you’ll wonder “why is he filming this?” But since it isn’t explicitly one of these “all that remains of the night of that horrible tragedy is the footage the missing teenagers filmed” kind of movies, I found it easier to sort of just roll with it. It’s a personal film shot from a personal point of view.

It’s also an extremely minimal production. The whole film is just two people (and one voice on the phone), both of whom also wrote it (to the extent that it’s written - they improvised around a basic outline they came up with ahead of time) and one of whom is the director. There’s no score, there’s one camera, and there are minimal effects. It’s two people interacting with each other in increasingly uncomfortable ways and it feels extremely natural, which makes it work even better. If it reminds me of any other film I’ve written about for this thing, it’s probably Leaving D.C., which is similarly minimal, though this film is tenser and more unsettling, but like the former film, it’s very much centered in believable human experience and that’s why it works so well. This doesn’t scan like most horror films - it’ s set in sunny, cheery suburban environments and it plays for most of its runtime more like an indie drama about someone who finds themselves becoming increasingly entangled with a very lonely. awkward, emotionally arrested man, someone who has a real problem with boundaries for reasons hinted at obliquely in the beginning of the film. It seems more like something you’d expect from Mike White or Todd Solondz, as Aaron tries his best to navigate Josef’s feelings in a way that extricates him from the attentions of this incredibly needy person without hurting him. This is a horror film where most of the horror is expressed in conversations, which is a hell of a thing.

It’s a relatively short film, not even 90 minutes, but it does have some pacing problems. It starts to lose its focus a little in the back half, and so things meander for a bit before a fairly strong ending. There’s also going to be some “why would he do that?” questions asked of Aaron, but Aaron doesn’t know he’s in a horror movie, and once things get extremely strange he does start to fear for his safety. But to look at Josef, so lost and hangdog and forlorn, how could he possibly be anything other than just…kinda creepy?

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon

Wednesday, December 8, 2021

No One Gets Out Alive: Things Are Not What They Seem

The phrase “but it turns out that things are not what they seem” gets used so much in synopses for horror movies that I sometimes suspect whoever writes those things just has a document full of phrases - that included - from which they just copy and paste when summarizing a movie. It’s right up there with “but then their dream house turns into a nightmare” and “what began as a game becomes terrifyingly real.” It’s really difficult to muster a lot of enthusiasm for a movie whose description makes it sounds like fifteen other movies.

Luckily, No One Gets Out Alive, a movie that is both not what it seems and is about a situation where things aren’t what they seem is better than the generic title would lead you to believe, though it isn’t quite as good as it could be.

It opens with scratchy, grainy film footage of what appears to be an expedition to Central or South America. No dialogue, not a lot of exposition, just a trip into the jungle, and the retrieval of an enigmatic stone box. Cut to today, and a young woman listening to a voicemail from what sounds like her mother, who was very happy that she visited. Now she’s getting out of the back of a semi, flinching against the light, one of many people packed in the trailer, like cargo. She’s being hustled out, as if the driver is anxious not to get caught.

Her name is Ambar, and she’s come to Cleveland, OH from Mexico. She’s trying to start over, make a new life in the United States. Ambar is undocumented, though, which makes things hard. She takes an exhausting job in a sweatshop where she gets paid in cash. It’s a life on the margins, and she can’t keep staying in a motel - the proprietor wants to see her ID. So she snags an ad for a boarding house advertising cheap rooms. It’s run by a taciturn fellow named Red, who doesn’t ask for her ID, but does ask for a month’s rent up front. It’s an old building, run-down, in a depressed part of town. There are rules: No smoking in the rooms, no male visitors. Red says she’s one of two occupants at the moment, but Ambar can hear other women at night through the walls, sobbing. There are other rules: Red’s office is private. The basement is private.

Don’t go into the basement.

I know it’s not especially strong praise, but this film could have been so, so much worse than it is, and honestly a lot of the time I was very pleasantly surprised. It’s a much more restrained and understated movie than I was expecting - the editing is crisp and terse, and the film makes good, effective use of small reveals and careful, tasteful use of repeated motifs, both visual and narrative, throughout. Even more importantly, for a film that could be exploitative caricature - young woman all alone in a city full of people ready to take advantage of her - almost everyone comes off like real people. It’s not a character study or anything, but even the antagonistic characters are portrayed at a human scale and aren’t just two-dimensional villains, and interactions between people feel natural and believable. This is a film that is confident to let unsettling things happen in the background instead of relying on loud noises and jump scares, and that buys a lot of goodwill with me.

The first act is relatively quiet, focused mostly on Ambar’s tenuous situation and how vulnerable she is as an undocumented immigrant, and that builds some tension on its own. It has some parallels to His House, in that sense, though I think that’s a stronger film. Still, like that film, this is about a stranger in a strange land trying to build something for themselves while constantly being plagued by setbacks, and that does pretty good work on its own. Ambar’s desperation feels real without being forced or melodramatic, and as the first act progresses, we start to get hints of something being not right around the edges on top of what is already a very precarious position. If anything, the first act is maybe a little too restrained and quiet, and I worried that it was just going to putter along in this gear until the end, but the second act complicates Ambar’s situation further, and the pace picks up steadily moving toward the climax.

But the pacing is still sort of a problem. It’s a story about how things aren’t what they appear to be and that’s fine as far as it goes, but it also relies on a narrative feint where the truth isn’t what you expect it to be either. You’re lead to believe Ambar is in one kind of trouble, but it turns out to be much, much worse. Again, this is absolutely fine, but it gives the game away too early on - inside of the first act a number of clues are dropped toward what’s actually going on, and so the final reveal in the third act doesn’t hit with the force that it could. Part of this could be because I was spoiled for the last act going into it, but I think part of it is also that it signposts some things entirely too clearly at the expense of what you think is supposed to be going on. It’s tough to talk about it too much without spoiling the film, but the filmmakers don’t commit hard enough to the story of the kind of trouble that Ambar is supposed to be in for the truth to be much of a twist.

Part of what helps make up for this is the cinematography. It’s a dark, gloomy movie - daytime scenes are overcast, broken up by occasional more brightly-lit moments of relief that are nonetheless awkward or end up going sour, which nicely sets a mood. But the nighttime scenes (and most of the interiors in the boarding house) are sometimes so dark that it’s tough to know what we’re supposed to be looking at. When they’re lit, it’s appropriately drab and sickly or bathed in candlelight which is nonetheless not especially comforting. So the visuals, along with the acting and editing and characterization, go a long way. Most of the settings feel real as well, with the unfortunate exception of the boarding house interior, which feels much larger than it appears on the outside. The effect is less supernatural and more just revealing that it’s a set. That said, it doesn’t look especially cheap. It’s not a film that leans too heavily into gore or special effects for most of its runtime, but that changes in the final act, and then what’s there is believable and striking.

So the human elements of the story - Ambar’s attempts to establish herself in the U.S. and the obstacles in her way, the way she interacts with others and how they treat her. - feel true and generate a low-level sense of dread as you know things aren’t going to go well, and so the escalation to something worse and then no, something even worse than that should stack on top of the existing unease, but giving away important details early undercuts that. Even though it’s a smart film in a lot of ways, it also never really builds up the head of steam that it needs to. Once things do ramp up it mostly works, but the whole thing ends on a disappointingly conventional note in Final Girl mode, and it just feels like there were more interesting places to go with it. It all feels…fitful, like the flickering lights that signal something bad is about to happen throughout the film. Sometimes it works really well, sometimes it doesn’t. So no, it’s not what it seems, in that it’s a much better-made film than you’d expect, but if it had done a better job of selling us on what we were expecting the story to be, then the reveal of what it truly was would have hit even harder.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Wednesday, December 1, 2021

The Wicker Man (1973): You’re Not From Around Here, Are You?

 Every now and then - most recently with the release of Midsommar - the idea of “folk horror” will come up in the conversation. It’s a very pure expression of a fairly basic premise, that of the outsider coming to an isolated community where ancient beliefs and rituals are still practiced and meeting with a bad end. What I gather distinguishes folk horror from films as wildly different from it (and each other) as Dagon and Children Of The Corn and Cannibal Holocaust is that in folk horror, the traditions being drawn upon are distinctly pagan in flavor and rooted in real historical traditions (the “folk” part(, and not just stock-standard crazy evil cult worship.

It’s not something of which I’ve seen a lot, but it’s really difficult to talk about without bringing up what is largely considered the modern beginning of the genre, The Wicker Man. This is another one of those classic films (it’s been referred to as “the Citizen Kane of horror films”) that I haven’t seen…well, no, that’s not entirely true. I have a dim recollection of watching it many years ago and not being especially impressed. But I was much younger and less patient then, so I thought it’d be good to give it another look and see if it still holds up decades later.

And the verdict is…well, sort of. It definitely has its moments and I can’t say I’ve really seen anything else like it (in a good way), but ultimately it’s more interesting as an exemplar of a style than it is effective as a horror film.

The film opens with a cheeky title card where the producers thank the lord and residents of the isle depicted in the movie for their cooperation, and I have to say, it’s a nicely off-kilter touch…much like thanking the residents of Halsingland for their cooperation in the filming of Midsommar. We cut to a seaplane flying across a stretch of rocky islands in what are presumably the Hebrides, before landing just off the harbor in a small village. The plane is flown by Sergeant Neil Howie, a police officer sent to the small, isolated island village of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a little girl. Howie floats out on the water as a crowd gathers at the harbor, gawking at him without sending a dinghy out to bring him to shore. A fair amount of shouting on his part doesn’t change this, and he’s told that nobody’s allowed to land in the harbor without the permission of Lord Summerisle. Howie eventually manages to convince them that refusing to cooperate with a police investigation would be a very bad move, and he’s allowed to come ashore.

What Sergeant Howie finds is a very strange place indeed. Summerisle is known for its especially delicious fruit, exported all over Scotland, but the local pub only has canned food. The usual evening pub crowd is unusually bawdy and lascivious. The local church and its attendant graveyard are left to ruin, overrun with weeds. And even though a letter from the island requested the police’s help, everyone swears that they don’t know the missing girl.

They have their own traditions here.

Right off the bat, this film is not so much scary as it is relentlessly uneasy - the juxtaposition of pagan belief with otherwise contemporary English village life lends the whole film a feeling of pervasive strangeness that dovetails well with the story of an outsider come to an isolated, rural place with its own strange ways. The people are never explicitly sinister or leering villains, this is just their way of life, as normal to them as any other, but there’s definitely the paranoia you expect when someone from outside comes nosing around. All conversation stops when Howie walks into the room, windows open and people peer out as he passes, and with that comes cheerful, friendly obstruction and noncompliance with the investigation. People are happy to tell him that no, they’ve never heard of this girl, and even the woman who presumably wrote the letter insists that there must be some mistake, even though it’s ostensibly her daughter he’s come to find. He can’t even search the local records without the explicit permission of Lord Summerisle. The small village with its secrets works well in establishing a mood because it is an environment at once familiar and alien, so nothing can be taken for granted.

All of that works fine as it goes, and it’s a good foundation on which to build a story, but it’s undercut by the characterization of its protagonist. Sergeant Howie is depicted as a Christian devout almost to the point of puritanism, which makes sense as a contrast to a village full of people practicing pre-Christian beliefs and rituals, but the story constantly trips over the clash between these perspectives. Howie flip-flops between being a policeman investigating a crime and a puritanical zealot in ways that don’t quite feel believable and end up distracting. It’d be one thing if her were a devout Christian experiencing a crisis of faith as he sees a community flourishing in the absence of his god, but almost from the moment he hits the island he’s a bull in a china shop, doing as much harm as good to his investigation by loudly objecting to everything he sees and as often as not exceeding his jurisdiction to satisfy his moral outrage. I think either story by itself could have potentially worked, had Howie been a priest sent to a post on Summerisle as the village’s vicar, primarily characterized by his shock at the absence of God on this island, or in a procedural story as a police officer trying his best to navigate an extremely unfamiliar culture while trying to find a missing girl. Either of those works, either of those has interesting story beats associated with them, but cramming the two together disrupts the flow of the story and worse, tends to make Howie unsympathetic, which I think makes the film less effective overall. A more sympathetic Howie and a story that didn’t feel like a police investigation interrupted by a lot of exposition and argument about faith would have made for an even more compelling story than what we get.

To its credit, it certainly doesn’t look or play like most horror films, and I’m always here for a singular vision. It’s extremely colorful, with lots of sunlight and soft focus and even when the locations are drab, the villagers and their community pop with color. The people are cheerful and smiling and even though there’s no leering villainy, it still all feels unsettling. The soundtrack is largely English folk music, which makes sense for a film about Britain before Christianity came, but the overall result is something that feels,- at least on the surface - pastoral rather than sinister, which adds to the utter strangeness of the village itself.

There’s a tremendous eye for detail in the strangeness as well. There are lots of little bits of business in the background from the villagers, the local drugstore is stocked with ancient remedies, not modern ones, schoolchildren are taught about May Day rituals as naturally in school as history would be anywhere, and everyone, multiple generations in on this island, are as natural and comfortable in their beliefs as would be anyone anywhere, but they’re just different enough from modern sensibilities (especially around sex, which bothers Howie to no end) that it’s a little disquieting. There are a number of musical interludes as well, which adds to the otherworldly feel at the level of narrative. Horror isn’t usually musical (Sweeney Todd aside), so again in this we’re slightly wrong-footed throughout, to the film’s credit.

It’s definitely easy to see the DNA for a film like Midsommar here. It has some of the same beats, the colorful village and geniality of the villagers, the way the real story is sort of hidden in plain sight the whole time, but between the character of Howie (and some desultory editing which tends to break the film up into vignettes rather than a single story with momentum), I’m not sure this one still works as well to the modern eye. It definitely, definitely has its moments (and the end, while somewhat overlong and convoluted, ends up as a doozy), but it maybe tries to be too many things at the same time. You can do a lot with the story of someone looking for a little girl who’s gone missing, especially against a backdrop as vivid and evocative as Summerisle, and bringing ancient beliefs into a modern context makes for a surprisingly uneasy experience, but piling on a debate about faith on top of everything else just ends up making it a bit of a muddle.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Frailty: I Saw The Light

(Important Note: Do NOT look this one up on IMDB before you watch it - there are spoilers in the casting information, and this is one you definitely want to go into unspoiled.)

Religious faith does a good line in scary movies. That’s pretty much the heartbeat of most films about demonic possession, especially the idea that the existence of real evil serves as a test of faith. Sometimes you get the movies about religious fanaticism, where faith is weaponized to destructive ends. Or even just ones where hapless visitors stumble upon a faith community with very, very different ideas about worship. God is, basically, just as scary as Satan.

Frailty is definitely a movie about faith, but it’s one that breaks a mold or two, much to my pleasant surprise. It’s a well-made, understated story full of uneasiness and dread.

You wouldn’t really know it from the opening credits, though - very generic montages of newspaper articles about a series of gruesome slayings called “the God’s Hand killings” interspersed with old-timey crime-scene photos, all murky and sepia-tinged. Gives off definite direct-to-video vibes.

But stick around, as we open on an FBI office in Dallas, late at night. It’s a big building, but it’s almost deserted, everyone gone home at a civil hour. But Agent Wesley Doyle is working late. He’s the agent in charge of the God’s Hand case, and he’s short on leads. Agent Hull tells Doyle that there’s someone here to see him - someone with information about the God’s Hand case. He’s waiting in Doyle’s office.

The man is Fenton Meiks. He’s from a little town called Thurman, and tells Doyle that he knows who the God’s Hand killer is. It’s his brother, Adam, and Fenton’s willing to lead Doyle to where Adam’s buried the bodies that the FBI haven’t been able to find yet. So Doyle and Meiks take a road trip, and Fenton begins to tell Doyle the whole story…

…which takes the form of a flashback to the late 70s, when Fenton and Adam are just little kids, living with their dad. Their mother died giving birth to Adam, and dad works long hours as a mechanic, so Fenton pretty much looks after Adam until dinnertime, when their father gets home. Dad’s a decent man - hard-working, firm but loving, and devoted to providing his sons with the best life he can. And one day, their father gives his sons some news: The night before, as he tried to sleep, God sent a vision of an angel to him. This angel told him that he and his sons had been chosen for a special mission. There are demons in this world, the angel says. They look like people, but they aren’t. And it is the mission of him and his sons to destroy these demons.

So their father - their kind, decent, loving father - gathers up an axe, and a lead pipe, and begins driving across Texas, bringing these “demons” home to destroy them.

It’s a film, then, about what happens when your father - the man you’ve known and loved your whole life - wakes up one morning firm in the conviction that he must murder total strangers on orders from God. And in that sense, it works very, very well. It’s mostly set in the past, with occasional interludes in the present as Doyle and Meiks drive to Thurman over the course of a dark, rainy night. Were it not for the specific subject matter, it’d feel a lot like a slightly nostalgic coming-of-age story, the kind of film you might have seen in the late 1980s, even though it was made in 2001. So it’s got that same out-of-time feel that last week’s movie did, except this one doesn’t suck.

And part of why it doesn’t suck is because it’s very much about these three characters and the relationship between them. It’s not an especially gory film - most of the violence takes place off-camera, and a lot of the film’s effectiveness lies instead in how all of this is affecting the characters and how they relate to each other. The father never stops being their father - he doesn’t fly into homicidal rages or chew the scenery or start acting crazier and crazier over time. He’s just always their dad, which makes the things he says and does that much more uncomfortable. It’d be easier if he were obviously a lunatic, but he’s the same friendly, firm, loving father that he is at the start, even as he’s bringing home people, bound and gagged, and murdering them. He’s very clear that these are not people; these are demons, and so his essential decency never wavers, and his unvarnished humanity is unsettling. There’s real discomfort in seeing how he tries to get his sons involved as well - this is very much the story of two boys who love their father very much, even as he appears to be sliding into madness, and the two very different ways they process that, so every scene where they help him lure victims and dig graves creates this feeling that we’re watching two young boys be completely traumatized. Over time, Fenton resists it and becomes increasingly estranged from his father and brother, and because younger Adam loves his dad, he believes him, and becomes more and more compliant as time goes on. So this isn’t a slasher film - instead, it’s film rooted very much in a deep sense of dread, as you wonder where this is all headed. There isn’t really a clear villain, either - throughout all of it, their father remains sympathetic, and as things get worse the relationship between the three of them fractures, and there’s a real sense of tragedy there.

Visually, this is a film that manages to be really stylish on what is still clearly a pretty limited budget. Light plays a big role in this film - it slices across the screen, falls across faces, casting half into shadow and half into sharp relief. It pools around the characters as they sit in otherwise darkened rooms, the cold fluorescents of the FBI office late at night a beacon against the darkness outside. The father’s visions from God are marked by rays of light reflecting off everyday objects until they become almost blinding, reading as something mundane that he’s mistaken for the mystical. The daytime flashback scenes play like an idyllic, half-remembered summer reverie, shot in bright colors and soft focus, and the nighttime scenes in the present day are all rain and shadows and fog. The music is fine but nothing noteworthy, the dialogue is believable and the acting consistently good, but it’s the visuals that sell the story the strongest. After all, we talk about faith and the revelations of that faith as “seeing the light.”

That said, it does lose a little something at the end, which maybe goes on a little too long. There are important revelations and a twist that makes us reevaluate everything we’d seen, but it sort of feels like the movie ends maybe three different times and the final scene feels anticlimactic enough to dispel some of the energy it would have ended with otherwise. But overall it’s a skillfully made story about the horrors that emerge from devotion, and the equally horrifying consequences of doubt. Light illuminates and blinds, depending on where it's directed.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Dead End: Goes Nowhere

Given a choice between writing about a bad movie or a mediocre movie, I gotta admit, I am going to prefer the bad movie most of the time. There’s something about mediocre movies that’s almost worse, that almost make me angrier. I think it’s because they tend to be so formulaic, so transparently manipulative, and that reads to me like laziness and cynicism. It’s insulting to the audience. Bad movies, on the other hand, are generally ones that do something really wrong, that fuck up something (or multiple somethings) important, and there’s a car-wreck element to it, watching the film just spiral into something beyond recovery is sort of its own kind of horror. I doubt that “oh god, what were they thinking?” is what those filmmakers are aiming for, but it tends to be a more energizing experience than another Blumhouse jump-scare extravaganza.

And folks, let me tell you, Dead End is fucking terrible. Easily one of the worst films I’ve seen in months. It goes wrong early, and keeps going more and more wrong as it goes along.

It is the story of the Harrington family - father Frank, mother Laura, and their son Richard and daughter Marion. They’re taking a trip to Laura’s mother’s house for Christmas Eve dinner, with Marion’s boyfriend Brad in tow. There is squabbling. There are disparaging mother-in-law comments. There is Richard antagonizing Brad. There is Frank insisting that he do all the driving even though it’s getting late. Frank decided this year to take the back roads instead of the interstate, for a change. Frank dozes off at the wheel, narrowly missing a car coming the other way and swerving off the road.

When the dust settles and they get back on their way, the road seems unfamiliar. They pass a cabin filled with animal skulls and hatchets. The road goes on too long.

They pass a mysterious woman in white with a nasty cut on her forehead, clutching her baby.

So we have five people in a station wagon, trapped on what appears to be an endless, haunted stretch of road, and they aren’t alone. The problems really begin with the overall tone of the film. It was made in 2003, but the writing, acting, and characterization (or lack thereof) are right out of the 1980s, as are the production values. This film is relentlessly…shoddy, at every level. In terms of production design, it’s clear that this film was shot on a soundstage or on a very limited stretch of road, with a lot of close-ups, very few exterior shots of the car in motion, and car interiors that are clearly a stationary vehicle with moving scenery outside. The windows of the car are fogged or smeared to the point that Frank shouldn’t be able to see anything out of them, and it’s obvious that that’s to hide the artificiality of everything outside. We only see the car in motion for a few yards at a time, padded by a lot of establishing shots of a bend in the road or the highway in motion, and these shots get reused throughout the film. There are some gore effects used sparingly (and mostly effectively), but there are far more shots of people staring in horror and disgust at something just off-camera, and it’s clear that’s because they didn’t have the budget to actually reveal whatever it was they’re looking at.

This pervasive cheapness extends to the characters in the film. This is especially a problem because the majority of this film is people in a car, trapped with each other. For as much time as the camera spends on them, the characters need to hold up under that scrutiny, and their relationships with each other are going to end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting in between spooky moments. And what we get are…cartoons. Frank is every inch the befuddled, out-of-touch father who bitches about his mother-in-law and gets the name of popular musicians wrong. He’s so out of touch he thinks Atari consoles are still the height of consumer electronics in 2003! Isn’t that wacky? Laura is the daffy mom, more worried about the pie she made than anything else and constantly nitpicking Frank’s driving. Marion is mostly silent, Brad is a jock who talks about being “in the zone,” and Richard…well, Richard is absolutely fucking awful. He is an iteration of the obnoxious younger brother who communicates mostly in profanity when he isn’t slumped against the window listening to royalty-free music on a Walkman (in 2003) or antagonizing Brad with a non-stop torrent of homophobic slurs for reasons that are never, ever made clear. He’s the most unsympathetic character I’ve seen in a horror movie since Sal from Altitude, and that is saying something. When they stop at one point to look for a phone, Richard, no lie, goes off into the woods, tacks up a centerfold to a tree, and starts masturbating. Who does that? In lieu of character development, they take turns freaking out, yelling, screaming, going catatonic, losing their minds entirely, or dying. It doesn’t amount to much, it’s not grounded in anything resembling real human behavior, it’s just caricature and histrionics start to finish.

In terms of pacing or narrative momentum, well, for a movie that takes place on the road, it’s surprisingly inert. The underlying premise is a little one-note - they’re trapped on a seemingly endless stretch of road, and that’s only going to take the story so far by itself. There are moments, interludes, sequences that communicate the idea that there’s something supernatural going on, but they’re too few and far between and become repetitive quickly. There’s no progress, there’s no discovery. They drive, weird things happen, they drive some more, more weird things happen, maybe somebody dies or freaks out, they keep driving. That’s kind of it. Well, things do switch up a little in the second half of the movie, in what seems like it’s supposed to be the protagonists revealing dark, upsetting family secrets under the psychological strain of their ordeal, but mostly it just amounts to people blurting stuff out, other people reacting to it (or not), and then either it goes by the wayside or gets exaggerated into something ridiculous. It’s less cathartic than it is just kind of silly.

And that gets at the last really big problem with this film. Tonally, it’s all over the shop. There are a few beats that would be actually scary, moments that would raise tension in a film that was played darker and straighter and more subdued, but here everything is played so broadly that at multiple points it verges on slapstick. Sometimes it actually IS slapstick. At the point where the family drama gets mashed into the supernatural aspects and any semblance of structure goes out the window - characters that were catatonic are suddenly fine, characters that were fine suddenly lose their minds - it’s all become so cartoonish that it can’t be taken seriously. But on the other hand, there are a few graphically nasty moments, and the juxtaposition of the two ends up being more jarring than anything else.

I think I can see the general outlines of what the filmmakers were trying to go for - it seems like it’s supposed to be a riff on movies and television shows like Creepshow and Tales From The Crypt, where you have these grisly, lurid stories with some kind of moral comeuppance at the end told in broad, blackly comic fashion, but it never coheres because it doesn’t handle any of the individual elements well and they don’t mesh as a result. Making that kind of story means evoking a very specific mood, setting, and context, and nothing about the film clearly signals that this is how we’re supposed to be taking what we see. It can’t decide whether it’s a story about people trapped on a haunted stretch of road, or about a family who have all kinds of secrets coming apart at the seams, and the result is a largely nonsensical jumble of moods and sequences and choices that are impossible to take seriously, but laced with just enough nastiness to be uncomfortable. It’s too gory and mean-spirited to be a comedy, and it’s too broad and cartoonish to be a horror film. It’s not much of a black comedy either, because that generally works when you’re playing the horror straight, and when the comedy is actually funny. It ends in pat fashion, explaining every single thing we saw and underlining it two or three times in case we didn’t get it the first time around. What a mess.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Outpost: Going Loud

The hope that I’m going to go into something that looks pretty stock and predictable and end up discovering a hidden gem springs eternal. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. But I feel like I’ve been on a real “maybe it’s better than it looks” kick lately - there’s something about chasing that feeling of discovery than I’m really into right now. I’m sure at some point I’ll get back to my usual mix of artsy horror and classics, but lately the urge to pick something I’d usually overlook and run with it has been strong, even if it does tend to result in disappointment.

I hate to say it, but Outpost is another one of those instances that ends up more disappointing than not. It’s frustrating, because there’s stuff here that I like, but for every cliche it ducks, it runs right into another one, and on top of that, it doesn’t really stick the landing.

The film opens in a bar in an unnamed part of Eastern Europe. There’s an Englishman named Hunt (nobody in this film has more than one name), clearly out of place, talking to a mercenary named DC. Hunt is an engineer, who represents a very large company. They’ve purchased some land in the area and want Hunt to survey it for mineral value. Hunt needs DC to put together a team for security, to escort him through an especially dangerous, war-torn area to get to the site. A lot of terse negotiation happens, men talking in manly fashion to other men. It’s that kind of movie. It’s not as cartoonish as it could be, but it’s not not cartoonish either. So DC assembles a team of six soldiers of fortune, men used to killing the people they’re being paid to kill. It’s a 48-hour op - get in, survey the land, get out.

And off they go, into the forest, where it turns out this company has purchased land containing am old bunker. A very old bunker. A Nazi bunker from World War II.

This isn’t about mineral rights.

So yeah, what we’re talking about is weird old Nazi research and the dangerous secrets it left behind. This is practically a subgenre unto itself. And on top of that, a group of mercenaries escorting a businessman through dangerous territory is its own set of cliches, and it pretty much nails most of those. There’s very little to distinguish the mercenaries from each other except their nationalities - you’ve got Prior, the shitkicker ex-Marine, Taktarov, the Russian, Voyteche, the generic Eastern European, Cotter, the former African child soldier, McKay, the Irishman who was most likely an IRA volunteer back in the day. and Jordan, the English medic. Jordan is the only one to exhibit any signs of compassion, which, along with his role as medic and his religious faith sets him apart from the others and makes him the target of the obligatory gendered insults. Dialogue is absolutely stock-standard tough-guy talk throughout and the businessman is your standard condescending technical whiz. There are absolutely no surprises on that front, and though none of it is played as melodramatically as it could be, it’s also absolutely nothing new.

Where there were some surprises, for me, is in how things play out for at least the first two acts. A bunch of soldiers of fortune in an old Nazi bunker, who discover that they aren’t alone…well, Nazi zombies is by no means a new idea, and it’s apparent very quickly (if you haven’t already figured it out from the cover art) that that’s what we’re dealing with. For that matter, Nazis as literal monsters is absolutely not a new idea, and at its worst trivializes the real horrors committed by real Nazis, so I’m not a huge fan of that. So it would have been very easy for this film to jump right into a gory action-heavy splatter-fest, to have snarling corpses in Nazi uniforms, resurrected by foul occult rituals, eating brains left and right. But…very much to its credit…it doesn’t do that, The majority of the film is actually a slow burn, punctuated by small clues that something isn’t right, clues which gradually escalate into actual threats as it becomes harder and harder to deny that something very wrong happened here a long time ago. And the nature of what happened is pretty novel, for that matter. There’s some lip service paid to the Nazi interest in the occult, but it doesn’t really figure into the story - this threat is born from technology, and it’s just a different enough take that it kept my interest. So even though it runs headlong into all of the mercenary cliches you can think of, it ducks a lot of the cliches about Nazi experiments run amok, and I think that’s noteworthy.

Also, surprisingly, it’s not an especially tense film. There’s an odd deliberateness to it that keeps it from really building a sense of momentum, but what it loses in tension it gains back in mood and atmosphere. There’s very little music, and the color palette is desaturated almost to the point of being monochromatic, with just a few pops of color during the daytime. Nighttime exteriors are dark with dramatic backlighting that spills through the trees, silhouetting the hulking figures that lurk there. The bunker is dark, rusty, full of dust and rust and cobwebs and deep shadows, and the things that still live down there emerge from the shadows silently, as massive silhouettes, quiet, monochromatic, and monolithic. Away from the macho bluster, it’s mostly a subdued film, and its violent moments are closely observed but not especially lurid. It’s awful, but quietly awful. If it reminds me of any other movie playing in this particular sandbox, it’d be The Keep, which is not one lots of filmmakers working in the Nazi monster field generally emulate. So that came as a pleasant surprise too.

If that’s how it’d been all the way through, it’d be easy to call it a little better than average, but then it takes all of it strengths and throws them away in a climax that goes completely in the other direction, as the protagonists go full-on gung-ho mode and it turns into something like a slightly crap war film, all gunfire and shouting and joking-in-the-face-of-death camaraderie to very little end. It sacrifices the grim, understated mood that had been working for it for cliched pyrotechnics. It makes the climax feel even more pointless than it would have already, given how little reason the film gave us to care about the protagonists, not to mention dragging out the ending just enough to establish the setup for a sequel (of which, yes, there have been two), instead of giving it a note of finality that would have at least had some kind of impact. It was never going to be great, but it at least provided enough interesting choices to keep me watching, before squandering it all on an end that was exactly the obvious, unsubtle, unsurprising ruckus I assumed it was going to be from the start. It had some interesting ideas, and I wish it had the courage to commit to those ideas all the way through. It would have helped.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Wednesday, November 3, 2021

Halloween: Night And Day

So, it’s confession time. In all of the years I’ve been writing about scary movies, there’s been a pretty big gap in my cinematic education…

…I’ve never seen the original Halloween.

I did see Halloween 4 back in the day, and one of the first things I ever wrote here was a defense of Rob Zombie’s remake, but as seminal horror films go, this was a pretty big oversight on my part. I’m not really a fan of slasher films and never have been, but even I have to recognize the landmark status of this film. It wasn’t the first slasher film (what was is debatable, was it Black Christmas? Blood Feast? Peeping Tom? I’ll let someone else have that argument), but it was a watershed moment for the style. codifying it as a genre unto itself and spawning legions of imitators, not to mention so many sequels, reboots and remakes that there are literally multiple Halloween timelines at this point.

So even though it’s not really my style of movie, it still strikes me as one that I should really address. And since Sundays are when I watch the films I write about here, and since this most recent Sunday was the titular holiday, it seemed like this was exactly the right time.

Of course, there’s always baggage any time you come to an iconic film late in the game. Out of the ones I’ve written about here, some didn’t work for me because they’ve become too well-known, too embedded in popular culture to have any surprises left, some still have all their original power intact, and as it turns out, this one falls somewhere in between. Some elements haven’t aged as well as they could have, and hindsight means it’s hard to see past the things that aren’t yet cliches in the film, but will end up becoming so. But there’s still a lot here to admire, much of it in contrast to the movies that ended up taking its ideas and turning them into cliche. You can see how a lot of filmmakers missed the point or took the wrong lesson away from this film.

It begins on Halloween night in Haddonfield, IL, in 1963. It opens on a point-of-view shot - we’re seeing things through someone’s eyes. Whoever they are, they’re peering through a window at a young man and young woman making out on a couch. The couple go upstairs to do what you do in situations like these, and upon the young man’s departure, our point of view goes into the house, goes into the kitchen, and picks up a knife. The point of view puts on a mask, and now we see through the eyeholes of the mask. We can hear our point of view’s breathing. The point of view goes upstairs, where the young woman is brushing her hair, and it stabs her to death before walking back downstairs…

…where it is revealed to be a six-year-old boy.

The boy is Michael Myers, and he’s just murdered his sister Judith. Cut to Halloween in Haddonfield, IL, in 1978. Myers has been remanded to a hospital for the criminally insane for the majority of his life, and his supervising doctor, Dr. Loomis, and a nurse are preparing to take custody of Michael and escort him to a hearing. When they arrive at the hospital, there’s been a security breach. Michael Myers is loose. He steals a car and heads for Haddonfield, to finish what he started fifteen years ago.

The events of the film take place over the course of a single day - it begins midday, night falls around the halfway point, and it ends before dawn. Framing it this way provides one of its first major strengths: This film uses pacing really, really well. It’s a much slower burn of a movie than subsequent imitators, and that works to its advantage. Because it’s set over the course of one day, the whole first half of the film is buildup, a slice of life in small-town Illinois. We’re introduced to our protagonists - Laurie, Lynda, and Annie - at school, as they’re enduring their classes for the sake of the fun they’re going to have that evening, unaware that they are being watched and followed. This is intercut with Loomis’ attempt to track down Myers and convince law enforcement that the people of this town are in danger. Meanwhile, Myers, back in his hometown, watches and waits for night to fall. A lot of this film’s power is in the way it makes you wait for something awful to happen, knowing that it will.

The relatively slow pace of the first two acts is the broadest example of this, but even on a scene-by-scene basis, this film does not rush. It takes its time, and draws everything out, but it rarely feels like it’s spinning its wheels. Even in the third act, at the film’s climax, it’s very deliberate - there’s an inevitability, an implacability to it, and even as familiar with the film as a pop culture artifact as I was (and having seen a remake that kept many of the broad strokes intact), there were still moments that made me gasp. The threat is clearly established early on, in the light of day, and we have to sit with the tension - we know something bad is going to happen, so when night finally comes, there’s a momentousness to it, a sense that shit is about to get very bad. Time is an effective element in this film.

And so is space, for that matter. This film’s other big strength is its staging. The whole first half of this film takes place in broad daylight, punctuated by instances of Myers stalking Laurie. It’s audacious - generally night makes everything scarier, but breaking that particular rule makes everything that happens that much more unsettling. And it’s never really front and center - this film does a very good job of letting creepy things happen in the background. We never really get a good glimpse at Myers during the day - he’s crowded into one side of the frame, just shoulders and a torso, or partially obscured by scenery. We know someone’s there, but they’re largely a mystery. Likewise, until night falls, all we ever really see is the aftermath of his violence (barring his escape at the beginning) - he’s moving through the world, and at first all we see is the wake he leaves behind him. So you get a sense that there’s someone bad out there and that they are doing bad things, but for the first half of the film, it’s all in the margins, visually and narratively.

But when night falls, it becomes a whole other matter. The violent moments in this film are generally minimal, though in two instances it lingers long enough that you get a sense the suffering and distress he’s causing, which is something that largely goes ignored in other films in the genre. Some die slowly, some die quickly, but it’s here, in the final act that Myers is revealed - the iconic blank white mask, the violence depicted as it’s happening instead of after the fact. There’s a reason Loomis is worried, he’s not a crazy old man, and now we see why. But there’s a restraint there many other films in the genre lack. It’s still more suggestion and aftermath than explicit gore - much like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, this film is a lot less bloody than you think it’ll be. But it works because we’ve had the entire first half of the film to get to know these people, so when they die, they are people dying, not cannon fodder for practical effects.

Visually it does a lot with a little, making excellent use of shot composition to reveal Myers emerging from the shadows, framed as a lone, stark figure who is suddenly there, then just as suddenly gone. The blank white mask does a lot of work in this regard because it’s a striking element that can just as easily blend into the background as be brought forward in our attention. A lot of this film works because Myers is lurking in the background, and it’s what he’s doing while other people are in the foreground unaware, or elsewhere in the house, that ramps up the tension and dread. As an audience, you know what’s coming and you’re sort of helpless to watch it play out, like a nightmare.

It does have its shortcomings, though. The dialogue’s pretty corny throughout, some of it landing clumsily, and some of the effects work hasn’t aged all that well (the opening sequence feels especially clumsy to the modern eye), but given that it was a low-budget independent film in the late 1970s, that it still gets over to the degree that it does is a testimony to the filmmaking skill behind it. Characterization is a bit thin, though in some instances this works to its advantage - we know nothing about Myers, and that’s as it should be. He would eventually be over-explained into the ground by almost all of the Halloween movies that followed, but here all we know is that he’s unknowable, and the unknown is frightening. There’s not much to Loomis either - he seems to be defined by his need to stop Myers, the Van Helsing to Myers’ Dracula. Annie and Lynda are mostly ciphers, teenage girls more interested in boys and partying than school. Laurie gets a little more depth - she’s the good one, the “girl scout,” but she isn’t prissy or prudish. There’s real adolescent vulnerability there - she’s smart, but it’s the late 70s, so that keeps her on the outside. It’s less a rejection of her friends’ ways and more the feeling that it isn’t an option for her, and you can sense some sadness around that. Which is more than characters in films like these usually get, but you can see how subsequent filmmakers would turn this into “masked murderer picks off horny teenagers, only to be foiled by a virginal Final Girl,” codifying the “rules” of the slasher film so thoroughly that Wes Craven would eventually turn that into something surprisingly fresh and interesting with Scream…which would of course get its own slate of sequels, adding smirky self-awareness to the mix. There’s a reboot of that franchise in the works as well.

And all of that bums me out, because there’s more than that going on here, and seeing where the cliches started makes me feel bad that this (and an absolute rat’s nest of sequels and remakes) would be its legacy, because it really does feel like it deserves more than that. I mean, it’s a classic, and rightfully so, but I wish what people took away from it instead was the value of restraint and suspense, instead of tits, kills, and body count.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

The Devil Below: Expect The Expected

I like it when movies pleasantly surprise me. I try to focus on movies that I think sound interesting, or have gotten good word-of-mouth, or have some historical importance, or have a premise that sounds interesting to me. Sometimes, however, when I’m having trouble settling on a film, I’ll default to something that looked…not interesting, necessarily, but slightly more novel than the average found-footage/zombie/demonic possession fodder that clogs up any streaming service out there. Maybe it’s from another country, or maybe the setting isn’t something that’s been totally overdone, or maybe the premise doesn’t sound quite as hackneyed, or shit, maybe I just like the thumbnail.

Whatever the reason, I generally don’t go into these with the sort of high hopes I have for my first-choice films, and there have been a few times I’ve given up maybe 10 minutes in because the writing or acting was so risible that I knew I wouldn’t be able to sit through the whole thing, but there’s always that hope that it’s going to be better than I expected, that I’ve found a diamond in the rough.

And that’s what makes The Devil Below such a frustrating experience. It’s mediocre on balance, but every now and then you can see glimpses of a better movie struggling to assert itself. It makes attempts to transcend its limitations, but it never really gets there.

We open on a couple of coal miners - one older, one younger - coming up to the surface, ready to end their shift. They’re father and son, and as it turns out, Dad’s in charge of the operation. His son’s asking for him to reconsider firing a miner who’s been screwing up on the job. Dad’s worried that he’s endangering the safety of the crew, and his son points out that he’s got a lot going on at home and losing his job is the last thing he needs…and just like that, something snatches the younger one from behind a container. His father tries to give chase but ends up getting jabbed by some large, barely-glimpsed talon, and injured, he is only able to lie there as his son gets dragged away.

Flash forward about 40 years, to a young woman looking over maps of rural Kentucky, noting locations, borders, roads and trails. She leafs through old newspaper articles about a massive underground coal fire that completely consumed the mining town of Shookum Hills. The fire still burns to this day (which is an actual thing) and the town - along with all of its residents - vanished without a trace.

The woman is Arianne. She’s a guide, someone who is very good at getting people places, no matter how remote or hostile. She’s been hired by Darren, a geologist at Cambridge, to get him and his crew to the former location of Shookum Hills. Darren thinks that there’s a very rare mineral in the mine that’s causing the coal they were mining to keep burning so hot for so long, and he wants to take samples, to publish a paper about it. So it’s him, Arianne, Shawn - another geologist with some…interesting…beliefs, their tech guy Terry, and Jaime, who provides security. The locals aren’t helpful, telling them that they’ve never heard of Shookum Hills, and soon enough, a car tries to force them off the road. Arianne shakes the pursuer and backtracks to discover an overgrown road off the main highway, at the end of which is an electrified fence. The kind you use to keep someone out…

…or keep something in.

As it turns out (and we know this because of the opening flashback), the miners of the Shookum Hills Mining Company delved too greedily and too deep, and woke something up. The few locals who remain are doing what they can to keep it contained, and then along comes Darren and company, and, well, they fuck it all up.

The film does start with some promise - you’ve got four dudes and a woman going on this expedition into Appalachia to discover what happened to an old mining town. That strikes me as an interesting premise - I do love me a “group explores forbidden territory” movie. In lesser hands, this would have been about four posturing fratboys and the woman who ends up crumbling as soon as things go bad and maybe ending up a love interest for one of the other protagonists. In a much lesser movie, she’d have to go skinny-dipping or strip down to a thin, clingy tank top for reasons. But luckily, this is never that movie. None of the guys are especially annoying and Arianne, rather than being there solely to be put in peril, is tough, capable, and competent. And even better, she’s treated as such by the men. So they aren’t really reduced to caricature, as easy as that would have been. But on the other hand, there’s also not really a lot there to replace caricature. Darren…is English. Shawn…has some weird ideas. And Terry and Jaime don’t even have that. They aren’t much more than ciphers.

This dull functionality extends to the way they act as well. Their behavior sort of wavers between being sensible and believable and the exact opposite of that, depending on the needs of the plot. At some points they’re competent and professional and act like human beings would, and then at others they completely abandon that, not as a reaction or response to something that’s happened or because of some character flaw, but just because they need to do this now for the story to move forward. You basically have two groups - the protagonists, who have stumbled into a situation they don’t understand and have made it much worse, and locals, the remnants of the town’s population who have stayed behind to keep this threat contained. You can forgive the protagonists for being massively out of their depth, but the people who stayed behind, once things start getting bad, don’t really seem to have a plan despite having been tasked with containing this particular problem for the last 40 years or so. It seems largely like they exist to give us a couple of different groups to be menaced and picked off throughout the film instead of just one. If it’s possible, they have even less personality than the protagonists, and so it’s very difficult to get invested in them.

So you’ve got characters who have the potential to be something other than business as usual, but aren’t. On top of that, you’ve got a story that has the potential to be something other than just a monster movie, but isn’t. The film makes some feints toward being a story about science versus faith as explanations for phenomena. Darren is very much a man of science, but Shawn is a geologist who (somewhat improbably) believes in intelligent design, but apart from one or two on-the-nose arguments up front and some borderline-hamfisted dialogue later on,  it’s never really developed, and it could be. Faith defies empiricism, which is fine as a way to find meaning in life, but is sort of crummy if you’re trying to figure out how something works, and science is constantly reevaluating its claims in the light of new evidence. A monster is just a species we’ve never seen before. That could make for some interesting character development (as it is in Final Prayer), but here it’s not really central to the story in a way that it could be. It’s just some stuff people say and then it gets forgotten until the next time somebody has to say something.

But I can forgive a certain amount of generic character or absence of thematic depth if there’s an evocative mood, or a real sense of tension or momentum to film. Get me caught up in the ride, and it’s easy to ignore the other stuff. But again, here, the film doesn’t really give us a lot to feel. The cinematography is fine, lots of overcast shots of abandoned mining territory and orange-lit cave systems, but when it comes down it, the potential weak point to any monster film is going to be the monster. You need a really big budget to come up with monsters that can remain convincing on camera for extended periods of time, and this film clearly doesn’t have either. For the first two acts it’s okay - you only get brief, shadowy glimpses and it doesn’t hurt believability. But by the climax they are by necessity on screen a lot, and it becomes very clear that it’s just some people in costumes and some dodgy CGI. The filmmakers try to paper over this with visual distortion, presumably due to the conditions underground, but it’s kind of clear that that’s why they’re doing it. It calls attention to the artifice, so it doesn’t really help. On top of that, the design of the monster…which we get a clear glimpse of in the second act as a sketch one of the locals made…is, frankly, silly. And that’s the nail in the coffin on that part of the film, right there.

So we have featureless characters in an openly mechanical story being menaced by an unconvincing threat, but probably the film’s biggest problem (apart from the third act, which is shapeless and disjointed and consists of a lot of things happening purely because they need to) is how it never really surprises the viewer. A few months ago I talked about Last Shift as a film that knew how to play sequences out of kilter with what audiences have come to expect, to generate real tension and surprise out of scenes that could have been very predictable. By contrast, this film plays it exactly how you’d expect. Every time. You see setups coming a mile away, and those setups do exactly what you think they’re going to do at exactly the moment you expect them to do it. Nothing about this film surprises apart from the characters not being quite as cartoonish as they could be, and the ending - while it had the potential to do something darker - ends as safely and predictably as any other film, made competently but without much imagination or vision, would.

Not all of this is the filmmakers’ fault. Monster movies are a tough proposition, and horror films rarely get the kind of budget you need to realize something truly inhuman in a way that’s going to be convincing over long stretches on screen. But the rest of it didn’t have to be this way. If you don’t have the budget for a truly spectacular creature, then give us characters we care about, or a story that dares to be something a little smarter than “people go into mine, get picked off one-by-one,” or creates tension through atmosphere or surprising choices on a scene-by-scene basis. But when you know what to expect, and that’s what you keep getting, it’s never going to rise above a level of dull competence. It’s a film forgotten as quickly as it is watched, and that’s too bad.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon