Compare & Contrast: Kairo/Pulse

I want to try something a little different this week, something I’ve been thinking about trying for awhile. If a foreign horror movie does well, as often as not it’s going to get a U.S. remake. And these remakes range from almost shot-for-shot duplicates of the original film to ones where tattered scraps of the original film cling to something otherwise wildly different. I think these exist mostly because the film industry in the U.S. makes a regular habit of underestimating the intelligence of audiences. Reading subtitles isn’t difficult, and if you’ll avoid a film because you don’t like to read…well, you’re part of the problem.

But within that space, there’s some potential to make observations about the differences between them. What survives the transition, and what doesn’t, which details changed and which ones didn’t. These choices can be revealing about the assumptions made by either set of filmmakers, and what sort of cultural touchstones go into making horror films, and what those say about their respective cultures. So what I’d like to do in a compare and contrast post is look at the original film and the remake side-by-side, to see what worked, what didn’t, and what the choices made in each film might tell us about the societies that produced each film.

A lot of this, for me, begins with what was colloquially referred to as “J-horror,” a group of horror films made in Japan from the late 90s to early 00s. It does seem to be sort of a watershed moment that marked increasing interest in horror films made outside of the U.S., and at a point where streaming hadn’t yet made access to films from all over the world easier. So along came remakes of the higher-profile J-horror films. So that’s where I’d like to start with this. My last post was on the film Kairo (Pulse), which is a (rightly) well-regarded example of the form. A bleak, chilly meditation on loneliness and urban isolation, it received a remake, titled Pulse, in the U.S.. The two films share a few similarities, but they are by far more different than similar, and I’ll likely be spoiling details of both films, so if you haven’t seen Kairo, maybe come back once you have - it’s pretty good. Overlong, but pretty good. The remake? Well, not so much.

AHOY! SPOILERS AHEAD! 

To start, both films share the same basic premise: Some kind of mysterious signal is transmitting itself over the internet, people who are exposed to it start committing suicide, and ghosts are starting to appear wherever these suicides occur. After that, things really diverge narratively and cinematically. In Kairo, the film followed two parallel storylines, that of Michi, an employee at a plant nursery, and Ryosuke, an economics student, as they separately discover this strange phenomenon. Pulse replaces the two parallel storylines with one, that of a young college student named Mattie and her friend group. This doesn’t really help or hurt the film, but the characters are so stock that it’s kind of annoying. It’s often difficult for me to pick up on character nuances in subtitled films, but in the remake it’s clear that these are two-dimensional college-kid caricatures, more concerned with partying and getting laid than anything else. Worse, the addition of a model-handsome miscreant who goes from “dude who bought a stolen computer” to Mattie’s love interest in rapid order is so fucking tiresome. He’s literally just some dude who purchased stolen property and maybe twenty minutes later he’s her biggest confidante, and by the end they’re making out. It isn’t necessary, it does nothing for the story or the characters, it just gives the filmmakers a chance to shove a dude with razor-sharp cheekbones and impeccably groomed beard stubble into the whole thing. That’s what a lot of horror movies in the U.S. were back in the 00s - impossibly good-looking people getting bumped off for reasons. Neither film was ever going to be a character study, but it’s really difficult to see this as anything but ticking boxes on some kind of focus-grouped checklist.

The changes to the film itself - the art direction, the specific story choices, the narrative details - are much bigger and really work to make the original and remake into two sharply different films. Kairo relied a lot on mood and atmosphere - it was a quiet, relatively empty movie, somber and melancholy. It took place in a drab, overcast part of Japan, full of rain-stained brutalist apartment buildings, and its important moments were simple- a silent figure in the corner of the room, mysterious black stains on the wall, people sitting still in barely-lit rooms, pale figures that bent and twisted as they walked. The result was eerie and full of dread, with the inexplicable horror of a nightmare. Pulse is not a quiet, empty movie. You’ve got your nightclub scene, you’ve got your bustling college campus, you’ve got evil cyber-ghosts who are all glitch and stutter and visual noise, a riot of special effects who make weird growling noises and suck people’s souls out of their faces. Do they come through electronic devices? Yes, except when they just pop out of washing machines for no apparent reason. They suck your life force out through the magic of special effects, then you lose the will to live, and then you just…vanish? Maybe we’re supposed to assume that they kill themselves, but this is a film that’s far more squeamish about the idea of suicide than the original was, even though it was sort of central to the original’s thesis. Sometimes they get these creepy black growths spreading all over their body and then they turn into ashes in yet another display of digital effects. And then more screaming, more jump scares, and an ending that sheds all of the quiet sadness of the original for an unnecessary monologue that just restates what we’re seeing with our own eyes. There’s no mood or atmosphere here, just a lot of yelling and musical stings to let us know when to be scared and pale, hairless figures screaming at people before doing special effects at them. It’s borderline-incoherent in the degree to which it just sort of seems like a bunch of cliches pulled out of a bag. Psychology gets some mostly-irrelevant lip service, there’s this weirdly antagonistic shrink who just sort of appears out of nowhere and harangues the protagonist, there’s a professor who talks about stalking and then isn’t seen again for most of the movie…until he gets killed, and there’s a lot of cyber-gibberish (“but I shut down the system!” “It doesn’t matter! THEY ARE THE SYSTEM!”). Pulse doesn’t feel like anything except a pointless racket.

Pulse is also a much more literal film than the original. In Kairo, computers weren’t really the point. It was a film about loneliness and alienation, and computers just facilitated that, a window into other lonely lives. Sure, there was some stuff about spirits spilling through into our world because their realm was full (a nice nod to “when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth”), but like everything else in the film, it was never really fleshed out. It was cryptic and opaque, but there was enough internal consistency that it felt like nightmare logic, like there was a sense to be made if only we looked hard enough. In Pulse, computers are the entire point. Technology is slathered all over every frame, everyone constantly checking their cell phones (not even smartphones), “cyber”-this and “cyber”-that, hackers, every single bad internet cliché of the early 2000s jammed into the movie, and eventually, after a lot of wandering around getting scared (and the occasional borderline-pointless nightmare sequence shot in a style I can only describe as “aggressively desaturated”), it turns out that some telecom engineers delved too greedily and too deep and unleashed some kind of malevolent presence on our world. So no, it’s not the malaise of modern life, it’s these evil creatures that want to feed on our will to live. This is explained at length in a third-act infodump, though it’s far from the only time that we get told stuff that was already apparent to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. Symbolism’s for the other guy, we’re going to make this as simple as possible because we have no faith in the intelligence of our audience.

Where Kairo was quiet, Pulse is loud. Obvious, hamfisted, devoid of mood or atmosphere, made up of a few segments lifted from Kairo absent any real context surrounded by 2000s-era mass-market horror film cliches. The original made sense as a piece of Japanese film. The loneliness of modern urban life, increasing isolation, black stains on the wall evoking the shadows of Hiroshima, restless spirits. All of these make sense in the context of Japanese history and culture. The remake grabs bits here and there, but disregards any of that context, and the results, besides being noisy and overwrought, also verge on nonsensical in places, mostly because they seem thrown into a different, more generic horror movie without regard for why they’re there. Really, the more I think about it, the more this seems like it was originally an unrelated movie about evil websites or evil cellphones or something, and they lifted two or three bits from Kairo to rebuild the movie around. It’s got almost nothing to do with the original, it’s not even in conversation with the original, it’s just a butchering of a much-better film.

IMDB entry for Kairo
IMDB entry for Pulse

Kairo on Amazon
Pulse on Tubi
Pulse on Amazon

Siksa Kubur: Death Is Not The End

I made this observation a few weeks ago, but it continues to interest me how you can start to pick up on particular cultural touchstones once you’ve watched enough horror movies from a particular country or part of the world. Spain really likes demons and demonic possession as the prime mover behind its horror, Japan has its nods to animism, the importance of the family unit, and water as a symbol for the presence of the supernatural, England does a lot with ancient beliefs and pagan tradition. This doesn’t describe every film from these places, of course, but they pop up enough to seem like things particular to those places.

And I’m starting to figure out some stuff about Indonesian horror as well. It’s interesting how much of it serves as cautionary tales about what happens when you don’t live a pious life – curses that follow generations when someone violates Islamic traditions are pretty common – and just how…wacky…it is. At their best, Indonesian horror films, whatever they might lack in technical polish or savvy, have a wide-eyed earnestness to them that carries the films over rough spots, like an Islamic Chick tract. It’s very no-fucks-given, and Siksa Kubur (Grave Torture) is one of the better examples.

Sita and Adil are brother and sister, who until recently worked in their family bakery. But something terrible happened, something driven by religious fear, and now they’re orphans, taken in by an Islamic school where they are taught a trade alongside being taught how to be good Muslims. But Sita isn’t having it – it was religion that got her parents killed, stories about the torment that the impious suffer even as they lie in their graves. The soul is tortured in the afterlife, the body is tortured after burial. She’s angry and determined to believe that it wasn’t her parents sinning that got them killed – it was religion that killed them. Her teachers can’t answer her questions, they just call her a sinner for her troubles, and she doesn’t want to stay there. She grabs Adil and they head for a tunnel that’s supposed to take them off the school grounds, but it goes on a little too long, it gets a little too dark, and they meet someone there. A young boy named Ismail…

…which just happens to be the name of a former student who died under mysterious circumstances.

Probably this film’s biggest strength is the way it plays around with conventions of the genre. Normally Indonesian horror films are pretty straightforward, but this one isn’t afraid to leave the whole “protagonists have to return to some kind of cursed village to undo something terrible” story in the dust and set everything much more firmly in the modern world. It’s a story about the tension between faith and doubt, how religion is used as justification for violence, the way unresolved grief can become obsession, and the nature of morality. Which is a lot to pack in, but it doesn’t really feel forced, everything plays a role in getting the audience to the end of the story, which takes detours through revenge stories, attempts to apply scientific methods to the supernatural (an obsessed sibling out to disprove supernatural phenomena gives this some definite Oculus vibes), meditations on aging and mortality, and stories about the wealthy and powerful attempting to cheat hell. You think you know where it’s going, but there’s a real WTF-ness in how the story unfolds in some surprising directions as it goes, but without ever feeling jarring – everything emerges from what precedes it, while packing in the requisite moments of supernatural menace and a walloping dose of “say your prayers and you won’t get tortured in the afterlife” that is becoming, to me, an absolute staple of Indonesian horror films.

Another staple of Indonesian horror films is energetically janky effects work and this film is no different in that regard. In this case, though, the production values are really good otherwise so it’s a more jarring contrast than in other Indonesian films where the whole thing feels sort of grungy and so relatively primitive effects work blends right in. In a couple of places it’s especially glaring, almost comic when it shouldn’t be. Blackly comic, but still. On the other hand, there are a number of moments that do a lot with less – voices where there shouldn’t be any, little bits of creepy business in the background, an especially grisly game of hopscotch – which buy the film a fair amount of goodwill for the moments when things don’t really land. The performances are a little variable, but the actors playing Adil and Sita – as children and adults – do a really good job and keep the film feeling grounded. And even when the performances aren’t as strong as they could be, there’s a lot of raw emotion in them which gives the whole thing a feeling of intensity and genuine unease that you don’t always get in horror films. Sometimes the story feels like it’s turning on a dime but it manages to make it work in the end, especially in a third act that gets seriously weird in places – I can’t remember the last time I saw a film actually pull off nested nightmare sequences this well.

Apart from the uneven effects work, there are a couple of other problems – the end is an absolute head-scratcher, the setup for the central conceit is a little convoluted (like, that’s a lot of work and planning just to prove a point), but it manages to stay away from easy jump scares, has some nice moments of visual flair, and some surprisingly heartfelt acting that manages to elevate it above your basic ghost story and your basic Indonesian religious tract. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s nice to see something a little more contemporary-feeling from this corner of the world.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

We Need To Do Something: It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is an annual competition to see who can write the worst opening sentence in fiction, named for the author of the novel Paul Clifford, which begins “It was a dark and stormy night.” It’s been going since 1982, which is a lot of genuinely awful opening sentences, and I’ve found it pretty entertaining in the past, but to my mind, a sentence written to be deliberately awful is never going to be truly awful. Knowing it was constructed to be bad makes it entertaining to me. It’s sort of a corollary to the idea that a film made explicitly to be a cult film will never actually be a cult film. There’s an earnestness that you need and can only get when the filmmakers are being utterly serious. It’s the gap between ambition and execution, not to mention disregard for filmmaking convention, that makes bad films into cult sensations. If the Bulwer-Lytton contest is an example of something being funny because the people are in on the joke, films work the opposite way.

But nobody’s going to mistake We Need To Do Something for a cult film, or a comedy, really. It takes place on a dark and stormy night, and it’s just a misfire. It’s clumsy and muddled, with a few good moments, but not nearly enough to redeem it.

I’ll say this, it’s got a nice opening shot of a woodsy suburban neighborhood at dusk, as gray storm clouds start to roll in. It’s foreboding, but not overly so. Cut to a family walking into what appears to be a nice, if small bathroom in someone’s home. Lots of brick, tile, glass block, sort of evoking Spanish style alongside angular modernity. They’re laying down a blanket, and appear to be settling in to ride out a storm. It’s a married couple - Diane and Robert, and their two kids, Bobby and his older sister Melissa. They’ve got boardgames, and Robert’s sipping from a big insulated water bottle, but it’s already clear that something’s a little off. Melissa was late getting home and keeps insisting she was doing homework at her friend Amy’s house, but she’s evasive about it. Robert’s kind of abrasive and short-tempered, and Diane keeps messaging someone on her phone, but won’t let Robert see it and it turns into a whole thing. Meanwhile, it’s getting dark outside and, well, stormy. Then there’s a loud crash outside the door, and when Robert tries to see what it was, he discovers that a tree has crashed through their house and is now solidly blocking the door.

They’re trapped. And there’s something else out there.

It’s not impossible for movies that start off being about something that could actually happen and escalating into the supernatural to be good (see, for example, The Descent), but it doesn’t feel like this film can make up its mind about what it’s trying to accomplish. It doesn’t help that the entire family starts off annoying going into it. Robert and Diane begin the film deep into the first act of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, all sidelong looks and snapping at each other about things they won’t say out loud. Robert is especially bad – it’s clear right off the bat he’s an abusive alcoholic trying to be in charge of a family that stopped respecting him a long time ago, Melissa is your basic sullen, nobody-understands-her teenager, Diane is brittle and a little shrill, and Bobby is an odd duck in a way that is slightly off-putting. If there’s one through-line to this entire film, it’s the feeling of being stuck in a small room with a bunch of very irritating people, and the result is impatience as much as it is tension. You’re trapped in there with them, but not in a way that promotes sympathy.

So you’ve got protagonists who are various shades of unlikeable, and a story best described as confusing. It begins as a standard survival story – you’ve got a bunch of people trapped in the same place, without enough resources to go around, and on the one hand, it makes sense that this family holes up in the bathroom when the possibility of a tornado is on the table. That’s what you’re supposed to do. But on the other, they bring a blanket and…some board games. No water, no snacks, no flashlight, no radio. As someone who grew up in prime tornado territory, those are the basics. But, to be fair “suburban family has no fucking idea what the basics are” is a plausible narrative, and if the filmmakers had committed to that, slowly drawing the families’ secrets out as things got worse…well, it still wouldn’t have been a slam-dunk, the writing is broad and the performances not especially nuanced (Robert especially threatens to chew the scenery), but I think the clarity and focus of that kind of story, especially in such a claustrophobic environment, would have had some punch to it.

Instead, the filmmakers inject a supernatural element (with, to be fair, one of the more effectively startling moments of the film), and again, if they were to commit to that, that’s fine too. But the film vacillates, giving neither narrative the room it needs to breathe. The build-up works, at first, but then takes this unnecessary elaborative detour that takes the supernatural element and scrambles it all up until you aren’t sure what the fuck is happening apart from the actual suffering being experienced by these four people. The survival story doesn’t work because they’re so angry with each other to start that you can’t really tell the story of a happy family descending into savagery. The supernatural story doesn’t work because, apart from being confined to two or three moments in the film, it can’t commit to a particular logic or direction, it’s just spooky shit that is initially revealed to be due to one thing, but no, maybe it’s another, or maybe it’s the first thing, or…you get the idea.

And this lack of focus even shows up in the narrative fundamentals. This is a film that, at different levels, doesn’t really think through the details. We get a shot at the beginning that establishes the bathroom door as opening onto the interior of the house (as one would expect), but once the storm is over it seems like the door is looking out onto an exterior, as if the tree demolished the entire house, which…that’s not how collapsing trees work. A trapped snake conveniently becomes un-trapped, blindness disappears as soon as it arrives when it’s necessary for the character in question to act, a smartphone lost in the rain is found perfectly functional. And the supernatural piece gets all of its development in flashback (said flashbacks containing some stuff about self-harm that borders on romanticization, at least enough to feel icky) and that part of the story ends up being all muddy because it’s not satisfied with a very simple, straightforward cause, it piles stuff on and ends up close to incoherent.

There are bits here and there that could be pieces of a better movie, a couple of effective set pieces, some details that are actually nicely underplayed, and some repeated imagery which could be leveraged into a suggestion of dream logic and the idea that this might not be what it appears to be, but nope. It’s not funny enough or strange enough to be a cult film, not deliberately outrageous enough either. It’s just as banal and clumsy as “it was a dark and stormy night.”

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

Lo Squartatore Di New York: Not A Nice Place To Visit, And I Certainly Don’t Want To Live There

As near as I can tell, there are a couple of different types of Italian horror films that get filed under giallo. You’ve got the stylish (or at least stylized) murder mysteries, where lots of people get stabbed or strangled or otherwise dispatched by mystery figures in black leather, and then you’ve got the zombie/demon movies, where some gate to hell or another gets opened up and all kinds of gooey monstrosities emerge to kill, eat, and both eat and kill people. Where do cannibal movies fit? If/when I ever make a point of watching any, I’ll let you know, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. I know that giallo describes a wider range of movies than this, but this is what I’ve observed so far. And regardless of which of those two types it is, there’s one thing they have in common: They’re bonkers. Not a shred of subtlety to be found. The more I think about it, “outrageous” really fits, in that they’re both wildly unconcerned with plausibility and also likely to evoke outrage.

And in both those regards, Lo Squartatore Di New York (The New York Ripper) fits the bill in spades. It’s the kind of film that gets described as being “very much of its time,” but really that just means it’s sleazy and gross on multiple levels. Worse, as far as I’m concerned, it seems to bring together the two types of giallo I outlined above, but does so without including the strengths of either. The narrative doesn’t hold together, and it’s bloody and violent without being either stylish or over-the-top enough to get over. It’s kind of the worst of both.

That said, I have to applaud the opening. We get a scenic view of what is presumably the East River, and an older gentleman walking his dog along the trash-strewn asphalt adjacent to the riverbank. Ah, city living. He finds a chunk of wood and he throws it. Like the very good girl she is, his dog brings it back. So he throws it again, and she dives into some bushes to retrieve it. But when she comes out, he looks at her in dismay, as the camera cuts to her standing there holding a decomposed human hand in her mouth. It’s not an especially surprising scene, I would have been more surprised if it had gone any other way, but then it freeze-frames on the shot of the dog holding the rotting hand and plays all of the opening credits over it. It makes you look at that hand. The movie is saying “you are in for some shit,” and it’s right.

Cut to world-weary police lieutenant Fred Williams at the precinct house, taking the statement of a dotty old landlady who is reporting one of her tenants missing. Does his cop intuition tell him there’s more to this than a flighty young woman who’s taken off for an impromptu trip? No, not really, but he’s the protagonist, so he’ll have to do. We move from New York’s finest standing around looking bored to a young woman riding her bike to the Staten Island ferry. She accidentally scrapes against a car along the way and the driver makes a point of loudly explaining to her that she’s a menace to society with the brains of a chicken and how “you women” should stay at home where they belong. And yeah, that’s…this movie came out in 1982, and that’s pretty much how the whole film is going to be. As luck has it, he’s parked on the ferry, and as they get underway, this young woman takes the opportunity to slip into his car and write “shit head” on the inside of the windshield in lipstick.

But before she can finish, she is interrupted by someone with a switchblade. Permanently.

So Lieutenant Williams gets assigned to investigate the Mysterious Case Of Why Women Are Turning Up Dead. He is ostensibly assisted by a psychologist named Dr. Paul Davis, who will be helping him develop a profile of the killer. I say “ostensibly” because mostly all Dr. Davis does is play chess, look smug, and belittle the people around him. What follows is a lot of stuff happening, in no particular order. This is a film that doesn’t move from scene to scene so much as it lurches from scene to scene, and though you can make out something of a story, there’s not a whole lot of attention paid to pacing or structure or anything like that. Characters are routinely introduced with little to no context in the way that you expect that connections between them will be revealed, or that they’ll cross paths and things will make more sense, but not so much. In most cases (at least the women), they’re in the movie to get murdered and that’s kind of it.

So this is a film about a police investigation into a series of murders, but I can’t really call it a procedural, because that implies that there’s anything resembling procedure. This film makes leaps in logic that would easily take Olympic gold if it were an event. Apparently, Wiliams is able to determine the killer’s age and that they’ve lived their entire life in New York City from…a blood test. That’s…that’s not a thing. The killer makes a point of calling the police to taunt them, and even though this taunting consists of the killer saying “you’re so stupid” a lot and quacking (yes, quacking), Davis determines from this that the killer is very intelligent and cultured. In theory, Williams is working with Davis to catch the killer, but they confer maybe three times over the whole film – large sections go by apparently having forgotten this was supposed to be happening. Davis’ analysis of the killer is empty psychobabble, but really, that’s just par for the course. It’s easy to tell that everything in this film is based on someone’s speculation about what police work and psychology are, since presumably there was no money or time for a consultant, and so they just made shit up. Most of the film is just ping-ponging between characters, setting up red herring after red herring. Is it the man with two fingers missing, who attacks a woman on the subway? Is it the wealthy doctor with some very specific kinks? Is it the young painter whose girlfriend narrowly escapes the killer? Is it Dr. Davis? Hell, is it the police chief? The answer will surprise you, because it’s totally unrelated to any of the clues the film has planted.

So it’s a clumsy, incoherent story, told in clumsy, incoherent fashion. The dialogue’s as stilted as you’d expect from an Italian production set in New York (Williams to the police chief: “Well, if it isn’t the big chief person himself”), although there’s enough location shooting that it feels like New York, and it’s New York of the early 80s, all grubby and run-down, subway cars scabbed over with graffiti and dingy apartments and porn theaters in Times Square. All of which is explored in the most prurient and salacious way possible. Is there any real reason why one of the murders requires a lengthy sequence at a live sex show? Not really, and yet here we are. There are more than a few shots of nude female bodies on morgue tables, many of the women happen to be naked when they get killed, and there’s one sequence involving a nude woman and a razor blade that is genuinely nasty. The effects are still obvious, but well-done enough that it isn’t as comical as it could be. And there’s one sequence with the wealthy doctor’s wife and two men in a bar that had me wanting to take five or six showers once it was over. Put simply, the film is misogynistic as fuck. Women exist in this movie to be naked and/or stabbed. They’re sex workers, or someone who had the nerve to talk back to a man, or stuck-up rich women slumming for rough trade, and even the one the film goes out of its way to tell us is a genius? She’s also prone to hallucinations. Bitches be crazy, am I right? We learn that Davis is most likely gay – does it end up mattering? No, thank goodness, given the genre’s track record with homosexuality, but it’s portrayed through a fairly leering one-off scene that ends up contributing nothing to our understanding of him either. It’s an uncomfortable film to watch, and not in the sense of being confrontational, so much as it feels like you’re stuck in conversation with an oily little creep who thinks jokes about rape are funny.

It just sort of bounces back and forth between murders and aimless conversation until the third act, which keeps you guessing (or more specifically, confused) right up to the end, revealing a rationale for the murders absolutely head-clutching in how convoluted it is. Even by giallo standards, it’s kind of a doozy, coming out of nowhere, just like everything else about this film. It’s a thriller without the visual flair of those giallo at their best, and it’s got the graphic violence of the more straightforward horror giallo without being evocative, and it manages to preserve all of the gross attitudes of the period. So it’s evocative of another time, absolutely, but it’s a time that nobody in their right mind would want to revisit.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon 

Asvins: Foregone Conclusions

Sometimes - not often, but sometimes - I’ll put on a movie to write about and within the first few minutes get the sense that it’s going to be a turkey and probably not worth my time. Usually, I’ll just stop films like this and watch something else instead. Asvins does not get off to a strong start at all, in any way, shape or form, but this time I decided I’d try to stick with one of those films instead of dismissing it immediately and seeing how it went. As it turns out, I was not at all rewarded for my efforts. It’s an incoherent mess that somehow manages to be both obtuse and obvious at the same time

Varun and his brother Arjun are vloggers who’ve decided to explore an especially creepy mansion in a remote part of England as a way to capitalize on the trend in dark tourism (visiting places where tragedies happened) and to hopefully raise their profile, go viral, all of the usual content-creator things. They’ve brought along their younger brother Rahul, who’s just found out he’s going to Germany to study audio engineering, Arjun’s wife Ritu, and Varun’s girlfriend Grace. They’re headed for an old abandoned estate that’s only accessible during low tide. It used to belong to Aarthi Rajagopal, a renowned archaeologist.

One night, 15 people were murdered there, and Aarthi apparently tortured herself to death. So it’s got a history.

So the premise is five people going into a huge abandoned building with a dark past to record what they find there, and sure enough, what they find there is very bad. This is the same basic premise as about 85% of all other found-footage horror films. But, to its credit, it ends up being about something beyond the initial premise, which is good because the initial premise is sort of run through in the first fifteen minutes, and the film is just shy of two hours long. And this is really the first of the film’s big problems - it plays like someone took the narrative beats, cut them up, threw them in the air and arranged them as they landed. It takes a surprisingly long time for the film to actually get started as it is. There’s a title card along the lines of the events depicted being fictional and any resemblance to people living or dead is coincidental. Also, no animals were harmed. Then there are multiple cards thanking multiple people, presumably for collectively funding the film. Then there are the credits for multiple production and distribution companies. And then there’s a long animated sequence in which we learn some folklore, one which both manages to give away anything that was going to be a surprise and at the same time isn’t strictly necessary since the story will be belabored extensively over the entire second half of the film. It’s very easy to come away from all of this feeling like you already know how the movie is going to go, and yeah, that’s pretty much how it goes. Then we jump into events in the current day, with what plays out like the climax of a found-footage 101 film, people running around a deserted location screaming and getting picked off by a series of jump scares.

And that’s all before the opening title. Then we bounce back to the events that lead up to those moments, in which everything (mansion belonging to an archaeologist, 15 people found murdered there, the archaeologist killed herself) is explained even though it had already been explained during the opening sequence. So we get a fairly generic found-footage film as about the first half of the movie, but one that starts at the end. And then the second half of the film sort of serves to show what was going on before, during, and after the first half, but not in a way that is necessarily easy to follow.

But all of that is okay, because we will be reminded constantly of what’s happening. This is a film that apparently assumes we have the attention span of a goldfish because we get almost all of the necessary information fed to us repeatedly through dialogue, through conveniently discovered recordings the archaeologist made in which she repeats everything we’ve already learned as well as a bunch of important points literally being written on notes tacked to a wall, which are then cut to multiple times. You know most of how the first act is going to go in the first five or ten minutes, and even have a general idea of how the rest of the film is going to go by the time you’re ten minutes into the second half and the rest is just sitting there and letting what is basically a foregone conclusion spool out. And at almost two hours long, it gets pretty tedious.

So what is happening and how we get to the end are pretty easy to figure out well in advance, but how it gets there still doesn’t follow much of a clear through-line. The film is divided up into chapters, all with titles having to do with two deaths, two lives, two worlds, two minds, and combinations thereof. Twins and two different worlds play into the story, but there’s all this stuff about people having two minds, one is stronger than the other but one of them is also a demon, I think? It doesn’t add much to the story, and on top of that, the second half of the film is littered with portentous voiceover about darkness and light and minds and worlds and demons too and none of it is especially illuminating  The action shifts in ways that I think are supposed to represent different worlds, but it isn’t clear which one is which or what’s actually happening at any given point. Is someone real or a ghost? Are they really them or a shapeshifting demon? Is this the real world or the spirit world? Is this the past or the future? For most of the film, it’s anybody’s guess and though things get a little more coherent toward the end, it’s not enough, as we get into curses and demons and people being bound together and because a demon’s controlling someone you can control the demon through the person you’re controlling, all for an ending that ends up being cliched and confusing in equal parts.

The performances don’t help any - I won’t ding the dialogue, as clumsy as it is, because that could very well be down to translation. But most of the performances are from the Scooby-Doo school of acting, all yelping and screaming and making extraneous noises in ways that don’t so much suggest emotion as bad attempts to perform emotion, lots of mugging  and melodrama at odds with the pitch of the scene otherwise. There are maybe three genuinely creepy moments in the whole thing, and that’s not nearly enough to save it.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Enys Men: Lost At Sea

I don’t know that I’d call myself a sucker for cryptic, enigmatic horror films, but if I were put under oath, I couldn’t really deny it either. I think this goes back to my contention that horror is, at the end of the day, not about thrills and chills and gore and jump-out-of-your-seat moments exclusively, like some (many) professional critics seem to think. There’s a whole palette of emotions that could be said to fall under the umbrella of horror, and to me, that’s the important bit: How does it make you feel? And you don’t need to be literal to evoke a feeling. Sometimes, watching something play out that sits just at the edge of comprehension, that may not make logical sense but fills you with unease…that’s the territory of nightmares, and what are horror movies if not our nightmares?

So yeah, I don’t think a film has to make strict “sense” to work. Cryptic, enigmatic, oblique, tone-poem movies can work and work well, but also risk falling apart into incoherence, and that’s unfortunately what I think happens to Enys Men. There’s a lot going for it, but it never really comes together and the result is something that is ultimately more confusing than haunting.

There isn’t really a story so much as there is a series of events and possibly recollections. There’s a woman (credited only as “The Volunteer”) who lives on the remote island of Enys Men, where her sole regular duty appears to be observing a small patch of flowers, noting soil temperature and the condition of the flowers on a daily basis and recording the results in a logbook. The records go back quite some time. She gets up, checks the flowers, checks an abandoned mineshaft by dropping a rock down into it and noting how long it takes to hit bottom, then she goes inside and makes her breakfast. It’s a rocky, wind-swept island, all rocks and moss and the crumbling stone ruins of what appears to have been a small mining village. She lives in the one intact structure on the island, a cottage that’s almost overtaken by the greenery creeping up its sides, as if the island is reclaiming any memory of human occupation. She has running water, but electricity is provided by a generator and rationed out for lights and some broadcast music in the evening. Her only contact with the mainland is a dodgy two-way radio and a supply boat that comes by on a regular basis. There’s a standing stone in her front yard, a monument to some long-ago tragedy.

Otherwise, she’s alone all the time, just her and all of the ghosts of this island.

Not to be too reductive, but it being a story of someone who’s ostensibly going mad from loneliness, told in largely disconnected static moments, results in something that is sort of like The Lighthouse as told through the lens of Skinamarink. It looks like something from a bygone era - scratchy, grainy film and a saturated color palette that nonetheless consists mostly of mossy greens, grays and browns, with striking patches of color - the sea, the sky, the woman’s bright blue eyes and brighter red coat, a bright red generator contrasted against a gray stone wall. The sense of isolation is effectively conveyed by the film being very quiet. There’s very little music  - the score is mostly ambience with some string and horn swells at especially fraught moments and there’s some diegetic music from her little radio, tinny and faint. There’s almost no dialogue as well (it’s about 10 minutes in before you even hear a voice), so you get these long stretches of silence punctuated by the rattle of a generator, the squawk and buzz of the radio. They aren’t jump scares per se, but the sudden cuts to them do have a startling, unnerving effect. This is probably the most effective thing about the film - the way it alternates long takes with sudden cuts keeps you off-balance. The camera spends as much time off of the woman as on, maybe more, which makes the island itself as much of a character as she is.

The quiet is unnerving, and so is the apparent monotony of the woman’s existence, described through repeated motifs of her daily routine which start to give way to what could be flashbacks or visions, and the way they combine and recombine starts to make everything stranger as the film goes on, in a fashion reminiscent of I Am A Ghost, another story of a woman all alone in an isolated location. What is at first innocuous becomes, over repetition, sinister, and for the first act at least, there’s a real eeriness to it all. But after the first act it starts to fizzle out, and I think it doesn’t work as well as it could for a couple of reasons. First, the pacing is very, very slow. This isn’t always a problem (in Skinamarink, for example, it works toward the dreamlike mood and a sense of constant tension), but here it serves to bog down the film in the second act, and any tension built up during the first dissipates. It starts to feel very repetitive, but not in a way where the repetition communicates anything. A film moving slowly isn’t a problem, but it does need to move. There’s less of a sense of disintegration or escalation than there needs to be as the film goes on. And this ties into the second problem, and that’s that ultimately it’s very difficult to make sense of what’s actually happening. There are what appear to be elements of the supernatural and even some body horror which have some kind of logic to them, but as everything moves away from routine and toward something more fragmentary and irrational, it seems less like the supernatural or a deteriorating mental state and more just a bunch of scenes that sort of relate to each other without committing to a particular through-line. The brief is mostly “person living in relative isolation starts to lose it,” or maybe “is she losing it or is she really being haunted” but the end result is mostly confusing - how much is memory and how much is losing grip on reality isn’t clear, and though there are some moments in isolation that are eerie and unsettling, the whole never really gels like it should and it just sort of ends without pointing toward any particular understanding. Which, again, isn’t necessarily a problem if you’re just going for pure mood, but there’s enough underlying story here that some kind of revelation is expected, and not enough structure for us to really grasp it. 

It's a shame, because the editing, cinematography and sound design are all really good - the aesthetics are there and very distinct, which is important for a visual medium. It definitely has a vision, which goes a long way with me, but the execution is messy enough that it feels like a missed opportunity.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

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.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

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 

Phantasm: The Undertaker’s New Clothes

 I always feel a little uneasy when I plan on tackling something that’s considered a classic in one way or another, especially when it’s something I’ve never seen before. There’s always the concern that a longtime favorite won’t have held up, but when something I’ve never seen before has a history and reputation and a devoted following and it doesn’t click for me, well…

…well, then you get Phantasm. It’s a definite cult classic, spawning multiple sequels and firmly embedded in the horror lexicon. Years ago I watched it (or tried to) and I remember feeling confused and underwhelmed enough that I don’t think I finished it. But that was a long time ago, my tastes have broadened, and it’s a gap in my cinematic education. But having seen it now, I find myself very confused by the adoration for this film, because I really don’t think it works.

It opens on a man and a woman, in a graveyard, engaging in what I think is supposed to be sex. It’s tough to tell, because they aren’t really doing the things you expect from a couple having sex, like expressing enthusiasm, or moving. The man mumbles something about how good it was, in a tone of voice you usually associate with falling asleep. But suddenly the woman has a knife! And she stabs him! For just a moment, her face is replaced by that of a gaunt, unsmiling old man. On to the next scene. The man who we just saw getting stabbed was Tommy, and his friends Jody and Reggie meet outside the funeral home adjacent to the cemetery where Tommy met his end to discuss his passing (“hell of a way to break up a trio”) and the upcoming service (“I just don’t get off on funerals, man. They give me the creeps”). Jody’s thinking about leaving town, but he has his little brother Mike to think of. They lost their parents in a car accident, and ever since, Mike’s had real abandonment issues, sticking to Jody like glue. Jody told Mike to stay home because the funeral would be upsetting, and so Mike sneaks out to the cemetery (on a very loud dirt bike) and hides in the woods to spy on the funeral through a pair of binoculars. You know, like you do. And once the service is over and the mourners have left, a tall thin man comes up to the grave, grabs the casket as if it didn’t weigh a thing, and loads it into the hearse.

It's the man we glimpsed while Tommy was dying.

So a sad young boy with abandonment issues and creepy voyeuristic tendencies discovers that strange things are afoot at the local funeral home, and after that it’s all over the place. There’s no real story to speak of, this is a movie where something happens, then something else happens, then another thing happens with varying levels of abruptness. It’s one of those movies that’s so cheap and so clumsy that it attains a level of surrealism -see also Messiah Of Evil and Carnival Of Souls - but unlike those films, it never really manages to develop much of an atmosphere or mood, so all you’re left with is one what-the-fuck moment after another, and if anything the cheapness and clumsiness undercuts a lot of the horror, rendering what should be tense, eerie moments comical.

In between scenes of Mike and Reggie and Jody talking in various combinations and a puzzling interlude with an ostensibly blind and mute fortune teller, there are a couple of nightmare sequences that, to be fair, have a certain raw vitality to them, and the strange things afoot at the local funeral home are certainly very strange - whatever you think is going on, you’re probably wrong - and events go places you wouldn’t expect if you were going into the film blind. But then the action stops so Jody and Reggie can play a quick song out of nowhere. A tense chase scene involves an ice cream truck and is thus scored by an especially tinkly version of “Three Blind Mice.” Mike interrupts a potentially tense scene by literally running through it hollering at the top of his lungs, There’s little sense of continuity and no sense of narrative flow or rising tension, and that combined with wooden acting and beyond-wooden dialogue, consistently cheap art direction, effects and set design, all has the potential to lend everything the sort of gritty strangeness you’d need for the film to get over. It really does have that weird fever-dream vibe, but some of the choices made here…well, it’s hard to tell if they’re supposed to be intentionally comic or not. The result is a film that’s hard to take it seriously even on its own level, or even to meet the movie halfway. It feels like store-brand giallo, or the kind of film out of which Mystery Science Theater 3000 makes an absolute meal.

It does have its moments, albeit few and far between. There are some effective visuals - the antagonist is a tall, thin, unsmiling undertaker who cuts a striking presence and seems to be everywhere at once, and he’s responsible for the moments when things do work. There are some other interesting visual choices here and there - washes of bright red for a particular point of view, a moment in an antique store with an old photograph that’s effortlessly dreamlike and unsettling - but there’s too few of these scattered too thinly throughout to really feel like more than missed opportunity. And so it’s really frustrating and baffling for me, trying to find the film’s appeal as a horror film. I can understand its appeal as a weird bad movie, but it’s given the reverence of something like Halloween or Night Of The Living Dead and I just don’t get it. It’s certainly striking for its time - it was released close enough to Halloween but far away enough from A Nightmare On Elm Street that I can see how could really make an impression on someone who had no idea what to expect. The rules hadn’t been codified yet. But it’s hard enough to get past the flaws now that the gap between the film I saw and the reputation it has me doubting my own sanity a bit.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

Smile: A Really Good Movie Trapped Inside A Very Average One

I’ve felt a lot of different things over the course of watching movies and writing about them. Fear, anxiety, dread, sadness, revulsion, even boredom, anger and disgust at the especially terrible movies, disappointment at the ones with promise that don’t quite get there. But I’ll be damned if I can remember the last time I walked away from a film feeling a mixture of frustration and confusion on top of everything else. Upon finishing a film I can usually gather my thoughts pretty easily and land on some kind of conclusion. What I liked, what I didn’t, what I thought worked, what didn’t, stuff like that.

But I cannot remember a time when a movie has left me as mixed-up and uncertain about what I just saw as Smile has. I guess if I were to be reductive I’d call it a mixed bag. For every piece of it that works, there’s something that doesn’t, and it fails with the same intensity with which it succeeds. So it’s hard to wholeheartedly recommend it but I can’t really dismiss it either, and if my dithering is annoying two paragraphs in, well, it ain’t gonna stop here.

The film opens cold on a face - a woman’s face, still, unblinking and insensate. The room is dim and very messy, laundry spilling out of hampers and a scattering of pills spilled out of bottles. A lot of bottles. The door opens, and there’s a little girl. And she sees this woman slumped over in bed, surrounded by so many empty pill bottles. And this is how this little girl discovers that her mother is dead.

The little girl is Rose Cotter, and she grows up to become a psychiatrist. She works at a hospital in emergency medicine. She wants to help people whose demons threaten to get the better of them, for whom life is a day-to-day proposition. She’s seen what happens when the demons win. And so, in the course of an otherwise routine day, she’s asked to do intake on a young woman named Laura. She’s a grad student, no previous history of mental illness, but she’s seeing things. Rose starts with the standard questions and Laura insists that she isn’t crazy. But Laura’s seeing something everywhere she goes. It looks like people she knows, but it’s not them. It wears their faces like a mask, and nobody else can see them. And they are smiling at Laura. Smiling so widely. Rose tries to reassure Laura that our mind can make us believe something that isn’t real absolutely is, and Laura becomes extremely upset because Rose isn’t listening, Rose doesn’t believe her. Rose can’t see the thing that is standing right behind her. But Laura can, and she starts screaming and backing away. Rose looks away long enough to call for assistance.

And when she looks back, Laura is standing there, very still. Smiling.

I think the best way I can describe this film is as one that succeeds and fails with equal intensity. It’s got a good foundation. The use of a smile as an indicator that Bad Things are about to happen is a great singular image. A smile is nice until it’s a little too wide, and held a little too long, at which point it’s unnerving. So that’s a great start. It’s narratively minimal, in that all you have to do is have someone smiling somewhere in the scene to convey dread. It’s nightmarish stuff in the best way, in that it’s a little cryptic, a little inexplicable, and can be absolutely anywhere in the scene. So this is the kind of film that doesn’t need to have too many moving parts. And narratively, it doesn’t - Rose witnesses something bloody and terrible, and finds herself plagued by nightmares, episodes of sleepwalking, and she starts seeing things. Her life starts to fall apart and she becomes increasingly obsessed with trying to figure out what’s happening.

And toward this end, one of the film’s biggest strengths is that it does a very good job of setting a tone early. Shattering glass is a recurring motif, and it’s a good analogy for the overall feeling of the movie as well. It’s something hard and brittle that fragments and splinters in the blink of an eye, leaving lots of sharp edges. It’s tense and nervy, using lots of close-ups and shots centered on a figure, drawing your eye to the middle of the frame in a way that feels confrontational. Holding close on people’s faces a little longer than you think can do a lot to elicit unease, and I have to say, the shot composition does a lot of good work in this regard. It does resort to the occasional jump scare, but just as often it gets the same effect from dramatic contrasts in cuts from one shot to another instead. The transitions can be whiplash-inducing, but that’s a feature, not a bug. There are nightmare sequences that come unexpectedly and seamlessly with waking life, and vary enough that you can never be sure of what’s coming. The soundtrack is mostly scratchy static, low-frequency swells, and queasy, wavering tones - it’s not subtle, and it’s not afraid of using stings to punctuate startling moments, but it doesn’t feel overdone, again, it feels confrontational somehow. It’s a film that is very much in your face, almost relentless in its insistence.

The performances are somewhat uneven, but Rose is a strong central character. She’s someone who’s pretty clearly driving herself too hard to try and outrun whatever haunts her, and that’s just where the movie starts. Once things go bad, she’s got no buffer for it, so she gets twitchier and more erratic as the film goes on. She handles her situation badly, which is realistic given what she’s witnessed. She’s a mess, which is exactly what you would be in her situation. Her decline is one of the most believable things in the film, one of the few times that the old “everyone thinks she’s crazy but the ghosts are real” cliché actually has some punch to it, because she’s so raw and because the character’s actually pretty developed - the way she immediately retreats and apologizes following any angry outburst is a nice touch given what happened to her as a child. It can be uncomfortable to watch in the best way.

I think a lot of its failures have a lot to do with not living up to its strongest moments, but more on that in a bit, because the messiest and most complicated thing about this movie is, for me, a big part of its central conceit. Its treatment of mental health…well, I’m really not sure how to parse it. There’s a strong reliance on other characters dismissing or trivializing mental illness - phrases like “nut case,” “head job,” and so on are thrown around so much and so glibly that they almost feel like a stylistic choice, and most of the people surrounding Rose range from baffled to callous on the subject. One way to read it is as being tremendously insensitive in general, a film about a psychiatrist and the supernatural presenting as mental illness made by someone with little appreciation for the gravity of the material. And there’s certainly plenty of precedent in horror - classic and contemporary - for exactly that, so that’s entirely possible.

But on the other hand, it’s only the laypeople in the film who talk that way, never the professionals, who are portrayed pretty reasonably. This paints the other characters as less sympathetic and frames them as being in the wrong here. As a result, the divide between what Rose is experiencing and how pretty much everyone else in her life handles it serves to alienate her further as the film goes on. So in that sense it could also be read as an attempt to illustrate how often issues around mental health aren’t taken seriously and how alone people suffering can feel. But it’s really tough to tell which is the case, so I sort of want to say it didn’t work. There’s also this idea of an evil spirit that feeds on trauma, and again that feels like an attempt at metaphor, at how trauma and pain get communicated generationally and passed on, that it is something that haunts you and people who haven’t experienced it will never be able to understand, and though I think that making it a literal monster isn’t a mistake thematically, I don’t think it really serves the movie well as a story because the literal monster is sort of underwhelming for the most part. It’s good to remember that what we don’t see can be even scarier than what we can. As soon as you put the monster up on screen, you threaten to fall short of what the audience has conjured up in their heads.

And that’s just one of a number of cinematic missteps here. As I said above, the use of smiles and smiling figures is potentially a powerful image but it ends up being really underutilized. There are attempts to build it in throughout, but they’re fitful enough that it never really builds up the kind of inescapable dread that it could. Characterization is a kind of all over the place - Rose is very believable, then others in her immediate orbit are a little less fleshed-out, and she has a sister and brother-in-law who, along with a detective, are almost literal cartoons. There’s a dinner with them and her fiancée that feels like it comes out of an entirely different movie, maybe a farce about suburban vanity. The dialogue is this odd mix of conversational and stagey, verging on speeches and monologues. Maybe the artificiality helps the overall tone insofar as the whole thing feels slightly unreal, like Rose is sort of seeing the world through the eyes of a trauma survivor and everything seems a little shallow and fake, but again I can’t tell if it’s a deliberate choice or not. I think if the performances had been consistently grounded or consistently artificial, either would have worked well, but bouncing from one to the other feels confusing.

And on top of that, it’s too long - this was not a story that needed to take almost two hours, and the third act suffers most in terms of feeling padded. It arrives at the end I assumed it would (rather than one I thought they were hinting at that could have been much creepier), and that by itself is okay, because handles well it could have been really powerful. But it took an unnecessary detour on the way there for a Final Girl moment, featuring a big speech that laid everything out too plainly, that told instead of showing, and coming at the same moment the monster becomes visible to us made it really, really on the nose. Nothing that happens in that sequence needed to be spelled out, and the monster was scarier when it was just someone smiling at you. But it keeps hammering away at the point. This extends to the filmmaking itself, which uses a few cinematic tricks a little too often. Like I said, there’s a lot of breaking glass, in this movie and as thematically and tonally apt as it is, it’s also frequent enough that it starts to verge on comical. There are also a lot of drone shots, which is fine, it’s becoming kind of a cliché, but whatever, but they include more than one where a long shot of someone driving or of a city skyline inverts itself. I don’t mind this as an effect, but don’t use it more than once, for pity’s sake. That it echoes films like The Ring and It Follows bothers me less than it did some critics, but along with overreliance on those other elements, it all does threaten to occasionally spill over into feeling assembled from parts. It never quite gets that bad, but it’s sort of on the radar, which isn’t great. And the pacing issues mean that the end itself doesn’t have the impact that it should. It feels anticlimactic, both because an attentive viewer saw where everything was going but then it took too long to get there, so it just lands with a thud.

Like The Night House - another film about loss and trauma embodied as monstrosity - it’s a film that suffers most when it underestimates its audience and feels the need to spell out stuff that doesn’t need to be spelled out. When it’s good, it’s really good, but when it fucks up it doesn’t fuck up by half measures. It’s a really good movie trapped inside of an aggressively average movie, and I can’t say for certain if the glimpses of something much better justify sitting through the really pedestrian stuff, but they’re certainly there..

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

The Changeling: Family Matters

Ghost stories are, for the most part, stories about the past. Someone lived here and though they are long gone, something of them remains. Or, something very bad happened here long ago and the restless spirits of those caught up in it are unable to move on. Every now and then you’ll get one that puts a bit of a different spin on it, but ghost stories usually come down to solving the mystery of what happened long ago that keeps the presence or presences haunting a particular place from moving on.

And in that sense, The Changeling is, for most of its duration, a classic ghost story. It’s very much about the past, not just in its story, but also how it tells its story, and in the signifiers of the time period in which it was made. When it’s in classic ghost story mode, it works quite well, but when the focus shifts elsewhere, it stumbles in the home stretch.

John Russell is a pianist and composer on vacation with his wife and daughter in snowy upstate New York. Their car has broken down and they’re pushing it off to the side of the road so John can find a phone and call for a tow. But spirits seem high and everyone seems to be making the best of it. John spots a phone booth, and his wife and daughter occupy themselves with a snowball fight on the shoulder of the highway. But what this means is that they don’t see another car swerve to avoid a semi truck and plow right through them. All John can do is watch from the phone booth, horrified.

Some months later, John’s relocated to Seattle to take a position on the music faculty at a local university. He’s still adjusting, still breaks down into tears sometimes. Everyone is sympathetic. He’s looking for a house to rent until he puts something more permanent together, and an acquaintance puts him in touch with the local historical society, who have a property they can lease to him. Someone from the society shows him around what is referred to as the Carmichael estate. It’s huge, palatial and sprawling, with a wonderful music room. It hasn’t been occupied in about twelve years, and the previous occupants left some things behind. Books, mostly. Truth be told, it’s probably too much for one person, and so John finds himself rattling around in this gigantic house. Just him and his grief.

Him, his grief, and mysterious noises in the middle of the night. Doors that open and close by themselves.

Everything about this film is rooted in the past. To start, it was released in 1980, so it’s set in a world very different from the one we live in now. Everyone smokes, you call information to get someone’s phone number, and John records his compositions on a big reel-to-reel tape recorder. So there’s a bit of quaintness to it in that sense. But then, on top of that, it’s very much a ghost story in the gothic tradition, and being a ghost story, it’s about something that happened long ago at the time of the film, so you’re watching a film about the past intruding on a present that’s now very much the past in the style (mostly) of an even older storytelling tradition.

And for at least the first two-thirds of the film, does a pretty good job of being a ghost story in the gothic tradition. A lot of little things do the work here - doors opening and closing by themselves, mysterious banging noises, closed-up rooms thick with cobwebs, all set in this enormous old house, dark wood, a vertiginous central staircase, stained glass, a seemingly endless warren of rooms and hallways. Performances are a little mannered as befits when it was made, but not so as to be distracting. It’s more just a rhythm and pace to the dialogue that you really don’t hear much anymore, and it’s tempting to say that the house is the real star of the film. That might be going a bit far, but this is one of those films where the long, dark silence of a big old house is interrupted by small, strange things, like jabs at your calm.

And so the house does a lot to sell it. It sits in the middle of a bunch of bare, leafless trees, skeletal in the middle of Washington state’s lush evergreens, it’s all big empty rooms and long stretches of corridor that the film uses very much to its advantage with continuous pans and long Steadicam shots, the camera gliding through the mansion like the ghost itself. The soundtrack is all classical music, quivering strings and dissonant piano - it’s not subtle at all but it’s also rarely overbearing. The tendency toward long shots of the mansion’s interior is offset by a clipped, almost brusque editing style where one scene will crash right into another. It’s jarring, sometimes to good effect and sometimes not - it creates at sense of uneasiness and temporal dislocation at times, but other times it feels sloppy, like a scene crudely edited out.

And this does, to a degree, extend into the narrative - relationships between characters develop quickly, events move really fast (sometimes defying plausibility)  and some characters are whisked out of the story immediately after being introduced. It’s a little on the longer side, but doesn’t really feel like it until the third act when the focus shifts. And it’s this shift that I think represents the biggest problem the film has. John devotes himself to uncovering whatever happened in this house so long ago to leave a restless spirit inhabiting it, and it ultimately abandons the moody, tense ghost story of the first two acts to spend too much time focusing on a cover-up and conspiracy driving the mysterious events of the rest of the movie. Ghosts are typically restless spirits that are the result of some past tragedy or injustice a spirit that can’t rest, and that’s fine, but what should be a final revelation, a coming together of all of the pieces and the discovery of actual proof of this horrible secret ends up getting tangled up in something closer to a political thriller, and it kills the momentum and the atmosphere pretty quickly just when it should be tightening up. It almost feels like what should have been the whole movie got compressed into the first two acts. What’s more, the exposition starts getting pretty clumsy in the third act  -there are more than a few instances throughout where people tell instead of (or worse, in addition to) showing, but there’s a lot of it at the end, and things start getting muddled, happening just for the sake of happening without really fitting into a cohesive narrative as well

Had it stayed the course, I think it would have been very good, but as it is it does feel like it sort of sputters to an ending. It feels very much of its time and so it does threaten to feel quaint, but when it works, it works very well in a mode that still has a lot of life left in it, even if it has been left behind for more bombastic efforts. I think it’s a good argument for old-fashioned ghost stories still having some life left in them. Well, at least it is when it's focusing on the ghost story.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi