Ouija - Origin Of Evil: That Is One Tasty Burger

So just last week I was talking about how much I don’t like films made off the back of other films. Sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, re-imaginings, et cetera. Don’t even get me started on franchises. I think it’s the way it turns film into product. I’m not going to get all precious and “my cinema” about films, but…it’s the difference between a home-cooked meal or fine-dining experience and a burger and fries from your fast-food place of choice. But here’s the thing: Sometimes those fine-dining places get a wild hair up their ass and do their own take on the burger and fries. It’ll be a burger and fries, but the meat is top sirloin, the bun freshly baked, the fries hand-cut and fried in duck fat. The form is fast food, but the execution isn’t.

That’s the analogy that came to mind while I was watching Ouija: Origin Of Evil. It’s a prequel to an apparently not-especially-good film about a haunted/possessed Ouija board. Hardly a novel idea, but it’s executed with such taste and care that the finished product is way better than you’d expect.

It's Los Angeles in 1968, and Alice Zander is conducting a séance for a middle-aged man and his visibly skeptical daughter. They’re trying to contact the man’s late wife, and Alice reaches into the beyond to make contact. The table rattles, doors open and shut, candles blow out and relight. A shadowy figure appears behind some curtains before rushing toward the daughter, screaming. The séance ends, the father and daughter leave, with Alice refusing to accept payment.

Once they’re gone, Alice goes back inside and calls to her own daughters to come out, while she breaks down the various devices she used during the séance. The younger daughter, Doris, had made cabinets rattle. Her older daughter, Lina, was the apparition behind the curtain. Lina wasn’t supposed to rush the man’s daughter, but Lina thought she was a bitch. Alice points out that that little stunt cost them their pay. And it’s pay they desperately need. Alice is a widow, and the wolves are constantly at the door. Doris prays at night to her father, she thinks he’s just gone away on business, but Lina and Alice know the truth. He isn’t coming back. Alice is tired and worried, Lina is angry in the righteous, passionate way that teenagers are. She’s straining at the leash, desperate for independence. And it’s this independence that leads her to sneak out at night, to go to a friend’s house while her friend’s mother is away at her bridge club. They listen to music, sip booze. There’s a cute boy there that Lina fancies. Then her friend pulls out this new game her mother got. It’s a Ouija board.

Lina sees how freaked out her friends get at the possibility of communicating with the dead, and mentions it to her mother as a possible new prop. Needless to say, Alice grabs one and goes to work doctoring it, magnetizing the planchette so she can manipulate it hands-free from under the table. Doris wants to know if she could use it to talk to her father, and even though Alice and Lina discourage her, once they’ve left she gives it a try. Something responds.

But it’s not her father.

In the interest of full transparency, the director made one of my favorite horror movies ever as his feature debut, so I’m a little biased. That said, everything I like about his style is on display here and it elevates the result. Like his previous films Absentia and Oculus, this film leverages the power of restraint, of not going loud or making things obvious. The scary moments tend to happen in the background, without an unnecessary amount of fanfare, and I think this makes these moments even more effective. They reward the attentive viewer, catching you unawares and being that much more startling as a result. There are some near-mandatory jump scares, and yes, they’re still jump scares, but inventive staging and - again - a lack of buildup or forecasting make them about as good as those get. It’s a film full of little moments that make you go “GAAHHHHH!” The performances are suitably restrained all-around, with no scenery-chewing to be had. Alice and Lina and Doris seem like a real family, with complicated feelings about life after their father/husband has died, Lina is a resentful teen, Doris just wants her father back, Alice is trying to keep their heads above water, and they’re all wrestling with grief in different ways. It’s not enough to provide much thematic subtext, but it also keeps everyone from feeling one-note. There’s a priest who manages to be smart and thoughtful, and even the expected romantic spark with Alice isn’t overplayed. The relative lack of histrionics throughout is refreshing.

It’s also visually self-assured. The whole thing is shot as if it had been made in the early 70s, and the attention to detail (including reel-change marks) is cool, but the picture quality is still a little too clean to look like an actual film from the 70s, so as it is just seems like a really good period piece instead of a historical artifact. But it also means there’s an analog warmth to the visuals that keeps the whole thing grounded. The narrative is fairly well-paced (with one exception in the second act), and in contrast to last week’s The First Omen, the connection to the film it precedes comes only at the very end, so it works as a self-contained film, with a satisfyingly creepy ending.

On the less-effective side of the register, it does feel at a couple of points like the director’s good judgment is in a tug-of-war with a studio that wants things to be bigger, louder, and more obvious. There are couple of unnecessary musical stings, and an exposition dump at the end of the second act, that leads into a plot development that’s over the top enough to elicit an eye-roll; but largely they let him cook on what is basically a work-for-hire deal, and he took something that could have been as pedestrian as the original film apparently is (ooh, evil Ouija board! Nobody’s ever done that before) and made it genuinely spooky.

There’s an art to making a good classically scary movie, and I feel like that art gets forgotten. You don’t need to shove a bunch of screaming distorted faces at the audience, you don’t need dopey teens doing the dumbest things (at one point, Lina says “splitting up would be the dumbest thing we could do” and I got a good chuckle out of that), you don’t need blaring musical stings to tell us that what we’re seeing is scary. You just need to trust your audience’s intelligence and the result is going to be a lot better. A burger and fries is still just a burger and fries, but made correctly, with really good ingredients, it’s going to be exceptional.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon

Deep Fear: Not As Deep As It Thinks

Trying to make a movie - any kind, really - that is “about” something is, in my opinion, generally a losing proposition. Mostly because all films are about something insofar as they’re a product of a particular time and place in a particular culture, rely on a particular level of technology (which feeds into an aesthetic), as well as the experiences and worldviews of the director and cast in terms of the choices they make. Whether people are consciously aware of it or not, thematic narrative is an emergent property of the filmmaking process. So when someone consciously decides that they’re going to make a film that addresses a specific theme or issue, they run the risk of making it didactic, hectoring, and obvious. Not always, but usually the ones that work the best in my experience address whatever it is in terms of someone’s experience, through the circumstances of their life. There’s a difference between telling a story that leads to the viewer saying “that’s fucked up” and making your entire film 90 minutes of you telling the audience “well, actually, this is fucked up.” It really does come back to “show, don’t tell” most of the time. 

And this is one of the problems with Deep Fear, though not the only one. It’s only fitfully effective, lacks structure, and in its attempts to say something about a larger issue, can’t quite overcome its clichés. 

It doesn’t get off to a promising start, with one of those prologues that tells us what we already know, that there’s something bad down in the tunnels below Paris. A graffiti artist is listening to music on a cassette Walkman circa 1989, but it just happens that he can fast-forward exactly to the start of the next song. As someone who actually used that technology, that is…not really a thing. Right off the bat, it seems like plausibility is not going to be a concern. Soon enough, there are strange noises coming from the end of a tunnel, artist gets dragged off. 

Fast-forward about four years or so, and three friends are sitting in a bar, shooting the shit over drinks. Henry is celebrating his last weekend as a civilian before reporting for military service. Max and Sonia are there for moral support. Well, Sonia does nip off to the restroom to meet an acquaintance who sells her a little baggie of something to keep the party going and clues her in to something fun he’s going to be doing tomorrow night if she and her friends want in .And this is how Henry, Max, and Sonia meet up with Sonia’s friend Ramy for a night of exploration. See, Ramy knows a way into the Paris catacombs, the ancient tunnel system running under the span of the city, once used for the disposal of the dead, now an enormous labyrinth ripe for exploration and the sort of things you do away from the prying eyes of the law. 

There are all kinds of things down there.

Apart from the on-the-nose prologue, it takes awhile to set things up, spending a lot of time with the characters Which is fine, but it doesn’t do much to develop the characters themselves. Henry is kind of a bro, Max is a dorky hypochondriac (we know he’s a dork because he wears glasses), and Sonia is…not white. That’s kind of it. So we’re given the opportunity to learn about them, but there’s nothing to learn. There’s a nightmare sequence that underlines Sonia’s otherness in a way that feels shoehorned in, and kind of unnecessary given what happens later. Ramy is their guide, and otherwise kind of a nonentity. There are a few other characters, but they’re even less than that. None of them are especially obnoxious, but nor is there enough to really feel much of a connection to them either. 

Once they get down into catacombs, things pick up a bit with the blind claustrophobia of the setting. There are lots of tight squeezes, uncharted areas, and unstable tunnels, and the precariousness is pretty well-realized. It’s by no means of the same caliber as The Descent, but it’s reminiscent, especially in terms of needing to manage your way through increasingly smaller spaces and worrying about collapses, not knowing if there’s another exit somewhere. There’s good potential here, and a run-in with some neo-Nazi skinheads sets up the opportunity for real tension (as well as making the earlier nightmare sequence less necessary than it already was), but though it provides the impetus for everything that happens in the third act, it’s sort of forgotten almost immediately until it becomes relevant again, but when it does, it’s not in any meaningful way. It’s a very fitful film in this way - it has promise that goes undeveloped, tension that dissipates when its cause is sort of abandoned for the next thing, and the third act starts by developing something interesting before discarding it for a pretty stock-standard “people get picked off one by one by implacable monster” thing. The nature of the monster, without spoiling it here (don’t even read the IMDB entry for this one, really, the brief blurb gives too much away), isn’t especially imaginative either. It’s something we’ve seen before, and ultimately it doesn’t amount to much beyond people getting fed into a metaphorical meat grinder, with an ending that makes a fairly on-the-nose statement about the immigrant experience in France. 

It's interesting to think about alongside As Above, So Below, though - that film used the premise better but had an utterly ridiculous protagonist. This film had the better protagonists (or at least more believable as people) but didn’t use the premise all that well. There’s also a touch of Creep (the somewhat icky 2004 one) in the idea of the ghosts of war continuing to lurk under the surface of the cities wounded by it, and though it isn’t as invested in humiliating its protagonists as that film, it’s not really doing anything with the idea either. It sort of feels like the filmmakers had a generically solid idea for a monster movie set in the Paris catacombs, but decided it needed to “mean something” and so they made character and narrative choices that amount to “treating people badly because they’re different from you is bad.” Which isn’t exactly earth-shaking as revelations go. Fairly shallow for a film set so far below ground.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

Shock Waves: Blast From The Past

One of my most vivid memories of being a kid growing up in 1970s Oklahoma was looking through the movie ads in the newspaper. It was the ads for horror films that piqued my interest the most - for probably obvious reasons - and I was kind of a sheltered little kid, so the sort of things promised by these lurid assemblies of art and ad copy were absolute nightmare fuel to my very active, very vivid imagination. And I was raised to believe that the best way to deal with your nightmares was to face them, so I ended up being both afraid of what these films promised, and terribly curious about them at the same time. 

Does this help explain why I, very much a grown adult human, like to write about scary movies for fun? Don’t be ridiculous. But in all seriousness, one of the benefits of living in an age where a lot of stuff is available on physical media or streaming is that I’m able to go back and revisit the films I remember seeing ads for in the paper as a kid. It’s interesting to see to what degree they do or don’t live up to what I pictured in my head. Rabid? Not so much. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Absofuckinglutely. 

So Shock Waves is sort of an indulgence, in this sense. I always wondered what kind of film it was as a little kid, but there was no way I was going to get to see it at my tender age and it never showed up on cable. So here I am, years and years later, finally settling up with one of those films that burned their way into my tiny little brain. As it turns out, it’s a surprisingly restrained film given the subject matter, and somehow its limitations work for it, rather than against it. The result is something surreal, rather than gory or sensationalistic.

The film begins in voiceover on a static image of some German soldiers, circa WWII. We’re told about Nazi experiments into developing hardier, more resilient soldiers, and battlefield rumors of Nazi troops who fought barehanded through the harshest conditions without ever slowing down or stopping to rest. And how out of all of the divisions of SS troops deployed during the war, one unit was never accounted for. This shifts to a boat out on the water, a man and his son out for a day of fishing, when they discover a dinghy adrift with one unconscious passenger inside. It’s a young woman, who starts lashing out in fear as the two attempt to rescue her. And we shift to the woman in voiceover, saying when they found her, she wasn’t even aware that they were trying to help her, and that at that point she couldn’t remember any of what had happened to her. But clearly, something had. Something terrible.

It all started on a chartered boat trip - sightseeing, scuba diving, that kind of stuff. Seven people on the boat - Ben, the captain, Keith, his first mate, and Dobbs, the galley hand. Their guests are Chuck, an affable bachelor, Norman, a peevish, abrasive car salesman, and his patiently enduring wife Beverly, and Rose - the woman we see being rescued. Things were going along fine until they hit that patch of water where their compass stopped working. Until they collided with another ship and started taking on water. Our protagonists scramble onto the same dinghy we saw at the beginning, and head for a nearby island. 

The ship they hit, it turns out, is an old, abandoned wreck. It looks like something from WWII. And then the figures begin walking out of the wreck, along the ocean floor. Figures in Nazi uniforms.

No, the math isn’t complicated. There’s old Nazi experiments unaccounted for and a bunch of people trapped on an island. What we have ourselves here is a movie about Nazi zombies. That’s not really spoiling anything. You could figure it out (as I did) from the movie poster alone. But it also doesn’t really play like any modern conception of a zombie movie, Nazi or otherwise. It isn’t hard to follow, and really there’s not that much story there anyway. The protagonists land on the island, they discover they aren’t alone, and it goes badly. But how that story gets told in ways you wouldn’t expect. This film has a narrative style best described as stiff - it’s not disjointed, per se, but every scene feels very much like a single, isolated sequence, and so the film as a whole feels less like a continuous story and more like a series of narrative snapshots arranged in a comprehensible order. It's not clumsy, but it’s definitely an assemblage of scenes rather than a movie, if that makes sense.

This extends to the performances, which are all varying shades of wooden, and dialogue that never sounds like anything other than lines being delivered. There’s also not a lot of overlapping dialogue or interruption or crosstalk, so that sense of narrative isolation burrows all the way down into the acting itself. It feels very much like everyone says their lines and then waits for the next person to say theirs before they start talking again. It’s not off-putting, but it does feel odd. And when the action really starts to pick up (which takes a little while), almost all of the actual violence takes place off-camera. I’m assuming it’s because they didn’t have the budget for a lot of effects work, but in some ways I don’t mind that - there will be a reveal (many of which work pretty well) and then a cut to the aftermath. There’s a terseness to it that actually sort of works with the stiffness of the acting and direction to create something almost like an aesthetic. Not minimalist…maybe brutalist filmmaking, since it creates a feeling of distance or remove. It’s like we’re not watching things happen to people, we’re watching people reenacting things that happened to other people.

That sense of remove means that it doesn’t generate as much heat or tension as I’d like. But there are also a number of interesting stylistic choices that I appreciated. It was made in 1977, so like a lot of other films from around that time period, it’s sort of making up its own conventions instead of adhering to an existing formula and that pays off at times. The film begins in voiceover and it’s several minutes before we get actual dialogue, the film itself is one long flashback, and I don’t know if it’s the first Nazi zombie movie ever made, but it’s a definite contender for that title, and the way it handles zombies isn’t really the “slow” zombie of something like Night Of The Living Dead or the “fast” zombie of something like 28 Days Later. They’re stealthy - they hide, they pounce, and they’re utterly, unnervingly silent. There’s an eeriness to them, especially how they walk along the ocean floor, rise from the water when and where you don’t expect it. The restraint works in a way you rarely see in zombie films. Hell, that you rarely see in horror films much anymore in general. They’re more like Michael Myers in the first Halloween film than they are what we’d think of as zombies. And there are some nicely off-kilter moments - an abandoned ballroom with a lone Victrola in the middle playing classical music, scenes plunged totally into darkness, long conversations with an off-camera character, some almost painterly uses of light and shadow, bodies lying motionless in shallow water. When I think of impressionistic filmmaking, zombie films don’t usually come to mind but there are some moments here that qualify.

The budget does show through at points, but more in how the story is told, rather than the quality of locations or practical effects. The cinematography is, with some notable exceptions, workmanlike, and the soundtrack is lots of simple early synthesizer, all burbles and swells and dissonant melodies and theremin-like ambience. But because this very simple, stripped-down approach carries through at every level of the film, it actually works.

 

It’s sort of a tradeoff - the film exchanges tension and thrills for strangeness, so it’s not as scary as it could be, but what we’re left with is something more interesting and unique, ending on a nicely unsettling and inconclusive note. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this, and I don’t know that it’s a forgotten classic or anything, but it’s very much one of a kind. Probably would have scared the crap out of me as a kid, though.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

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

The Vigil: Laid To Rest

As movie monsters go, you can’t get more classic than the ghost. They’re generally portrayed as restless, tethered to our world by something unfinished or unresolved. Sometimes they’re benign, sometimes they’re vengeful, but that’s their thing: They can’t move on. They can be read as an externalization of our regrets, or our fear of regret. We are haunted by the things we can’t let go.

And The Vigil is an excellent example of how the idea of the ghost can work both as a monster and a metaphor. It’s spooky, thoughtful, and surprisingly moving.

We open on a room in what looks like a community center or a church annex, with a group of people sitting around, relating the events of the last week. A woman talks about asked out, and how oddly forward it felt. A man is asked how a job interview went, and he relates that it didn’t go as well as it could have, noting that he’d made the mistake of handwriting his resume on a piece of loose-leaf paper. These are people who seem to be brand new to modern life, despite being fully grown. And as it turns out, that’s exactly the case - they’re all former Hasidim, who’ve left a very cloistered, insular life behind, and are struggling to adjust to a culture that is almost entirely foreign to them. This is a support group, then, where they share their successes and get tips on how to navigate this new existence more easily.

Yakov Ronen - he of the loose-leaf resume - is having a rough time of it. He’s having trouble finding work, he’s having trouble making rent, he’s down to choosing between buying food or the medication he takes for his panic attacks. And so as the group is departing for the night, waiting outside on the street, is Reb Shulem, the rebbe for the community these people have left behind. You get the sense he’s done this before - waited outside, trying to coax the strays back into the flock, and the group leader is very unhappy to see him. But he tells Yakov he has work for him. A member of the community has passed away, and Shulem needs a shomer - someone to hold vigil over the deceased until morning.

Typically this is a volunteer, someone who knew the deceased, but in cases where none are available, someone can be paid to perform the service, and the deceased was reclusive, estranged from pretty much everyone in his life except his wife, never leaving the house. Yakov’s not really in much of a position to refuse $400 for five hours’ worth of work, so he goes with the rebbe to the house of the deceased. It’ll just be him, the body, and the deceased’s widow, who is elderly and frail and expected to sleep through the night. They had someone lined up, but he left suddenly.

Well, he fled the house, to be precise. He said there was something in the house with him. Something…wrong.

What follows is very much a long, dark night of the soul. Yakov is left alone in the apartment not just with the deceased and the widow, but as it transpires, he’s also left alone with his own disconnection from his old community and heritage, his own guilt and unresolved trauma around the tragedy that drove him out of the community, and on top of that, there is some extremely weird shit happening in this apartment, and soon enough everything comes to a head. There is some real ambiguity here in terms of how much of this is actually happening, and how much of it is potentially hallucination, brought on by a lack of sleep or food or medication. I do think the film commits to a particular reading, but it doesn’t do so right away, leaving things open for awhile. It begins as you’d expect, with the requisite mysterious noises and things glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, but as the film moves on it becomes harder and harder for dismiss what’s happening as the product of an overactive imagination. I don’t know that it’s especially innovative on that front (though it does make some interesting choices), but it’s executed skillfully and with a decent amount of restraint. The film does a good job of escalating tension - it’s a spooky, atmospheric apartment, all dim lighting and staircases going up into the dark, and though it’s a small location there’s a real sense of geography, where things start to feel more dangerous the further away from the living room Yakov goes - a feeling that there are terrible things just outside of the range of the few lights that are on. It’s especially effective in the climax, a confrontation set at the end of a long, narrow hallway, lit only by candlelight. There’s something of the nightmare about it, cryptic and awful without being obtuse.

It’s visually inventive as well, in a way that low-budget indie films sort of have to be. Everything is shot with a lens that makes shots look at little warped and distorted around the very edges, a subtle fisheye effect that lends everything a sense of slight unreality and unease, and shots often transition with a very brief stutter or fast-forward effect that further heightens the feeling of dislocation. Yakov spends a fair amount of time on his phone, and his text messages and web search results are superimposed on the screen next to him - it’s highly artificial, but it works because it’s less disruptive than constant cuts to the screen of his phone and provides us with more insight into his character without just telling us things. The action moves between the present and flashbacks to Yakov’s past, so as the film goes on we get a better sense of what’s brought him to this place in his life, and like the rest of the film, the flashbacks are set at night, grainy from low light punctuated by streetlights and lens flare which again make everything feel slightly otherworldly, like a fragmented dream.

Where this film falls down is in a tendency to try too hard. There’s a flashback at the beginning that is creepy and atmospheric, the scenes in the support group are natural and comfortable, and there's a real sense of tension between Yakov and the rebbe, but then a lot of that restraint and subtlety gets left behind once the vigil begins. The soundtrack is pretty obtrusive, all full of ominous strings and brass and synthesizer that often double and triple-underline things that need very little highlighting at all. The setting and the action rely on minimalism, and the constant blare of the score serves to undermine that. There’s also a couple of jump scares that the film doesn’t really need, and though they aren’t especially irritating, you sort of wish they’d gone for something a little less obvious.

But despite that, I think the film ultimately redeems itself in the end, tying Jewish mysticism (in a more respectful treatment than other films I’ve seen) and two generations’ worth of trauma and survivor’s guilt together into a story about literal and metaphorical ghosts that gives as much space to grief and sorrow and the opportunity for healing as tension and dread. It might not be a flawless film, but it’s a thoughtful and well-considered one and has some extremely evocative moments. Ultimately, it ends up being a film that eloquently addresses the need to take the things that haunt us and lay them to rest.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
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Green Room: However This Ends, It Won’t End Well

After the events of the last few weeks…oh, who are we kidding, the last four years, I find myself thinking about a lot of things. This week, I’m looking at the savagery that so often attends white supremacy, the distinct gap between its lofty rhetoric and its reality, and the use of white supremacists as monsters.

White supremacists do a good line as villains. I mean, there’s absolutely a reason for that, as a viewing of Night And Fog will vividly demonstrate. But I think over time there’s a tendency to reduce them to ciphers, to a placeholder for “evil” in the absence of actual characterization. There’s any number of horror films that feature Nazi experiments gone awry as monsters, or that make human villains white supremacists as a way to amp up their menace. Some time back, I wrote up the film Frontiere(s) and gave it a lot of shit (rightfully so, I think) for making its antagonists not just cannibals, but Nazi cannibals, as if that would somehow compensate for the film’s shortcomings in other areas. Another case of thinking that a signifier replaces actual writing or story or themes. 

What this threatens to do over time is reduce white supremacists, like serial killers are reduced, to monsters devoid of any real recognition of the harm they actually do and have done to real living people. Like I said, a viewing of Night And Fog will demonstrate the folly of doing that.  

Green Room - a grim, relentlessly tense film, devoid of sentimentality - doesn’t reduce its villains. In fact, it is their humanity that makes them so unsettling.

We open up on a van, run off the road into a cornfield. It’s not violence, it’s a band on tour. Long hours on the road, the driver’s fallen asleep. They’re the Ain’t Rights, a hardcore punk band from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., on a coast-to-coast tour. They’re in the Pacific Northwest, a long way from home, and after…acquiring…some fuel, they meet up with the promoter for their next gig. As it turns out, he lost access to the venue while they were already en route. And this is an occupational hazard for touring bands in the punk scene. You aren’t represented by a management company, you don’t have a bus, you aren’t playing arenas, or even clubs sometimes. Sometimes the gigs are at coffee shops, or abandoned warehouses, or in someone’s basement. The promoters aren’t professionals, often they’re just fans themselves, flying by the seat of their pants. 

So gigs fall through. But the Ain’t Rights - Reece, Tiger, Pat, and Sam - are indeed a long way from home, and they needed that gig money to keep going. They’re going to have to end the tour and limp back to D.C. on one tank of gas and whatever they can siphon out of SUVs in parking lots along the way. The promoter says he can line something up - it’s a little out of the way, in rural Oregon, outside of Portland. It’s a matinee, two other bands, $350.00 guarantee. Considering their last gig netted them about 28 bucks, this is what they need to get back home. One slight catch. As the promoter puts it, it’s mostly a boots and braces crowd down there. Skinheads. 

“Play your older stuff,” he says. “Don’t talk politics.”

Here’s the thing about the Pacific Northwest: Once you get outside the big (diverse, progressive) cities like Portland and Seattle, things get very white and very mean very fast. As it turns out, they’re not playing at a bar so much as they are at a compound - a bunch of buildings way out in the woods, far away from prying eyes. Lots of Confederate flags, National Front logos, White Pride World Wide stickers. It’s pretty clear what the politics are. 

But, to their credit, the ones running the venue are consummate professionals - they get the band loaded in, tell them the schedule, and put them in the green room to hang out until soundcheck. Tiger, the group’s hotheaded vocalist, decides they’re going to open their set with a Dead Kennedys cover - “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” It does not go over well. But that’s not the problem - once they launch into their own material, the pit opens up and everyone has a good time. They play a solid set, collect their pay as promised, and start loading out. But Sam realizes she left her phone in the green room, and so Pat goes to grab it…

…and walks in on four people sitting around a very dead young woman.

Pat’s seen something he wasn’t supposed to see. Something, for that matter, that wasn’t even supposed to happen. The last thing these folks want is police attention, and now they have to make the problem go away. And the Ain’t Rights are now part of that problem.

So this is a siege film. The Ain’t Rights are locked in the green room with a couple of skinheads, and they’re pretty sure that they don’t have long to live. They’re out in the middle of nowhere and a very long way from home. And in walks Darcy Banker, the owner of the venue. He’s older, calm, measured. He doesn’t raise his voice. He’s a working man, with a number of different business interests and a passion for “racial advocacy.” As he reminds the crowd, “remember - it’s a movement, not a party.” If the crowd is the people there for the party, then Darcy brings in the people there for the movement, the loyal soldiers, the “true believers,” ready to do what they’re told, ready to make their bones, to earn their red laces. He issues orders like a man who has handled situations like this before. His eye for detail and icy pragmatism are even more chilling, somehow, because they’re so methodical and detached. There’s no yelling, no ranting, just cool appraisal of the situation and consideration of all the factors. Banker isn’t just a committed white supremacist, he’s also a businessman, and he can’t afford having the cops come around his place for reasons that have nothing to do with the murder. He and his loyal soldiers know the law, know how the law thinks, know the limits of the law. And so the Ain’t Rights, a bunch of 20-something musicians, have to figure out how to outwit a building full of people wholly comfortable with violence, a strong motivation to make this whole thing go away as quickly as possible, and a pretty good idea of how to do so.

The result is a tense, claustrophobic film that avoids a lot of easy clichés. First, it gets the setting exactly right, and that setting brings with it its own dread. It’s easy for film and television to get subcultures wrong, usually in ways that only members of that particular subculture will notice. This is a film about a hardcore punk band trying to tour, and what happens to them when they get in way, way over their heads. And it rarely, if ever, strikes a false note on that front. The shows attended by eight people, crashing in people’s houses, siphoning gas, falling asleep at the wheel, it’s all true to life. You’re hurtling across the country basically on the goodwill of others, and sometimes they come through, sometimes they let you down. I was a punk rock kid too, and went to shows in cruddy DIY venues where the soundproofing was mattresses shoved up against the windows, shows ended early when the cops showed up to shut it down, shows where people in KKK and neo-Nazi t-shirts mingled freely with the rest of the crowd, shows where some of those people put other people in the hospital after the show. In some parts of the country, it just comes with the territory - you go out to see bands and the faint hum of imminent violence is just always there. Culture at the margins attracts people at the margins, and things get gritty. The setting, then, rings instantly true. It’s pretty clear to any audience that the protagonists are among a rough crowd, but if you’re especially familiar with the milieu you’ll get the same empty feeling in the pit of your stomach I did as soon as they pulled up to the club, because you know this situation. You’ve probably been in this situation. In this subculture, you learn how to read the room, and you know when bad shit is brewing. It’s absolutely true to life.

Next, it gets the characters right and affords them a great deal of humanity. The Ain’t Rights aren’t action heroes, but they’re not entirely helpless either. Touring coast-to-coast out of a van breeds a certain amount of resourcefulness and tenacity, and they’re not about to let themselves get slaughtered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There aren’t any hysterics, any breakdowns, they keep their wits about them, which makes everything that happens that much worse in a way. They’re doing the best they can, they’re just wildly overmatched, and their best isn’t necessarily going to be enough. And the skinheads are people too. It’s not unusual for film and television to turn white supremacists, especially white-power skinheads, into two-dimensional fanatics, constantly rabbiting on about purity and the master race and all that. But that’s rarely how people talk or act. Even Nazis have lives and conversations about things other than being Nazis, and so the antagonists don’t go around throwing up Roman salutes or engaging in gratuitous sadism. There’s no leering, no monologuing. They’re not especially happy about the situation either, but it’s happened, and they have to take care of it. Some of the younger members of the crew are eager to prove themselves and welcome the prospect of doing so with bro-ish enthusiasm, while the older members are all business. They’re not looking forward to this, but they aren’t backing down either, and they have no problem taking lives. So this is not a film populated by caricatures. It isn’t a character study, but you get a good sense of who people are from how they carry themselves, how they talk, how they act, and they’re largely real.

So we have people who feel real in a place that feels real, and what happens also feels very real, and this is where the horror really is. This is a violent film, but it isn’t the gratuitous, tossed-off violence of the slasher film. People cry and moan and bleed out, and the damage is visceral. It’s a desperate struggle to stay alive, things happen quickly and without buildup or fanfare as often as not. Someone’s alive one second, then they’re not. It doesn’t revel in gore, a lot happens just off-camera or is cut away from quickly, with a few graphic depictions of violence providing excruciating punctuation. It’s broken glass and box cutters and shotguns and machetes and attack dogs and choking people out until they turn purple and just…stop. It’s hard to watch. It’s supposed to be. The violence matters here in a way that often isn’t true in horror films and vividly illustrates the stakes.

Which isn’t to say that it’s wall-to-wall ultraviolence, there’s a real sense of mood here as well. It’s leavened by a dark sense of humor throughout - the protagonists are acutely aware that they’re outmatched and don’t respond with steely resolve as much as bewilderment and a sense that they’re sort of making it up as they go, and the utter arbitrariness of their situation - four people just trying to get back home, in the wrong place at the wrong time, the difference between life and death a matter of a cell phone and a door that should have been locked - gives the final act a real sense of tragedy and melancholy. All of this could have been avoided, none of this had to happen, but it did, and it cost lives. 

For all their rhetoric about preserving their culture and heritage, white supremacists are ultimately bullies who hurt others to feel better about themselves. It always ends up there, no matter how polite the front they present. But they aren’t monsters, just like serial killers aren’t monsters. Monsters aren’t real, and people like this are. They’re weak, damaged, and their need to make themselves feel strong only causes needless suffering and anguish. As Darcy says at the beginning, “however this ends, it won’t end well.” And it doesn’t. Good people die for no good reason at all. That’s what this film says, and it’s haunted me since the credits rolled.

IMDB entry

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The Unborn: Laying It On A Little Thick

(WARNING: I'm going to end up spoiling this movie over the course of this entry.)

Lately I've been thinking about restraint, and how underrated it seems like it's become in modern mainstream horror. It's not enough to let creepy shit happen in the background and let the audience discover it, it's not enough to suggest, to hint, to horrify through implication. Pile on the musical stings and the scares, because unless people are shown scary things every five minutes, they might forget it's a horror movie!  It's like the cinematic equivalent of those haunted-house rides where things pop out and go "BOO!" at you around every turn. Is it actually scary, or just startling? Part of what makes scary things scary is the way they contrast against the regular, everyday, "real" world. It's the intrusion of something evil and wrong into our safe, comfortable existence, and for it to work, it requires that we be grounded in that safe comfortable existence in the world of the movie before it all gets turned upside down.

The Unborn is in such a hurry to be a scary movie that it doesn't stop to establish the world in which it occurs before it starts messing with it.

The movie opens with a young woman out for a run. As she's jogging, she discovers a blue child's glove lying in the middle of the path. She stops to pick it up, and then bam! There's a creepy-looking little boy - all anachronistic clothes and chalk-white skin with dark circles around his eyes (his unnaturally blue eyes) and not saying anything - standing there. Then bam! The boy is gone, replaced by a dog wearing a blank white human-faced mask (actually not as silly as I'm making it sound). Then she's following the dog into the woods, where it vanishes, leaving the mask on the ground. The young woman starts digging around in the leaves under the mask, and she finds…a fetus. Yes, it was all a dream, though the movie at least has the good taste not to end the scene with her sitting up in bed screaming. The sequence is equal parts heavy-handed cliche and effective spookiness, but what is more problematic is that it's, like, the first five minutes of the movie. We don't even know who this person is and bad shit is already happening to her.

This person - Casey - is a college student who lives with her well-to-do father. Her mother passed away when she was younger, from causes initially unspecified. Soon enough, the weirdness seeps out of her dreams and into everyday life, when she catches the kid she babysits holding a mirror up to his newborn sibling's face and chanting some weird shit. When she puts a stop to it, the child (not the creepy kid from her dreams but kinda weird in his own right) states matter-of-factly that "Jumby wants to be born" before hitting her in the face with the mirror. And it's all downhill from there - she starts hallucinating, and she's developing heterochromia in the eye that got hit with the mirror. That eye is turning an unnatural blue.

Some sort of supernatural force is after Casey, and the body of the film is concerned with investigating a rat's nest of family secrets - the circumstances surrounding her mother's death (which, as it transpires, was a suicide), who "Jumby" is, exactly, the identity of the mysterious old woman her mother went to visit - and what they have to do with the malevolent force intruding on Casey's life. There's nothing wrong with this sort of approach, but ghost stories generally benefit from space, silence, and careful attention to detail, and this movie can't help but pile shit on, like we'll stop being scared the instant there isn't something creepy happening or as soon as the shocking twist revelations stop coming. The result is a barrage of imagery and story beats that doesn't stop long enough to become scary. It's technically well-executed - some of the imagery is a little obvious, some of it is really effective, and it's more or less internally cohesive, but it it really suffers from the decision to drop us head-first into spooky supernatural stuff before we even have a reason to care. It doesn't help that everyone in the movie is more of a character than they are a fully realized person. That's not a problem in and of itself if the story or the mood or the imagery or the atmosphere makes it easy to overlook the lack of characterization, but the filmmakers are hanging an absolute glut of plot and imagery on characters who don't so much interact with each other as say and do what they would probably say and do regardless of what's going on. It feels less like they're reacting to what's happening to Casey and more like they're just sort of saying stuff when it's their turn to talk. It makes what's already sort of a confusing mess feel a little sterile and calculated as well. The machinery is showing.

And when I call it a glut of plot and imagery, I mean the filmmakers do not know when to quit. It's not enough to just have a mysterious kid - the mysterious kid has to look dead, and he has to do that thing where after a second or two into the shot, his face goes all distorted and scary for no apparent reason. It's not enough for the protagonist to be hallucinating this creepy kid in a crowded club, it has to be followed immediately by a scene where she's trapped in the club's bathroom while the toilets and faucets vomit up blood and insects everywhere. It's not enough for her to be haunted by the ghost of her unborn brother (which is a pretty cool premise in and of itself, and could make for a really good, squirmy, uncomfortable movie), that ghost has to actually be a demon who was trying to possess her unborn brother after possessing the brother of the protagonist's grandmother - a brother who died as a result of experiments performed on twins during the Holocaust. I mean, come the fuck on - that's, like, two or three movies' worth of premise right there. It's not enough that the demon can possess people, it also has to twist them into weird shapes while it does it (except when it doesn't and they just look sort of like the "zombies" from 28 Days Later). The filmmakers just keep piling shit on.

It's just all too much of a muchness. Even the climactic exorcism scene suffers from this excess - pretty much any movie that involves an exorcism builds to the exorcism and that carries with it a certain feeling of anticipation or dread that doesn't need a lot of extra help. Only here. the exorcism is being held in an abandoned church that's had creepy graffiti scrawled all over the walls - like it's not enough that people have gathered to perform this ritual, you have to have the actual walls going BOO! as well? And the unwillingness to let the characters have lives outside of what's necessary to drive the plot ends up being problematic, as the end reveal for the cause of the whole thing presupposes information we didn't really have. Why didn't we have it? Because the movie begins, cold open, with the weird shit starting. It's not a huge cheat or anything - it asks us to believe that something totally plausible happened - but that we're expected to understand and accept that after the fact just calls attention to how much is sacrificed for the sake of cramming in as much stuff as possible, just for the sake of setting up the ending.

I feel like  a lot of my problems with films I haven't liked lately have been some variation on the idea that they're just going through the motions - putting the "scary parts" into a negligible narrative framework without any sense of context or feeling that these things have emerged from a believable world with real people in it. I wonder how much of this stems from a sense of contempt for horror as a genre - or contempt for genre film in general. As if "genre film" means you just have to hit the right notes, include the right type of scenes, and you'll have a hit. The Unborn doesn't feel as cynical or lazy as that - it's got pretty high production value and a surprisingly strong cast - but it feels desperate to get the job done, like it doesn't trust its audience to be patient or to catch subtle details, or to get caught up in the atmosphere of the film without some bit of business going on onscreen. And that's just as dismissive and contemptuous of the audience as the most obvious cash-in.

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Frontiere(s): Going One Step Too Far

One of my pet peeves in horror movie criticism is objection to what the characters actually do in the film. I see it on film review sites coming from people who should know better (or maybe I just wish knew better), and in the teeming cesspit that is any discussion thread for any horror movie on IMDB. "The characters are stupid" is, to my mind, rarely if ever a legitimate complaint. "That would never really happen" is also not a legitimate complaint, especially coming from enthusiasts of the slasher genre, for obvious reasons (really? Are we going to quibble plausibility in the fifth fucking film to star an unkillable hulk in a hockey mask? Really?).

I prefer to go into a movie assuming that it's going to have its own internal logic - how else do you suspend disbelief for any movie featuring the supernatural? I have a problem when movies violate their own internal logic - when something happens without any roots in what came before - but as long is the movie is internally consistent, I'm fine. I also go into a horror movie accepting the idea that the characters are going to do stupid things. Sometimes because people are just stupid, and sometimes because being in a terrible situation makes otherwise sane and rational people do insane and irrational things. This particular form of lazy criticism is usually followed by a disquisition on how they, the commenter, would have handled it. It's usually some variably baroque variation on "I'd kick the monster's ass." Detailed badassery is sometimes included. The wish-fulfillment practically oozes from your monitor. "Why didn't they just…" and "that would never happen" are lazy substitutes for serious consideration.

That said, "that would never happen" is one of my key criticisms of Frontiere(s). There's really no better way to put it.

Frontiere(s) opens during the Paris riots of 2005, as four small-time criminals are attempting to flee the city. One of them, Yasmine, is pregnant. The movie opens with her in voiceover, contemplating bringing a child into a world like this. The movie opens cold, fast, and furious. The shit is burning down, and they are the rats trying to escape it. There's a lot of running and yelling. The four of them are going to have to split up, but they agree to meet at an inn in a rural, isolated area and regroup there. How they know about this place isn't really clear, and this won't be the last time we're not really clear on something, but the movie hurries forward.

The first two get there, and they're treated to a nice meal and the promise of some action from a couple of attractive women who work there. As said getting down is being gotten, one of the women pulls off her shirt, and from the the back, the viewer can see something the protagonist can't - the giant National Socialist emblem tattooed on her back. Oh, shit, this inn is run by Nazis! And Yasmine - who's pretty damn Arab - is headed there! What will happen?

Well, the first thing that happens is that the two guys who arrived first get knocked out, strung up and bled like pigs. See, they aren't just Nazis…they're Nazi cannibals.

Because either just plain Nazis or just plain cannibals wouldn't have been horrible enough?

See, here's another thing I don't like - when the threat is more threat than you really need to be threatening. After a certain point, you're just piling on the adjectives. Case in point and brief tangent: The book Gerald's Game by Stephen King. I like King's body of work generally, but they aren't all home runs. In Gerald's Game, a woman and her husband are at a remote cabin in the woods for a married-couple type getaway, and decide to indulge in some kinky (handcuffs and roleplaying) sex. Well, the husband (the titular Gerald) gets a little carried away and starts playing entirely too roughly for his wife's comfort. Though handcuffed to the bed, she manages to get a good kick to the gut in. Ill-considered though this was, what comes next isn't retribution - he has a heart attack and keels over. So now here she is, naked, handcuffed to the bed, and she realizes the front door is unlocked. That's some serious "oh, shit" right there.

Then King introduces the antagonist - a mentally retarded man who lives in the area. This could be really bad - combine the needs and body of an adult with the mind of a child, and bad things can happen. But wait! He's not just mentally retarded, he's a mentally retarded cannibal! Basically Ed Gein with a subnormal IQ. But wait! He's not just a mentally retarded cannibal, he's a mentally retarded cannibal with the bone-deforming disease acromegaly!

Steve-O, you had me at "handcuffed to the bed, naked, and the front door is open." Why pile the rest of this crap on?

I have the same problem with Frontiere(s). You don't need for Nazis to be cannibals, and you don't need cannibals to be Nazis. Either is scary on its  own. It feels like overkill, like the story equivalent of all the running and yelling at the opening of the movie.

So anyway Yasmine and the other guy get to the inn, and they discover in short order ("hey where are our friends?" "oh shit, at least one of them is dead in the basement along with a shitload of other butchered bodies!" Fuck!) that they're in a bad situation. They are captured, chained and caged.

But not slaughtered - not yet. See, the creepy German patriarch of the Nazi cannibal family has decided that he wants to spare Yasmine - black-haired, olive-skinned, Middle Easterny Yasmine - for "breeding stock." He wants her to pump out babies to begin the master race.

Hold right the fuck on a minute. He wants to mate his perfect Aryan boys to this Arab girl? That would never happen.  I don't mean "that's stupid", I mean that pretty much violates the one thing that defines Nazis - an obsession with racial purity. The whole point is to avoid miscegenation. This guy is bad at being a Nazi. There is now absolutely nothing useful about them being anything other than garden-variety cannibals. I didn't actually throw up my hands at this point, but I certainly performed the mental equivalent. They lost me.

The rest of the film is basically more running and screaming, but with buckets of blood being flung around. There's a daughter whose children are all deformed and feral, but after they're introduced early on they never really come up again. Violent standoffs occur, things burn, people are coated in gore, but there's no sense of import to it - there's no dynamic, the movie starts loud and fast and keeps being loud and fast, and maybe the filmmakers expected that running and screaming to compensate for the movie's shortcomings. The result is incoherent and dull - we're never really given an opportunity to see the protagonists as people, but we're supposed to sympathize with them (hence the baby, I guess?) and the rest of the movie isn't developed enough to make their role as pieces to be pushed around a board suitable for the story. There's a difference between crossing a line, crossing a boundary, and just blindly pushing forward. This movie just blindly pushes forward, piling on threat after threat, all of it ending up loud, empty and directionless, lost.

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Town Creek: Joel Schumacher (Almost) Lets One Get Away Unscathed

Let's be honest: Joel Schumacher has made some real head-clutchers in his career. Not even including his earlier stuff (D.C. Cab, St. Elmo's Fire), we're talking about the guy who took a perfectly good screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker (better known in my head as "that sick bastard who wrote Seven") about a private detective sent to investigate the provenance of an alleged snuff film, sucked all of the subtlety and nuance out of it and slathered it with a thick layer of Nicolas-Cage-in-extra-shouty-mode and called it 8mm. This is the guy who bent Tim Burton's take on Batman backwards until it turned back into the Adam West version. This is the guy who, for fuck's sake, put nipples on the Batsuit. So given that's what he turns out when you give him a bunch of name actors and a decent budget, what do you think is going to happen when you give him fewer resources and a smaller budget?

Surprisingly, you get a tight, economical, suspenseful, effective little horror film called Town Creek.

After a brief prologue set in pre-WW2 West Virginia concerning a German farming family and the boarder they take in from the Fatherland, we jump to the modern day, where Evan, an EMT, is trying to help treat the injured at the site of a nasty domestic violence call. In short order, we learn that Evan has a war hero brother named Victor, who has been missing for some time, and a subsequently tenuous relationship with his father. We get all of this from some brief exchanges between characters, none of which really feel expository. The relationships feel believable, and you get a good sense of how Victor's absence has really strained the family. So when Victor shows up at Evan's trailer in the middle of the night, filthy and vagrant, insisting that Evan come with him, bringing weapons and medical supplies, well, that's where things really start to pick up.

The two brothers steal away in the middle of the night and paddle across Town Creek to the farm on the other side - the same farm from the prologue, which has been home to some very strange doings over the last 70 years. Why does the family look the same now as they did in pictures from the 1940s? What - or who - is being kept in the big cargo container on their property? Why are there runes painted all over the fence, doors, and windows? Who - or what - is in the basement, and why is the door chained and padlocked? Whatever it is, it's bad, because Victor's come back to kill the entire family.

There are answers to all of these questions, and before it's all over, we'll find out everything we need to, pretty much. But before things can go right, they have to go wrong, and the better part of the movie is a well-plotted siege story, with everyone inside the farmhouse attempting to contend with something very old and very evil outside of the farmhouse. Like everything else about this movie, the story moves briskly - not rushed, but confident and unhesitating. It helps that our protagonists are both highly competent (a combat veteran and an EMT), and other players are plausibly drawn as well - nobody's motivations feel unrealistic, there aren't any "don't leave the house/check the basement/investigate the noise alone, you idiot!" moments, and most of the resolution feels well-earned. It's violent, with some of the fight scenes carrying some real visceral weight (along with some well-employed effects), but everything moves along with a real sense of pace - I was not once bored while watching this or waiting for the next thing to happen. Victor asks Evan (and us) to come along with him, and once we do, we barely have time to catch our breath.

It's a shame this didn't get a theatrical release or wider exposure via Horrorfest (instead we get hot messes like Autopsy), because this is a solid scary film - it's tense, it doesn't overplay its hand or overexpose the monster, and resolves itself well (with the exception of a highly cheap ending shot, which felt really out of place with everything that went before).  I read on IMDB that Schumacher made several changes to the script like he did with 8mm. If it weren't for the horrible cliche of the last shot, I'd be hard-pressed to find any of his usual thumbprints all over it, but even though it ends on a bit of an off-note, I'd say Joel Schumacher actually did a good job with this movie. All the more reason to never let him near a blockbuster ever again.

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