Lake Mungo: Death Takes Everything, Eventually

There’s a great line from one of my favorite non-horror films, Unforgiven: “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away everything he’s got, and everything he’s ever going to have.” It captures, I think, the yawning, gaping emptiness that comes with grief; the inescapable absence. When someone dies, it’s not just them that’s gone, it’s also all of the future days you’re never going to have together, all of the chances you’d have to make amends for things you regretted saying or doing, any chance to watch them change or grow. 

All of those things are gone, and though I think it’s something easily enough appreciated intellectually, it’s hard to really communicate how it feels, that feeling of finality and the regrets that come with it. One of the things, then, that makes Lake Mungo such an accomplishment, apart from being a ghost story told with skill and restraint, is the way it communicates the specific impacts of grief on the people who experience it. There are a lot of emotional notes that horror can hit, but sorrow isn’t one that gets a lot of attention, and this film does it really well.

It’s presented as a documentary, about the tragic drowning of 17-year-old Alice Palmer during a weekend outing with her parents June and Russell, and her younger brother Mathew. One moment she’s swimming with her brother, the next she’s just…gone. It’s some time before divers manage to recover her body, and Russell takes on the difficult job of identifying her. Alice is gone. One day she’s there, the next she’s not, and each of the surviving Palmers deals with it in their own way. Russell throws himself into his work. June starts taking midnight walks and peering into other people’s houses, desperate to step outside of her own life. Mathew takes photographs.

And then they start hearing strange noises in the middle of the night. And Mathew starts noticing figures in his photographs. 

Figures that look like Alice.

There are a number of ways the story could have gone from here, but instead of leaning hard into scares, it leans hard into the grief that the Palmers are feeling and how it affects the way they think. Russell doesn’t know what to believe - after all, he saw Alice’s body. But June wants so much to believe that Alice is still alive that even Russell starts to doubt himself. Mathew sets up cameras all over the house, trying to see what else he can capture. Eventually, June contacts a psychic. It never tips over into histrionics - their coping methods may not be especially healthy, but they don’t abandon all reason. Mostly what you feel is an impairment in their ability to really communicate with each other - they don’t want to upset or hurt each other, so they keep secrets from each other, let things go unsaid. This is a really common human tendency, there’s nothing unbelievable or melodramatic about it.

But there’s a real tension that develops from this - on the one hand, they’re not telling each other everything, and on the other, they’re desperately searching for explanations, for some way to understand why Alice is gone. So they’re keeping some secrets and digging into others. And this leads to some interesting narrative reversals as the film goes on. What we thought was one thing turns out to be another, new information comes to light, and it turns out that Alice was keeping secrets of her own. As a couple of characters put it, she wasn’t just keeping secret - she was even keeping secret the fact that she had secrets. There were things that Alice didn’t tell anyone about, and so you have this wounded family trying to explain this mysterious presence while not telling each other the whole truth, and so, like any good documentary, as the narrative unwinds our expectations are upended as new explanations come to light. We think it’s one thing, then another, only for an important discovery in the third act to make us question everything all over again.

Also, like any good horror film presented as a documentary, the filmmakers handle the narrative conceit deftly by playing it completely straight. It’s really, really easy for horror filmmakers to screw up a documentary or found-footage conceit by tipping their hand too early, by signposting that something scary and bad is going to happen, when that’s not really how really good documentaries work. Real documentaries are narratives too, and often use pretty standard storytelling devices to craft a particular narrative, including sudden, dramatic revelations. You don’t always want to tell your audience too much about what is coming, and horror films that position themselves as documentaries of one sort or another all too often don’t trust in the restraint that requires, and instead do things like open with title cards describing the “horrible, indescribable events of that night” or something like that, or worse, try to inject scary imagery in the middle of it like the documentary itself is haunted or something like that. It’s trying too hard, and usually the film suffers as a result. Here, the filmmakers give us a documentary first - lots of cleanly produced talking-head segments, with consistently solid, naturalistic performances, interspersed with believable archival footage. The news broadcasts look like news broadcasts, the family photographs look like family photographs, the home movies look like home movies. It might not seem like a big deal,, but those sort of mundane, naturalistic things can be some of the toughest to fake if you don’t have a good eye for detail, and since we’re so used to see stuff like that in our everyday lives, any artificiality tends to leap out and ruin our immersion in the story. 

The archival footage does  a lot of hard work here on its own - a big part of this film is the Palmers believing what they do on the base of photographic and video evidence, and this is all based on early-00s technology, so the level of imprecision contained in the visual evidence reflects the shaky subjectivity on which the Palmers rely to shore up their belief that Alice isn’t entirely gone. Photos are blurry and dimly lit, video footage is grainy and distorted, phone-camera footage is pixelated and low-resolution. It all could be what the Palmers think it is, but could just as easily be something else. Even home-movie footage of Alice is often blurry, as if she’s already fading from memory despite her family’s best efforts.

There are also lots of long, moodily-lit insert shots of the house, hallways and empty rooms which work on a couple of different levels. First, they help establish the sort of atmosphere that a documentary about possible supernatural occurrences would want to establish - plenty of good haunted-house films have shots of empty rooms and hallways as part of their arsenal, but here, accompanying those shots with voicer-over instead of spooky music helps them to read less like a haunted-house film than documentarians trying to capture that same feeling. It’s subtle, but important. Second, they reinforce the sense of emptiness and absence that the Palmers are feeling. The house is a little emptier than it should be, and so it also reads like an attempt to convey the sadness and the grief the Palmers are feeling as well. And because the whole thing reads so much like a documentary about the subject matter rather than a piece of fiction dressed as a documentary, it’s easy to get engaged with it, which makes the third-act revelations and conclusion hit that much harder.

And it’s that third act that really brings the film home. We go on this journey with the Palmers as they look for some kind of explanation for the inexplicable, and they do get closure of a sort, but it’s not really neat or clean in any way, and as the final credits roll, we’re denied any neat conclusions as well. It takes some time to pay off, but it does in a way that settles a bone-deep chill on you, one that is equal parts horror and sadness. Some people can move on with their lives, and others will never, ever have that chance, because was taken away from them, along with everything else they were ever going to have. 

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Prowl: Missed It By That Much

As one of the musicians in This Is Spinal Tap sagely observes: "There's a fine line between clever and stupid." We don't always notice one way or another - plenty of good scary movies fall down on the plot, dialogue, or character fronts, but if what's happening onscreen keeps us invested, that's probably more important, and we don't always notice how smart a given movie is until it does something unexpected or otherwise subverts the expectations we have for the genre. But when a clever movie starts getting stupid, that can be a problem. Give me something that raises my expectations and I'm happy, but I've seen more than a few movies that lose the courage of their convictions and go for something easier and more cliched in an effort to meet someone's expectations of what a scary movie "should" be. Generally, they suffer as a result.

Prowl is not a complicated movie, but it is a generally good one. Unfortunately, it spends a good chunk of its running time walking a very fine line between being confident and smart about its material and falling into the sort of cliches that come part and parcel with the genre, and that wavering is ultimately a distraction.

Amber is a small-town girl with big-city dreams. Not so much to become a big star or anything, she just wants to get out of her little town. She's sick of looking after her alcoholic mother, misses her father, and has dreams where she runs and runs and runs away from something that keeps trying to bring her to ground. A small get-together at her friends' house sketches out the limits of her world - her friend Suzy, Suzy's complicated-relationship boyfriend Peter, spacy rich-kid Ray and his girlfriend Fiona, and nerdy, yearning Eric. They like where they are, interpersonal drama and all, but Amber doesn't. She's got a line on an apartment in Chicago, but the person offering to rent it to her has gotten a better offer, and unless she can drop off a deposit in the next day, he's going to rent it out to the other prospective tenant instead. Desperate, Amber turns to her friends to help get her to Chicago in time (which turns out to be a much more complicated affair than you'd think, but not in a way that feels implausible), and after much negotiating and eating of crow (nothing like having to hit up your nerdy friend for the use of his car the day after firmly rejecting his advances), the whole gang is on a road trip…until their van breaks down maybe 20 miles outside of their hometown. Well, shit.

Luckily, a trucker headed into the city takes pity on them and lets them pile into the back of his trailer, asking that they just not mess with the cargo he has in the back. They're smart about the offer - they take pictures of themselves with the trucker to let their friends know where they are, and one of them rides up front with the trucker to keep him honest (of course, nerdy Eric draws the short straw on that one). And they're off, making the best of the back of the trailer with booze and weed and music and Truth or Dare. Everything goes swimmingly until the truck takes a bad bounce and a swerve. Attempts to get Eric to answer his phone up front get only the trucker, who claims Eric is asleep, and he's awfully reluctant to wake him up. Then - peering out of holes in the side of the trailer - they notice they aren't anywhere near Chicago. Then one of them wonders why the trailer has holes in the side in the first place. Inevitably, someone messes with the cargo - it turns out this guy is carrying bags of blood, and it's not a refrigerated truck.

And then the truck stops, and the trailer door opens on a huge, abandoned factory space. Figures scuttle through the rafters and down the walls.

The premise of Prowl isn't that complicated - there are hunters, and there are the hunted. For the most part, the movie does a very good job with a very basic setup - it's a stripped-down, kinetic movie with little to no superfluous material (the same director made the far superior Rovdyr, which has all of this movie's strengths and few of its weaknesses). Everything that happens has a point and a purpose, even the smallest, most inconsequential asides at the beginning of the film. Once the action starts, everything moves quickly and decisively, and although there isn't necessarily a lot to outright scare you, there's a good overall atmosphere of tension and fear for the most part. As teen-meat setups go, it's a reasonably intelligent take - the party scene is a deft, economic sequence, communicating a lot about who these people are without necessarily spelling everything out, and that's one of the movie's strengths - the ability to convey a lot of information, trusting in the ability of the audience to make sense of what's going on without belaboring the obvious. The protagonists are actually pretty competent throughout - they make very few dumb decisions, and actually take action against the creatures hunting them, instead of completely breaking down. We're mostly kept in the dark about who/what the antagonists are, which is for the better, because when the lead antagonist starts talking, you get the feeling if they'd let the dialogue go on on any longer, it would go right headfirst into stupid cliche.

And that's where this movie gets into trouble - it is constantly veering back and forth between being on the right side of the line and being as stagey as any other I Know What You Screamed Last Summer When You Took A Wrong Turn on Friday the 13th sort of movie. When Amber tells the trucker (apparently in all seriousness) that she has to get to Chicago because it's her destiny, your eyes roll completely up into the back of your head, even though it ends up paying off in the end. Amber's friends spout teen-movie homilies one second and talk like normal human beings the next. It's pretty apparent what's hunting them, and it feels like the movie wants to give us some sort of explanation, some sort of mythology, but stops short. It's better that way, because there's no reason to think that the explanation we get would be anything special, and so you wait to cringe at how cheesy it's going to be, but it never comes. But still, based on the wildly uneven tone of the movie overall, it could come at any second, so the cringe just sort of sits there, just under the surface of your face, waiting to happen.

Our sense of place and time is sort of a problem, too - you get the idea that the meat of the action is supposed to be taking place at night, but there are flashes of daylight as the protagonists move from one place to another, and since they're running from abandoned warehouse to…another abandoned warehouse?…it gets easy to feel like this is less about people trying to escape a bad situation and more like they're doing laps around a very large set. To its credit, though, its final act has a nice little reversal that feels just unexpected enough to be a pleasant surprise, but is still rooted very solidly in everything that came before (even redeeming some of the sillier and less understandable moments from earlier in the film), and the ending feels refreshingly ragged and free of closure in a good way. It avoids cliche as often as it flirts with it, but in doing so, you get the feeling that you're watching a good movie that has a mediocre one trapped inside it, struggling to get out.

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How I Would Have Done It: The Final

(What I'd like to do in my How I Would Have Done It posts is examine a movie that I think didn't live up to its potential and, well, talk about how I would have done it if I'd been the writer or director. Mostly because just leaving it at "that was dumb" or "that sucked" is kind of unsatisfying, especially when there was something really good buried in there somewhere. I'll be discussing story elements in detail, so all kinds of spoilers await.)

The Final was the first movie I ever considered as the subject of a How I Would Have Done It post, way back almost 3 years ago when I first started writing this little thing of mine. The experience I had watching it could be summed up as "So…this kind of sucks. It kind of sucks, and it doesn't have to." It was the first time I found myself watching a film and thinking of specific ways it could have been improved. There's a good idea for an intense psychological thriller here, but it's buried under some sub-Saw bullshit and baffling pacing choices. The Final is a movie about the fucked-up things that teenagers do to each other, and there's a lot of potential there that the filmmakers eschew for a bunch of torture set pieces.   The real scary thing in this movie isn't all of the gory atrocities visited upon the popular kids, it's the ease with which teenagers are capable of doing terrible things, and how quickly events spiral out of control.

The Task: Snatching Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory

I seem to be on a streak right now of movies that don't have the courage to stick to their original premise, that almost make it to the finish line as (to one degree or another) a well-told story but then oops! It's a horror movie, so we need to throw more horror shit around, and any goodwill the film has built up to that point goes right out the window. The Dead tries to do too much in its last 15 minutes, Undocumented doesn't have the guts to do something non-obvious with its premise, and Wake Wood is a great low-key supernatural tragedy until someone decides there needs to be more EEEEEEVIL in it. They get close, and then blow it.

I pretty much feel the same way about The Task, though there's a lot more whipsawing back and forth before all is said and done.

The movie opens on a guy helping a woman with some packages she dropped, after which he is dragged into a van and hooded, along with a bunch of other people. Oh shit, they're being kidnapped! Well, no, not if you know the premise. Said helpful dude, along with six other people, has signed up to be on a reality show called The Task. They have to spend a night in an old abandoned prison (maybe prisons are the new hospitals) and perform a number of tasks (see what they did there?) in order to win a big ol' cash prize. One of the other contestants helpfully exposits that they're all crazy for doing this because don't you know what the brutal, autocratic warden did to prisoners in this prison? It's a place of evil, et cetera ad nauseam. He even wets his pants at the sight of the prison. Oh shit, it's really that haunted and scary? Well, no, the guy who peed was just a plant by the production company to rile up the other contestants. So, see, it's not really a damned place after all, they just want the contestants to think it is.

This is actually the part with which I had the least trouble. MTV used to run a series called Fear, in which teenagers who were probably skimmed off the bottom of the Casting Vats for whichever iteration of The Real World was on at the moment competed for cash and prizes by doing a series of tasks in abandoned places with terrifying histories (which were made up wholesale and tacked onto thoroughly scouted locations). So these kids go in to these old abandoned buildings, pretty much pre-scared, and have to do things that are just going to ratchet up their level of terror and anxiety (sit alone in a totally dark room, stick their hand into an opening to retrieve something, that kinda thing). And the whole thing was captured by fixed cameras and cameras worn by the contestants in sickly nightvision green. Like anything else MTV does, it didn't last, but it seemed like a pretty effective exercise in the power of suggestion and context. So the game in this movie is pretty much Fear, only a little cornier, with even less likable contestants.

Yeah, this was the part that bugged me the most - the protagonists are annoying as shit, to a person. The African-American man (the one getting kidnapped in the opening) speaks mostly in slang, the blonde who wants to be on TV isn't so much a ditz as the cardboard cutout of one, we know the smart girls is smart because she wears glasses and speaks in the verbose pseudo-scientific bullshit that people do when they're trying to appear intelligent,  the British girl and her brother are both edgy and tough and cool and, well, British, and the gay guy isn't just gay, isn't just openly gay, he's a lisping, mincing twink with a fauxhawk who says things like (when told to walk straight ahead) "there's nothing straight about me" and "closets are scary - that's why I came out of mine." It's like, the characters don't annoy me as people, but as a lack of people - they're flat, empty stereotypes. Walking signifiers. People with air quotes around everything they say and do.

(On the other hand, and I'm pretty sure I've said this before - that isn't necessarily a problem for narrative plausibility because those seem to me to be the exact sort of people one expects to try out for reality shows. So I spent a good chunk of the movie wavering between being annoyed by them and wondering if that wasn't actually the point. You get an answer eventually, and I have to give the movie golf claps for it, but more about that in a minute.)

So long story short, one of the contestants has to perform some creepy ritual for his task, and it appears to inadvertently raise the ghost of the brutal warden who ran the prison (wasn't that just part of the backstory? Oh shit! There really was a really brutal and horrible warden and he really committed atrocities!), and then blood, stabby-stabby, people start dying and it's mostly sort of static and enervated. It's pretty much a cycle of 1) Someone leaves the base to complete a task 2) That person ends up dead somewhere 3) GOTO 1. In between, we get to look in on the production crew, who are all sort of awful in their own showbiz ways (and the acting is pretty terrible here too, but again, golf claps) and it takes them too long to react when things start going south and they don't seem too fazed when someone they send out to fix some equipment never comes back, but believe it or not, there's actually a decent explanation for all of this. I was continually irritated by this movie, so when we get to the third act and some mounting suspicions about what we're seeing get confirmed, I was actually a little pleased that they made the choices they did, no matter how obnoxious those choices were up to that point.

But they could not leave well enough the fuck alone, and attempt yet another twist in the last ten minutes, and although it doesn't unravel the whole movie, it's just predictable and poorly executed enough to take any air out of whatever saving grace this otherwise by-the-numbers creepy-stuff-in-abandoned-buildings film gets from its final act. This wasn't going to be a classic by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a little frustrating to see what little charm the movie had snuffed out because somebody didn't think what they had was obvious enough.

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From Within: Teen Suicide (Don't Do It)

Okay, so adolescence sucks. This is news to exactly nobody. It's a time of massive physical, social, and intellectual upheaval, when your body rebels against you, your mind is opened to entirely new ways of thinking about the world, and the people around you - some of whom you've known your entire life - take on new, strange meanings. Being a teenager in a small, tightly knit community is possibly even worse. You don't get to decide which secrets are yours to keep and which are community property. If you're the slightest bit different, people come down on you hard. The people who've known you your whole life have no intention of letting you become anyone else, for good or ill.

From Within isn't a movie about the horrors of adolescence, but it isn't not about them either. It's what happens when an already scary time finds new ways to be scary.

We open with a young couple - a boy and a girl - sitting on a pier at the edge of a lake. The boy reads something from a book, and then apologizes to the girl before blowing his own brains out. Getting things off to a bang, as it were. The girl, promptly and thoroughly traumatized, runs back to town, only to end up a short time later with a pair of scissors jammed into her neck by her own hand. It's a small town, a folksy, all-American town. A good, old-fashioned American town full of God-fearing Christians (except for those weirdos we don't talk about), shocked by two suicides so close together.

Among those upset are Lindsay and her friend Claire. They both go to the local high school and attend the local church like most everyone else in town (everyone except that one family with the house outside of town). Lindsay's a nice girl, she's sweet and friendly, and the pastor's son seems to have a thing for her. Still, Lindsay has her own problems - Mom's a drunk who clings to her faith as tightly as the bottle, and Mom's boyfriend Roy is an ex-con who shares Mom's devotion to the Lord but manages an aura of greasy creepiness to go along with it. Lindsay's sad, yes, but she's also got her hands full. It's tough enough to just be a kid in a small town without bringing down other people's grief on top of it. The town searches for answers, and of course there are rumors, rumors drawing on long-standing town grudges and unpleasant past events nobody wants to talk about. But that's typical for a small town - nobody ever forgets anything.

Then another girl is found dead, her wrists slashed with broken glass. A girl whose final minutes were spent running from an apparition who looked just like her. As if she were haunting herself.

On balance, From Within is a ghost story that makes as many smart choices as it does poor ones. The setting works - the whole town feels like it's balanced on the edge of an early fall evening, like Halloween is coming. The church is an omnipresent force, communicating a sense of constraint without falling into cultishness, and most (most) of the characters are nicely underplayed - I kept waiting for hysterics and melodrama and for the most part, they never came. Lindsay feels like an actual kid instead of some self-aware parody of adolescence. Even the inevitable "terrible secret" has some room to breathe and doesn't necessarily drive the action. There are moments of bitchy dark humor and it's nicely scary, with an ending that avoids sentimentality. On the other hand, some character progression and events feel rushed, throwing off the sort of rhythm absolutely necessary for a good ghost story. More to the point, the creators sacrificed an opportunity to tell a really good horror story about adolescence for a really easy horror story for adolescents.

Much of the action in this movie revolves around Lindsay's evolving friendship with Aiden - a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. He's all broody and tormented and dark and shit. It was Aiden's little brother who killed himself at the beginning of the movie, and he gets his ass kicked at school because his family has weirdo non-Christian beliefs in a town where everyone goes to the same megachurch. So there's kind of this Romeo & Juliet (or, you know, Twilight) thing going on where the whole thing started as the inevitable next step in some feud and who cares. Take the broody pagans out of it (along with some of the worst dialogue in the script) and you could have a story about what happens when you grow up in a small town with the weight of everyone's expectations on you, and how that weight pushes children in the throes of adolescence into odd shapes, stunted by all of the growth they have to do and no room in which to do it. Some turn to drugs, some turn to casual sex, some turn to alcohol, some turn to weird clothes and music, why wouldn't some turn to messing with forces beyond their control?

The bones of the movie are there, the directorial instincts are generally good, but the obviousness is disappointing. This could have been a story about teenagers, with remote adults disconnected from everything until it's all far too late and people start dying. It could have been a story about how the upheaval of puberty makes it hard to tell when you're crossing a line, about the secrets we keep from our families, ourselves, and each other as we grow. Because at its worst, adolescence is practically a nightmare anyway - why not make it literal?

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The Broken: Through The Looking Glass

One of the reasons I think scary movies are capable of being art is that at their best, they do an excellent job of committing to an aesthetic. Horror movies are capable of creating worlds like no other, from Saw's world of sumptuous velvets and rusty gears to Halloween's pools of shadow interrupted by splashes of expressionless white faces, to Night of the Living Dead's stark, grainy, pointillism. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre reminds me of nothing so much as some of Pieter Breugel's paintings, but good luck getting anyone else to listen to you once the words "chainsaw massacre" hit the air. The color palette in The Abandoned makes the world feel sick somehow, and the bright, clean lines of The Shining only make the horrors superimposed on them that much worse. Sometimes the aesthetic refers to a specific historical period, as in The House of the Devil or The Devil's Rejects, in terms of events, and circumstances as well as our understanding of film from that time period. This way you've got the world, how we understand the world, and how we understand films made about and in that world adding to the experience of the story itself. Plus, you know, blood and tits.

Even with all of that, I can't remember the last time I saw a movie that committed to its premise so fully in its aesthetic as The Broken does.

Gina McVey is a radiologist in London. Hers seems like a nice life in the city, with a boyfriend on the cusp of turning into something really serious. We see the two of them at a surprise birthday dinner for her father, with her brother and his girlfriend also in attendance. People are happy and laughing. In the middle of the merriment, a mirror on the dining room wall just…shatters. Out of nowhere, no fall, nothing thrown. It just collapses into hundreds of shards.

How often do we think about mirrors, really?  We need them to help us groom ourselves, to make us into the people we present to the world. They are flat, cool, silvery pieces of glass, and we take for granted that we are facing ourselves in them.

The next day, Gina McVey, while standing on the streets of London, watches herself drive by in her car. Not someone who looks like her - her. Not a car like hers - her car, down to the license plate.

How often do we think about mirrors, really?

The Broken is as simple, clean, and coolly presented a horror film as you could ask for. London is laid out in shades of blue and gray, as if glimpsed by reflection in still water. Dialogue is quiet and spare, space and silence fills most of the movie, and the pace is deliberate. The events play out slowly, measured, like the steady drip of water, music swelling to a sharp, piercing edge at new revelations. Small things are as important as larger things, not all of them telegraphed. There are mirrors, x-rays, cameras. Images and reflections, seeing and being seen keeps everything stretched tight with the paranoia you'd associate with Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Stepford Wives. It's not so much the terror of people not being who they appear to be as being nothing but their appearance - there's something empty and hungry about that, something horrible.

This is the sort of movie that demands patience and careful attention to get the most out of it. The pace means dread rising to terror rather than sharp scares (at least until things start to escalate), and if you don't know exactly what it is you're seeing and why it's important, it's not going to have the impact it should. Small things go wrong, but have much larger implications. You need to do the math to be rewarded, which is totally fine by me. This is the stuff of my nightmares, the innocuous event carrying horrible meaning. My one objection then is that the story attempts one last twist at the end, and it feels unearned because it relies on an experience of previous events that hasn't been drawn clearly enough for us to understand it. It makes the story a little too complicated (when it hasn't been up to this point) and robs the conclusion of some of its power. That said, the trip there is an exercise in premise embodied - this movie is composed of mirror glass. It's cool, slick, precise, and offers up nothing but what we see, silently and without judgment. But when everything comes apart - when the mirror breaks, it breaks hard and sharp, adding red to the palette in drips and pools.

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Kill Theory: Words Get Shouted, Things Get Broken

After my last post on My Little Eye, it occurred to me that there are quite a few "people forced to play a deadly game" movies floating around. Some of them are pretty good, some of them are pretty bad, and some of them are part of the Saw franchise. Accompanying the basic premise (people, isolated location, do a thing or you/somebody else/everyone dies) is usually some half-baked psychology - how badly do you want to keep living, what will you do when faced with your worst fear, how far will you go for money/survival, yadda yadda yadda. It's half-baked because you don't need to put people in some convoluted trap house to find that sort of thing out. Hell, just sit a couple of people in different rooms and have them play out the Prisoner's Dilemma if you want to see what people are capable of doing and for far lower stakes. Narratively, it gives the filmmakers a pretext upon which to hang the events of the movie, the framework for the icky stuff to follow. Contextually, it gives the evil mastermind types some justification for the atrocities they perpetrate. They can tell themselves they're investigating the depths of humanity, but they aren't. They're just sadists - no, wait - they're pretentious sadists.

If you're going to take this "the real monster is humanity" route in your movie, your best bet is to underplay it, to let believable characters with plausible motivations act naturalistically. If you're going to try and convince me that people are capable of monstrous deeds under sufficient pressure, then make the protagonists recognizably human. Show, don't tell. My Little Eye, for its faults, did a very good job of this. Kill Theory runs so far from this approach to storytelling that it can't find its way back.

The movie opens with one of the least plausible conversations between a psychiatrist and patient ever. The patient survived a mountaineering accident, cutting himself loose from his three best friends to keep himself alive while they plummeted to their deaths. In case that wasn't apparent from their conversation, we're treated to superimposed news clippings telling us pretty much the same thing.  The patient believes that anyone else would do the same thing he did in a similar situation (hence the title KILL THEORY and no awards for subtlety). The psychiatrist all but says "I think you're wrong about that, and the state says you're not a danger any longer but I'm writing another book and you're going to be good for a few chapters, so I'm not signing off on your release unless you agree to another year of treatment," cementing the patient as someone with unresolved issues and the psychiatrist as an unethical asshole.

The entire conversation was totally unnecessary except to tell us "hey, a crazy dude who is being irresponsibly released is probably going to make a bunch of people choose between themselves and their friends in some kind of weird survival game to prove some point to an asshole psychiatrist." In case we thought we were watching a tender coming-of-age story entitled KILL THEORY.

Cut to our van load of teen meat headed into the woods for a long weekend of pre-college graduation debauchery. There's seven of them - egotistical rich boy Brent and his vampish girlfriend Amber, nominal decent guy Michael and his equally decent girlfriend Jennifer, ethnic goofball Carlos and his Maryann-ish girlfriend Nicole, along with girlfriendless nice-guy fifth wheel Freddy. They are walking clichés, head to toe. All they talk about is drinking, sex, sex after drinking and drinking before having sex. Many, many uses of the word "bro." They're staying at one of Brent's fathers' many summer homes, well stocked with beer, liquor, and a trashy stepsister named Alex. Alex rides a Harley and lets Freddy know up front that she won't be giving him any pity fucks. So, you know, classy.

With that one exception, they're children of privilege, living it up because they can, enjoying the world like it's there all for them. There's lots of talk about how they're good friends and there for each other, but it's pretty obvious Brent is an asshole, there's some relationship issues, and Freddy is, from go, a ticking time bomb of frustration and insecurity. The characters are defined completely by a trait or two each, and they're all mostly unsympathetic. Ten minutes in, the first thought that popped into my head was "I cannot wait to see each one of these characters die", which doesn't bode well if you're going to try and evoke horror through identification with the characters in the midst of their plight. At this point, it's just a shooting gallery of jerks.

Moreover, it's a shooting gallery of jerks who seem more than capable of turning on each other without any outside assistance. They're in a house in the middle of rural nowhere, there's a lot of booze, a lot of buried resentment, and at least a couple of guns and other sharp, pointy shit floating around. This is the sort of thing that breeds the very scenario the filmmakers are looking to examine. The crazed mental patient is just as superfluous to the narrative as the opening scene introducing him.

But there he is, gravelly-voiced dude tormenting them and making them turn on each other - the specifics aren't especially important, because it's not what happens in movies like these, it's between whom it happens. Lock a bunch of people into a situation like this, and it's the relationships that are going to drive the tension, not any outside threat or inventively graphic methods of execution. So if the people aren't well-drawn and we don't care about them, and there's really not much to them beyond one or two character traits, what we get when things go bad is a lot of yelling (to indicate strong emotions like fear, anger, and grief) and stuff getting broken - windows, dishes, bottles, electronics, you name it - lots of loud noise and crashing to indicate that Bad Things Are Happening and we should Be Upset. But it's no substitute for empathy, and none of these people seem to really be all that loyal to each other to start, so what we're left with is a very noisy set of death scenes, punctuated by either whispering or yelling. We don't want the torture to end as a release, we just want it to end so everyone will just shut up.

At the end of it, we are left knowing nothing more about the human condition than the point that if you take a bunch of self-centered people with screwed-up priorities and you put them into a situation which encourages them to be self-centered and screwed up, they're going to do self-centered, screwed-up things. This is a revelation to exactly nobody. What should be tense and horrifying isn't because tension requires that we care and being horrified requires that we don't want bad things to happen to the protagonists. Behavior should be identifiably, plausibly human for us to recognize our own flaws and be frightened for the protagonists, and frightened of our own weaknesses. When it isn't, it's just a pantomime of human interaction, interrupted by flashing neon signs telling us "THIS IS BAD" or "PEOPLE DO BAD THINGS WHEN THEIR LIFE IS ON THE LINE," overplaying the situation at every turn. It's unpleasant caricatures of people and loud noises bookended by pretentious bullshit about the "primal core" and "closure." It isn't a horror film, it's an opera about the cast of Jersey Shore being starred in a snuff film, written by that one high school student who's weird and wears all black and shit. No, wait, I might watch that.

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The Abandoned: Location Is Everything

For as much as I keep saying "oh, you don't need characterization and tightly plotted stories to make good horror films," those bloody well seem to be the ones I keep going on and on about. I'm sure this is one of my biases - I like cerebral horror films, mostly because some of the scariest nightmares I've ever had revolved around sudden discoveries or a dawning awareness that something is wrong, or realizing the horrifying implications behind otherwise innocuous images (in this sense, the director that most consistently captures the feel of my nightmares is David Lynch). Still, there are plenty of other elements to film which have to come together to make an effectively scary movie. You've also got to have tension (it's possible to be so cerebral as to verge on inert), you've got to have threat, and you've got to have atmosphere.

The Abandoned is probably one of the most effective uses of atmosphere in horror film I've seen in the last 5 or 10 years. Seriously, every frame of this movie looks like a series of paintings made by someone who has never known happiness. There's not much cast, there's not much story, but the atmosphere alone gets this movie over and then some.

The movie starts in rain and mud and the odd half-light of especially stormy days. A rural couple discover a truck in their front yard, with a dead woman in the front seat and two crying infants next to her. The whole sequence is drained of color, like the rain has washed everything away.

We leap forward in time forty years later, to find Marie Jones headed into the office of a Russian notary, having flown overseas from the U.S. at his request. Marie has apparently inherited the estate of her biological parents - a farmhouse in rural Russia - upon the discovery of her long-dead (and long-disappeared) mothers' body. As there are no other living heirs, the property is now hers. The Russian city is gray and cold, filled with mist, hanging separate in time somehow, the old world and new coexisting. Marie gets directions, gets a car and sets out for the Russian countryside.

Marie first arrives at the farmhouse we saw in the prologue. The couple living there, now very old, tell Marie that she shouldn't go to the property, that it is wrong and damned somehow. This is one of those instances where, were Marie aware she were in a horror film, she would turn right around and go back to the States. But Marie isn't in a horror film because nobody is in a horror film, and dismisses the couple's objections as superstition. Here she also meets a man who says he can guide her to the property at night (it is apparently hard to find and access, and the locals' fears don't bother him). The drive to the property is every night drive through an unfamiliar forest you've ever had - dirt road, fog, trees leaping out in the headlights, deeper shadows behind - and after awhile, there's yet another feeling of dislocation - they could have been driving for minutes or hours, it's hard to tell. The guide tells Marie that the farmhouse sits on an island in the middle of a large lake, the only way on and off is by bridge, and they need to check the bridge for animals before crossing. Marie sits and waits in the truck until she sees the guide in the headlights, and she gets out.

The guide is no longer there. She is alone in the forest, with only her flashlight and the truck's lights to show the way. Then the truck dies. Marie is out here on her own, adrift, with no sense of location, no way to go except forward. She reaches the house, and enters. The house itself is every decaying farmhouse ever - cobwebs and dry splintered wood and beautiful craftsmanship gone to rot and dust. There is a sense of interruption - the house is still mostly intact, but it seems as if it were left in a hurry and never returned to. These plates and chairs and books have been sitting here for decades, exactly where they were when the clock stopped.

Somewhere in the house, an infant screams.

The setup for this movie is simple enough that talking any more about it would give away entirely too much. Suffice it to say that it is a movie about unfinished business, the sometimes loose relationship that time and space and causality have with each other, and what exactly happens when you go home again. Where it shines is in its visual detail. It isn't stylized, but there are very definite palettes for different parts of the movie - muddy browns, cold grays, sickly yellow-greens. The lighting is very natural, which somehow makes everything even worse - this is what it looks like when flashlights throw shadows, when the only light is a yellow lantern, when the sun strains to shine through clouds, or is only a hazy white ball in the mist. It is artful without being stagy, naturalistic in the midst of unnatural things. It is every unfamiliar city and forest and abandoned farmhouse we've ever seen in pictures or our own curious exploration, and in this movie, all of the horrible secrets we imagine these places hold (and tell ourselves don't, really) are laid out for us. Yes, something terrible happened in that abandoned farmhouse. Yes, if you get lost in the forest you won't find your way out. Yes, this movies says, some things are better left alone, and here's why. I've walked through the hallways of this house in my nightmares and woken up with a scream still caught in my throat, left there by the things Marie sees before it's all over.

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Crazy Eights: Six Characters In Search Of A Story

Writing my last post about 13HRS, in which an honest (though not wholly successful) attempt is made to set up a third-act reveal of some really horrible secrets, I started thinking a lot about the importance of information control in horror movies. You don't want to make it impossible for the viewer to figure out what's going on by  making a reveal entirely contingent on information you don't get until the moment of reveal (slasher movies are especially bad about this, in my opinion), nor do you want to give away the game too early. Make the clues or imagery too obvious and instead of getting that slow dawning of terrible understanding - the "piecing together of dissociated knowledge" that "open up such terrifying vistas of reality" of which H.P. Lovecraft spoke - you get "oh, I know what's going to happen" and then however long you wait around for the unfolding of the inevitable. Play fair, but be careful which cards you put on the table.

Crazy Eights is an excellent example of how not to do this.

We're presented with a title card telling us that between the mid 1950s and mid 1970s, a whole lot of behavioral experiments were conducted on little kids, most of them in secret. Cue a little girl being brought to a hospital in the middle of the night. Fade down. Could this be important later? Hmm.

Six childhood friends gather for the funeral of a seventh, who recently committed suicide. The movie opens with three of these friends experiencing odd phenomena - nightmares, visions, hallucinations, so we know we're in for something not of this earth. These three meet up with another three at the funeral, and afterwards, go to the house of the dead friend to try and figure out what happened to her. Her will requests that these six friends look for a box in her house and open it together. Once the box is found and opened, the friends discover a photograph, a map, and a key. The map is to a time capsule they buried as children, and the photograph is one of all of them as children. There are eight children in the photograph, but nobody comments on the eighth child.

The group drives back to their hometown and locates the time capsule which is, for some reason, in the loft of an old barn.

(It's a small detail, but it contributes to an overall sense of disconnection that pervades the movie. The six friends seem lost, distracted, just slightly off to one degree or another, from Jennifer, who is probably the most grounded of the six, to Beth, who is just one sandwich shy of being completely crazy. These people don't feel grounded in the world - they seem adrift somehow, talking slightly past each other, not really being present or aware of their surroundings. It gives the first part of the movie a slight fever dream feeling, as if this might not actually be happening. A time capsule in a barn loft is no less odd next to these people).

Opening the time capsule reveals the usual mementoes of childhood - a slingshot, some paintbrushes, a journal…

…and the skeleton of a little girl.

Thoroughly creeped out, our sextet grab some things and take off. Except no matter how far they drive, they keep coming back to an old, condemned house. Going into the house (like you do) gets them locked in. The search for the way out drives them to a tunnel leading them from the house to what appears to be an abandoned hospital. An abandoned hospital which feels somehow familiar to the six of them. Except when it…doesn't?

This is the biggest problem with Crazy Eights. All of the parts are there, but they never really cohere into a story because they're constantly undermined. We have a group of friends, one of whom has  just killed themselves, who have known each other since childhood, but whose childhood is filled with gaps - they remember the time capsule, but not the eighth child in the picture. They recognize the hospital, but then are surprised to discover that they've been there before, then shrug off that feeling because oh yeah, they've been there before and it's no big deal. It would be one thing if the gaps in their memory slowly resolved themselves until the truth was made known, but every discovery of what should be some horrible secret is undercut both by the protagonists failure to react appropriately to it and the expectation we've had from the title card that this is somehow related to a series of secret experiments. Of course weird shit is happening and secrets are going to get unearthed. There's little to no surprise to the movie at all because the cards are all on the table from the start.

This is compounded by serious confusion in the story - again, like the piling on of elements for no apparent reason in movies like Mortuary and Frontiere(s), there's a childhood secret, there's amnesia, there's a ghost (no prize for guessing who), there's secret experiments - there's just no reason for all of this stuff to get crammed together. The secret experiment angle seems like a rationale for the abandoned hospital setting (for which I've already called a moratorium) and adds little else - it could, but the ghost angle distracts from it. It's not clear what purpose the old house serves (unless they couldn't get any good exterior shots for the hospital - cynical? Yeah, but it's saying something that it even occurs to me), the only reason the time capsule seems to be in the loft is to allow it to get broken in a fall, revealing the skeleton. The amnesia is only there when it needs to be, and then it disappears when it isn't convenient, making the whole missing-memory angle a moot point. The artifice is apparent throughout, less a horror movie than a bunch of horror movie set pieces thrown together.

It'd be better if it were sort of like Peter Straub's Ghost Story, with amnesia thrown in - old friends brought together by a terrible secret, only the past event is as hidden from the characters as us. Which would be okay, characters and audience could put it together at the same time for a nice slow "oh shit" reveal. Again, this can only happen if we are fairly given the opportunity, but the filmmakers almost set it up in reverse - we start out knowing an important piece of the puzzle, and then watch the characters wander through the movie (enervated, sterile, almost occurring in a vacuum despite the aggressively grimy setting) figuring out what we already know, but still withholding the last bit of vital information - except when they sort of drop it in a couple of times (or, for that matter, as the first fucking frame in the movie) and the characters seem to react not at all. Maybe it's supposed to seem dreamlike, but there's little to no tension. Things happen, but there's no sense of drama - it's just a series of sequences staged in different parts of an abandoned building. People figure something out or find a clue, other people die, and we're supposed to care. It's sort of like The Big Chill, if people died at the hands of a vengeful ghost instead of long-term exposure to boomer self-absorption.

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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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Autopsy: Lots of Bits All Sewn Back Together

Immediately after I wrote my post on Mortuary, Autopsy came to mind. They work well as a set, as an exercise in comparison and contrast.

Both are reasonably low-budget horror movies with some solid mid-tier talent involved.

Both evoke part of the normal procedure for handling the dead.

Mortuary went straight to video, Autopsy got theatrical release as part of Horrorfest.

Mortuary was generally panned by the enthusiast press, Autopsy got a positive reception.

The contrasts bug me. Not because I thought Mortuary deserved better (it really didn't), but because I think Autopsy is also a big mess. Mortuary was a narrative mess - it couldn't settle on one story to tell. Autopsy has a single story to tell - a reasonably clear narrative line - but tonally, it's all over the place.

The movie opens with a bunch of teens partying in New Orleans' French Quarter - establishing shots are presented as photographs, interspersed with the action they are in the process of capturing. It's more inventive than what I usually see from what I loosely think of as teens-in-trouble movies. So we have a group of friends - a boyfriend, a girlfriend, two female friends, and a guy they've just met, and they're all drunk or high as shit.

One thing leads to another, there's interpersonal drama, and they're driving down a rural road when a man, clad only in a hospital gown, steps out in front of their car, promptly getting flattened like you do. Panic and arguing about what to do with the body sets in, but before anyone can make a decision, along comes an ambulance. The orderlies in the ambulance agree to transport the kids back to the hospital - they're pretty banged up themselves and need medical care. Pretty convenient, there being an ambulance…right there…in the middle of nowhere, Huh.

Once they get to the hospital, they see that it's pretty much deserted - one doctor, one nurse, and the two orderlies who, on closer inspection, look all kinds of sketchy. Like just-finished-serving-their-debt-to-society-that-morning sketchy. Apparently, the hospital has been running on a skeleton crew since Katrina. The kids are triaged by the nurse, who sends them to different exam rooms, leaving the less injured impatient in the waiting room. Why is it taking so long for the doctor to see everyone? Why is the hospital so empty?

And for that matter, why are there insensate, apparently-lobotomized patients roaming the hallways?

The plot is pretty straightforward - hospital empty, kids trapped, orderlies criminal, doctor and nurse batshit insane. Kids want to get out, doctor doing horrible experiments. That's the thesis, and it's not really spoiling anything. The hook for something like this isn't what's going on. It's who gets out, how, and why they're trapped there to start.

I don't have a problem with a simple narrative - case in point, Rovdyr - but even within the confines of the narrative, you need to strike a tone. Different types of movies have different types of tone - is it going to be cool and menacing? Raw and frenetic? Spare? Haunting? Brutal? Mortuary struck a tone - cheap and awkward, but still a tone - but Autopsy really feels like a few different movies stuck together. The hospital is all long, empty, echoing hallways, silence, shadows, and deserted examination rooms, like in a good haunted house movie. The protagonists are wary, argumentative, like in the sort of movie where everyone needs to stick together and whose inability to do so costs them their lives. Their interaction is tense, there's a potential for misunderstandings, betrayal. The orderlies are hard and brutal, right out of something like Hostel, and have the piles of body parts to match. Their interactions with the protagonists are casual and ugly in their violence. The doctor (Dr. Benway - that's subtle) and the nurse are histrionic - almost operatic, like something out of an Argento movie, and they provide an equally stylized climax that bears little resemblance to the rest of the film.

The setting and some of the characters lend themselves well to a grounded, realistic survival story - people disappear every year, and the idea of an abandoned hospital forgotten in the wake of Katrina is ripe for something plausible and truly harrowing. On the other hand, you have a really out-of-place drug-trip sequence and a climax as completely bonkers and improbable as the antagonists which drive it. The character of the doctor has some promise on his own - there's one sequence involving a lumbar puncture that takes an already-painful procedure and adds all kinds of layers of creepy to it - but although his motivations make sense in the context of the movie, its treatment and specifics really need to be in a much crazier movie than this one. It takes you out of whatever investment you already have, and investment - the acceptance of the film's world and a desire to see events through to the end - is critical for the movie to be effective. We follow these kids from the French Quarter down a dark backwoods road, and end up getting lied to about where we're going.

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The Final: Avoiding The Obvious "Failing Grade" Joke

Calling the movies distributed as part of After Dark's Horrorfest "uneven" is probably understatement. Some have been great (The Abandoned), some have been good (The Gravedancers), some overrated (Borderlands, Frontiere(s)), and some just a downright mess (Crazy Eights, Autopsy). The Final doesn't swell the ranks of the great and good, sad to say. It's probably much closer to a downright mess.

It's a good premise: Picked-on teenagers conspire to lure the popular kids to a party out in the woods, where they will be drugged, held captive, and tortured as retribution for all of the horrible shit they've done to the protagonists. The protagonists are fine - they're a ragtag assortment of geeky, left-out kids, and the potential victims are obnoxious and unsympathetic. I don't see a lot of difference between rooting for the death of stupid teenagers and mean teenagers, so it's not a problem to me. It goes back to what the almighty Joe Bob Briggs referred to as "yuppie meat" in his account of a visit to the set of one of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequels. Sort of celebration of natural selection - when someone pokes a tiger, they get mauled, and the only ones who don't see that coming are the ones doing the poking.

I've read others' complaints about the writing - overly dramatic, ham-handed, stilted, pretentious, it gets called. I don't have a problem with that either, because that's how the kind of kids who have these sort of revenge fantasies would talk. The actors playing the protagonists of this revenge flick are playing characters who are themselves the stars of their own internal 24-7 revenge flicks, which they have chosen to make external. A lot of the action takes place in one room, and the protagonists spend most of their time on a elevated section similar to a stage, their victims arranged before them like an audience.  I'd like to think that's a deliberate choice. But of course they're going to be melodramatic and pretentious and histrionic. They're teenagers.  I wanted to strangle the main protagonist for being such a posturing douche, but anything other than a posturing douche would have been wrong for the story.

So there's promise here. The premise is fine, the way the characters are played is generally fine (or at least good enough), but all this promise is let down by a messy narrative. Once they get the popular kids to the party and drugged, we're pretty much set up for a closed-room psychological horror film. There's no mystery as to who the killers are, there's nothing supernatural, so all of the responsibility for a good narrative rests on what happens when you give the powerless all the power and make the powerful powerless. What happens when your fantasy becomes reality? Does it actually feel good to physically abuse that cheerleader who gave you snotty looks in the hall? Does wounding a football player who beat you up on a regular basis make all your own wounds heal? Or is that critical line between what we allow ourselves to imagine and what we are actually capable of doing stronger than we think? And you've already got kidnapping and maybe assault staring you in the face - the stakes are ratcheting higher with every minute, and maybe the really quiet one turns out to be a complete sadist, and maybe the mastermind was all talk, and it's all falling apart and you can't kill them after all, but you can't let them go either. Who's going to end up alive, and given that the victims aren't very nice people but probably don't deserve this, how will we feel about it?

That would have been cool. I would have watched that.

Instead, we get desultory sequences of torture that don't build any tension or anxiety - they start, people are damaged, they end, with very little impact on other events - and even more damaging, a needlessly complicated side plot involving a unlikely supporting character that cuts away from the main story before any sense of fear or uncertainty develops. The proceedings feel sterile and disconnected, and you only get a sense of immediacy once or twice, and just as they develop, well, one of the weird kids starts playing the banjo or we cut to the b-story. Whether you're trying to evoke fear, suspense, fright, dread, horror, revulsion, or whatever, you need to arrange the imagery and narrative of your film in a way that will evoke these things, and there are all kinds of ways to do that. The director dropped the ball here by arranging the elements of the story carelessly. The narrative is as distracted as a teenager and as ungrounded in real human fear as the 85th diary entry about the cosmic injustice of not having a prom date.

So maybe in that sense, the whole proceeding is some big meta-filmic joke - a movie about teenagers with teenage dialogue and teenage concerns, but also a teenage callowness and lack of focus. That might inspire some golf claps and a quiet "well played" murmured from around the stem of my pipe, but that doesn't make it a good movie by any means.

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