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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

Terrifier: Insane Clown Parting (Your Head From Your Shoulders)

It’s been a long time since I took the month of October to do something a little different. While most people are talking about the horror films worth watching, that’s what I’m trying to do most of the year, so instead I try to change it up. But I think the last time I really committed to the bit was a month of films that aren’t horror films, but are totally horror films, and that was a long time ago.

So I decided that for this spooky season, I’m going to focus on the kinds of movies I usually avoid. I got the idea after watching Malignant, which, despite my reservations, ended up being fun. Although I can’t guarantee that any of the others film I watch this month will get the same reception, there’s a willful perversity to the idea that I like. I spend most of the year focusing on my lane, so October seems like a good time to stray from it, maybe interrogate my dislikes a little.

With that in mind, I really don’t like slasher movies. I like watching horror films that unnerve me, get under my skin, make me feel things, that scare me. And I don’t find slasher films very scary. Because once you get past the spectacle of ludicrously graphic violence, there’s not much there, usually. I know many people find gore and violence upsetting – and don’t get me wrong, when graphic violence is used to help tell a story with relatable people and actual emotional stakes, it can be a powerful storytelling tool, but gore and graphic violence by themselves, for their own sake, don’t really move me. At that point it’s hard for me to see them as anything other than an exercise in special effects. There’s often not much consideration for the characters, not a lot of effort to make them relatable, sympathetic people, and at their worst they can be downright reactionary.

Basically, bloody death without a story and emotional stakes or worse, presented as entertainment, isn’t my deal. And so I decided to watch Terrifier, which has a decent reputation as a pretty unapologetic slasher film. To its credit, isn’t especially reactionary (maybe a little), and it’s made with style, but at the end of the day, it’s the prototypical slasher movie stripped down to its bare bones. It’s a movie where nobody exists as anything more than cannon fodder, and the violence is the only point.

We open on a news program, where the host is about to interview a woman who is the only known survivor of the Miles County Massacre, a murder spree that occurred a year ago, last Halloween. It ended with the killer – known as Art the Clown – dead. Or so the survivor says, despite his body mysteriously vanishing from the morgue. But she’s insistent, and it’s easy to see why, as Art left her with a face that’s very hard to look at. The idea that whoever did something that horrible could return is not a comfortable one. And somewhere out in the city, there’s someone watching this program. Someone so incensed by what they see that they smash their television.

Someone putting on greasepaint and a clown costume and gathering up a bag full of very sharp implements.

And then back at the studio, we cut to the host in her dressing room talking on her phone, making all kinds of disparaging comments about the appearance of the woman she just interviewed, before the very same woman suddenly attacks her and begins mangling her face while laughing maniacally. That is a thing that happened. Now we’re following two young women, Tera and Dawn, who’ve just left a Halloween party, and discover that someone’s slashed Dawn’s tire. Tera calls her sister Victoria, who’s busy studying for finals, but agrees to come get them when her roommate staggers in drunk with some dude in tow. Tera and Dawn walk into the nearby pizza joint to get a slice while they wait. And then they look over and there’s this, like, really creepy dude in a black and white clown costume who just, like, keeps staring at them. Dawn teases Tera that he thinks she’s really cute, and then gets a selfie with him while Tera’s just getting wall-to-wall bad vibes and you can kind of tell that Tera probably prevents Dawn from making some seriously bad decisions on a regular basis. The clown never speaks, never blinks. He just keeps staring.

This is basically a slasher film with all of the fat trimmed from it. It’s not even an hour and a half long, and the story doesn’t really extend past there being a bunch of people out on Halloween night for one reason or another and now an evil clown is murdering all of them. No history, no backstory, no legends. There’s an evil clown and he’s killing people. So it gets right down to business. On the one hand, the near-minimalism of its approach is something to appreciate, but at the same time it’s also laying bare just how little there is going on beyond sensationalism here. No niceties, you just came for the killing and we know that, so here you go. In that regard, it’s all pretty two-dimensional.

But I will give it this: this film has a well-realized aesthetic. It’s grainy, the colors are garish, and everything is starkly lit. Every scene feels like a well-lit island in a sea of darkness - almost theatrical, as if spotlights are illuminating sets that consist of what’s necessary for the scene and nothing else, which makes the stripped-down, minimalist feel seem more intentional than crass. The score is ominous synthesizers right out of a 1980s slasher movie, and so along with the visuals, the whole thing feels vintage without feeling like pastiche. It evokes a mood and feeling without calling too much attention to it. Art the Clown does make for an interesting antagonist as slasher-film killers go. He’s clad and painted all in black and white, which stands out well against the blues and reds and purples and harsh light sources spilling over the rest of the frame. His face is stark white with gaping black holes for eyes and a mouth, and he’s totally silent, doing all of his expression through mime. I have to say, it’s a nice change from your bog-standard hulking figure in some kind of mask, and it ends up making for a lot of pretty striking moments, along with injecting some pitch-black wit into the proceedings. I don’t know that I would have wanted a backstory or any kind of dialogue or anything from the antagonist, because the inexplicable, near-supernatural murder clown thing worked better than I expected it to.

Outside of that, it’s wholly of its type. It's a grungy film, where every location is believably deserted, abandoned, and filthy, and there’s a lot of blood and guts (with Art’s costume getting more and more bloodstained, and the shocking red against the white is an effective visual), and though the effects aren’t the cheapest I’ve seen, they’re low-rent enough that it’s relatively easy to maintain some kind of comfortable distance from the horrible shit that’s happening. Which, yeah, that’s one of those things I don’t like. That’s what makes pain and suffering entertainment, when you can hold others’ torment and ugly deaths at arms’ length. The camera lingers on bodies getting punctured, stabbed, shot, mauled, gnawed on, stomped, and sawn in half. That’s the point of the film and really the only thing that matters. I don’t dislike these characters, certainly I don’t think they deserve their fates, but I can’t really say that I care about them either. You know right off the bat that this is a film where lots of people will die, and they do. There’s no surprise to it, no shock or upset, really. And we don’t get to know them, no there’s nothing to hope for, nobody to root for. It’s a bunch of gross death scenes broken up by cutaways to other people or someone walking from one place to the next to meet whatever fate has in store.

This film is unapologetically what it is - a film made for people who expect scene after scene of violence, and on that front it delivers. It’s got a more cohesive aesthetic than I expected, and some vivid moments among the gore, but I can’t say it’s changed my mind about the genre.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

The Black Phone: Escape Room

Maybe it makes me kind of a film snob (okay, it definitely makes me kind of a film snob), but I have general aversion to big-budget, mass-marketed horror films. Which isn’t to say that all indie horror is good (far from it) or that films with large budgets are all bad, but films with a certain level of star power, coming from certain directors or distributors, getting a certain amount of publicity push, tend to get my hackles up. In general, I don’t like franchising and I don’t like films that insult their audience’s intelligence. And since I think of horror as a valuable way to tell stories that can push buttons, take us places we wouldn’t otherwise go, I like those things even less in horror film. 

So I gotta say, I went into The Black Phone with reservations. It was produced by Blumhouse, who have, to my mind, a mixed track record - they’ve put out some reasonably good (or at least non-mainstream) stuff, but also a lot of the slick, glossy dreck that gets franchised and spun off to death. Multiplex thrill rides. The director made Sinister, a film that had a lot going for it right up to the point that it totally derailed in the name of franchisability. So it didn’t really look promising. The premise didn’t help either, though we’ll get to that.

But on top of my film snobbery, I have a perverse streak. And so the more I saw ads for this thing come up, the more I simultaneously though “ugh, no thanks” and “you know, I really should check this out to see if it’s bad as I think it’s going to be.” Like, I don’t especially like to shit on films, even though I recognize that’s some of my most animated writing, but sometimes I feel the urge to see if my prejudices bear out, or if they’re just prejudices.

And in this case, well, it’s a little of column A and a little of column B. There are things about it which I deeply dislike and I think drag it down, but there are also some real strengths that kept me from dismissing it entirely.

It’s 1978, and we’re in Denver, Colorado. We meet Finney, and his sister Gwen. They’re trying very hard not to make any noise around their dad. He works the night shift, and when he’s not working the night shift, he’s deep into his vodka and orange juice. So every day is walking on eggshells, and coordinating whose turn it is to take care of him. On top of that, Finney gets bullied a lot. Things aren’t easy for them, and haven’t been since their mother passed away. Things are tense at home, and things are tense at school, especially since kids started disappearing. Police have no leads, just black balloons at the site of some of the disappearances. And then one day, walking home, Finney stops to help a man who drops some groceries outside his van. 

One flourish of black balloons, and Finney wakes up in a soundproof basement.

So, the premise here is, well, kind of high-concept. There are a number of moving parts here. You’ve got this mysterious masked figure who’s been abducting adolescent boys from around north Denver, boys who vanish without a trace, never to be seen again. You’ve also got an old rotary phone in Finney’s basement prison, one that isn’t connected to anything, but rings anyway (and there are…voices…on the other end). And Gwen is…maybe psychic? That sort of feels like a lot to buy into all at once. This was another big part of my skepticism going in. But honestly, it ends up being less of a problem than I thought it would be. Oh, sure, when I stop to think closely about it, it all threatens to fall apart (police are not getting a warrant based on a little girl’s dreams), but in the moment it was only slightly distracting. 

I think, overall, the film’s biggest problem is probably the writing, especially with the kids, of which there are a number. As someone who was actually a kid in the period this movie takes place, I don’t remember anyone actually talking like this. It all sounds very much like dialogue,, and the actors playing the kids have trouble selling it, so it all feels very artificial. This is less of an issue with the adult dialogue, and it becomes less of a problem overall once Finney’s been abducted, but it’s still there and makes it harder to really get into the film. You’re being constantly reminded that this is just a movie. The performances range from adequate to excellent, and if they suffer it’s mostly from the aforementioned dialogue. But even apart from its artificiality, there’s also a tendency to cram in exposition or overexplain. Which is odd, because there are some places where it uses flashback effectively, so a scene where a character just says a whole bunch of stuff to another character that is clearly meant for the audience (because the person they’re talking to already knows all of it), it stands out even more. 

Again, it’s just a movie. If anything, it suggests that the filmmakers thought the audience wouldn’t be able to piece it together on their own. Oh, was that too hard to follow? Here, I’ll tell you what you just saw, and I’ll speak slowly and use small words. Fuck that. It’s also hard to get invested because in some ways, you have a pretty good idea of what the broad strokes are going to be (of course Finney’s going to get abducted, of course he’ll spend most of the movie trying to escape and failing) and the problem is that there aren’t really any surprises in that regard. There’s no attempt to twist or subvert our expectations, so at its worst, it sort of becomes an exercise in waiting for the climax (which itself throws in an unnecessarily convoluted twist that stops the momentum short). I kept waiting for the story to surprise me, and it didn’t, at least not until the climax. But it wasn’t really a jaw-dropper, more of a “oh, that’s kind of a cool way to handle it.”

So yes, it had a lot of weaknesses. But like I said at the start, I can’t dismiss it outright because it does some things very well. It gets the period details pretty right in ways that feel realistic and unfussy. It doesn’t go out of its way to call attention to it taking place in the 1970s. It looks right and feels right in that regard. I’d have to say that generally, the visuals are a real strength of this film. It takes place in a world that feels sort of brown and overcast (the 70s did have a lot of wood paneling), and there are some really nice moments of visual flair - abductions told in rapid fadeouts, well-placed flashbacks that sometimes turn into dream-logic insights, not dissimilar to moments in Audition, which is not a comparison I thought I’d be making. Lighting (especially in Finney’s interactions with the abductor) is on point, and Finney’s conversations on the titular phone are staged almost theatrically in a way that embodies the disembodied voices to good effect.  So it looks good and even if the writing and performance is obvious, the cinematic storytelling isn’t. And however ridiculous the things people say to each other, the characters don’t themselves feel ridiculous. This is especially important concerning the abductor, who doesn’t play like a monster or a villain so much as a deeply troubled, stunted man who is constantly reliving some awful psychodrama. And the climax has sort of a puzzle or escape room feel to it that wasn’t obvious to me at all ahead of time, so when it all came together it felt nice to see how all of these disparate things had a purpose that wasn’t obvious from jump. But then the end ran too long because the filmmakers threw in a totally superfluous twist right at the end, one that I suspect created the need for the scene that followed it, where a character literally explains what we just saw. 

And this is the problem with mass-market horror, I think. On the one hand, you want to make a good film, but  on the other hand, you need to make a film that’s going to put enough butts in seats to generate a profit, and that can mean making a film for people who don’t really appreciate nuance, or even pay attention. So everything becomes kind of loud, kind of obvious. I had the same problem with the director’s previous film - it started strong and then crashed in the third act with the introduction of elements that were clearly meant to make it into a franchise. And here, as then, we have what could have been a really good horror film undone by the need to make it justify its budget. I wish I were wrong sometimes, and this is one of those times.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Hellraiser (2022): The Flesh Failures

This is going to be a tough one for me to talk about. On the one hand, the original Hellraiser was an extremely formative film for me. Sitting in a free midnight screening in a mostly-empty theater, watching it play out on a big screen in the dark, it was the first time I think I ever watched any sort of film and got the feeling that all bets were off, that anything could happen. It almost felt…unsafe, and that stuck with me. It wouldn’t be the last time a film made me feel that way, but it was definitely the first. And a few years back, I waded into the nine extant films in the Hellraiser franchise (ugh), and barring some special effects that haven’t aged well, it still holds up surprisingly well.

But on the other hand, there’s the other eight films, and what I discovered re-watching the first four for the first time in years and watching numbers 5 through 9 for the first time is that not only would subsequent films fail to replicate what made the original so special, they’d decline in general quality really fucking fast. It was another example (alongside Nightmare On Elm Street) of the studio deciding to just start cranking out sequels while the property was still hot, without any regard for what made the original good or interesting. In the case of these films, the nadir was a slapdash stab at found-footage that was made - start to finish - in three weeks, purely to keep the studio’s license for the IP from lapsing. It was literally a film that wasn’t made to be viewed. It’s hard for me to think of a more cynical and calculated thing, and this is considering that every film in the series after the fourth was an unrelated screenplay that was retrofitted into a Hellraiser movie to varying degrees of success. They didn’t even bother to write them. Another one came out in 2018 to equally poor reception, but I was done.

So, Hellraiser (2022) simultaneously does and doesn’t have a lot to live up to. It has the shadow of the original hanging over it, but on the other hand the remaining films set the bar pretty low. And so my experience watching this film was a confusing one for me. It’s hard for me to tell how much I like it, or if I just appreciate it. And no, it’s not the revelatory experience the first one was for me. It doesn’t really do anything unexpected, and it does have problems, mostly in the third act. But it also does a lot of stuff right, and so it’s safe to say that even with its flaws, it’s miles better than any of the films that followed the original,

It opens on a gray day in Belgrade. There’s a man sitting on a bench with a satchel, and a woman approaches him. The whole thing feels like something out of a spy movie, in a good way. They’re there to make an exchange. She gives him a large sum of money, and he gives her a wooden box containing something that we don’t get to see. Cut to a large mansion in the Berkshires. There’s some kind of party going on, it’s all very stylish in a perfume commercial sort of way, and reminds me of nothing so much as a 1990s take on wealth and decadence. A fit young man sits nervously at the bar, and the woman from Belgrade sits next to him. She suggests that she can introduce him to the owner of the mansion and he jumps at the chance. The young man is Joey, and he’s being introduced to wealthy art collector Roland Voight. He’s ushered into a large room filled with small sculptures and art objects, and one of them is a small wooden puzzle box of intricate design. At Voight’s encouragement, Joey starts trying to solve the puzzle, and with a few twists and turns, it snaps into a new configuration, one that causes a blade to pierce Joey’s hand. Voight is unsurprised by this. The room starts spinning for Joey. Storm clouds gather, and then…something is in the room with them. Something with chains and hooks. Something to which Voight appeals. Something that takes Joey away.

Six years later, we meet Riley while she’s having noisy sex with her boyfriend Trevor…as it turns out, while her brother Matt, his boyfriend Colin, and their roommate Nora are in the other room making dinner. It’s a quick study - Riley’s a few months out of rehab, and given that she met Trevor in rehab, she’s kind of a mess. The dynamic between all of them is established pretty economically through how things are said as much as what is said - it’s a little exposition-heavy to start, but it rights itself. Riley’s underemployed, and is trying to figure out something better so she can get out of Matt’s apartment. Trevor starts to suggest something, but hesitates because she’s “trying to be good.” But when pushed, he reveals that at his job he made a lot of deliveries of “billionaire shit” to a warehouse out on the edges of the city, and after one last one, the orders just…stopped, and the warehouse seems to have been abandoned. But maybe there’s still some billionaire shit inside, and he remembers the keycode.

So they break into this warehouse and discover a single shipping container. Cutting the lock reveals a safe. Smashing the dial off the safe reveals a wooden case.

A wooden case with a familiar-looking puzzle box inside.

The film gets off to a wobbly start - the very beginning is a nice inversion of the grubby backroom deal that opens the original film, but then it cuts to the wealthy decadence thing that seems more like something out of one of the sequels. and the beats feel pretty predictable. But then when it shifts into the more intimate story of Riley and her brother, things start to feel more grounded. We settle into this difficult relationship and the people touched by it to one degree or another, and it feels pretty natural. And throughout, Riley’s at the center of all of it, as her decisions spiral outward to suck more and more of the people who care about her into something they can’t begin to explain, something full of blood and pain.

And so this is another way it’s in conversation with the original film. The original was very much about desire, and the price we’re willing to pay to satisfy our desires. And here there’s a definite narrative about needs and weaknesses and compulsions and hungers that runs through the whole film, along with the cost they exert on the individual and everyone around them. Riley has a self-destructive streak a mile wide, one that doesn’t manifest in melodramatic ways, as much as in consistently making the wrong decision, whatever form that takes. Whatever the safe, healthy thing to do is, she runs as far from that as she can. And Matt, time and time again, runs codependently after her, as compelled to try and fix her or rescue her as she is to destroy herself. So where the story of the decadent eager to seek newer and more exotic sensations drove the original film, here it’s more about someone on the ragged end of that, someone who’s become a prisoner to the things they sought. But the point is the same throughout - these needs…all of them… have a cost. And I’ll give the film credit for driving the action with human frailty to the degree that it does.

Elsewhere, it acknowledges the original film in tasteful, restrained ways - there are a number of visual and musical allusions throughout, more like it’s using the vocabulary of the first film than repeating scenes or anything obvious like that. It feels as much like an updating of what the first film did (and none of the subsequent films bothered to do) as anything else, nothing so blatant as stunt casting or fanservice, and what little bits of worldbuilding there are don’t distract from the story too much. There’s always the danger of spending more time on the mythology than the story or the people, and that doesn’t really happen here. If anything, it explores some of the ideas from the second film from a slightly different angle, in ways that are sometimes more successful, and in others less so, but never to the corny, sub-Freddy Kreuger depths of that film’s final act. In a lot of ways, it feels like what a sequel to the original film would have been with a bigger budget and a focus on making a good film instead of trying to crank something out as quickly as possible. To be fair, Hellraiser 2 had a really good second act, but that’s about it.

But as well-made as it is, it does feel like it’s missing something for me, and I can’t tell how much of it is how the film is made and how much of it is me bringing my own history to it. It has a couple of good, tense moments in the third act and a twist I didn’t see coming, but I’ve seen variations on this story, I know how the world of this film works and it never really stretches that or does much to upend it. It’s respectful to the original, and that’s good, but perhaps too respectful. I’m never really surprised or shown anything new, and though I suspect that someone who’s never seen the original film could be startled by this - it’s still got a vision unlike anything else in horror - it also doesn’t capture the grimy fervor of the original, that sense that you’re in the hands of someone who isn’t playing safe with their ideas. It gets very violent in places, though not often, so there’s still a punch to it when it happens and as much is accomplished through restraint as graphic depiction. But it’s all…maybe a little too clean, a little too polite, missing that sense of connection to hunger and desire that the original film has. It’s colder, more cerebral in ways, where the original had a kinky, transgressive heat to it. I do appreciate that the antagonists are as aloof as they originally were, and the updated designs work well in some places, less well in others. But the sense of menace is largely restored.

And there are narrative issues as well. The pacing lags at times, and the ending drags out a little too much, trying to tie up too many pieces all at once, slowing things down and reducing the tension, and the way it all resolves feels a little stock to me. There’s a coda that seems maybe a little obvious and sequel-baity, though it’s well-done for all of that. It’s certainly better than any of the increasingly misbegotten sequels that followed the original, and in its subject matter I feel like it’s a better take on what Hellraiser 2 was trying to do than what that film accomplished, but it’s not the original. You can only make a film like that once.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
 

Extremity: Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride

Another one of horror film’s time-honored traditions is stories of make-believe that goes too far. Maybe it’s a movie, or some kind of game, or more recently a reality show or an escape room, but what they have in common is the idea that something that’s being presented as simulated danger turns out to be real, actual danger. It’s an idea that’s easy to do badly, as films like The Task, Hellraiser 8, or The Houses October Built readily demonstrate. It’s a pretty simple premise - what if they’re being murdered for real? - and it’s often treated simplistically, starting and ending with the obvious. It’s the kind of film I’m likely to skip over, all other things being equal.

But as an example of this kind of story. Extremity avoids a lot of the cliches I was afraid it was going to fall into, and largely tells a story that finds tension in places other than the obvious and keeps you guessing. At least, until the third act, when one seriously wrongheaded narrative choice undoes a lot of the film’s goodwill and it limps to its end as something much less compelling. I’m not mad, just disappointed.

After a brief, cryptic scene of someone we can’t see possibly engaging in self-harm, the film opens with sensationalistic title cards and voiceovers about extreme haunt attractions, and how they’re totally unregulated with no safe words or supervision and how anything could happen in one, interspersed with ostensible footage from such haunts, with people being slapped around, covered in cockroaches, etc. You get the impression that this is going to be a movie about how some unsuspecting patrons are lured into some kind of snuff operation, and that threatens to be really boring.

But then the camera pulls back to reveal that what we’re seeing is a video that a young woman is watching on her phone. Her name is Allison Bell, and she’s applied (and selected) to be a participant in an extreme haunt (sometimes called “immersive horror experiences”) called Perdition. She receives instructions to drive to a building out in the middle of nowhere. Then she’s on the phone with someone else, presumably her girlfriend, who’s begging her not to go through with this. Allison assures her she knows what she’s doing, that this is something that she needs to do. Allison had some very bad things happen to her as a child, things maybe she’s never really gotten over. There have been suicide attempts. She’s obsessed with horror films - not your standard stuff, not like what I write about here, the real grimy underground stuff. The kind that sometimes gets confiscated by customs. She arrives at her destination, gets out of the car and dumps her medication out.

Allison wants to push herself as far as she can.

In retrospect, the opening scene sort of sets the thesis for the whole film. It’s not a complicated one - everything is not what it seems - but it’s handled well for the most part, and gets at the compelling thing about these sort of attractions, the degree to which the line between theater and reality blurs. And these sort of attractions do exist in real life, though the pearl-clutching about no safe words or regulations doesn’t seem to have much basis in fact. They’re money-making operations, and require publicity. They’re on the radar, so there are precautions. Guests have to sign extensive waivers of liability, health checks before admission are not uncommon, and there are most definitely safe words. It’s all because attractions like Blackout and McKamey Manor really do ride a line between haunted house, immersive theater, and BDSM scene. They are absolutely not for most people. And much of what we see of Perdition is very similar to what I know of those attractions, so it all feels plausible in that regard. It’s pretty grim - Allison and another participant, a guy named Zachary, find the releases they have to sign in the bathroom of the abandoned building and then begin the game by fishing something out of a toilet filled with actual shit.

This is the gist of this kind of experience: Once you’ve committed to it, once you’ve signed the release, you’re theirs. And it becomes clear very quickly that what Allison and Zachary imagine that is going to mean is very different from what the people running Perdition have in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride. It’s too late to get off now. The narrative, then, features a lot of interplay between what’s artifice and what’s real. Part of it is in how the story is told from multiple perspectives. The film bounces around between what’s happening in the present, flashbacks to Allison’s childhood, conversations with her therapist and a fraught life with her partner, along with the occasional dream sequence, and the perspective of a Japanese news crew there to document Perdition. So there’s what Allison and Zachary are enduring, what brought Allison here in the first place, and what’s going on behind the scenes. There’s a lot of perspective-juggling going on, but it’s all easy to follow. Anyone coming into this expecting a story about an extreme haunt where the make-believe is ALL TOO REAL or some shit like that is going to be disappointed. For most of its running time, this is more about the tension created when someone who is most likely very unstable puts themselves in a position where their already-fragile ability to cope is pushed to its limits, as well as what happens when you’re trying really hard to make your artistic endeavor a success and maybe you’re taking some chances you shouldn’t, or cutting some corners. It’s more of an accident-waiting-to-happen film, and that’s where a lot of the tension is.

And in that regard, it does a good job of keeping us on our toes - at any given time, it isn’t clear how much of what’s happening is really this attraction going off the rails and how much of it is theater, or to what degree Allison is decompensating or not. Just when you think you’ve gotten it figured out one way or another, it’ll throw something else in to wrong-foot you. There was one twist that I guessed pretty early on, but to the film’s credit, it took a long time to pay it off, which made it easier to believe that maybe it wasn’t coming after all. As the film moves on, we start to get a sense that everyone’s sort of got their own issues - Allison’s are obvious, but the person running Perdition is dealing with a lot behind the scenes, you get the sense that his motivations might not be the healthiest (though not in the way you’re probably thinking), leading to him breaking with protocol and overstepping boundaries, and his staff run the gamut from competent professionals to relatively untested amateurs, to people who seem quite possibly legitimately unhinged. So it’s a story where we’re getting a glimpse into all of the places where this could all fall apart, a confluence of the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time leading to avoidable tragedy. But it’s never (well, almost never) as simple as unsuspecting teens being lured to their doom.

Also to its credit, it has a great sense of setting and style - exteriors are snowy and rural, forests and the outskirts of town in what might be the Rust Belt, though it’s never made clear, interiors are suitably dank and decaying urban ruins, all lit in lurid funhouse reds and blues and purples, as befits the nature of Perdition. It’s one of the few times the abandoned hospital aesthetic doesn’t seem like a cliché to me precisely because Perdition is leaning into that aesthetic like any horror attraction would, and it looks quite real. There’s sort of a late 70s/early 80s grindhouse scuzz to it in places without it ever feeling like pastiche. The soundtrack is ominous synthesizer, shrieking strings, discordant rattles and clanks and thumps, and though it’s nothing surprising, it conveys a feeling of jittery anxiety well, and never really overwhelms the action. The acting is serviceable to good, but the dialogue - especially the sequences with Allison’s therapist - runs toward the clumsy and affected, and it’s definitely distracting at times. There are, on the other hand, some deft cinematic touches in the visual storytelling, so the overarching proposition is still one of a film that’s smarter than you’d expect from the premise.

The biggest problem to me is probably the third act, which starts strong, but then climaxes in a twist that absolutely beggars believability and leads to a series of events and narrative choices that push everything into much more disappointingly conventional territory. A lot happens very quickly and sort of glosses over how plausible any of it would be, some characters behave in really puzzling ways, and it takes the otherwise relatable, grounded story that we’ve been watching so far and pushes it into Grand Guignol in a way that to me didn’t really feel earned. There’s also one final flashback that feels like it’s supposed to be an important revelation, but it’s not really set up as well as it should be so it just feels a little confusing and out of nowhere, ending on a note as cliched as you might have expected before you started watching it. Which is too bad, because there was definitely something here that was working well for most of its running time, and it’s by the same director who made Last Shift, another film that seemed like it was going to be hackneyed mediocrity and ended up being much better than that. But that film, although not perfect, came nowhere close to sabotaging itself in the home stretch like this one did. You don’t get what you were expecting, and that’s good, until it isn’t.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

Dead End: Goes Nowhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Grave Encounters 2: More Of The Same, For Better Or Worse

Apologies for the late posting – the shift to working from home that I’ve experienced as someone who is fortunate to be able to work from home right now messed up my internal calendar, and Wednesday came and went before I realized that I forgot to put this up. The week loses a bit of its rhythm when your surroundings don’t change, but I’ve made the necessary adjustments.

Anyway, given how much unprecedented stuff is going on right now, I thought now would be as good a time as any to try something I’ve never really done before. As I’ve pretty well established by now, I’m really picky about found-footage films, pretty much over films set in abandoned hospitals, and am really not a fan of sequels or (ugh) franchises. But last week I discovered that I liked Grave Encounters – a found-footage film set in an abandoned mental hospital - well enough, so I thought, why not keep this train rolling and take a look at the sequel?

What little critical reception I’ve seen of Grave Encounters 2 has been mixed, which is unsurprising to me, given that I think sequels to horror films are bad ideas in general. And some of that certainly comes into play here, though it does make some smart choices along the way as well. I am going to put this one under a spoiler bracket, though, since I anticipate I’ll be talking about the events of the first film and specific things I did and didn’t like about it, so if you haven’t watched Grave Encounters and plan to, maybe hold off on reading this one until you’ve had a look at it.

Retrospective: The Hellraiser Series, Part 2

So this...is where things are gonna start getting icky.

Frankly, I was surprised at how poorly 2 held up in retrospect, and 3 has never been a good film by any metric (except maybe putting butts in seats, but given how much the (ugh) franchise vanished off the radar after 3, I wonder if it even performed well there), and the nature of sequels is such that invariably, at least where horror is concerned, there are going to be increasingly diminishing returns. So films 4, 5, and 6 are by all rights pretty much guaranteed to be disappointments.

That said, the experience wasn’t...as bad as I thought it was going to be. A couple of these films are actually not bad. I wouldn’t call them great, but much better than I expected. Unfortunately, what does start to show through at this point are the nakedly mercenary considerations that went into their production, which sort of cast a pall on whatever strengths they have, and one of them is just, by any measure, ass. Only 4 was even originally intended as a Hellraiser film, and the director felt enough pressure to make it more commercial that he ended up disavowing it. The other two are from (fairly similar) repurposed scripts that have the mythology of the first films inserted to wildly varying degrees of fit and effectiveness. So at this point, it’s really just about product now, and that’s a pretty dispiriting thing to realize when you’re trying to take these films seriously as creative works. A lot of things have been conspiring to keep me from working on this thing of mine for awhile now, but I’d be lying if I said that the prospect of having to grapple with such obvious cash grabs wasn’t part of it.

But here we are, with three more films out of nine to consider, so once more into the breach...

Retrospective: The Hellraiser Series, Part 1

I’ve made no secret over the course of this thing I’m writing that I don’t like the franchising of horror film. I mean, generally turning films into franchises is a bad idea when they aren’t really built for it, because it seems like over the course of any given series, you run the risk of taking what was interesting about the initial film and diluting it into a series of fanservicey gestures that end up not so much being films as allusions to previous films (“remember when this one character said that one thing two movies back?”), or the most superficial aspects of the initial film being reiterated until subsequent films are just expressions of some very basic narrative hooks (“what Rube Goldbergian demises await the hapless teens in this installment of Final Destination?”) instead of coherent stories. 

That sucks regardless. However, I think when it comes to horror it’s even worse, because part of what lends horror film power is the element of mystery, of the unknown, the unexplained, the unresolved. The best, most powerful horror is the horror that denies you the safety or comfort of understanding it. The best horror leaves us stranded in the dark when all is said and done. And franchises do not operate on that principle. Every subsequent film begins with us knowing a little more about the antagonist at its core, every subsequent film fleshes out the world that contains it a little more, every subsequent film leans more and more heavily on a gimmick or hook. Franchises explain, explore, and exploit. And so in horror, what begins as a story about a monstrous unknown invariably turns into crummy fantasy (e.g., the Nightmare on Elm Street films) or soap opera (e.g., the Saw films).

So yeah, fuck a franchise. But so far, I’ve based this argument on partial evidence. I confess to having crapped out of the Saw series halfway through the fourth one out of boredom, and there were...what, three or four more after that? Same with the Nightmare on Elm Street films - I’ve seen the first three and New Nightmare, but I know I’m missing a couple. So I’m going to try to work my way through a franchise, start to finish, by examining one that at least grabbed me the first time around.

I’m going to look at the nine films (to date) made in the Hellraiser franchise. I’ve seen the first four already just as a casual viewer, and the early ones were much more important to me as a young filmgoer and horror enthusiast than the Elm Street or Friday the 13^th films ever were, so there’s a sense of commitment for me that I just don’t feel with those others. These films definitely trace an arc from successful to bargain-bin, and I want to know how that happened and if there’s anything to be gleaned from them in this day and age.

Because there’s nine of them, I’m going to do three posts, each covering three films. Just as fair warning, they’re going to get pretty spoilery. So, without further adieu, let’s tackle the first three...

Se7en: The Way That Leads Up To The Light

It's rare that I remember the first time I watch a film, no matter how good it is. It’s just not the sort of experience that typically makes an impression on me. I remember the first time I watched The Shining, because I remember being utterly terrified by the ads for it as a child, and when as a teenager I finally gathered the courage to watch it, it was on network television, constantly interrupted by commercials and weather alerts, and even with the constant disruption it still reached right back to the deep nightmare part of my brain.

I also remember the first time I ever watched Se7en. I’d been waiting for it to come out on video because I missed it in theaters and all of the ads made it look really interesting as far as theatrical serial killer movies went. So for a couple of weeks I made a habit of swinging by my neighborhood video place to see if they’d gotten a copy in yet. One night I was coming back from a double feature at a small arthouse theater and stopped at the video store on the way home. It must have been 10:30 or 11 at night, but they finally had a copy. Despite the fact that I’d been watching movies for the better part of the night, I took it home and put it on. I don’t think I was able to fall asleep until about 3 or 4am after watching it, so afraid I was of closing my eyes. It made an impression on me as a film that on first viewing felt palpably evil - it shook and disturbed me in a way that few films had before or have since.

It opens in quiet and stillness, with a detective at home gathering the tools of his trade for another day at work. His beat is the city - it’s never specified where, it’s always just “the city” - and he surveys a crime scene with a practiced, weary eye. He’s William Somerset, and he’s seven days away from retirement. Other cops don’t seem too broken up about his leaving - they think he thinks too much, asks pointless questions. Somerset thinks down into the situation, looks at the world beyond its surface details, and it seems like a career of doing this has made him tired and sad, and he just wants to be over.

But it isn’t over yet, and he has to meet his new partner, David Mills. Mills chose to be transferred to a job in the city from somewhere out in the suburbs, and he’s pretty much the spot-on cocky new cop, all wisecracks and assertions that he’s not just some rookie and Somerset is not trying to hear it at all. He has no patience for this guy, he just wants him to stay out of the way until his seven days tick down. But they’ve caught another case, and it’s, well, it’s a weird one. In a squalid basement apartment, a man sits dead at a table, his hands and feet bound. He’s a very large man, and by all accounts, he was force-fed at gunpoint until his throat swelled from the effort of swallowing and his stomach began to tear. Behind his refrigerator, written in grease, the word “gluttony.”

There are seven deadly sins, and this is the first.

What sticks with me most about Se7en is its palpable cruelty - not just in the murders themselves, which are awful - gruesome in their literal instantiation of the sins they illustrate, but also in the way that the antagonist deliberately extends suffering to people beyond his victims. The wife of one victim is forced to look through the crime scene photos, her husband’s mutilated body barely obscured by sticky notes, and her fresh grief and pain in the face of the necessary task is awful. Another man is made complicit in the death of another - what choice do you have when a gun is in your mouth? - and it’s clear from his anguished testimony that he’s broken by this experience. It's one of the few serial killer films (a genre of which I am not fond) that bothers to acknowledge the pain and damage that the murders cause to the living as well, and the murders, though theatrical, seem grounded in a particular purpose, which is another element I think so many lesser films miss, mistaking elaborate staging as the end, rather than a means. We barely ever see the antagonist on screen, but the damage he does runs throughout the film, making him monstrous through his deeds rather than any elaborate costume or gimmick.

And the city is…well, not a character of its own, but certainly an insistent note underneath the proceedings. The city is what gives birth to these atrocities and lesser atrocities every day. Somerset takes a cab ride and the view out the window is vague shapes, bodies moving in the rain and it seems like something out of a Francis Bacon painting. It is a dehumanizing place, almost always raining, shabby gray buildings blotting out the sky. Nobody in this movie is happy, courtesy and warmth are in scarce supply. It’s a bleak place where vicious things happen and the best you can hope for is that you don’t have to step on too many bodies in the course of a single day. It’s almost tiring to exist in this place for the course of the movie. It’s a dark place, and that’s how I remembered it from my previous viewings, but my memory of the film is faulty - I always remember it as being shot as a very dark, gloomy film until the denouement, when everything brightens up, but that's not how it is at all. Light plays a huge role in this film throughout - friendly interiors are warm and golden, whether it's a new home or an old library, crime scenes are sometimes pitch-dark and illuminated only by flashlight, sometimes they're lit by the sun pouring in through the windows, sometimes they're fitfully lit by neon. People die in the most squalid of basement apartments and porn shops, and people die in office high-rises and penthouses, and the light shining upon their deaths is as different as they and their ends are. Characters are framed in light - soft light, hard light, they are backlit. I mean yes, light is an integral part of filmmaking and film viewing, but this is a movie about terrible, terrible things told in sunshowers and sunrises and sunsets and early evening dusk and the harsh light of high noon. It’s amazing how fallible memory is, or maybe how powerfully this film communicates its idea that my memories of it are that it is darker visually than it actually is.

This visual subversion extends to the characters as well. Mills and Somerset seem like a riff on the standard odd-couple cop duo - the mismatch of the weary vet with the wisecracking hotshot who come together and understand each other in the end - but they really are prickly and assholish with each other, it's not cliche. Somerset is thoughtful, cerebral, and entirely too old for this shit. We know this not because he keeps saying it, but we know it in his weariness, his resignation, his desire to be shut of this case so he can just serve out his last seven days and retire to someplace far away. He's seen too much and he can't bear to see any more. He’s not especially nice or sympathetic, but that’s what years of facing the worst of humanity does to someone who thinks and feels deeply. It curdles them. Mills is every cop cliche - he's mouthy, raring to go, sees the cases in black and white terms, but it's not heroic, it's frustrating. You want to reach out and shake him when he reduces the killer to a "nutball" because Somerset is right - this is someone with purpose and method and dismissing things that could get you closer to him is seriously irresponsible. Somerset tackles the case by reviewing Milton, Dante, Chaucer, the ideas of sin and repentance. Mills stares blankly at the crime scene photos. For Somerset, it’s important to know the killer, and for Mills the whole story is the crime. As the movie wears on, there's movement - Somerset's energy is renewed and he takes an active interest, and Mills shows some humanity through the cop façade. Much of this occurs in a nice dinner scene between Somerset, Mills, and Mills’ wife Tracy. She humanizes them, connects them, and helps to provide an oasis from the horror. They take the first steps toward becoming actual partners without everything being resolved neatly. They still disagree with each other, they still rub each other the wrong way, but they’re united in their desire to put a stop to the person committing these horrible crimes.

And the killer is a nice subversion of the typical movie serial killer as well - in the end, he is revealed to be essentially a nonentity, a total mystery in everything but his motives. For as profoundly disturbed as his surroundings reveal him to be (yet another crime scene of sorts, lit mostly in reds), he is remarkably composed and understated. We are denied the history or back story endemic to the most clichéd film depictions of serial killers - everything about him is made manifest in the acts we have witnessed, the carnage - physical and psychological - he has caused. He gives it all to his single-minded act of devotion and leaves nothing for himself, or for us. And in the end, when everything opens up in light and space and bright blue sky, one final atrocity finishes the story - the long struggle up to the light, through squalor and glamor, from the basement apartment at the beginning to the rural purity at the end, all of it was exactly as was planned, as it all had been all along, as if it had been foreordained, as surely as Scripture.

IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Available on Amazon Instant Video
Unavailable from Netflix

American Mary: Cut Deeper

One of the things scary movies do well is explore uncomfortable ideas and ask uncomfortable questions about justice, fairness, safety, good and evil, human frailty, the nature of life and death, stuff like that. All of our most cherished ideas about how the world works are capable of being put under the microscope, of going under the knife. They cut open our understanding of how everything is supposed to be and reveal the squirming guts within.

Okay, so that got more pretentious than I would have liked, but the point stands. Horror at its best often doesn't let us have the safety or sanctity of our illusions, and American Mary is a movie poised to dig deep into taboos about the body, only to shrink back from the real, frightening thing it could express. It has the knife in its hand, and flinches.

Mary Mason is a medical student, and a bright, promising one at that. She wants to become a surgeon - a demanding discipline in a demanding profession. Her teachers are assholes, but what's the old joke? "What's the difference between a surgeon and God?" "God doesn't think he's a surgeon." She's working hard, and she's broke. Medical school isn't cheap, and she's behind in her bills. In a moment of desperation, she answers an ad for some non-sex modeling/fetish/photography work. She puts on her sexiest lingerie and a long coat to go to her "job interview."

It's just as creepy and sad as you'd think. Show the club owner the goods, turn around so he can get a good look at her ass, give the club owner a massage. You can see the doubt, uncertainty, and discomfort on her face. But just as it's about to get sadder and creepier, someone barges into the room - there's a problem downstairs. It turns out someone's gotten hurt, and hurt badly, though it's never specified how. Mary's a medical student, and the club owner tells her that if she can fix this guy up, he'll give her $5000 and she won't have to show him her tits. What a deal. Mary keeps the guy from dying, takes the money, and runs home to throw up and freak out at what she just did. And then the next day, she gets a phone call from Beatress. Beatress works at the club, and heard about what Mary did. Beatress needs someone discreet, with medical training. Money is no object. Beatress has a friend who wants some surgery done.

Some very…unorthodox…surgery. Something surgeons won't do.

So Mary has a certain set of skills, and needs money. There are people who require those skills, and will pay a premium to get things done to them that the modern medical community won't do. Mary really needs the money, and that need takes her places she never thought she'd go.

It's as promising a premise as I'd want. I'm a sucker for hidden-subculture movies, where shit you'd never think existed not only exists, but there are entire economies built up around it, and are lurking behind any door, down any basement, on secret websites. The realities about illegal cosmetic surgery are horrifying enough that a horror take on them could make for a vividly disturbing movie, a look under some very real rocks at what squirms beneath them. Unfortunately, there are enough problems with American Mary that the possibilities largely go squandered.

One of the biggest problems is how tonally jarring this movie is - there are moments of real menace and discomfort, to be sure, but they're often juxtaposed with dialogue that's glib almost to the point of being goofy. Sometimes it works, helping to ground Mary as someone not in need of rescue - for good or ill, she knows what she's doing, and doesn't have a lot of patience for fools. It's especially effective when she's talking to someone she has horribly disfigured in the cool, even tones of a doctor providing post-op assessment and care, and there's a conversation scene at a party that's bizarre enough that it feels like an outtake from David Lynch's Lost Highway. Instances like those are good, helping to sell a feeling of increasing disorientation, disconnection, and unreality. But other times it completely undercuts the mood that has built up - I think it's meant to be blackly funny, but instead it yanks you out of the moment.

This disconnect spills over to the type of story the movie wants to tell as well - is it an account of one woman's moral and mental disintegration? Is it a journey into the depths of a bizarre, secret subculture? Is it a revenge story? It touches on all of these, but doesn't really earn any of them.

In the beginning, you get the sense that this is going to be the story of how Mary, initially desperate to fund her education, starts compromising her principles in ways that become increasingly horrific, except that after a couple of brief episodes of shock and revulsion, Mary is shown embracing what she does enthusiastically to the point of becoming something of a prima donna. It's not really about the increasingly bizarre things people are willing to do to their body, either, because very little of what's presented is really that outre anymore, and the most shocking things we're going to see are some of the first things we see. There's no journey from "odd, but what harm could it do?" to "really? Well, I need the money" to "oh holy shit what the fuck is this?" It gets weird early  and everything after that is going to be shocking at best to people with no previous exposure to the idea of body modification. On the other hand, if you've spent any time on the Internet or watching weird documentaries on TLC, much of this will not be anything new, and - at least in my case, as someone who's had a copy of Modern Primitives on his bookshelf for about 20 years now - not that shocking at all. There's definitely a revenge story to be told here, and the ideas and events related to it are some of the most effective parts of the movie, when it really hits a nerve with a feeling of casual disregard, almost contempt for the privacy and autonomy of someone's body.

But that's wrapped up by the end of the first act. The second act flounders, sort of poking at each of these different stories (and still at its best when it's focusing on the revenge aspect) to see what will work, but doing so without a sense of pacing or continuity. The third act loses the plot entirely, ending the film on a note so anticlimactic and unearned it felt like the filmmakers genuinely weren't sure where to go with their story and just decided to end it instead.

This is all the more disappointing because there's some real promise here - there's a great, varied visual palette at work, ranging from grimy, shadowy callbacks to the basement dungeons of Hostel to cool, gleaming operating theaters to airy loft apartments and warm, sensual penthouses. Some of the best-composed shots let their most important information happen in the background without calling extra attention to what's going on, often making what we see even worse, and there's both cleverness and restraint in how gratuitous gore is avoided - for a movie ostensibly about illicit surgery, we don't see a lot. Although the acting and dialogue don't work as often as they should, when they do connect well with the material, it lends a bracing acerbity to the darkest parts of the movie. And the basic idea is really sound, and between Mary's customers and her teachers, with her in between, there's a lot of room to explore the intersection of body image, consent, technology, power, and biology. But this movie doesn't dive in - it shrinks back, not just from spraying blood and guts everywhere, which is a good thing, but it shrinks back from the ideas as well.

The more I think about it, that restraint really does end up being the movie's undoing. I was really looking forward to a journey down the rabbit hole as Mary finds herself in a position to fulfill the needs of people with increasingly stranger and more specific desires, pushing the limits of what our body can and was meant to do, and coming out the other end completely transformed by her own transformative work, as monstrous as the monsters she makes. Instead, we got a Lifetime Movie of the Week about the extremes of cosmetic surgery, complete with an angry husband. There's no real interrogation of the ideas that technology makes our flesh malleable, and that desire can make the shapes it takes increasingly strange. There's no real, legitimate cost to Mary in what she is doing that we can see after the first 30 minutes or so. There's a germ of an idea that legitimate surgeons are just as morally corrupt as Mary, but that entire question is settled early and not revisited often enough to make it a source of tension or suspense, and in some moments when we should be experiencing real fear or disgust, goofy character moments distance and disengage us from sincere experience. For a movie about illegal surgery, it just doesn't cut deeply enough.

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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.

Sinister: Father Fails To Know Best

People make bad decisions all the time in scary movies, but they're typically made without all of the information we have as an audience ("don't read from that book, it's evil!"), or they're made under the assumption that that information is bad ("the crazed killer escaped the asylum? Nonsense! Besides, he will never get past us. Get out of here, you old fool!").  It's part of that whole "why didn't they just…" criticism I don't like. But every now and then, you get a movie where even discounting the supernatural or otherwise unrealistically horrible factors in play, people are making just shitty, awful decisions, and you can kind of see why things are going to turn out bad for them. Case in point? Sinister.

Ellison Oswalt is a true-crime writer whose last great success is ten years behind him. Oh, sure, he wrote a couple more books, but neither of them caught fire the way his best-seller did, and it's looking like he's out of gas. What's an author to do? He could teach, he could write or edit textbooks, but nooooooooo, that's not the life this married father of two wants. Why get a steady gig, one that will provide for your family, when you can continue to chase the sort of once-in-a-lifetime success few ever experience once, let alone twice or more? So Ellison and his family periodically pack up and move to the site of some horrible crime so Ellison can research it and write a book about it.

Needless to say, this behavior endears him to no one. He alienates law enforcement by being openly critical of them in his books, his kids are miserable from having to move around a lot. his older child has night terrors from wandering into Dad's office full of grisly crime scene information when he was little, and as much as Ellison talks about justice and telling the victims' story for them, it's just a speech. It didn't used to be, but now it's a line of patter, to reassure himself as much as his wife or the people who resent him moving in to their town to pick at the carcass of a recent tragedy. What he wants is wealth and fame and money. He wants another fifteen minutes. He watches old videotaped interviews of himself, warped and fuzzy from age, and it's hard to tell if he wishes he were still that person, talking so passionately about justice, or if he's contemptuous of himself for being so naive. 

So for his most recent effort, Ellison moves everyone to a small town in Pennsylvania, where a family of five has been horribly murdered, hung from a tree in their back yard. The youngest daughter went missing, and it's the missing-persons case on which Ellison is focused. Not content with just living in the same town, Ellison moves his family into the home where the murders took place, and then doesn't tell them that's where they're living. And yeah, I guess I can understand why, and sure, they got the house for a song, but come on. Even if there were no more to the story than that, that's a pretty creepy, shitty thing to do to your family, especially when one of your kids is already traumatized on some level by stumbling on some crime scene photos when he was 8 or 9.

And because this is a horror movie, there's definitely more to the story than that. Ellison finds a box labeled "Home Movies" in an otherwise totally empty attic, and inside there's an 8mm projector and several reels of film, labeled "Pool Party", "Family BBQ", "Lawn Work", etc. The first one is titled "Family Hanging Out", and it's innocuous footage of a family playing catch in their backyard, just chilling out…

…until it cuts to four bodies swinging from the very tree under which they were playing seconds ago. 

And the next reel, "Family BBQ", ends similarly. In fact, they're all home movies that end in horrible death for a family. and they date back to the mid 1960s. And for just a second, just a moment hanging in time, Ellison considers turning the film over to the police. But it's been ten years since he had a hit. So, instead, he watches another reel. And another, and another, damning himself more and more deeply every time he flips the Start switch on the projector. And that's when it begins. The mysterious figures, the odd noises in the attic, the sense that there is someone…or something…standing behind him, just out of sight. Because there is. Something ancient and terrible. 

It's like Jack Torrance moved his family to the Overlook specifically to write about all the horrible shit that happened there, and then was surprised when bad shit started happening

In a way, it's a Pied Piper/Peter Pan story, and you could argue that none of what happens would happen if Ellison would just grow up, quit chasing fame and fortune and start being a responsible husband and father for once. Which is nice to see in a horror film - it's not a character study, but it's nice to see something besides Average Family Moves Someplace Evil, to at least have an idea of why the protagonist is making the decisions he is. Likewise, the supporting characters seem believable as well - the sheriff doesn't want him in town for absolutely good reasons, and the obligatory Comic Relief Deputy ends up being one of the sharpest tacks in the whole story. In fact, the scope of the movie is small, and that's to its benefit. It all pretty much takes place in one house, and almost all at night. It almost feels like one of those movies where its constraints make it better - were it not for the budget and promotion behind this, I could totally believe it as an indie horror movie shot on the cheap by using a cast or crew member's house, and only shooting at night.

It's uneven as hell, though - the "home movies" are very well done, very uncomfortable, the grain of the film and the artificiality of the color make them queasy and disturbing. They look wrong and evil, and as Ellison spends more and more time looking into the story behind the murders, his world starts to become fragmented and artificial - not overly so, but just enough that it feels like the evil contained in the movies is starting to bleed through. And also? holy shit the sound design. The music is understated and uneasy in a way a lot of American horror movies don't get, the insectile scraping and squeaking of the film projector, the loud WHUMPs  and crashes and creaks coming from upstairs, all make for some excellent set pieces.

Maybe that's the problem - this is a bunch of good set pieces, but it doesn't all necessarily tie together as well as it should. Depending on what's going on at any given point, there are two visions for this movie. Is it an unsettling story about human weakness and frailty in the face of inexplicable evil, or is it a broad-strokes monster movie about some ancient bad guy with a specific M.O. and back story? You know, the kind of thing that lends itself to sequels and franchising? Well, where are we in the run time? 

These conflicting visions extend even to the aesthetic of the movie itself. As the supernatural component of the story becomes more manifest, it relies on makeup that doesn't stand up to close examination, and a lot of the dialogue and acting (though not all, which almost makes it more problematic) is just hokey and overdone enough that it makes it hard to take the movie seriously. Just as tension starts to ratchet up, or a mood is established, somebody says something or something pops up somewhere that just undermines all of the goodwill the movie built up to that point. This conflict ultimately compromises the story - a twist (one which someone observant has probably already guessed by this point, but no matter) is telegraphed before its formal reveal (which is one of the creepiest and most unsettling sequences in the movie) , so when the formal reveal does come, it's robbed of a lot of its power, and instead of saying "holy shit!" it just sort of lands with a "well, no shit." And, worst of all, I think, what could have been an effective, gut-punch of an ending is pretty much ruined by a cheap jump scare most likely designed to say HEY LOOK THERE COULD BE A SEQUEL SO LOOK OUT FOR SINISTER 2: SINISTERER! Even the end credits serve as an opportunity to back-load history for the ostensible Big Bad of the piece. 

One of the writers has apparently said (this from Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt) that the design for said creature changed from something less conventionally monstrous to what was in the movie because they were afraid that their original design would hurt the movies' chances at being franchised. If you read my blog on a regular basis, you'll know just how angry this makes me. If you haven't, these posts will give you an idea of why this makes me want to punch a producer or studio executive right in the heart.

That's the worst part of it, I think. It really sort of felt like a tug-of-war between a good, solid, scary film in the vein of The Ring and cheap franchise pandering - an opportunity for brand establishment instead of a movie first. Somebody wanted to tell a scary story about a man whose weakness costs him everything, and somebody wanted product with an identifiable central character to start a franchise, and the end result is just good enough to be a disappointment. We all lost.

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