Cobweb: Played

Goddamnit, I got suckered again. I just went through this a month or two ago with Pond, whose trailer looked eerie and unsettling, but as a whole movie was mostly a pompous, nonsensical slog. Sometimes trailers do take the absolute best bits in a movie and string them together, giving you the impression that yes, it’s all going to be like this. Sometimes trailers lie.

But at least with Pond, I was going in blind. Where Cobweb is concerned, I only have myself to blame. Well, myself and the filmmakers. People whose opinions I trust and respect found it disappointing, and under normal circumstances, that’d be enough for me to take that film off the list. But damned if the trailer for it didn’t make it seem spooky and menacing enough that it piqued my curiosity. As much as I heard it wasn’t very good, that trailer kept pulling me back, making me wonder if there wasn’t something to it. Well, the trailer got me again, because it managed to find the good parts of a film that isn’t even really the sum of its parts. It looks good, it has a reasonably good twist, but the execution’s all over the shop.

It's almost Halloween in an appropriately autumnal small town, and Peter is a little boy with a lot of worries. He’s quiet and shy, and thus a natural target for the class bully. But it’s more than that - he lives with his parents in an old, semi-spooky house, full of bumps and creaks as it settles on its foundations, as wood expands and contracts with the weather. It’s hard for him to sleep some nights, and he has nightmares sometimes. One sleepless night, he’d swear he heard knocking behind the wall, even though his mother says he just has a very active imagination. So he gets out of bed, and knocks on the wall himself. Something knocks back.

Something knocks back, and a small voice says “help me.”

The beginning of the film isn’t bad at all. There’s a chilliness to it, and Peter seems like a kid who is genuinely haunted by the shit he’s dealing with. But the problems start early. It seems like what was intended was for the story to start off being about this mysterious presence in the house, but as the film goes on, it will pivot to Peter’s parents maybe hiding some kind of terrible secret. You’ve got the concerned teacher who sees his behavior and when all of the kids in class draw Halloween-themed pictures, Peter draws something that any responsible adult is going to interpret as a cry for help. Is it the thing in the walls? Is it his parents? Is it both? And that’d be fine, but the first big problem here is that for something like that to work, you need for his parents to seem reasonable and loving and normal, right up to the point that the madness makes itself known. That way, the juxtaposition of their apparent normalcy and whatever comes through is upsetting, shocking, an “oh shit” moment. And from the very beginning, Peter’s family doesn’t seem normal at all. Right off the bat, there’s something really odd and off about them. It’s the same problem as how in The Shining, Jack Torrance seems dangerously unstable almost from the first moment he’s on screen, so his descent into homicidal madness really isn’t all that surprising. As a result, there’s no tension or contrast, and instead of an upsetting reversal of expectations, we’re left with a foregone conclusion, and so a lot of the movie feels like an exercise in waiting instead of something shocking and revelatory.

There are also problems with the flow of the narrative. The first two acts are oddly…not perfunctory, but there is the feeling of a bunch of sequences robbed of the connective tissue that would make it feel like a story. It’s one of those cases where it feels like the filmmakers had a bunch of spooky moments, rather than a fleshed-out narrative. The performances are generally stilted (except for Peter, whose actor does a pretty good job with what he’s given) because in part the actors have to deliver dialogue that’s clunky and artificial. Kids do not talk like the kids in this movie talk. Choices are made in the story that I don’t think hold up to real-world scrutiny, and seem made to position all of the pieces in place. There’s an air of contrivance to the story. It looks like things are going to improve in the third act with a pretty shocking act, but what should be a natural gut-punch of an ending ends up being just the beginning of a drawn-out, largely unnecessary confrontation. The climax consists of some pretty stock slasher-movie moments alongside a lot of unnecessary exposition that belabors a point that would have been better served by flashbacks instead of a bunch of stuff being said over and over and over again before the whole thing just sort of…stops. I get the sense that it was supposed to feel ambiguous, but it doesn’t, it just feels like they couldn’t think of a way to bring the story to a close, so they just ended it there. And it’s really frustrating because I see the pieces of what could have been a much better movie peeking out here and there. It’s got the courage to go to some pretty dark places, but once it gets there, it wastes the opportunity on the least interesting choices it could make.

I think this is why the trailer was so persuasive to me – trailers are basically isolated moments intended to sell the film, and this is a film that definitely has some really good isolated moments and imagery – the sheer, baffling strangeness of a backyard overrun with pumpkins, quick asides that communicate important details without being overdone, an impressively creepy nightmare sequence – but that’s all it is, a bunch of moments that never really come together, and what would have been a nice reversal of expectations squandered by letting it play out entirely too long until all of the implied horror is exhausted through over-explanation. Scares aren’t enough. It’s not enough to play the notes, you have to know why they’re being played in the first place.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
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Haute Tension: Final* Girl

It’s years in the rear-view mirror by now, but one of the through-lines for what got me writing about horror movies for fun was the New French Extremity. It’s not a label anyone really uses anymore, which is probably for the better, since - at least in terms of horror films - the whole thing sort of fizzled out quickly. To the extent it ever was a movement (which is debatable), it produced some excellent films, and some absolute turkeys.

Haute Tension (High Tension) is one of the most frequently mentioned examples of New French Extremity, but I have to say, it’s much closer to the turkey end of the continuum. What we basically have is an effective, if workmanlike, slasher film that starts off strong before being marred by a slack third act and what has to be one of the most head-clutchingly ridiculous twists I’ve ever seen in a film.

We begin at what is presumably the end. There’s a woman sitting on an examination table in a hospital gown. Through the gap in the gown, we can see that her back is striped with deep cuts and abrasions, some severe enough to need stapling shut. There’s a camera recording her as she mumbles something about nothing keeping “us” apart again. Then we flash back to this same woman, running through some woods, covered in blood. Something bad has happened, but we have to go back to the beginning to understand it. Marie (the young woman from the introduction) and her friend Alex are college students, off to Alex’s family home in the country to study for exams, far away from the distractions of the city. No booze, no parties, no boys. Lots of winding country roads, and they pass by a truck driver parked on the shoulder in a rusty cargo van. It becomes clear pretty quickly that he’s got someone else in the truck with him, in the act of fellating him. But Marie and Alex have driven on by this point. And they’re long gone by the time the truck driver tosses what turns out to be a severed head out the window. It’s a striking moment, I’ll give it that.

Meanwhile, Marie and Alex arrive at Alex’s house, and after meeting her folks and her little brother, Marie repairs to her guest suite to get some rest. It’s late at night, it’s been a long day, and it’s been a long drive.

It’s late at night, and there’s a knock on the door.

So I’d say it sets its stall out early, but in a way that really effectively builds the tension of the title. We’re introduced to Marie and Alex, take some time to get to know them and their whole deal, and then this sudden, shocking segment with the truck driver gets dropped into the story like a time bomb before returning to these young women on the road. Something very bad is going to happen, but it’s not going to happen yet, and now that we know this lunatic is out there, we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop, as Marie and Alex and Alex’s family are all blissfully unaware of what’s headed straight for them. In some ways, it reminds me of how the original Halloween teased Michael Myers through the better part of the film, always just slightly out of frame or out of focus or partially hidden behind scenery. The longer he’s out there, the worse it gets.

And I’ll say this, when this film works, its stock in trade is definitely tension. Once night falls, it doesn’t really take long for things to pop off. And once they do. they don’t really let up. We don’t really know anything about any of these people apart from Maria and Alex both being sort of party girls and Alex’s family seeming nice enough. But at least for the first couple of acts, sheer momentum gets the film over in the absence of much emotional investment in any of the characters. Once the action starts, it doesn’t really slow down. It’s a violent film (as slashers often are), but the violent segments are a mixture of off-camera restraint and almost confrontationally detailed. We don’t always see what’s happening, but what we do see is more than enough. There’s a lot of blood in this movie, spattering and pooling and spraying, and a lot of people in visible distress, and if it doesn’t always linger on the violence it does linger on their suffering and pain. It’s a grubby film as well – a lot of it is shot in sort of a sickly yellow that makes everything look sort of stained or used, at least outside of the farmhouse setting, and the killer is oily, sweaty, and grimy in a filthy jumpsuit, dirt under his nails, as bestial as his introduction would have you think. He doesn’t talk much, mostly just grunts as he brutalizes everything in his path. Crisp editing helps to keep the action moving, Marie trying to avoid this sudden menace in the confines of a fairly cozy farmhouse, so for the first couple of acts, it’s a film in almost constant motion. But that’s the first couple of acts. The third is where everything falls apart.

First, the film, despite being a French production, is dubbed into English, and although it isn’t too distracting at first (there is the odd verbosity you get when you’re trying to fit dialogue in one language to the speech patterns of another), as the film goes on more and more of the dialogue is in French and subtitled in English, and any attempt to make dubbed dialogue fit the actors’ speech goes right out the window.. It doesn’t seem like a stylistic choice, as much as someone just stopped doing their job. Why it wasn’t all in French and subtitled from the get-go is a mystery. I don’t know that it would have saved the film, but it would have seemed like less of a rush job. And for all of the tension of the beginning of the film, once the action moves away from the farmhouse the pace grows looser and looser until we’re left with a not-especially-exciting “chase scene” that consists of two cars driving at a sensible speed through the woods, capped by increasingly ludicrous levels of violence - cartoonish in a way that earlier moments weren’t - and false endings. It goes from claustrophobic and…well, tense…to something much more bland and formulaic.

But the worst of it has to be a reveal in the third act that makes very little sense in term of literally everything that came before. I don’t mind twists, for the most part. But a good twist relies on the film playing fair with the audience up to the moment it’s revealed, so that rewatching it (or even getting the flashback that spells it all out) gives you the opportunity to put the pieces together yourself, to see how the truth was staring at you the whole time. Clever use of misdirection and new context goes a long way, but this isn’t like that at all. It’s not just that there’s no opportunity to figure it out, or even anything we could observe that might suggest that not everything is as it seems. We actually see things throughout the film that actively contradict it. You can use clever staging of shots to hide things in plain sight, but this film doesn’t bother. It just…I guess for lack of a better term, it just straight-up lies about everything we’ve just seen, for no apparent reason. It adds nothing to the film except sort of a cheap “gotcha” moment. The end result is the feeling that the filmmakers had about an hour’s worth of a decently suspenseful if not especially substantive movie and realized they needed to come up with another thirty minutes, so they just sort of winged it. And it shows. In the sloppy dubbing, in a climax that wanders aimlessly, in a last-minute revelation that makes absolutely no sense, it fucking shows.

This is a film that gets mentioned as one of the biggest of the New French Extremity (for what little that’s worth), but it’s easily one of its biggest disappointments. It doesn’t have Martyrs’ well-crafted story, or Inside’s claustrophobic, confrontational tone. It’s closer to something like Frontier(s), with its reliance on blood and screaming and active contempt for storytelling. I was spoiled for the big twist going in (part of why I’ve taken so long to write about it) and I was still surprised at how half-assed it was. The more I think about this film, the angrier I get.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
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Seytan: We Have The Exorcist At Home

The Exorcist is one of the most well-regarded horror films ever made. It’s a classic, surprisingly forward and transgressive for its time. It’s scared the shit out of a lot of people. And like any successful horror film, it’s also spawned sequels, prequels, reboots, re-imaginings, almost all of which pale considerably next to the original. You don’t make something monumental without seeing it crudely duplicated over and over, every successive attempt missing the point more and more.

And I think the peak (or maybe nadir) of this has to be Seytan (Satan), a hilariously shameless Turkish rip-off of The Exorcist, its crudeness startling and comic in equal measure. I cannot call this a good film, but it’s definitely a ride.

It opens on an archeological dig in the Middle East, and a somber, bearded man combing through the unearthed artifacts. He finds a small, sinister-looking idol, stares at it meaningfully for a few minutes, before walking up to a larger idol to compare them. The larger idol, well…it looks like a papier-mâché attempt at Godzilla. This kind of ends up setting the tone for the movie in general.

Meanwhile, back in Turkey, Ayten is a well-to-do woman who lives in a large house with servants and her daughter, Gul. Her husband appears to be very absent, not even bothering to show up for Gul’s upcoming birthday. But Gul seems happy enough, a pretty regular kid who has an imaginary friend to keep her company and  a Ouija board to play with. Ayten’s got her hands a bit full, though – she has to plan Gul’s birthday party, figure out how to get Gul to warm up to her new gentleman friend Ekrem, and deal with that loud rustling and banging coming from the attic at all hours.

It sounds like a bunch of rats up there. 

Okay, so, when I say this is a rip-off of The Exorcist, we are talking damn near shot-for-shot, right down to a musical motif that sounds like Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” to a legally actionable extent. If you aren’t familiar with The Exorcist, just know that there are literally dozens of you out there. It’s basically the ur-demonic possession movie, the one that sets the standard and creates the vocabulary, for better or worse, for all of the ones that come after it. If you are familiar with The Exorcist, this is all going to seem very familiar. It opens in the desert at an archeological dig, moves to the home of a wealthy woman in the city and her daughter’s mysterious illness, the whole deal. Almost all of the beats are the exact same. Some adjustments are made for the replacement of Catholicism with Islam, but it’s all pretty vague on that front, sort of generically religious instead. The priests are replaced with an imam (the bearded man from the opening) and Ekrem’s friend Tugrul, who is an expert on exorcism and demonic possession as a cultural construction of mental illness. Tugrul has all of Father Karras’ guilt, having just put his mother in an insane asylum because he can’t care for her anymore. The crucifix that features in one of the most transgressive scenes in the original has been replaced by what looks like a letter opening with a devil’s head on it, but when I say it’s all the same beats, I mean it – the progression of Gul’s symptoms are the same, she undergoes the same grueling medical treatments, all the supernatural manifestations line up the same way.

But at the same time, it’s approximated so crudely that it comes out the other side as something much more bizarre and unintentionally comic. It's contemporary to the original (circa 1974), and was clearly made on the cheap even for its time, and the version I watched is not at all remastered or cleaned up or restored. It’s grainy, blown-out, there are moments where the quality of stock they’re using changes visibly so a few minutes have this bluish cast out of absolutely nowhere. They aren’t quite Manos: The Hands Of Fate-level production values, but they’re definitely close. This is especially evident in a burnt-in subtitled translation that had to have been done by the first person they could find with any grasp of English, for how inept it is. I’m used to translations missing the mark here and there, but this is egregious to the point that they sort of go on their own journey parallel to the film. They start off reading like they got run through a translation program a few times, and then you start to see editing marks intended to denote misspellings or unclear phrasing, left in the subtitles. But then it gets better, moving onto snarky asides about the dialogue and an honest-to-God parenthetical note to look something up on Google later. Nobody, and I do mean nobody, proofed these before superimposing them over the video file and this has to be the first time I’ve seen subtitles also serve as a Greek chorus on the quality of the movie and appear to turn self-aware. And that’s the unintentionally comic stuff. There’s also an actual punched-in-the-balls gag, complete with pained mugging, just sort of dropped into the middle of a scene. It’s like putting a pratfall, complete with slide whistle, into the middle of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

And yet, as comic as it is, the crudeness also gives it a fever-dream intensity that does serve as an interesting contrast with the original’s slow burn. This is a film that loves a sudden cut and a fast zoom, and quick cuts back and forth between close-ups. It likes to hold shots a little longer than you’d think (which makes Gul’s electroshock therapy especially disquieting, a genuinely unsettling moment in the middle of all the goofiness) and pretty much all of the shots are static. So that simultaneous urgency and stiffness, along with the surreally broken dialogue and low-budget effects best described as “chunky,” gives it a certain nightmarish edge as well.

It has none of the feeling of mounting dread that the original does, and there’s not a single ounce of subtlety or nuance to be found. It’s got pretty much all of the story beats of the original with little to no narrative connective tissue, just scene, cut, scene, cut, scene, cut, scene all the way to the end. But its weird primitive energy makes you feel like you’re not entirely sure what you’re seeing. It’s one of those films that feels like maybe you actually watched it late one night, or half-hallucinated it as you drifted in and out of sleep. Or like the cinematic equivalent of Ghana’s singular movie posters, something that bears some resemblance to the original film, while diverging in ways that careen off into the far reaches of sanity.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
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Asvins: Foregone Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

The Last Broadcast: Who Wore It Better?

I’m going to start talking about this movie by talking about a different movie. When The Blair Witch Project came out in 1999, it was something different. The use of the Internet to create a myth ahead of the movie and suggest that three people had actually gone missing was a big part of this, but ultimately it was the film’s conceit - that what the audience was seeing was the recovered raw footage shot by three film students in the days leading up to their disappearance. This was not what horror in the 1990s looked like, and it blew up big.

And, as is often the case, the success of The Blair Witch Project was attended by controversy, as people came out of the woodwork to claim that it plagiarized The Last Broadcast, which was, these critics would say, the real first found-footage horror film. So, as picky as I am about found-footage horror, I figured I should watch this at the very least as a historical artifact. And you know what? The claims are baseless. The Last Broadcast is barely a found-footage film. And even if it were first, The Blair Witch Project is significantly better. More to the point, The Last Broadcast is incoherent, amateurish to the point of ineptitude, and not so much poorly paced as not paced at all. 

On December 15th,1995, four men - Steven Avkast and Locus Wheeler, hosts of the cable-access show Fact or Fiction, Rein Clackin, expert in paranormal sound recording, and Jim Suerd, their guide, went into the Pine Barrens of New Jersey to investigate the legend of the Jersey Devil. Then, on December 19th, Jim Suerd comes staggering out of the woods, miles away from where they started, and calls 911 because the rest of them are missing. 

Two days later, the bodies of Wheeler and Clackin are found. Avkast is never seen again.

In the wake of these deaths, a documentary filmmaker named David Leigh has decided to make a film about the case and Suerd’s subsequent murder trial. The film is presented as that documentary, complete with talking-head interviews and examination of both archival footage and footage shot by the group in the Pine Barrens. Before getting into the film itself, I want to look at the idea that the filmmakers who made The Blair Witch Project plagiarized this film. It’s important to note that neither group of filmmakers ever dignified the idea - this seems, in retrospect, like a collective eruption of know-it-alls attempting to maybe gatekeep low-budget horror, I guess? Regardless of motivation, it’s a groundless assertion. The Blair Witch Project was already in pre-production by the time The Last Broadcast was released, The Last Broadcast isn’t really a found-footage film (arguably the first found-footage horror film is Cannibal Holocaust, made years earlier), and the only thing the two films have in common is “group of people who have no business being in the woods go into the woods and meet a bad end.” By that criterion, both films ripped off Deliverance. 

But again, the whole thing is irrelevant because as it stands, even if it were true, the people who made The Blair Witch Project made a far superior film by pretty much every metric. Or, to be less gentle about it, this is not a well-made film. It’s let down by its production design, its writing, and its pacing.

It's pretty clear that the entire production is a homebrew affair. That’s not an indictment in and of itself, I’ve seen any number of really good horror films made on a shoestring budget, and this was filmed for, like $900. That is, even by mid-90s standards, insanely cheap. But…it looks it, at every step. Part of doing something well on a small budget is knowing and working around your limitations. A film that is ostensibly the last footage of a bunch of dudes who go into the Pine Barrens to look for the Jersey Devil? That’s doable for not a lot of money. So it’s baffling as to why the filmmakers chose to make the film a mockumentary with only a smattering of found-footage set in the woods. None of the mockumentary stuff is believable. It works for the protagonists’ cable-access show, which is just as cheap and amateur hour as you’d expect, but when the whole film exists at that level, it looks like you’re just watching someone’s attempt to approximate something outside their grasp. Maybe two of the interior sets (that aren’t explicitly someone’s residence) are believable. A woman tasked with restoring some highly-damaged videotape has a “studio” in what appears to be a gutted or under-construction building, complete with plastic tarps everywhere. Jim Suerd’s “child psychologist” (who, against all ethical guidelines, is happy to talk about client sessions to a documentary film crew) is introduced…examining a dog in what appears to be a veterinarian’s office. Which suggests to me that he is, in fact, a veterinarian, not a child psychologist. This entire production is being directed by a former soap opera director (whose existence in the story is never really justified), and he appears to live in a single room with random post-it notes studding the wall behind him. Maybe he’s seriously down on his luck, but it kind of screams “wellness check.” A law enforcement officer from the county sheriff’s department wears an ATF shirt. Which is, well, a federal agency, and not a country sheriff’s department. Although he does have a hat with “Baroake County Sheriff’s Department” on it in what appear to be iron-on letters.

It’s not just that it looks cheap, it’s also that the filmmakers didn’t do the most basic due diligence on the elements of their story either. Forensic evidence is described as circumstantial evidence. IRC messages are apparently impossible to trace despite IP addresses being something even the most bottom-feeding script kiddie could access back then. On the other hand, their broadcast is described as being a “live Internet cable broadcast” in an era before livestreaming existed at all and video compression was still extremely primitive. All kinds of wireless Internet access tech that’s easily accessible today is handwaved into existence before the existence of commercial broadband or wireless Internet access. They’ve just got a bunch of desktop computers and video and audio gear set up in the middle of the woods under a plastic tarp without even a generator. Believability and realism are paramount for mockumentaries and found-footage films to work and nothing about this is believable or realistic in the slightest.

As poor as the attention to production detail is, the writing is even worse. Human beings simply do not talk like this. Some example dialogue:

“The magnifying glass of the prosecution’s microscope.” 

“We have found bodies. We don’t know who they are or how many we have found.” 

“I had heard of the Fact or Fiction murders. They were big news for a period of one year, and then like so many things in today’s fast-paced world, were forgotten.” 

“Our job is to eliminate suspects based on the evidence that we sift through and that we gather. And as we sifted through and gathered this evidence there was only one suspect left at the end.” 

“The tapes show a group of men going through a wide range of emotions.” 

This isn’t just stagey, artificially expository language. This is some Ed Wood shit. It makes sense for some of the characters to be inarticulate, but everyone talks this way. 

On top of all of this, the story and packing are clumsy and incoherent. The most violent thing that happens on screen (for most of the film) is a shove and someone half-yelling “I’ll see you at camp, man!” and this is treated as evidence that someone is a homicidal maniac. It’s barely a found-footage film, spending its entire first act in documentary mode setting up the whole situation and making a big deal about the footage they shot, only for us to be shown a few snatches of footage shot in the Pine Barrens, all of it too noisy and degraded to really be understandable (we get two people stumbling on a patch of blood, and some awkward conversation between the four of them, that’s about it) which is a fair amount of buildup for nothing. The third act bounces between the ostensible restoration of the rest of the footage (which even restored is too garbled to make sense of) and a rambling tangent about the nature of truth and how the real Jersey Devil is the media or something, climaxing in an utterly ridiculous non-sequitur of an ending that goes on far too long. There’s a reason this is consigned to historical curiosity.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

Hellhole: The Clue’s In The Name

(Just as a heads-up, I’m probably going to end up spoiling most of this one, but in a way it doesn’t really matter, because it’s nothing you won’t already see coming. This is in no way a subtle or surprising film.)

A good title can sell me on a movie. I’m a sucker for cryptic, oblique, understated titles (e.g., Hereditary, The Blair Witch Project) but every now and then there will be one that just begs viewing if only to find out what the hell it’s all about (e.g., The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Beyond The Black Rainbow). I think the problem, for me, is the ones that sort of fall in between, where they’re just sort of generically descriptive. Those don’t really spark the imagination, so it’s hard to imagine that the film will either.

This is one of many problems with Hellhole. It’s a film that is as dull, formulaic and obvious as its title would lead you to believe.

The film opens in Poland, in 1957. It is a dark and stormy night, and a car pulls up to a church, and a priest gets out, carrying an infant in his arms as he heads inside. He brings the child up to the altar, and proceeds to ask God for forgiveness as he pulls out a dagger. He’s going to kill the child, who has a strange birthmark on its shoulder. The police burst in and tell him to put the knife down. He tells them that they don’t understand, that this “evil seed” must be destroyed, and they gun him down for his trouble. If you’re wondering where you’ve seen this before, it was the end of The Omen, in 1976.

Flash forward thirty years, and a priest named Father Marek arrives at a monastery located way out in the sticks. They’ve largely been forgotten, or left alone, because they make a point of running a sanatorium for people who suffer from demonic possession, exorcising their demons and caring for them as they recover. As the prior sees it, it’s a necessary service that nobody wants to admit to. Father Marek is given a habit, a rosary (he brought his own), and his suitcase is searched. It’s very important, given their line of work, that earthly temptations are kept far away. His cigarettes and cell phone are confiscated. The evening meal is some kind of foul-looking gruel, dark and pasty, with…chunks…in it. Not that you expect ascetics to eat well, but this is especially unappealing.

After dinner, once he’s returned to his cell, Father Marek opens a hidden compartment in his suitcase. There’s a gun and a flashlight, and some news clippings about a series of mysterious disappearances in the area. The monks may have something to hide.

It’s a very dark movie. Not in the sense of sinister or brooding, just…underlit. It makes sense, since it’s a monastery, but it doesn’t help things. There’s some good, gloomy atmosphere toward the start but the rest of the film largely takes place indoors where everything looks the same. And this sameness is pervasive. I said up at the top that this film has many problems, and that’s not strictly true. It has one really big problem, in that it doesn’t have a single original or unpredictable bone in its body. You’ve seen all of this before, and it’s going to go pretty much exactly how you expect that it will, with an exception toward the end that doesn’t really help its case. As a result, there’s no tension, no surprise, and although it’s only 90 minutes long, it still feels like a slog.

It’s oddly devoid of tension, even in moments where there should be tension. Marek witnesses an exorcism that proceeds almost by rote - a young woman is bound to a bed, there’s prayer, she rears up and starts growling and convulsing, the bed starts shaking, and the prior’s crucifix bursts into flames. At no point does anyone evince anything stronger than mild concern. Most of them seem almost bored, and it certainly doesn’t look any different from any other exorcism you’ve ever seen in a movie before. The dialogue is serviceable (though the translation does make everything sort of an understatement) as are the performances and the soundtrack. Nothing special, but nothing awful. Just sort of there.  It’s just as rote in its action - Marek goes poking around where he shouldn’t be, not everything is what it seems, something spooky happens, rinse, repeat. And if that isn’t clear enough, the first act ends with a conversation (held in a confessional, because of course it is) that spells out what anyone actually watching the film has already figured out. No, Marek isn’t really a priest, he’s an undercover cop investigating the disappearances, which appear to be tied to the exorcisms they perform - exorcisms that the possessed inevitably don’t survive. Yes, of course they figure this out, and yes, the revelations you expect to follow - about Marek, about the monks, about what they’re really up to - they’re exactly what you’re anticipating them to be. There’s more to Marek than meets the eye (like the weird birthmark on his shoulder), it’s not by chance that he was assigned this case, and so on.

Normally I don’t like spoiling films that I’m writing about. Whether I liked it or not, someone should be able to watch it and decide for themselves, but this film is so predictable that anyone with any familiarity with the genre will, like I did, see every single beat coming. Until the very end, wherever you think the story’s going to go, that’s where it goes. There IS sort of a twist in the third act, and in theory it’s one for which I have sort of a perverse appreciation, but it’s handled so anticlimactically, it lands with such a thud that it’s actually more comic than anything else. In that moment, it almost felt like the film was shifting course to become a spoof of the sort of film it had been sincerely up to that point. Which is certainly a choice, though I can’t say it’s a good one.

And then THAT twist is reversed, but the filmmakers don’t bother to offer any narrative logic for it, almost like they realized that otherwise the film won’t have an ending, just a bunch of monks standing around saying “welp,” so nope, that didn’t count. I do have to give the film credit for not copping out on its ending (which contains the only interesting imagery in the entire film), but it’s far too little, far too late. The climax takes place in a cave under the monastery, around a well that is a portal to hell. A literal hellhole. It is a hole...to hell. This is what we have to work with here.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Sweetheart: Going Off-Course

(Sorry to drop two spoilery posts in a row, but I’m going to have a hard time talking about this film if I don’t reveal some events in the second half of the film. If it’s one you’re interested in watching, go watch it and then come back here.)

It wasn’t until I sat down to start writing this that I realized I’m covering films about someone stranded on an island with something bad two weeks in a row. And, unfortunately, I’m pretty disappointed with the results two weeks in a row as well. That said, I don’t think it’s anything inherent in the premise. The problems with The Isle were systemic and consistent throughout the film, and in the case of Sweetheart, I think it’s more a matter of an initially promising film that takes a hard turn. It starts off as a brisk, understated story of survival, veering into something else at the halfway point - something much more conventional and much less interesting.

The film opens cold, no title or anything, on a young woman named Jenn washed up on a tropical shore. There’s some wreckage scattered about, and it’s clear there’s been a shipwreck. Once she recovers her wits she discovers someone else, badly injured by a chunk of coral jutting out of his side. It’s apparent she knows him, calling him “Brad,” freaking out at his condition and crying out for help. She tries to remove the coral and staunch the bleeding, but Brad dies of his injuries. Traumatized, Jenn sets to work figuring out how she’s going to survive, looking for fresh water, a source of food, and a way to make a fire. She moves inland in her search, and finds the remains of an old campsite - a backpack hanging from a tree, an old cooler, and a tent long-buried under vegetation. It’s clear this stuff has been here a long time, and there’s no sign of anyone else on the island. This campsite was abandoned suddenly, a long time ago.

Eventually, Jenn comes to grips with the realization that she can’t just leave Brad’s body to rot on the beach. Fighting nausea and horror at her situation, she digs a grave on the beach and buries him. She scavenges matches and some other stuff from the abandoned campsite and eats a small shark that had washed up on the beach…a shark marked by deep furrows and gouges.

At night, there are strange growling and chittering noises coming from the jungle. Something big and heavy walking around. And in the morning, Brad’s grave is empty, the body pulled out and dragged…somewhere.

Soon after, the body of someone else from the boat - a young man named Zack - washes up on shore, badly mangled and torn in half.

The film begins on a fairly strong note, and for its first half, it’s taut, terse, and efficient. It’s just Jenn on the island, figuring out how to survive, which increasingly involves trying to avoid whatever creature is roaming the island at night. There’s minimal dialogue (almost none after the first ten minutes or so), no music to speak of, and scenes transition crisply between one point in time and another, cutting between them sharply in a way that communicates Jenn’s predicament. When the monster comes at night, it’s all inference and suggestion through sound design, and clues left behind during the day, marks of its passing. We only glimpse it once, from very far away. So we know it’s there, but it isn’t overplayed. It’s a film that feels like it’s going to be about a battle of wits and strength between a determined young woman and some strange predator.

Had it continued in this vein for the entire film, it would have been reasonably good, albeit with some plausibility issues (I kept thinking to myself “how is she managing to stay so clean, and where did these other changes of clothes come from?”), but on balance it’s engaging enough at the start that those things didn’t really distract too much.

But then the situation changes and what was a minimalist story of one person’s attempt to stay alive against both a hostile environment and some kind of predator devolves into a soap opera. At about the halfway mark, after Jenn manages to figure out how to stay safe at night (with some close calls), a raft washes up on the beach. Inside are Mia (who was apparently Brad’s girlfriend) and Lucas (who is apparently Jenn’s boyfriend). They’ve both managed to survive for a few days on the open water. At first, they’re happy to see Jenn and relieved to be off the water, but when Jenn becomes insistent that they leave as soon as possible, Lucas and Mia…well, they just turn shitty. They’re whiny and passive and don’t believe Jenn’s account about the creature stalking the island, going from zero to paternalizing in the blink of an eye. They’re deeply unpleasant, and Lucas confronts Jenn in a really nasty fashion, talking about how she makes it so hard for people to believe her and how the only reason she was even on this trip is because he pays her way in everything. He tells her she has no prospects, no future, and nobody else who really cares about her. It’s hard to tell if it was intended to reveal that Jenn was stuck in an abusive relationship, or if it was just a ham-fisted way to cast doubt on the things we’ve seen from Jenn’s perspective. 

The performances aren’t great, the dialogue isn’t great either (this was a much better film when people weren’t talking), and because Jenn’s black and both Lucan and Mia are white, we’re basically watching white people tell a black woman that she’s a pathological liar who can’t take care of herself, and that nothing she says happened to her was true. In the moment it feels really gross. Maybe it was intentional, allegorical of the experience of Black America, bur it isn’t at all clear if that was the intention. It feels more like a really unsubtle attempt to cast doubt on what we’ve seen so far, to suggest that maybe this is all in Jenn’s head, and it doesn’t really work.

What was a story about one woman’s survival ends up turning into a half-baked psychological thriller that throws Jenn under the bus without ever really fully committing to the shift - there are hints and feints at something more going on, (mostly in how Zack managed to get separated from Mia and Lucas, which they’re evasive about) but they’re never explored and it’s hard to tell how much of it is just down to really artificial performances. And then, in the final act, it pivots yet again into what is basically a slasher film’s climax, Final Girl badassery and all, only with a guy in a monster suit instead of a masked killer. Indeed, a monster that was only hinted at and suggested for the majority of the film get puts front and center for the conclusion, and like most monster effects, the longer it’s on screen the less believable it becomes. And at the same time the film stops being about Jenn on her own and starts being about how maybe she imagined it all because she’s such a terrible person, the music that had barely been in the first half of the film becomes much more prominent in the second half of the film, ominous, pulsing synthesizers which work fine, but further highlight the ways in which the film has become something much more predictable.

There was something more promising here - the beginning of the film depicts the creature as an almost supernatural force, dragging its food into a mysterious black hole in the ocean floor, with one woman against the elements and this thing trying to kill her, all told as much through inference and detail as anything else. If the filmmakers had stuck to this conceit, I don’t know that it would have been a masterpiece or anything, but it would have been better than I expected going in. But as it is, that wasn’t enough, and trying to stuff a clumsy attempt at psychological horror and an action-packed climax in as well feels either like a lack of focus (I do not understand how this film required three writers) or something like artistic cowardice. It’s a film about a shipwreck that went off-course and sank.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon

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
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The Devil Below: Expect The Expected

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

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

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

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

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

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

…or keep something in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
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Rattlesnake: Not So Much A Slow Burn As No Burn

Different types of stories require different types of pacing. If you’re telling the story of someone who gradually finds their normal life turned upside down, you probably want to go with a slow burn, gradually escalating the tension to a late-film reveal. On the other hand, if you’re telling the story of someone put into an impossible situation, in a fight for survival or a race against time, you’re going to want to keep things tense and fast-paced, to communicate a sense of urgency.

Pacing isn’t the biggest problem with Rattlesnake, but it’s definitely right up there. It’s a dull, interminable, and formulaic exercise, almost entirely devoid of tension or surprise.

The movie opens with a woman and her daughter driving down a long, lonely stretch of Texas highway. The woman is Katrina, and apparently she and her daughter Clara are “starting over,” though exactly what that entails is never made clear. They’re playing an alphabetical version of I Spy to pass the time while they drive. Katrina’s also really big on inspirational podcasts, real power of positive thinking-type stuff.  She and Clara have a conversation about a boy at school who was bullying Clara’s friend. Clara says he deserved to get hurt. Katrina admonishes her, saying “nobody deserves to get hurt.” Even if you don’t know what’s coming, it’s a little on the nose. 

And sure enough, their car blows a tire, and when Katrina pulls over to change it, Clara wanders off and gets bitten by the titular rattlesnake. They’re in the middle of nowhere, Katrina can’t get a phone signal, and her daughter is worsening fast. Katrina spies a trailer in the distance, and although it appears deserted at first, a woman emerges from the back and says she’ll take care of Clara. We don’t see what happens, but Clara’s symptoms subside and the woman directs Katrina to the nearest town, telling her “we’ll discuss payment later.” Once they make it to the hospital in tiny little Tulia, TX, doctors determine that she doesn’t have anything worse than heat stroke, and look at Katrina strangely when she insists she was bitten by a snake. And then a well-dressed man walks into the room after the doctor has left, telling Katrina that he’s here to discuss her payment. Katrina reaches for her insurance information. 

“No,” the man says. “Your other payment.”

It’s very simple, the man says. In exchange for Clara’s life, Katrina must take the life of another person, and it must be done before sundown if she doesn’t want Clara’s healing to be undone. Clock’s ticking.

The premise is established early on, and the biggest problem with this is that little is done to develop the story beyond that. It’s pretty simple - Katrina needs to kill someone in this small town before the sun sets or her daughter will die. And there’s not much to it outside of that. So what this means is that Katrina looks for opportunities to take a life, but you know they’re doomed to fail, because at that point the movie will be over and at this point it’s only about fifteen or twenty minutes in.. For a story in which someone needs to die by sundown, there’s surprisingly little feeling of desperation or urgency. The stakes are literally life and death with a running countdown, but the pacing is sluggish, and Katrina never really registers more than what seems to be mild dismay at her situation, so there’s very little sense of momentum or tension. It all feels…leisurely, settling quickly into a rhythm of Katrina looking for an opportunity, then blowing that opportunity, then some mysterious apparition shows up and does something spooky to remind her of her obligation, rinse, repeat. I found myself saying “how much longer until this is over?” only to realize it was just the end of the first act. I’ve seen some formulaic horror films, but this one almost aggressively failed to hold my attention.

It’s not just the pacing either, there’s also an absence of real stakes as well. Katrina looks for an easy, justifiable victim, and the film front-loads her hard as someone who doesn’t believe in hurting other living things (apart from the “nobody deserves to get hurt” exchange at the beginning, there’s an animal-rights  “Friends, Not Food” bumper sticker on the back of her car, and though they don’t tattoo KILLING IS BAD on her forehead, they might as well). This means the entire premise of the film is a setup to see what it takes to get her to sacrifice her values, and it’s pretty shallow in that respect too. Another source of tension should be the act of pushing Katrina to do something contrary to her core values. We should get a sense of what this is costing her, she should look tortured, desperate, sick with the idea of what she has to do, and she never really seems more than a little worried. There’s no real journey there either - she looks for the easiest, most justifiable targets possible, the film hands her a false start or two before settling on a cartoonishly bad person who totally deserves to die, so it never feels like a challenge or a real conflict. It never rises above the level of cliché, and although it didn’t end exactly how I expected it to, it feinted toward that ending before shifting to some seriously contrived bullshit that took almost all responsibility off of her shoulders, so she barely had to compromise her principles at all and got what she wanted. 

Oh sure, the film tries to end on a spooky note, but it mostly lands flat because it’s not clear what the implications are. I’m certainly a big fan of not overexplaining, especially where the supernatural is concerned, but all of this feels a little out of nowhere. Apparently this town is plagued by mysterious random murders that are the result of people getting caught in this bargain but it’s not clear why or how, and the appearance of previous victims as messengers to Katrina would probably be a little spookier if you didn’t come to expect them like clockwork by the second act. So this might be one of those rare case where I’d like a little more than “oooh, a ghost healed her daughter and now she has to kill someone.” 

I think maybe the best way to describe this film is as deeply mechanical. It’s shot and lit like a well-budgeted TV show, and the soundtrack smothers everything in a layer of ominous ambient sounds, pounding drums, shrieking strings, there’s nothing subtle about it - everything is punctuated with musical stings just in case you don’t know it’s scary. It’s one of the films where you can see all of the moving parts, where it feels about as inorganic as possible. Sure, there are some gorgeous shots of what appears to be central Texas, and the scene where Katrina learns the price of her daughter’s rescue is nicely creepy (because at that point it hasn’t been done over and over again), but that’s about it. Otherwise, you have a pretty good idea how the whole thing is going to play out, more or less, before the first act is over and at no point does it ever surprise. It’s a race against time that meanders, with a central conflict that doesn’t cost the protagonist a thing, and is so predictable that you don’t even really need to watch it to know how any given scene is going to play out. It doesn’t really play as a slow burn, because it never even rises to a smolder. It just sits there, inert and obvious, nothing new.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix