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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Available on Netflix

Four Boxes: Bait And Switch

I'm not especially picky when it comes to the movies on which I'm willing to take a chance.  Some movies are going to be a pre-sold commodity for me because of the director or what I'm able to glean from a trailer. Then there's all the ones about which I know next to nothing - the Netflix Instant queue is great for these, because for every two or three direct-to-video hack jobs, there's one hidden gem. If I'm a little judicious, I don't run into too many stinkers - usually if the premise sounds interesting to me (not too hackneyed or hackneyed in a way I like) and it's got more than one or two stars, I'll give it a shot. At the very least, I'll run into something flawed with potential, or a good idea brought low by poor execution.

Four Boxes is none of these.

Part of the problem starts right out of the (hahaha) box. Here's the premise of the movie:

Trevor and Rob are enterprising young men who run an eBay business specializing in the liquidation of unclaimed estate property. They look for recent deaths in the obituary section and check to see whether or not the deceased has any next of kin. If not, they basically clean out the property and auction the person's possessions on eBay. Ghoulish? Yes. Sleazy? Kind of. Truth be told, one of the few successful things about this movie is how well it portrays the sheer awfulness of the kind of people who'd make a living doing this (the name of the business? "Go Time." So, you know, nice). Their most recent score is a bland McMansion in the middle of some unnamed suburban development. The previous occupant left behind what appeared to be a life of bleak desperation. No furniture to speak of, just mattresses and a lot of boxes and Tupperware bins containing all of his stuff.

Upon investigation, it emerges that there were some not-quite-right things about the previous occupant. He appeared to be suicidal, certainly depressed, mourning the loss of a wife who apparently hung herself in the basement. Photo albums full of defaced pictures, faced cut out or scratched through. Cryptic notes and codes. Odd collections of objects. Rob discovers that the tenant was following a mysterious website called "fourboxes.tv", ostensibly a voyeuristic webcam site where the original occupant (a hot girl) had moved out and not removed or switched off the webcams. As a result the current tenant was under surveillance without their knowledge. As it transpires, the new tenant is up to no good.

So, you've got two guys going through the personal effects of a deeply disturbed man who was obsessed with an equally disturbing website. On this basis, I was happy to say "okay, let's give it a shot."

But that's…the premise. The execution reads more like this:

Trevor and Rob are shiftless, obnoxious manchildren who speak in appropriated slang slathered with a layer of irony so thick that their voices practically come equipped with air quotes. They see their efforts to resell the property of dead people as a way to get rich, something they can eventually franchise. They are stunted in their lives and relationships, incapable of honest communication. Trevor is slightly more mature, but this just means that he's more sleazy than anything else, and Rob is, in many ways, infantile. Think of Dante and Randal from Clerks with absolutely no charm or redeeming qualities. These, ladies and gentlemen, are our heroes. Their arrival at the house is followed by a desultory examination of the deceased's effects, complete with contemptuous mockery of the man's life and how he must have arrived at the end of his rope. They toss keepsakes and mementoes around, parodying the grief he must have felt.

Into this modern exercise in grave desecration steps Amber, Rob's fiancée (and Trevor's ex-girlfriend). She's equally as horrible as they are, just as prone to completely empty, inauthentic conversation, punctuated with terrible songs played on an acoustic guitar. These three are our protagonists, and they are so disconnected from any sort of empathy as to border on the autistic. Thirty minutes into the movie, I looked at my wife and said "I cannot wait for these people to die." So yeah, it's going to be very difficult to identify with these three. They're as empty and soulless as the suburban sprawl outside their window.

The titular website is equally inert. We're supposed to be watching somebody engaging in scary, dangerous behavior remotely, but it's almost impossible to make out anything on the webcam footage. Everything has been treated with what appears to be a heavy posterization filter, so we get still-frame sequences of muddy color to which the protagonists react with, well, mild interest. The surveilled occupant appears to be a man who walks around his apartment in a gas mask with a towel over his head like a hood. Rob calls him "Havoc." Why? Who the fuck cares? 

Nobody comments on Havoc's strange getup, and there's never really any progressive sense of danger from the website. Every now and then one of the characters looks at it, registers that they're looking at it, maybe invites over one of the others to look at it, and that's pretty much it. Even in the house of a disturbed dead man, watching footage of someone who might be a killer over the Internet, they're more occupied with themselves than anything or anyone else. They come up with cute names for the people they see on the camera footage, and when Amber points out that maybe they should call the police because it looks like Havoc has imprisoned someone, Rob scoffs, saying that nothing on the Internet is real, and even if it is, it's someone else's job to do that. The incident is soon forgotten. 

This is pretty much all the movie is, until close to the end. Inert sequences of three awful people sitting around talking about nothing in the most annoying way possible, and reacting to a possible real-world atrocity like they would an embarrassing video on YouTube. There's nothing scary about Havoc or his potential plans - there's some nonsense about him being a terrorist, building bombs to put in people's tailpipes, and he apparently kills people with a leaf blower, but that's about it. The closest thing the movie has to a climax is preemptively negated by a plot reveal that is probably supposed to shock the viewer, but doesn't because it's just as detached and hackneyed as the original story, making some kind of heavy-handed point at best, and at worst coming off as something the creators did because they had the attention span of a crack-addicted squirrel. This twist is upended yet again, but by that point there's absolutely no reason to care, and all of the arty match cuts and slow dissolves in the world won't give the ending impact. Somebody either thought they were being artistic, or maybe just "artistic", as an ironic comment on artistry in the age of webcams and YouTube.

And out of everything about this movie, I think that's probably the worst part - it refuses to commit to its premise, almost as if that level of sincerity is a bad thing, as worthy of derision as the sad testament to a sick man's last days. It sabotages its own story at every turn, by giving us nobody to care about, by refusing the buildup of any tension or sense of fear, by throwing in twists which not only negate everything that came before, but seem almost contemptuous of the audience, revealing the fraud of the filmmaking process (oh yeah, I get it - what we SEE isn't always what IS, wow, that's "deep", man…) and letting the entire enterpise slowly collapse like a balloon losing air. We're told that we're going to get a story, and what we get instead is the message that wanting a story or expecting to feel something in response to what we're watching is for losers, and this movie doesn't earn that. It's a trite, self-indulgent, piece of shit.

IMDB entry

Purchase from Amazon

Available on Netflix

Fun With Google 2

So what search terms come up this week?

Okay...

artwork naked "women on crosses"

i wish you'd get human centipeded

...what?

Gaze into the search engine abyss, it gazes into you also.

The Broken: Through The Looking Glass

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

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

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

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

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

How often do we think about mirrors, really?

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

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

IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Available on Netflix

Fragile: A Delicate Balance

Good ghost/haunted-house movies are usually studies in winding the audience up. They start quiet, with lots of breathing room between the scary bits, then bring the weird progressively faster and heavier until everything's fallen apart and the protagonists are running for their lives. They're basically extended crescendoes. This works because you've got a threat that can come from anywhere at any time, in any form possible. Long stretches of quiet punctuated by the unfriendly unknown make us really tense with little relief. There's not much room for catharsis, so the final act comes down on top of all of our accumulated anxiety like a freight train. At least, that's the idea. Maintaining this state of ever-mounting tension requires careful pacing. You can't ratchet things up too slowly or the tension dissipates. You can't pile it on too quickly or it becomes shrill and you numb the audience for the rest of the movie.

Fragile does a fine job at this balancing act up to the point when it falls down the stairs, scattering mood everywhere and rolling to an ungainly stop at the bottom.

Amy is an American nurse freshly arrived in England. She doesn't seem too excited - all things considered, she seems sad and haunted, not quite present. She's accepted a temporary position at a hospital located in a remote part of the Isle of Wight - accessible by ferry and a long drive through the woods. The hospital is in the process of shutting down in favor of a larger, more centrally located facility. It's an old, suitably gothic building, filled with bustling workmen and stacks and stacks of boxes and containers. This is a building at the end of its history, its stories to be locked up and razed, buried forever.

Amy's been hired to take care of the last group of patients to be relocated - some children with chronic medical problems who are going to need special attention. She'll be their night nurse, checking respirators, calming them when they wake up suddenly, making sure nothing happens to them in the small hours. Not especially prestigious work - by nature she's a temporary hire, but the nightmares Amy has about some terrible accident on the job in her past suggest that maybe this was all she could get. So she sits in a little island of light, watching a staticky TV, venturing out into the darkness to use the bathroom, to check on the kids. At night, the floor is very, very empty.

Then the noises start. The ones coming from the floor above them. The floor that's been closed up and left abandoned since 1952.

Fragile gets off to a good start - everything is drained of color, and cool blue tones dominate. It's often raining, or just done raining. Amy is distant, slightly hostile. She doesn't want to be here but doesn't have a choice. Not your conventional heroine, and making even her a little unsympathetic just adds to the gloom. Night in the hospital has that natural spookiness that any old, empty building does. Everything is quiet and still, and the shadows stretch out forever. Exactly what you want for a tense, drawn ghost story. You can imagine a pale figure just melting out of the shadows, reaching for Amy to show her some terrible secret.

But that's not really what happens. As things get weirder and weirder, the histrionics get turned up entirely too soon, across the board - Amy heads right for "I know you don't really know me but YOU MUST BELIEVE ME" territory without much layover at "what the hell is happening," the suitably atmospheric score acquires a bad case of soaring, minor-key strings over pretty much everything, and the malevolent presence not only starts lashing out at everyone, but makes itself entirely too visible too soon. You don't want to show the goods too quickly or for too long in a ghost story, since it's that invisible menace that's made audiences so freaked out up to this point. Finally putting a face to it makes it something more like a monster movie. In this particular case, some of the presence's specifics stretch internal plausibility a little, and the makeup effects aren't up to snuff, so you get entirely too good a look, and it stops being scary. When you should be thinking "ohshitohshitrunrunrunrun", you're thinking "that actually looks a little silly." 

So, when we should be at a fever pitch (the kind that makes you scream out loud at the next thing that happens), we're left saying "okay, so…they're going to get out now, right?" And unfortunately, this disappointment extends itself to the conclusion, which doesn't have the courage of the beginning's convictions. The movie walks a tightrope between showing too little and too much, and ends up trying to run full-tilt to the end of the wire.

IMDB entry

Purchase from Amazon

Available on Netflix

Fun With Google 1

Okay so whoever ended up here after a search for "porno room of torture"?

YIKES. Backing away slowly.

Yellowbrickroad: Miles To Go Before You Sleep

Every now and then, there comes along a really good scary movie that manages to combine or change up conceits and make it work. Yes, this stands in opposition to my contention that a good scary movie should find a narrative line and stick to it, but when a well-made film manages to upend your expectations or provide something aesthetically novel, it can make for some breathtaking filmmaking. Martyrs comes to mind, as do Cthulhu and The Descent. To that list, I'd like to add Yellowbrickroad, a powerful, well-executed exercise in creeping madness.

In 1940, everyone in the small town of Friar, NH up and left. They walked away from their houses, from meals on the table, from their lives, to head up a trail outside of town. Rescue parties found nothing but corpses - some dead of exposure, more slaughtered by an unknown hand, many more completely missing. Eventually, the town was repopulated. Curiosity seekers came, but nobody could find the trailhead, and the locals weren't about to tell anyone. Friar is a town with a secret.

Cy and Melissa, along with their psychologist friend Walter, have made a long-term hobby out of the study of the Friar disappearance. They've hit a lot of dead ends, followed up a lot of fruitless rumors and false leads. But finally, after much hammering away at New Hampshire bureaucracy, Cy has managed to secure the original case file with the coordinates for the trailhead. This is big. The three of them organize an expedition, adding forestry expert Teddy, mapmakers Erin and Daryl, and medical intern Jill to the team. They're fully equipped and supplied, they're all competent hikers, and their purpose is clear as they set off for Friar.

The locals in Friar are appropriately surly and insular - not just for a shunned town, but for New England in general. So when the GPS coordinates they have for the trailhead dead-end at a movie theater in the middle of town, it's like the town itself is trying to give the expedition the cold shoulder. One local - Liv - takes pity on the group and promises to show them where the trailhead is actually located if they take her along. She's got her own gear, she knows how to get around in the woods, she won't be a burden, she promises.

Good to her word, Liv shows them a trail up into the high country, marked with a stone that says "Yellow Brick Road" on it. Apparently, The Wizard of Oz was a big local favorite. Daryl and Erin take sextant readings, write down coordinates, do the math. Cy takes photographs, and Walter runs everyone through videotaped tests of cognitive function to make sure the expedition isn't getting to them. It's a long trail, and the further in-country they hike, the longer it seems. Daryl finds a hat - it's old, definitely from 1940, but looks like it was abandoned earlier that day. It freaks everyone out a little.

They hike further in, and begin to hear music. It's from The Wizard of Oz. The GPS tells them they're somewhere in Bolivia. The music gets louder. Walter tests Cy, asks him where he was born.

"I was born…I was born on the trail."

It's a good movie that manages to make the wide-open spaces and big sky of the New Hampshire wilderness seem claustrophobic and oppressive. Small things go wrong, then bigger things, then even bigger things until the true scale of what is happening crashes in on us like the music that haunts their every step, crescendoing into suffocating, ragged noise. These are seven people drowning in the forest around them, being swallowed up by a wilderness that does not obey nature's laws.

Yellowbrickroad does a good job of making you feel the weariness and isolation of the protagonist's situation - they're prepared, they're geared up, they're competent, and none of it matters. When they fall apart, it's messy and slow and sad. You root for them to stick together, but there's a dreadful inevitability to it all, and the worse it gets, the weirder it gets. It'd be too simple if they were just picked off by some unknown evil, one by one. It's less like they're singled out and more like they're at the mercy of some natural event that's as unnatural as possible. There's something wrong about these woods, and there always has been. This isn't a "who will survive" movie. This is a "how bad is it going to get" movie, and the horrors it has in store unfold implacably, until the breaking point is reached, at which point it gets even weirder, and even worse. These people wanted to know what happened to the town of Friar in 1940, and they get their wish.

Don't get me wrong, there are couple of missteps - for a movie that relies on a slow, deliberate buildup of dread, some things happen a little too quickly, and it's noticeable. The practical effects in one scene are just clumsy enough that it takes you out of the movie for a minute, and at a pretty crucial point too. Although these are disappointing blemishes, the movie as a whole does a good job of bringing you back in by being visually striking and inventive, using simple effects (and excellent sound design) to create an almost Lovecraftian sense of cosmic terror. The whole third act is a headlong plunge into nightmare, and by the time the credits rolled, I was out of breath. There are far worse things than being lost, than being unable to go home. There are trails that sing and call to you, trails that come to an end somewhere beyond time, space, and sanity.

IMDB entry
Purchase from Amazon
Available on Netflix