Frailty: I Saw The Light

(Important Note: Do NOT look this one up on IMDB before you watch it - there are spoilers in the casting information, and this is one you definitely want to go into unspoiled.)

Religious faith does a good line in scary movies. That’s pretty much the heartbeat of most films about demonic possession, especially the idea that the existence of real evil serves as a test of faith. Sometimes you get the movies about religious fanaticism, where faith is weaponized to destructive ends. Or even just ones where hapless visitors stumble upon a faith community with very, very different ideas about worship. God is, basically, just as scary as Satan.

Frailty is definitely a movie about faith, but it’s one that breaks a mold or two, much to my pleasant surprise. It’s a well-made, understated story full of uneasiness and dread.

You wouldn’t really know it from the opening credits, though - very generic montages of newspaper articles about a series of gruesome slayings called “the God’s Hand killings” interspersed with old-timey crime-scene photos, all murky and sepia-tinged. Gives off definite direct-to-video vibes.

But stick around, as we open on an FBI office in Dallas, late at night. It’s a big building, but it’s almost deserted, everyone gone home at a civil hour. But Agent Wesley Doyle is working late. He’s the agent in charge of the God’s Hand case, and he’s short on leads. Agent Hull tells Doyle that there’s someone here to see him - someone with information about the God’s Hand case. He’s waiting in Doyle’s office.

The man is Fenton Meiks. He’s from a little town called Thurman, and tells Doyle that he knows who the God’s Hand killer is. It’s his brother, Adam, and Fenton’s willing to lead Doyle to where Adam’s buried the bodies that the FBI haven’t been able to find yet. So Doyle and Meiks take a road trip, and Fenton begins to tell Doyle the whole story…

…which takes the form of a flashback to the late 70s, when Fenton and Adam are just little kids, living with their dad. Their mother died giving birth to Adam, and dad works long hours as a mechanic, so Fenton pretty much looks after Adam until dinnertime, when their father gets home. Dad’s a decent man - hard-working, firm but loving, and devoted to providing his sons with the best life he can. And one day, their father gives his sons some news: The night before, as he tried to sleep, God sent a vision of an angel to him. This angel told him that he and his sons had been chosen for a special mission. There are demons in this world, the angel says. They look like people, but they aren’t. And it is the mission of him and his sons to destroy these demons.

So their father - their kind, decent, loving father - gathers up an axe, and a lead pipe, and begins driving across Texas, bringing these “demons” home to destroy them.

It’s a film, then, about what happens when your father - the man you’ve known and loved your whole life - wakes up one morning firm in the conviction that he must murder total strangers on orders from God. And in that sense, it works very, very well. It’s mostly set in the past, with occasional interludes in the present as Doyle and Meiks drive to Thurman over the course of a dark, rainy night. Were it not for the specific subject matter, it’d feel a lot like a slightly nostalgic coming-of-age story, the kind of film you might have seen in the late 1980s, even though it was made in 2001. So it’s got that same out-of-time feel that last week’s movie did, except this one doesn’t suck.

And part of why it doesn’t suck is because it’s very much about these three characters and the relationship between them. It’s not an especially gory film - most of the violence takes place off-camera, and a lot of the film’s effectiveness lies instead in how all of this is affecting the characters and how they relate to each other. The father never stops being their father - he doesn’t fly into homicidal rages or chew the scenery or start acting crazier and crazier over time. He’s just always their dad, which makes the things he says and does that much more uncomfortable. It’d be easier if he were obviously a lunatic, but he’s the same friendly, firm, loving father that he is at the start, even as he’s bringing home people, bound and gagged, and murdering them. He’s very clear that these are not people; these are demons, and so his essential decency never wavers, and his unvarnished humanity is unsettling. There’s real discomfort in seeing how he tries to get his sons involved as well - this is very much the story of two boys who love their father very much, even as he appears to be sliding into madness, and the two very different ways they process that, so every scene where they help him lure victims and dig graves creates this feeling that we’re watching two young boys be completely traumatized. Over time, Fenton resists it and becomes increasingly estranged from his father and brother, and because younger Adam loves his dad, he believes him, and becomes more and more compliant as time goes on. So this isn’t a slasher film - instead, it’s film rooted very much in a deep sense of dread, as you wonder where this is all headed. There isn’t really a clear villain, either - throughout all of it, their father remains sympathetic, and as things get worse the relationship between the three of them fractures, and there’s a real sense of tragedy there.

Visually, this is a film that manages to be really stylish on what is still clearly a pretty limited budget. Light plays a big role in this film - it slices across the screen, falls across faces, casting half into shadow and half into sharp relief. It pools around the characters as they sit in otherwise darkened rooms, the cold fluorescents of the FBI office late at night a beacon against the darkness outside. The father’s visions from God are marked by rays of light reflecting off everyday objects until they become almost blinding, reading as something mundane that he’s mistaken for the mystical. The daytime flashback scenes play like an idyllic, half-remembered summer reverie, shot in bright colors and soft focus, and the nighttime scenes in the present day are all rain and shadows and fog. The music is fine but nothing noteworthy, the dialogue is believable and the acting consistently good, but it’s the visuals that sell the story the strongest. After all, we talk about faith and the revelations of that faith as “seeing the light.”

That said, it does lose a little something at the end, which maybe goes on a little too long. There are important revelations and a twist that makes us reevaluate everything we’d seen, but it sort of feels like the movie ends maybe three different times and the final scene feels anticlimactic enough to dispel some of the energy it would have ended with otherwise. But overall it’s a skillfully made story about the horrors that emerge from devotion, and the equally horrifying consequences of doubt. Light illuminates and blinds, depending on where it's directed.

IMDB entry
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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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Outpost: Going Loud

The hope that I’m going to go into something that looks pretty stock and predictable and end up discovering a hidden gem springs eternal. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. But I feel like I’ve been on a real “maybe it’s better than it looks” kick lately - there’s something about chasing that feeling of discovery than I’m really into right now. I’m sure at some point I’ll get back to my usual mix of artsy horror and classics, but lately the urge to pick something I’d usually overlook and run with it has been strong, even if it does tend to result in disappointment.

I hate to say it, but Outpost is another one of those instances that ends up more disappointing than not. It’s frustrating, because there’s stuff here that I like, but for every cliche it ducks, it runs right into another one, and on top of that, it doesn’t really stick the landing.

The film opens in a bar in an unnamed part of Eastern Europe. There’s an Englishman named Hunt (nobody in this film has more than one name), clearly out of place, talking to a mercenary named DC. Hunt is an engineer, who represents a very large company. They’ve purchased some land in the area and want Hunt to survey it for mineral value. Hunt needs DC to put together a team for security, to escort him through an especially dangerous, war-torn area to get to the site. A lot of terse negotiation happens, men talking in manly fashion to other men. It’s that kind of movie. It’s not as cartoonish as it could be, but it’s not not cartoonish either. So DC assembles a team of six soldiers of fortune, men used to killing the people they’re being paid to kill. It’s a 48-hour op - get in, survey the land, get out.

And off they go, into the forest, where it turns out this company has purchased land containing am old bunker. A very old bunker. A Nazi bunker from World War II.

This isn’t about mineral rights.

So yeah, what we’re talking about is weird old Nazi research and the dangerous secrets it left behind. This is practically a subgenre unto itself. And on top of that, a group of mercenaries escorting a businessman through dangerous territory is its own set of cliches, and it pretty much nails most of those. There’s very little to distinguish the mercenaries from each other except their nationalities - you’ve got Prior, the shitkicker ex-Marine, Taktarov, the Russian, Voyteche, the generic Eastern European, Cotter, the former African child soldier, McKay, the Irishman who was most likely an IRA volunteer back in the day. and Jordan, the English medic. Jordan is the only one to exhibit any signs of compassion, which, along with his role as medic and his religious faith sets him apart from the others and makes him the target of the obligatory gendered insults. Dialogue is absolutely stock-standard tough-guy talk throughout and the businessman is your standard condescending technical whiz. There are absolutely no surprises on that front, and though none of it is played as melodramatically as it could be, it’s also absolutely nothing new.

Where there were some surprises, for me, is in how things play out for at least the first two acts. A bunch of soldiers of fortune in an old Nazi bunker, who discover that they aren’t alone…well, Nazi zombies is by no means a new idea, and it’s apparent very quickly (if you haven’t already figured it out from the cover art) that that’s what we’re dealing with. For that matter, Nazis as literal monsters is absolutely not a new idea, and at its worst trivializes the real horrors committed by real Nazis, so I’m not a huge fan of that. So it would have been very easy for this film to jump right into a gory action-heavy splatter-fest, to have snarling corpses in Nazi uniforms, resurrected by foul occult rituals, eating brains left and right. But…very much to its credit…it doesn’t do that, The majority of the film is actually a slow burn, punctuated by small clues that something isn’t right, clues which gradually escalate into actual threats as it becomes harder and harder to deny that something very wrong happened here a long time ago. And the nature of what happened is pretty novel, for that matter. There’s some lip service paid to the Nazi interest in the occult, but it doesn’t really figure into the story - this threat is born from technology, and it’s just a different enough take that it kept my interest. So even though it runs headlong into all of the mercenary cliches you can think of, it ducks a lot of the cliches about Nazi experiments run amok, and I think that’s noteworthy.

Also, surprisingly, it’s not an especially tense film. There’s an odd deliberateness to it that keeps it from really building a sense of momentum, but what it loses in tension it gains back in mood and atmosphere. There’s very little music, and the color palette is desaturated almost to the point of being monochromatic, with just a few pops of color during the daytime. Nighttime exteriors are dark with dramatic backlighting that spills through the trees, silhouetting the hulking figures that lurk there. The bunker is dark, rusty, full of dust and rust and cobwebs and deep shadows, and the things that still live down there emerge from the shadows silently, as massive silhouettes, quiet, monochromatic, and monolithic. Away from the macho bluster, it’s mostly a subdued film, and its violent moments are closely observed but not especially lurid. It’s awful, but quietly awful. If it reminds me of any other movie playing in this particular sandbox, it’d be The Keep, which is not one lots of filmmakers working in the Nazi monster field generally emulate. So that came as a pleasant surprise too.

If that’s how it’d been all the way through, it’d be easy to call it a little better than average, but then it takes all of it strengths and throws them away in a climax that goes completely in the other direction, as the protagonists go full-on gung-ho mode and it turns into something like a slightly crap war film, all gunfire and shouting and joking-in-the-face-of-death camaraderie to very little end. It sacrifices the grim, understated mood that had been working for it for cliched pyrotechnics. It makes the climax feel even more pointless than it would have already, given how little reason the film gave us to care about the protagonists, not to mention dragging out the ending just enough to establish the setup for a sequel (of which, yes, there have been two), instead of giving it a note of finality that would have at least had some kind of impact. It was never going to be great, but it at least provided enough interesting choices to keep me watching, before squandering it all on an end that was exactly the obvious, unsubtle, unsurprising ruckus I assumed it was going to be from the start. It had some interesting ideas, and I wish it had the courage to commit to those ideas all the way through. It would have helped.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Halloween: Night And Day

So, it’s confession time. In all of the years I’ve been writing about scary movies, there’s been a pretty big gap in my cinematic education…

…I’ve never seen the original Halloween.

I did see Halloween 4 back in the day, and one of the first things I ever wrote here was a defense of Rob Zombie’s remake, but as seminal horror films go, this was a pretty big oversight on my part. I’m not really a fan of slasher films and never have been, but even I have to recognize the landmark status of this film. It wasn’t the first slasher film (what was is debatable, was it Black Christmas? Blood Feast? Peeping Tom? I’ll let someone else have that argument), but it was a watershed moment for the style. codifying it as a genre unto itself and spawning legions of imitators, not to mention so many sequels, reboots and remakes that there are literally multiple Halloween timelines at this point.

So even though it’s not really my style of movie, it still strikes me as one that I should really address. And since Sundays are when I watch the films I write about here, and since this most recent Sunday was the titular holiday, it seemed like this was exactly the right time.

Of course, there’s always baggage any time you come to an iconic film late in the game. Out of the ones I’ve written about here, some didn’t work for me because they’ve become too well-known, too embedded in popular culture to have any surprises left, some still have all their original power intact, and as it turns out, this one falls somewhere in between. Some elements haven’t aged as well as they could have, and hindsight means it’s hard to see past the things that aren’t yet cliches in the film, but will end up becoming so. But there’s still a lot here to admire, much of it in contrast to the movies that ended up taking its ideas and turning them into cliche. You can see how a lot of filmmakers missed the point or took the wrong lesson away from this film.

It begins on Halloween night in Haddonfield, IL, in 1963. It opens on a point-of-view shot - we’re seeing things through someone’s eyes. Whoever they are, they’re peering through a window at a young man and young woman making out on a couch. The couple go upstairs to do what you do in situations like these, and upon the young man’s departure, our point of view goes into the house, goes into the kitchen, and picks up a knife. The point of view puts on a mask, and now we see through the eyeholes of the mask. We can hear our point of view’s breathing. The point of view goes upstairs, where the young woman is brushing her hair, and it stabs her to death before walking back downstairs…

…where it is revealed to be a six-year-old boy.

The boy is Michael Myers, and he’s just murdered his sister Judith. Cut to Halloween in Haddonfield, IL, in 1978. Myers has been remanded to a hospital for the criminally insane for the majority of his life, and his supervising doctor, Dr. Loomis, and a nurse are preparing to take custody of Michael and escort him to a hearing. When they arrive at the hospital, there’s been a security breach. Michael Myers is loose. He steals a car and heads for Haddonfield, to finish what he started fifteen years ago.

The events of the film take place over the course of a single day - it begins midday, night falls around the halfway point, and it ends before dawn. Framing it this way provides one of its first major strengths: This film uses pacing really, really well. It’s a much slower burn of a movie than subsequent imitators, and that works to its advantage. Because it’s set over the course of one day, the whole first half of the film is buildup, a slice of life in small-town Illinois. We’re introduced to our protagonists - Laurie, Lynda, and Annie - at school, as they’re enduring their classes for the sake of the fun they’re going to have that evening, unaware that they are being watched and followed. This is intercut with Loomis’ attempt to track down Myers and convince law enforcement that the people of this town are in danger. Meanwhile, Myers, back in his hometown, watches and waits for night to fall. A lot of this film’s power is in the way it makes you wait for something awful to happen, knowing that it will.

The relatively slow pace of the first two acts is the broadest example of this, but even on a scene-by-scene basis, this film does not rush. It takes its time, and draws everything out, but it rarely feels like it’s spinning its wheels. Even in the third act, at the film’s climax, it’s very deliberate - there’s an inevitability, an implacability to it, and even as familiar with the film as a pop culture artifact as I was (and having seen a remake that kept many of the broad strokes intact), there were still moments that made me gasp. The threat is clearly established early on, in the light of day, and we have to sit with the tension - we know something bad is going to happen, so when night finally comes, there’s a momentousness to it, a sense that shit is about to get very bad. Time is an effective element in this film.

And so is space, for that matter. This film’s other big strength is its staging. The whole first half of this film takes place in broad daylight, punctuated by instances of Myers stalking Laurie. It’s audacious - generally night makes everything scarier, but breaking that particular rule makes everything that happens that much more unsettling. And it’s never really front and center - this film does a very good job of letting creepy things happen in the background. We never really get a good glimpse at Myers during the day - he’s crowded into one side of the frame, just shoulders and a torso, or partially obscured by scenery. We know someone’s there, but they’re largely a mystery. Likewise, until night falls, all we ever really see is the aftermath of his violence (barring his escape at the beginning) - he’s moving through the world, and at first all we see is the wake he leaves behind him. So you get a sense that there’s someone bad out there and that they are doing bad things, but for the first half of the film, it’s all in the margins, visually and narratively.

But when night falls, it becomes a whole other matter. The violent moments in this film are generally minimal, though in two instances it lingers long enough that you get a sense the suffering and distress he’s causing, which is something that largely goes ignored in other films in the genre. Some die slowly, some die quickly, but it’s here, in the final act that Myers is revealed - the iconic blank white mask, the violence depicted as it’s happening instead of after the fact. There’s a reason Loomis is worried, he’s not a crazy old man, and now we see why. But there’s a restraint there many other films in the genre lack. It’s still more suggestion and aftermath than explicit gore - much like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, this film is a lot less bloody than you think it’ll be. But it works because we’ve had the entire first half of the film to get to know these people, so when they die, they are people dying, not cannon fodder for practical effects.

Visually it does a lot with a little, making excellent use of shot composition to reveal Myers emerging from the shadows, framed as a lone, stark figure who is suddenly there, then just as suddenly gone. The blank white mask does a lot of work in this regard because it’s a striking element that can just as easily blend into the background as be brought forward in our attention. A lot of this film works because Myers is lurking in the background, and it’s what he’s doing while other people are in the foreground unaware, or elsewhere in the house, that ramps up the tension and dread. As an audience, you know what’s coming and you’re sort of helpless to watch it play out, like a nightmare.

It does have its shortcomings, though. The dialogue’s pretty corny throughout, some of it landing clumsily, and some of the effects work hasn’t aged all that well (the opening sequence feels especially clumsy to the modern eye), but given that it was a low-budget independent film in the late 1970s, that it still gets over to the degree that it does is a testimony to the filmmaking skill behind it. Characterization is a bit thin, though in some instances this works to its advantage - we know nothing about Myers, and that’s as it should be. He would eventually be over-explained into the ground by almost all of the Halloween movies that followed, but here all we know is that he’s unknowable, and the unknown is frightening. There’s not much to Loomis either - he seems to be defined by his need to stop Myers, the Van Helsing to Myers’ Dracula. Annie and Lynda are mostly ciphers, teenage girls more interested in boys and partying than school. Laurie gets a little more depth - she’s the good one, the “girl scout,” but she isn’t prissy or prudish. There’s real adolescent vulnerability there - she’s smart, but it’s the late 70s, so that keeps her on the outside. It’s less a rejection of her friends’ ways and more the feeling that it isn’t an option for her, and you can sense some sadness around that. Which is more than characters in films like these usually get, but you can see how subsequent filmmakers would turn this into “masked murderer picks off horny teenagers, only to be foiled by a virginal Final Girl,” codifying the “rules” of the slasher film so thoroughly that Wes Craven would eventually turn that into something surprisingly fresh and interesting with Scream…which would of course get its own slate of sequels, adding smirky self-awareness to the mix. There’s a reboot of that franchise in the works as well.

And all of that bums me out, because there’s more than that going on here, and seeing where the cliches started makes me feel bad that this (and an absolute rat’s nest of sequels and remakes) would be its legacy, because it really does feel like it deserves more than that. I mean, it’s a classic, and rightfully so, but I wish what people took away from it instead was the value of restraint and suspense, instead of tits, kills, and body count.

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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Dead & Buried: Sometimes, Dead Is Better

Every now and then, you’ll see a film described as a “curiosity.” This usually means that it’s not all that well-known, and isn’t necessarily typical for its time, but has some quality that makes it worth considering nonetheless. It’s easy to forget that in any given time period a lot of films get made, but not all of them get remembered. So, for example, if you think about horror films in the late 60s, you’re probably thinking about Rosemary’s Baby, not Spider Baby. And Rosemary’s Baby is excellent, no doubt, but Spider Baby has a unique charm and vision of its own that owes absolutely nothing to the former film, and it’s largely sat in obscurity. So when you stumble on one of these films that the zeitgeist has forgotten, they can be a real treat.

This is very much the case for Dead & Buried, which got made in the middle of the first wave of slasher films (a genre that’s become synonymous with the late 70s and into the 80s), but owes very little to that style of filmmaking. It does have its problems, but it’s also entirely its own thing and defies easy expectation a lot of time.

The film opens on a small coastal town in New England called Potter’s Bluff. There’s a man walking along the beach, taking photographs of nature, of fishing nets, seabirds, and then into his viewfinder comes an attractive young woman. They get to talking - he’s a professional photographer, she asks if he’s famous, it gets flirty, then it gets flirtier, then it gets blatantly sexual as she comes on to him…

…and then he’s surrounded by villagers, who -with the woman’s assistance - begin to beat him with shovels and bats, before tying him up and burning him alive, filming the entire thing.

Enter Dan Gillis, the local sheriff. He’s a local boy made good - went up to the big city to get a Master’s degree in criminology before coming back to Potter’s Bluff to take care of law enforcement. And now he’s looking at what appears to be the aftermath of an especially gruesome accident. There’s a car, overturned and burnt out, with a man - the photographer, as it happens - trapped inside. It looks like he burned to death in there, but something about it doesn’t sit right with Dan, so he consults with William Dobbs, the local mortician, and begins an investigation. There’s something strange going on.

So the basic narrative spine of this film is the small town with a dark secret, and the film does a good job of leveraging that feeling of small-town intimacy to create a pretty solid sense of paranoia throughout. Everyone’s friendly, everyone seems normal, and it’s not immediately apparent why some of the fine folks of this village are murdering tourists. Dan goes down a very dark, very strange rabbit hole over the course of the film, and it largely pays off. The rhythm of the film is a little perfunctory, leaning a little more towards a connected series of set pieces rather than a single organic story, but the filmmakers do a good job of setting up the important twists and reveals at a good pace, so it holds your attention and manages some very solid surprises. Most importantly, the whole game isn’t given away all at once - the “what” of the film is revealed bit by bit, but it isn’t until the absolute last moments of the film that you really get a sense of “why,” and even then there’s room for one last audacious reveal. This is a film that is very good at knowing when to drop the next surprise in your lap.

It also works well because it isn’t afraid to create a mood and commit to it. Since it’s set in a coastal New England town, everything is weather-worn buildings and gray, cloudy days and lights cutting through thick fog at night. A lot of this film is bluish and backlit, and it’s not very subtle in that regard, but it definitely helps maintain an atmosphere, and there’s a lot of very, very good practical effects work that still really holds up today, making it effectively creepy and gruesome without being especially gory. It’s not the obvious hatchet to the face of its slasher-film contemporaries, it’s something more evocative and uncomfortable than that, and combined with the small-town paranoia and the relentless gloominess, it’s a pretty uneasy experience, especially considering its age.

But speaking of age, in a lot of ways it is still definitely a product of its time. The dialogue is pretty stagey throughout, not all of the effects work holds up equally well, and the acting ranges from absolutely fine to scenery-devouring. And if you came of age in the 1970s, some of the casting is probably going to be a bit distracting. But then yet again, in some instances this actually works for it. At points it makes things feel nicely off-kilter, like a lighthearted TV movie about the wacky folks in a small town took a very dark turn at some point when you weren’t looking. And for a film made in the middle of the masked-killer craze, it really feels more like it’s riffing on things like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and even The Stepford Wives to some degree, and is even sort of adjacent to H.P. Lovecraft in his less cosmic mode. It’s a bold choice, and it pays off in both a sustained sense of paranoid uneasiness and in some surprising little choices in some scenes, culminating in a third act that is an absolute ride, capped by an ending that I can only describe as bonkers in its staging and its final reveal. If you stop to think closely about it, it’ll fall apart a little and there’s some stuff that isn’t ever really explained or resolved, but that didn’t really bother me at all while I was watching it - I was just letting it wash over me and getting swept up in the strangeness of it all. You don’t see films like this much anymore, and hell, you didn’t even see movies like this when it was new. It’s definitely worth a look.

IMDB entry
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The Whisperer In Darkness: Beyond Space And Time

After last week’s film left kind of a gross taste in my mouth, I felt up for something a little more…I dunno, wholesome?...for this week. This is definitely not my usual thing, being all “horror should be bleak and intense, it’s art, not entertainment” and whatnot, but I gotta admit, sometimes I need a break from that stuff and instead spend some time splashing around in the spooky end of the pool. So I thought I’d take a look at another film by the fine folks at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. They began as part of a group of friends who spent the 1980s doing live-action role-playing of the Call of Cthulhu tabletop roleplaying game, and I’m sorry that they’ve taken the archived accounts of those games off their website, because the amount of sheer theatrical inventiveness that went into some of those games, given the time period and resources available to them, is really impressive.

So two of them went on to found the HPLHS, and they do their primary business in the production of era-appropriate props for role-playing groups, while also working in the film and theater industries in Los Angeles. They’d done radio plays, but in the early 2000s, they produced their first feature-length film, a silent-film adaptation of Call of Cthulhu. It had its weaknesses, as I observed in my write-up, but there’s something I found really appealing about how they approached the material in a way that was budget-effective and made sense narratively. For the time when the original short story was published, if it had been adapted into a film, it would have been a silent film, so in a sense it was like a discovered artifact, a piece of entertainment from a bygone era, telling a story from that era. And it was largely evocative - maybe not as viscerally scary as a modern horror film, but you could appreciate how audiences in the 1920s would have freaked out at what was up on the screen. And for that matter, the genuine affection for the source material really shone through, so it was clear that this film - made on a shoestring budget, filming in backyards and actor’s houses, everyone pulling double and triple duty - was absolutely a labor of love. That’s not something you see a lot of in horror films, and I think it’s important to preserve it.

So it was with all of this in mind that I went into their second full-length effort, an adaptation of The Whisperer In Darkness. It’s a much more ambitious endeavor than the first film, and it has many of that films’ strengths, but also some of its weaknesses as well.

It’s the story of Albert Wilmarth, a folklorist who’s just come into possession of a very rare text - the original annotated manuscript of a long-unobtainable book about myths and legends specific to rural Vermont. Legends about the mysterious creatures that have been living in its hills and caves since long before the land was settled. Wilmarth is, of course, a committed skeptic - these are tales, not truth, and he has an academic’s interest in them, not a believer’s. But he’s also been in correspondence with a resident of the area, Henry Akeley, who insists that the creatures are very real, and he has evidence to prove it. Armed with this manuscript, Wilmarth intends to pay Akeley a visit.

Meanwhile, Vermont’s been experiencing the worst flooding it’s had in years. And things are washing up as the water recedes. Strange things, with an unrecognizable biology.

Just as their first film was done in the style of a 1920s silent film, contemporaneous to the story’s publication, this film is likewise done in the style of early talking films from the early 1930s, when this story was originally published as well. The move from silent to talking films adds a layer of complexity - now they have to actually manage dialogue and sound design along with everything else - as well as the need to flesh out a short story into a feature-length film. I give them a lot of credit here - this is a much more ambitious outing than their first film on pretty much every front, and mostly they pull it off with aplomb. The cinematic details, like title and credit presentation, are period-accurate, as is the camerawork (no drone shots here), dialogue, wardrobe, set design, and most importantly, the acting. There’s a certain mannered delivery to the way people talked in early talking motion pictures - I don’t know exactly why, (I wonder how much of it was a transition from theater and the need for precise elocution, along with broad affectation as a way to establish character) but whatever the case may be, there’s a certain rhythm and melody to how people talk that you don’t hear in modern films. If it hadn’t been present here, the game would have been up immediately. So - some technical details aside - this looks and sounds like a 1930s talking picture, which is essential to creating the feeling the film strives for.

It’s also a story about strange creatures from beyond the blackness of space, as Lovecraft’s stories tended to be, and so this meant a fair amount of effects work. A lot of that is pretty period-accurate too - lots of in-camera and practical effects work, though they did utilize some digital effects to cheat things that would have been more costly in terms of time and money to achieve in a period-accurate way. For the most part, however, it looks period-accurate, leading to the irony that digital effects are being used to emulate early stop-motion. But the upshot is that with a few exceptions, nothing looks too slick or clean to be something from a 1930s film. All of this is important because a film like this is going to work if it draws the viewer into its world - you aren’t just watching a movie about one man’s discovery of horrors from beyond space, you’re watching a movie about those things made in a very specific place and time, so you’re responding not just to the story, but to its time as well. It’s the same reason that filmmakers who attempt to emulate the 1970s-era “grindhouse” style of exploitation film use specific film stocks and editing choices and soundtracks and title cards. Referencing a period-specific set of aesthetics adds an emotional component on top of what’s already there.

So the upside is that for the most part, the filmmakers have made something that looks like it came out of a vault somewhere, as if we’re watching another film adaptation that audiences in the 1930s would have watched, and given that Lovecraft’s work wasn’t getting the film treatment when he was still alive, there’s a really interesting feeling to that, like we’re privy to entertainment from a parallel universe. There are some downsides, however. First, this film doesn’t quite have the emotional intensity of the earlier film - silent films were theatrical by nature, with no dialogue, so the music and the actors’ performance had to sell the whole thing. This made that film much more melodramatic, and thus, more intense. The performances are more subdued here, as befits a talking film, but as a result it loses some of that intensity. It’s a lot of polite, civilized people talking in a polite, civilized way, which is again totally period-appropriate, but it loses some tension as a result.

The second problem is that the pacing is an issue. There’s a nice sense almost from the start that all is not right here, even if you are - like me - familiar with the original story and have an idea of how it’s going to play out. But the last act feels padded with long stretches of expository dialogue, so when it feels like things should be speeding up and getting more tense, they slow down instead and there’s more air between the tense moments than there should be. The epistolary nature of the first film’s story made it a little easier to open things up. but here, there’s a more linear story in play and so it’s much more apparent when things are being stretched out. They made the choice to add new story elements onto the third act, and I understand their reasoning for doing so (mostly fleshing out the main characters a little more and making the end less perfunctory), but it seems to me that if they’d leaned more into the original version of the story, where there’s much more lead-up to Wilmarth’s trip to Vermont and less time actually spent there, making the end more of a rush of revelation after a slow burn, that might have been a more effective way of telling the story in terms of creating and sustaining tension and dread.

There are some technical issues as well, ones shared with their first film. Overall it’s an achievement - it’s tough to emulate a bygone style of filmmaking, and in so many ways they get it right, but the end product looks a little too clean, it’s a little too apparent that this wasn’t actually shot on 1930s film stock and recorded using period-appropriate technology. It’s too clean to be even the best restoration as well, so the conceit doesn’t always hold (there’s one special effect where it’s especially apparent they used green-screen, and it pulls you out of the story some). There are sequences which could have been accomplished in the 1930s through other means and would have been incredibly ambitious for the time, and I’m usually not one for artificially aging films (it’s so easy to go overboard), but I think in the case of this film and their previous work, some post-production dirtying-up would be to their benefit. There was also one monster design choice that didn’t quite land for me, reminding me less of horrors from beyond space and more of characters from an old Flash Gordon serial, which hurt the ending a little too. Then again, for everything that didn’t quite land, there were multiple things that did, but as is so often the case, when it doesn’t work it leaps right out at me as a result.

Like the first film, the result is more a film that you appreciate than one you get swallowed up by, there’s always a little bit of distance there, though I think this would be true of a number of films made during that time period. Still, the Society’s motto is “ludo fore putavimus,” which they translate from the Latin as “we thought it would be fun,” and it’s clear how much fun everyone had making this film. There’s something to be said for that when so many films are marketed and focus-grouped until all the life is sucked out of them. Even if it didn’t really scare me as much as it could have, I’m impressed at how they’ve pushed themselves and I can’t wait to see what they do next.

IMDB entry
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