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

The Hanged Man: Cut, Paste, Copy, Paste.

Much of film - especially horror film - is about artifice.  You're trying to convince viewers of something that isn't actually happening, whether it's that Gotham City is a real place, George Clooney robbed the Bellagio, or the nice house in the suburbs is infested with malevolent spirits. And we're complicit in that as viewers, at least if we want to enjoy the film we are. This is probably why I have the prejudices I have toward criticism based in comparisons to the real world. We are suspending disbelief to one degree or another when we watch any kind of film. Film is designed to facilitate that. There are exceptions - documentaries of course, but also mockumentaries and deliberately artificial films which instead use violation of that disbelief as a storytelling tool. But in general, we're watching a movie under the pretense that we're watching actual things happen, instead of being played out for us.

The Hanged Man screws this up in a big way, and doesn't even have the decency to use its mistakes as subtle clues to some larger end.

The film opens with a montage of people typing messages (which we hear in overlapped voiceover) in some sort of chat room. The tenor of their conversation is one of anger and despair. These are people who wonder why they should go on living. In fact, these are people actively contemplating suicide. As the montage continues, a new voice enters the conversation - one saying he has a poison that will help each one of these people reach a peaceful end. A pact is made, and a meeting place is set. They will meet at an abandoned barn owned by one of the group members, and they will wait for the man with the magic potion to come, so they can all leave this world together peacefully.

So these people - six in all - arrive one by one at the abandoned farm. They insist on addressing each other by their screen names, so we're introduced to Spaceshot, a shy young woman who owns the property; SoCo, a hotheaded young man who doesn't think Dwarfstar (the one with the poison) is going to show up; Flash, as irritating a caricature of a redneck as you could want; Miles, a fairly levelheaded normal-looking guy without much to distinguish him; X-Factor, a young graduate student; and LT56, an investment banker intent on going out with a bang. They gather at the barn, and wait for Dwarfstar to show. And then the local sheriff shows up, and the hallucinations begin, and it seems like everyone is being stalked by some evil presence determined to…kill them?

So there's problem one - make your protagonists suicidal, and suddenly threatening their lives seems kind of silly. Still, you can use an actual threat as sort of a "hey, living isn't so bad after all" wake-up call, so that's not a big deal.

Problem two is a big deal though - and that's that this is one of the most artlessly artificial movies I've seen in some time. Pretty much everything about The Hanged Man screams "hey, this is a movie made by someone who has no idea how to make anything look natural." The dialogue is awkward and not delivered so much as recited - it's a bunch of people saying words someone else wrote, complete with measured pauses between each person speaking, as if everyone is waiting for one person to finish before they begin. That they refer to each other by their faintly ludicrous screen names only underscores how absurd the whole thing is.  It even extends to the cinematography - many shots, especially toward the beginning, are so aggressively staged and composed that even our perspective on the unfolding events feels staged. You can't get away from the feeling that these people are being displayed, running through the motions. It almost feels like a teleplay, but still not a very good one.

On top of the technical issues, the characters themselves aren't terribly believable. The idea of a bunch of people who only know each other through the Internet meeting to fulfill a suicide pact has potential, for sure. The tension between putting real-life selves to their online personas has potential, as does the way that strangely detached intimacy would interact with an even more intimate act like group suicide. These should be lonely, emotionally damaged people, but they aren't. They're just a bunch of people who showed up in the same place at the same time. It's hard to tell if their conversations are awkward because of who they are and aren't to each other or because the dialogue and delivery are so forced. 

Then there's the question of why they're there - the suicide pact is supposed to be contingent on Dwarfstar (the seventh member) showing up with the poison he's concocted. He keeps not showing up, they keep waiting. As one does when this sort of thing happens, they start getting distracted, talking to each other, working out Internet relationships and group politics face to face in real time. Into this narrative void arrives the town sheriff, looking for a car that LT56 stole. Things go bad, and the next thing you know, the sheriff is tied up in the hayloft in the barn and everyone starts hallucinating that he's walking around free, cutting them down with scythes as visions of them killing themselves in entirely different settings flash through their heads. So there's the twist, I guess, but it's staged in a very fitful and distracted way - there's no rising tension, no climax, no twists. Things happen, then they don't. Sometimes the characters remember why they're there and advance the plot, but not all that often. 

For that matter, sometimes the characters remember that they're supposed to be characters, to have history and internal lives and purpose.  We get little flashes of insight into each one - at least one isn't who they pretend to be (on the Internet? Why I never), others lie to themselves. Some of these little bits are trite as hell, but some are actually staged well - there's a bit with Flash that's so good and so surreal it feels like it came from an entirely different, more interesting story. It's hinted at throughout that not only do these characters have their own secrets, but also that where they are isn't necessarily really anywhere - like it's a purgatory in which each character only sporadically remember that they're already dead and how they died. This isn't a spoiler, though - because that's not what's going on at all. If it were, it'd still be a huge cliché, but it'd at least make sense in terms of what we're given. But, it's something else entirely, and its climax is so thoroughly illogical and uninteresting in light of what came before that whatever little goodwill the film has earned by the end goes up in a cloud of "what the fuck?" Maybe it's supposed to be a twist, but twists are usually existing events reinterpreted from a different basic assumption. This is just a flat-out lie, dropped in out of nowhere, out of a different movie even.

And that's probably The Hanged Man's biggest failing - it's cut and paste from the bottom up. The dialogue is pasted in the actor's mouths, the shots are pasted in as storyboard moments with little narrative flow, the story is a bunch of elements pasted in in some vague order without consideration to drawing connections between events. Somebody plunked down all the pieces you need to make a scary movie and slotted them together without once asking why they should bother, and the transparency of that is so blatant as to border on contempt.

IMDB entry

Purchase from Amazon

Available on Netflix

How I Would Have Done It: Cigarette Burns

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

I am a huge fan of stories that operate on the model of "person hired to search for an elusive object finds himself in a world of weird, weird shit as a result." This basic story encompasses thrillers like 8mm, supernatural horror movies like The Ninth Gate, and to an extent, even Apocalypse Now. For me, it's that sense that some secret world lies just underneath the world we know, that behind the most innocuous doors are things that would make us question our sanity. There is mystery and wonder in our world, if we just pay careful attention.

Cigarette Burns is the story of down-on-his-luck theater owner Kirby Sweetman. Kirby owes a lot of money and if he can't pay it off soon, his arthouse movie theater will be closed down. Enter Mr. Bellinger, a film collector who would like Mr. Sweetman to use his extensive knowledge of obscure film to obtain a very rare artifact - a film called Le Fin Absolue Du Monde (The Absolute End of the World). Acquisition of this film is worth 200 grand to Bellinger, because…

…it was only screened once, and everyone at that screening ended up dead or irretrievably insane.

The film itself is practically urban legend at this point - the one known print was thought to be destroyed after the screening, and everyone involved with the creation of the film either vanished or killed themselves. Bellinger seems quite sure that the film did indeed exist, and that there is an intact print somewhere out there.

So what went wrong with the movie?

Para Entrar A Vivir: The Model Home

Watching this, I was reminded of one of the first apartments my wife and I looked at after we got married. It was a basement apartment in a grotty-but-not-dangerous part of town. It was accessible from a door that opened directly onto the street, and wasn't secured with anything more than a standard lock and a deadbolt - no lobby, no security cameras, no buzzer to let people in. The door to the apartment itself was worse - cheap wood with a knob that showed evidence of repeated jimmying and splinters and gouges around the doorframe where kicking had done what jimmying couldn't. Things were not off to a good start.

The apartment itself was dark, low-ceilinged and cramped. Windows were narrow and near the ceiling. The walls were bare brick that had been painted over. The closet doors were pulled off their tracks, with laundry spilling out. About the time the current occupant wandered out of the bedroom wearing only a pair of boxers, it was all over. Our consensus? "Let's not live someplace like where the fat guy died in Seven." It's been a watchword ever since.

Looking for a place to live is sort of a horror all its own. You're essentially putting your trust in a stranger when it comes to the one place that's supposed to be a center of safety and security. Violate that, and you touch something deep and primal when it comes to fear. The call is coming from inside the house. Nowhere is safe.

Para Entrar A Vivir (To Let) does a very good job of exploring the horror of home.

We open on a dimly lit apartment, dilapidated. Something's not right. Flies buzz, maggots crawl around plates, and somewhere, a baby cries. A young woman pads quietly down the hall. Whispers in voiceover say "everything is perfect. Perfect. Perfect on one and two. Children on two. Everything is perfect." What does it mean? Empty mannequin faces and limbs litter the hallways. Without answers, we cut to sunlight, cheery music, and Clara and Mario.

Clara and Mario are a young couple, expecting their first child soon. They've been living with Mario's family and it's getting sort of old. Clara's getting tired of looking at apartments, and her pregnancy's not exactly going smoothly. She's either puking or exhausted, or exhausted from puking. Mario picks her up from work so they can go look at yet another place. It looks perfect - 3 bedrooms, 1 and a half bath, full kitchen, lots of light. Shit, I'd rent it. It's a long drive, and Clara's tired. She takes a nap while Mario drives.

Clara wakes to thunder, lightning, and rain lashing the car. They're in an unfamiliar neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. It's what could gently be called a "neighborhood in transition", which is just another way of saying "it's still shitty, but we're laying our money down that that's going to change." Buildings falling down or already rubble, graffiti on the walls, industrial facilities for a skyline. Abandoned cars sitting stripped on blocks, and almost nobody in sight. Where are they? What have they done? Clara's worried, but Mario's trying to be optimistic.

The apartment building imposes itself on the sky, old but solid. It's being renovated, the real estate agent says, this area will be unrecognizable in a years' time. The apartment itself is what could be called a fixer-upper. Big, lots of character, lots of untapped potential. The real estate agent is confident, she's talking like the apartment is already theirs.

Oddly, there's a picture of them already in the bedroom. And one of Mario's old pairs of sneakers under a dresser. Almost like they were meant to be here all along.

This is a short film, so from here the rollercoaster starts a pretty fast downward plunge. This works in its favor, because the brevity and punchiness keeps vibrant the running and shouty bits that typically get old very quickly over the course of a feature-length movie. Obviously there is something Very Not Right about the building and the people in it, but it takes the rest of the movie to get all of the answers. There are chases, false starts, setbacks, near-misses, and a fair amount of blood involved. Everyone concerned is trapped in this majestic old building as a horrible parody of domestic bliss imposes itself on the proceedings like a beautiful bowl of fruit infested with worms. 

It's not necessarily an innovative movie, and it does have its missteps, but ultimately it is executed well enough to leave you wound up for the protagonists and asking the time-old question posed by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - "who will survive, and what will be left of them?" Like that movie the caricature of domesticity adds to the horror of just surviving unimaginable events, but rather than a piercing near-hysteric crescendo, here it is a resounding chord - the protagonists are the new residents in this little community where everything goes on as normal, even if not everyone involved is alive, completely human, or free of restraints, and it echoes into each corner. It doesn't stab, it suffocates. No matter how much we want to, sometimes leaving home is hard.

IMDB entry

Purchase from Amazon (as part of a 6-film anthology)

Available on Netflix

Shutter Island: On Being Sane In Insane Places

Almost forty years ago, a psychologist undertook a field experiment with some of his grad students. He had them check themselves into mental hospitals, based solely on the claim that they "heard voices." Once admitted, no amount of apparent improvement would get the hospital staff to see them as anything but mentally ill. Legitimate complaints about treatment were labeled "acting out", claims of being or doing better were chalked up to "denial." Once you're mentally ill, it seems to suggest, you have relinquished your right to be taken seriously.

Conversely, to the extent that lay definitions of mental illness include the distorted perception of reality (often, though not exclusively, found in schizophrenia), there's this sense that the mentally ill don't perceive the world as it actually is, that what they see and hear and think is not really there. So what is happening might not actually be happening, but then again it might. But even if it is, nobody will ever believe you. It's bad enough being all alone out in the woods/closed-up resort hotel/abandoned hospital and getting menaced by a thing, but what if the thing is right in front of you the whole time and nobody believes it? Even the smallest things become menacing. You don't know who's in on it and who isn't. You're not even sure there's actually an "it" for anyone to be in on. There's no safety at all, not even in groups.

Shutter Island capitalizes on this absence of safety to fine effect throughout, building a menacing construct out of multiple genres in the process.

It's 1954, and U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule are called to apprehend an escapee from a mental hospital situated on the titular island. It's a hospital for the criminally insane, where the worst and most dangerous cases are sent for treatment. Everything seems off from the beginning - the patient ostensibly escaped from a locked room and traversed hostile, rocky terrain barefoot. The doctors and nurses are all less than forthcoming about the patient's history, and the primary care psychiatrist just happened to leave for a week or so on vacation the day Daniels and Aule arrive. The agents have to surrender their firearms to the hospital's resident police force, and the chief psychiatrists - Drs. Cawley and Naehring - refuse to turn over records that might help them. The patients they interview are evasive at best. So something is definitely Not Right Here. In what to me was a pleasantly surprising bit of atypical behavior, Daniels basically says "fuck it, this is getting us nowhere, let's go home." Unfortunately, the gloomy weather they've endured since they got there has turned into a full-bore hurricane battering the island. The ferry won't be coming, there's no other way off, and the whole hospital has gone into lockdown.

Daniels and Aule are stuck, so there's nothing left to do but continue to investigate, pursue leads. But Teddy's starting to get migraines, and he wakes up every night in a cold sweat, nightmares of his time in the Army and the traumatic death of his wife and children torturing him. Digging into the hospital's history finds that they're partially government funded, with money coming from HUAC. Dr. Cawley spent some time in the O.S.S., and Dr. Naehring? Well, he came over from Germany, but he's vague about the specific time frame. Stories of unorthodox experiments and terrible surgeries performed in the island's lighthouse - oh sure, it's just supposed to be a sewage treatment plant…but then why the electrified barbed wire fence? All the while, the storm rages outside.

Shutter Island takes what it needs from film noir, gothic horror, and more contemporary stylistic exercises like The Cell to create an environment that feels unnatural and oppressive, even in broadest daylight. The film takes place during a time in American history when paranoia and suspicion are at a peak, and all kinds of terrible things were actually done in the name of stopping the Communist menace. Lives were indeed ruined and people permanently broken during this time. Moreover, it predates many of the advances in research and treatment ethics that are part and parcel of psychology today. World War II is over, but the ghosts of what happened to men who fought continue to haunt them in their civilian life. The idea of trust or even truth is a shaky one in this climate, and it suffuses the film. Even the most innocuous interactions feel like they have hidden meanings. Daniels and Aule really are in hostile territory here. 

On top of that, the whole island is a monument to the gothic style - jagged peaks, an old lighthouse, rocky cliffs, crumbling graveyards, and historically ornate buildings dating back to the Civil War. At the top of the bluffs, overlooking everything is Ward C - the worst and most dangerous of the worst and most dangerous, segregated from the rest of the population in a heavily secured Civil War fortress. People go into Ward C and never come back out again. As unsettling as the exterior is, the interiors are no less disturbing. Daniels is wrestling with a lot of trauma, and his nightmares are juxtapositions of his past and present in jarring ways, presented with an attention to color, lighting and detail that makes his interior world - no matter how hellish - a lusher and more, well, real experience than his relatively drab 1950s exterior life. Stylistic reappropriation can suck pretty badly when handled poorly, but here, it all contributes to the sense that pretty much anything we can usually count on to ground our perceptions is fair game. It's jarring, but in a way that makes sense given the story.

This movie is one in which we feel like we've been immersed in someone's waking nightmare. Nowhere is safe, nobody is trustworthy,  nothing is certain. Nurses and patients alike whisper behind our back. People vanish from locked rooms and return just as easily, with little comment from anyone. Sidelong glances, innocuous comments fill us with dread. Bodies at Dachau accuse us in our sleep. Lovers crumble to ash in our hands. Outside, the air thickens with unease. A storm is coming.

IMDB entry

Purchase from Amazon

Available on Netflix

The Nothing Men: Time in Purgatory

purgatory

1) a condition or place in which the souls of those dying penitent are purified from venial sins, or undergo the temporal punishment that, after the guilt of mortal sin has been remitted, still remains to be endured by the sinner.

2) any condition or place of temporary punishment, suffering, expiation, or the like.

3) serving to cleanse, purify, or expiate.

I think part of the reason I'm not a huge fan of gore films is that there's rarely any tension. You have a pretty good idea of what you're going to get going in. There will be people killed, there will be sharp implements (with the occasional blunt one for variety) employed, and there's going to be a lot of red stuff and squishy bits. It's certainty to a fault, and I tend to find uncertainty scarier. But I've already covered this ground ad nauseam in my discussion of the Saw films, so no need to run that particular dead horse through an unmistakably lethal but highly unlikely and overly complex death trap again.

So, uncertainty makes for tension, long story short. Tension is the bow drawn back, the roller coaster at the top of the hill, the silence after the unforgivable thing has been said. In my opinion, you can scare the shit out of people without spilling a drop of blood on screen. All you need is secrets. All you need is the sudden reversal. All you need is the twist. All you need is uncertainty.

The Nothing Men is, largely, a masterful exercise in tension and uncertainty.

Six men in a machine shop. The company's closing a bunch of their facilities, and for bureaucratic reasons unclear to non-Australians like me, the men have to remain at the site for a specific amount of time. Otherwise, they forfeit their severance packages. The machines and tools and materials have all been stripped away. The shop is a shell. But the men remain, doing nothing all day but drinking beer and playing cards and talking shit. Serving out the remainder of their time. 

The silence and stillness is a bit of a problem, though. The sort of ball-busting that's common among work colleagues starts to get a little loud when it echoes off empty walls with no sounds of work to muffle it. There's nothing to distract them from little slights and long-held grudges. One man has an unfaithful wife. One has a promiscuous daughter. One is a shy virgin, perpetually frustrated and unable to talk to women. One is a committed stoner with a limited grasp of the circumstances. One is a bookworm among blue-collar men. One is carrying on a fling with a woman who runs a lunch truck that comes by the shop. Without actual work. the shop is a pressure cooker. Sit there, do nothing, and spend all of your time talking to men who know enough about you to hurt you, but not well enough to care if they do. Everyone has secrets.

And this is before they find out about the new guy. Rumor has it he was at another location and after two days, everyone got fired for infractions - drinking on the job, gambling on the job, leaving the premises during work hours. Rumor has it this new guy is a spy, sent to rat out employees so the company doesn't have to pay their severance. It wouldn't be the shittiest thing a manufacturing concern ever did. And then the new guy arrives. The six men begin to plan.

The better part of The Nothing Men is a slow accumulation of dread, as information about these people trickles out. Why does the bookworm have trouble sleeping and a Zoloft prescription? Why does the shy virgin watch the lunch truck woman through the window? Why does the new guy go home for lunch every day and sit quietly on his sofa, staring at the cross above the fireplace? Resentment and paranoia thickens like storm clouds, and the violence inherent in these men, in this situation, escapes in sudden spurts, thwarted as soon as it has begun. Shots are composed and static, empty spaces as lyrical in places as the occupied ones. The silence is oppressive, and the voices breaking it do nothing to soothe us. The more we learn, the less sure we are, the less comfortable we are watching this tightly compressed limbo fall apart. Something will have to give, and it could come from any direction.

Which, ultimately, it does. Some of it from places you'd expect, but more often places you wouldn't. This movie is expert at the non-obvious choice. Still, as the story of these men unfolds, there are new horrors with each revelation, with every turn of circumstance toward the increasingly cruel. Comparatively little blood is shed, but every word wounds. In end, everyone pays the price for their flaws, for their sins, and for their secrets. Judgment is dealt. Suffering turns to punishment, punishment to purification, and in the end, a blue unblinking sky, and a single gunshot.

IMDB entry