Halloween 2012 Day 13: V/H/S (2012)

Halloween. The best holiday? Its the one day a year when we can pretend that horror movies are real. That our, generally bleak, painful, or at best simply tedious, reality can be more than that. Maybe there's something there that is even worse out there, something that, if we could even comprehend it, would terrify us to death. Or you get drunk and dress up and thats really cool too. My version is sadder, tho.
V/H/S inhabits a world that insists its darker than we see. A horror anthology set within a framework of depravity and violence. In the frame, we meet a gang of rapists and consensual pornographers who are contracted to retrieve one tape from the house of a collector. Inside the house, they find the collector dead in front of several televisions and VCRs. As the gang watch the VHS tapes on the tv, they begin to disappear. The shorts are all generally well done:  A group of dudes try to date rape a feral vampire, a couple on a road trip uncover a secret in the desert, a Friday the 13th homage, a college student moves into a haunted apartment, and a group of guys on their way to a Halloween party stumble into an occult rite.
All the shorts and the framework are shot cinema verite and the VHS conceit allows them to introduce artifacts and glitches into the films which, while at some points feel unnecessary and tired, are usually pretty great and effective. In particular, the way the glitches obscure certain "supernatural" elements in the Friday the 13th vignette are excellent. There are definitely weak parts in the film, surprisingly enough the Ti West short, Second Honeymoon, is far and away the weakest, but overall it stands up surprisingly well. I hadn't heard of most of the directors, Ti West excluded, so I'm looking forward to looking at their material. Definitely the best horror anthology I've ever seen and a good argument for more depth being plumbed in the cinema verite style.

Halloween 2012 Day 12: Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (1988)

There's a certain inherent appeal in the Hellraiser films. Its similar to the appeal of the Friday the 13th films: There's something inhuman and unstoppable with motivations completely alien and all it wants is you. The "infinite dimensions of pleasure and pain" in Hellraiser are a super compelling concept, hedonism taken to its absolute extreme. If only Hellbound stuck to that formula.
Hellbound picks up from where Hellraiser left off. Kirsty, our protagonist from the first film, is committed into the care of a doctor who harbors a sick obsession with Hell. After the doctor succeeds in bringing a villain from Kirsty's past back to life, she and her fellow patient, an autistic girl obsessed with puzzles, enter Hell to save Kirsty's dad, encountering not only the Cenobites but many monsters from both of their pasts.
The problem with Hellbound is similar to a lot of horror sequels. They decide that the best way to continue the story is by overexplaining everything, and this is especially a problem as a sequel to Hellraiser as it was an exposition-heavy film to begin with. We're exposed to Hell, which to be fair looks pretty cool if unoriginal, and learn Pinhead's origin story and the process by which a human becomes a Cenobite, significantly demystifying the horror present in the concept. Like Hellraiser, the acting is okay and the make-up and effects are phenomenal, but, unlike the original, it lacks the conceptual pull to create a compelling film. Jesus wept.

Halloween 2012 Day 11: Mutants (2009)

Zombie films, and really zombie fiction in general, is really played out. I can't think of a single horror movie monster I'm less interested or a single horror movie monster featured in more films recently. Until a real visionary manages to flip the script, all the potential in zombie cinema has been used up. There's nothing left but tired tropes being retread endlessly with different window dressing.
Mutants doesn't deviate from the script much. The film opens with a scroll that offers a little exposition, but unfortunately not enough. We are introduced to our standard french horror characters: The sympathetic wife and the protective husband. The husband is quickly infected by the Zombie Virus and the first third of the film is an incredibly interesting look at one man's transformation into a monster. Whenever the film adds additional characters, it suffers. The wife, in her quest to find the salvation of the mysterious NOE organization, soon meets a band of bandits intent on stealing whatever resources they can at gun or machete point.
The film runs out of premise within a half hour and stretches out cliches until an unsatisfying ending. It is certainly a technically competent film, with some very questionable editing decisions (time warp cuts, looping footage, and weird flashforwards) set aside. The makeup is absolutely gorgeous, serving to make the monsters sufficiently inhuman, and the setting, an enormous abandoned hospital in snow-covered Picardy, is breathtaking. If only they could have filled the running-time with something a little less trite.

Halloween 2012 Day 10: The Mist (2007)

Storms are mad scary. They exert this kind of otherworldly power. If this is what nature is capable of, it makes you rethink what supernaturally really means. Billions of dollars in damage and dozens of lives lost, all of it completely meaningless. We search for meaning in it, but there's nothing there just random chaos, though we can obviously make impacts on it.
The Mist is a Stephen King adaptation. A crazy storm rolls through Maine and an artist and his son go to the supermarket to pick up supplies. As they check out, a bloodied man runs through the door, screaming about monsters in the mist, quickly followed by the store being swallowed up in the mist. The refugees in the store quickly split into factions based on class, race, and religion and find the monsters within may be just as terrifying as the monsters without.
Having never read the novella, the film The Mist feels so much more Lovecraftian than anything Stephen King I've seen before. The monsters are this constant, lurking dread and the characters a motivated more by fear and paranoia than anything else, not to mention the complete lack of hope or salvation anywhere in the film. The acting is solid, but nothing to write home about, and the direction picks up a lot of slack found in the  process. Definitely worth a watch on a stormy day.

Halloween 2012 Day 9: Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)

I've expressed my dislike for the Paranormal Activity films on this blog before. They're the most cynical approach to horror film i can think of, edging out super-gory slasher remakes by a landslide. Zero budget is required, next to zero crew, an astroturf marketing scheme: These films are pure profit. I can stick with cynical, bankrupt horror films if there's at least a trace of something interesting happening at all in any of them, but not once in any of these films is an element of imagination seen. Just a cashgrab based on "Hey, the Blair Witch Project was cool but I bet we could make way more money."
Paranormal Activity 3 is no different from the two previous entries in the series. Absurdly rich people go about their banal, idle lives while dumb, uninteresting things happen til them and then suddenly, in the fifth act, something crazy (and usually stupid) turns everything on its head in a violent way. Formulaic at the best, artistically worthless at its worst.
One good things I can say about Paranormal Activity 3 is the child actors they got are definitely above average. The adult actors are another matter. Everything in this movie is boring and rings false to a point where there's no point in even discussing it. Its a Paranormal Activity movie. It is intentionally bland. In spite of, or possibly because of this, the most egregious problem with the movie is the screaming anachronism. Technology, interior design, and vocabulary that did not exist in 1988 is all over the place. The editing and continuity, just within the movie let alone within the year 1988, is a nightmare. Not a single person involved with this film gave one wit about detail. Bad movie, dont watch.

Halloween 2012 Day 8: Resident Evil (2002)

The Resident Evil games are interesting. They're this distinctly Japanese take on American horror cinema. They combine tropes from Japanese adventure games with tropes from American movies to create a synthesis that is, apparently, greater than the sum of their parts. I've never been able to play them due to how terribly they've aged. Even the new ones hold over too much from their older counterparts to make them unplayable. Why is my movement all on the left stick when I have a free third-person camera and a free thumbstick? Why is it still like that, Capcom?
The Resident Evil film is even more interesting, creating a distinctly American take on the Japanese games based on American movies. Paul Anderson has said that he wanted to create a distinct universe from the game's universe, but it follows that, due to the source material, the universe he created is accordingly insane. Mila Jovovich plays an amnesiac secret agent sent to purge a medical research lab of a hostile AI. Once she, and the team with her, enter the lab, however, they find it crawling with T-Virus infected zombies. The team, numbers dwindling, have to retreat to the surface before the failsafes activate and lock them inside the lab permanently.
This movie is more an action film than a horror film. Sure, it has the trappings of a horror film, the dark corridors, the pauses in the soundtrack, the jump scares, the monsters, but it lacks the tension to really classify it as a horror movie. It is, however, an excellent action movie in the absurd 80s Stallone/Schwarzenegger milieu. Attractive people shoot guns at bad guys and the bad guys explode. The soundtrack is absolutely excellent and most of the cast plays their parts well, a highlight being Michelle Rodriguez's badass commando. Why she isn't the lead in more hyper-violent action films along the lines of the Expendables is an important question we should ask ourselves. Expect mindless action, disregard everything about the video game, and enjoy the fun, stupid movie.

Halloween 2012 Day 7: Lord of Illusions (1995)

Magic is cool. Okay, I don't care if its campy or kitsch or dumb or whatever you want to say. Magic is dang cool. Anything that tries to convince people into thinking its something real or supernatural is the coolest thing to me, especially if its like a con. If there's someone in charge of the trick, illusion, or con game, it becomes absolutely fascinating. Much like professional wrestling, magic tries to supplant our existing reality and rules of physics and replace it with something way better. Something inexplicable. If one person can make this watch disappear, imagine what else they can do.
Lord of Illusions stars Scott Bakula as a hard-boiled private dick in Brooklyn who has had more than a few brushes with the supernatural. After being sent on a case to LA, he stumbles into a world of black magic, sexy babes, and resurrected gods of death. Deep in the Los Angeles magic and illusion scene, he bites off more than he can chew as people die all around him.
The film is dated. Clive Barker, serving as auteur on this film, makes the mistake many filmmakers did, and do, by pursuing computer animation over makeup or puppetry. Maybe it was less jarring in 1995 to see a low-poly skeleton walk around and then suddenly turn into a real skeleton as it comes to rest, but its almost laughable now. The acting is lackluster, Scott Bakula never had the chops to be a leading man and most of the main actors he's up against suffer from B-movie over-acting or woodenness. Famke Jannsen is sublime, as usual, in her role of leading lady, but that almost doesnt need to be said.
The pleasure in this film is found in the grim atmosphere it generates. Much like Hellraiser, Lord of Illusions doesn't reside in a pleasant world interrupted by a monster or a slasher or what have you. The world of Lord of Illusions is dark, corrupted, and just about hopeless. As our villain reminds us, in this film hope and courage aren't the antidote to evil. It stands as such a strong contrast to the film's peers. If you can ignore the poor aging and genre film stigma, there's a real bright gem in Lord of Illusions.

Halloween 2012 Day 6: Pontypool (2009)

Language is a sticky thing. Open to a certain amount of interpretation, it also has very concrete meanings. Attacking and dissolving these meanings is an important aspect of art and rhetoric but we have to remember that, while those things reflect our lives, they are guided by a separate set of rules. Language may evolve and change but in order to communicate effectively we must stand on somethings in the short term.
In Bruce McDonald and Tony Burgess' Pontypool, we're taken to a world where the English language has become hostile. Words are contagious but only the words, not the meaning they contain. In the film, meaning can be conveyed through non-verbal or non-English means. This raises some interesting questions as far as the motives of the virus, or at least whoever released it. If your virus is that advanced that he can transmit itself via a specific, almost theoretical means, why does it attack just the language and not the ideas it conveys? Are the Quebecois separatists the movie mentions mostly in passing, and quickly dismisses, the source? Reading it with that assumption, the film draws a mostly uncomfortable parallel between the Block Quebecois and the Third Reich.
That parallel along with much of its content makes this a distinctly Canadian film. Canada is swiftly becoming a kind of low-budget horror powerhouse. Pontypool makes the most of its small budget by setting it mostly in a radio studio with a cast of few more than four people, plus voices we hear over the phone and through windows and so on. This setting owes quite a bit to Welles' adaptation of the War of the Worlds and manages to take that mantle and do it justice. The scripting is very tight and the acting is definitely up to the task. An interesting movie with an interesting moral, to say the least.

Halloween 2012 Day 5: The Descent (2005)

I enjoy the outdoors. I've been hiking a few times in the Tetons, canoed through South Jersey swamps, climbed around Rock Canyon in Utah, etc. The biggest draw with that stuff for me is the remoteness of it all. You're miles away from anyone else and disconnected from the physical and metaphorical ties that bind us to our modern concept of humanity. The Descent is a movie about that disconnect going wrong.
The Descent is one of the most suspenseful and absolutely terrifying experiences before the monsters are even introduced. Sara, having recently lost her husband and daughter in a car crash, is taken spelunking with some of her friends, all experienced-but-casual outdoorswomen. They dive into an unexplored cave system and quickly find themselves in way over their heads against an opponent as fearsome as mother nature. When events head from bad to worse, they discover the cave system isn't as unexplored as they assumed.
The limited lighting and sheer darkness of this film puts across this incredible sense of claustrophobia and the acting and direction are absolutely top notch. It relies fairly heavily on jump scares as the film progresses, so if that puts you off, you might want to avoid it, but they managed to terrify me. The plot is whisper-thin but the atmosphere is so strong it doesn't really matter. The Descent is a scary, violent romp right into the dangers that the dark hide.

EDIT: I'm told that there is another cut of the film that removes a lot of the nuance and character of the film and rewrites the ending to something insipid, so please, by all means, avoid the US Unrated cut of The Descent.

Halloween 2012 Day 4: Lo (2009)

Lo is a simple film.
That's not to say that Lo isn't engrossing, engaging, or ambitious. Lo is a very basic story (boy meets girl, girl gets dragged into hell, boy summons demon to save girl) shot in a very basic manner (a black set with a small stage) using a minimal cast and very basic make up and effects, but it conveys itself with such grandeur and largess you forget how constrained it really is.
While I'm generally not a fan of films that are intentionally funny or intentionally "quirky," Lo is an enjoyable, simple experience that hits a lot of good buttons. A pleasant surprise from a film I was expecting to hate.

Halloween 2012 Day 3: Grave Encounters (2011)

Things you should/probably already know about me: I'm a sucker for cinema verite, I'm a sucker for abandoned buildings specifically hospitals, I'm a sucker for women with multiple facial piercings. Things you might not know but will now learn: I watched Paranormal State religiously in high school. I watched it every Tuesday in a huge block with American Gladiators, Dog the Bounty Hunter, and Intervention. Grave Encounters is Paranormal State with a payoff.
The film starts with a cast almost exactly identical to Paranormal State, Chip Coffey included. It continues in predictable found-footage style as the crew investigates a closed down asylum, chanting incantations and using "science" while the cameras roll and listening to hip hop and making fun of ghosts while the cameras are off. Things start to quickly spiral out of control when the caretaker locks them in for an eight hour ghosting session. Time begins to pass inexplicably, hallways seem to lead in circles, and crew members begin to disappear. Soon the crew, lead by Ryan Buell stand-in Lance, realize that something supremely messed up is happening.
Cinema verite is used most of the time to hide budget issues, like in the Blair Witch Project. Its easy, and Lovecraftian, to look terrified and let the audience imagine what horrible things are on the other side of the lens. Grave Encounters is not that film. It attacks its set-pieces stronger than many bigger-budget fall horror films and it accomplishes its scares in fine order.
There aren't a ton of issues with this film. The plot is thin and a vehicle for parody and scares, but to expect more isn't really appropriate. The effects are generally well-done but some shots look fairly cheesy and clearly just "one guy wearing a big glove in front of a green screen."
In short, if you don't love cinema verite, haunted asylum films, and Paranormal State, you're probably not going to get a whole lot out of this film. Imagine REC and Session 9 with a PRS gimmick and you've got this film. It's not groundbreaking, its not earthshattering, but its definitely worth a watch.

Halloween 2012 Day 2: Ghosts of Mars (2001)

Okay, lets get this out of the way first:  I definitely appreciate "ideas" over "execution." If you're making me choose between a slap-dash, cheap movie that innovates or is interesting in some way, I'll pick it every time over some highly-polished, gleaming turd. I'm a Troma fan not a Chris Nolan fan.
Even so, the flaws in Ghosts of Mars are impossible to ignore, even though the setting is absolutely fascinating. It's only the 22nd century but Mars is now mostly terraformed and ruled by a homosexual matriarchy. The matriarchy answers to the Earth government though, which is presumably still a patriarchy. Why? How has it remained it place long enough for the idiom "The woman is keeping us down" to become common-place? John Carpenter's Mars is an interesting place.
The monsters are uninspired, the acting is atrocious, the soundtrack is puerile, and the editing makes zero sense. Imagine a scene where a character slowly shuts a door, except it consists of four shots all with Star Wars wipes between them. Of the character shutting the door. That is the Ghosts of Mars experience. Make no bones about it, this is not a good movie. The setting, however, makes it so that its a movie worth seeing and contemplating.

Halloween 2012 Day 1: The Innkeepers (2011)

So, Ti West is a certifiable genius.
It takes a real certain mind to make a genuinely scary movie. West's House of the Devil proved he had the writing chops and love of genre to pull it off, and, coupled with his superb directorial ability helped no doubt by House of the Devil's gimmick, created a modern classic. The Innkeepers removes the ability to rely on nostalgia and gimmick while also adding in a certain humor, a recipe for disaster for your average director/writer/editor.
Mr. West is no average auteur.
With The Innkeepers, Ti West manages to make a genuinely funny movie with the characterization and the scares to back it up. The film very much feels like a modernization of mid-20th century genre filmmaking techniques. You don't see the villain in the first act and really you get little more than the vague impression that not everything is as it seems until the third, allowing the film to devote itself to developing the protagonist, Claire. Claire hits all the buttons for a good horror protagonist and Sara Paxton's portrayal of her does her credit.
The film is very, very cool and proves that Ti West can stand on his own merits without the coat of paint that is 80s pastiche. The Innkeepers is a veritable classic.