Halloween Day 5: The Ring (2002)

After her niece mysteriously dies, a reporter sets out to find the cause. On her way, she discovers a tape that, when watched, gives you seven days to live.
It makes a lot of sense that this film was directed by Gore Verbinski. As Japanese horror remake, it serves its purpose well. Its a pretty good film, markedly free of jump scares like other, more recent, remakes. The atmosphere is heavy and the dialog is worthwhile, even if it outstays its welcome. A pretty good movie.

Halloween Day 4: The Evil Dead (1981)

A few friends drive into the woods, to a cabin for a weekend. When one of them finds some old relics in the basement, including a book bound in flesh and a tape recording, they unleash something old and something dead.
The Evil Dead is an amazing film. Beginning to end, some of the finest horror you'll ever experience. Sam Raimi, at least during this era, can do no wrong. Evil Dead is a certifiable classic, as are its comedy successors. Every bit as exciting and scary as it should be. A great romp.

Halloween Day 3: Resolution (2012)

In resolution we find ourselves transported into a world where a man has chained his best friend to a pipe in the wall of an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. As the friend detoxes from meth, the man begins to lose himself in his own story.
The meta-narrative is kind of played and the ambiguity of the film, which admittedly is its high-point in a great climax, feels kind of forced. Otherwise this is a fantastic, superbly acted, tightly written, high-tension, full intrigue, spectacular film.
In a meta way, as so eloquently portrayed by the film, I'm starting to lose my edge with regard to horror films. Maybe its getting older, maybe its something worse, but I'm continuing to find myself more anxious about what's going to happen to the characters than I am about "monsters" or whatever. More anxious, less scared. It works pretty well in this film, where everything is chekhov's gun, and the constant worry of when its all going to fall in place adds to the movie but overall, tension has got my stomach in pits lately. Maybe I'm losing my edge. This movie made me think about these things, and any horror movie that leaves you thinking is a good one. Any movie that leaves you thinking is a good one, in my opinion.
This isn't really much of a review. Consider it an Op-Ed.

Halloween 2013 Day 2: Silent House (2012)

A young woman with her father and uncle begin to overhaul an old family home for sale. The family soon, as in like immediately, begins to experience all the symptoms of a home invasion. After her father and uncle disappear, Sarah is forced to navigate the dark house alone.

First of all, this is a bad movie. Anything that sounds positive about it, let me assure you, its a bad movie. The majority of the movie is made to look like its one continuous take, which it clearly isn't. The scares, while legitimate at the beginning, begin to wane very quickly. The story is essentially non-existent until the final act, where you'll start to wish the story was still non-existent. With an ending as uninspired, hacky, and offensive as the one supplied with Silent House, its no small wonder it tanked.

A lot of genre films get away with a lot as far as offensive stuff goes, and god knows this blog has made those concessions as well. The final act of Silent House is so beyond the pale with ham-fisted, unneeded, explicit, and tactless use of child abuse and rape, the directors should be ashamed of themselves for creating it. Ugh. And it thinks its so mature and forward-thinking to address heady problems like this in film and maybe there is a place for it, Martha Marcy May Marlene, another Elizabeth Olsen film, addresses some similar themes in an adult manner, but in my opinion, if you don't have the chops required to do something sensitive in an appropriate manner, maybe don't try. You're going to make a bad movie and alienate people, at best.

Why is it so hard to deliver a satisfactory ending to a horror film?

Halloween 2013 Day 1: Carrie (1976)

In the 1976 film Carrie, we're introduced to our protagonist as a reserved, isolated, mocked, and, most importantly, pure girl. When that purity is put into question, she begins to exhibit supernatural powers, specifically telekinesis, and her mother, abusive from the get go, begins to escalate her physical and emotional attacks on Carrie. As Carrie grows stronger and stronger, her high school peers begin to plot against her while her mother prays for her salvation.

Brian De Palma is a director who understands cinema better than most, and he guides what would be a rather uninspired script to a fantastic film. The editing in this film is superb, making great use of split screen and other, less traditional, tools in the cinematic arsenal. There's much more praise I could lay at the feet of De Palma. The soundtrack comes off as cheesy at times and the film might not have aged as well as some of its campier peers, but Carrie serves as an excellent piece of film.

V/H/S/2 (2013)

They crammed out a sequel to V/H/S already. Halloween 2012 is long gone by now, but V/H/S remains as one of the best horror anthologies of all time. Even with its weakness and extremely problematic content, its a high quality piece of work. Sequels generally aren't. V/H/S 2 stands up.

Once again we have a horror anthology set in this bleak universe. The collector is gone, the rapists are gone, all that's left is the house and the tapes. A man/woman private eye team break into the collector's house looking for a missing person. They find the person's laptop in the TV room. As the man begins to search the house for the kid, the woman puts in a tape. and another tape, and another. On each tape is another visage of horror: an eye transplant goes wrong, a man goes for a bike ride he'll never forget, a group of people investigate a cult, and a bunch of kids have a slumber party.

V/H/S/2 suffers from one major problem: most of the shorts run overlong. In the first, we get a full-blown explanation of how the terror mechanics work, which is never a good sign (see: friday the 13th part 2). The second and third go well past their welcome. Some of the shorts stretch the gimmick a little far. There's a lot of editing involved in the second and third that loses some of the suspension of disbelief. The last one, however, is almost flawless in its execution. It shows off some basic effects and makes what are clearly dudes in poorly made costumes blasting air horns absolutely terrifying.

Overall, V/H/S/2 is unnecessary but fun. Its nice seeing a short with an all non-white cast, there's no short that involves rape this time around, and the only homophobia I could see came from one throwaway line that probably should have been edited out. All in all, V/H/S/2 is worth a watch if you liked the first one. Also, they should have kept the S-VHS title, that one's way better than V/H/S/2.

Mama (2013)

Feral girl stories are the worst. They're lazy, insipid, and offensive. Nell? More like Hell (No, I Wont Watch This Film). It is by sidestepping the tropes in the feral girl "genre" that allows Mama its ability to scare.

At the outset, a man murders his wife and business partners, and runs with his daughters in hand. They, of course, crash into the woods. The father is quickly murdered by unseen forces in a spooky cabin and the girls are left alone to go feral in the wilderness. They are found five years later and taken in by their uncle, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and his romantic partner, Jessica Chastain. Sooner or later the couple finds out they brought back more than just two girls from the woods.

Just from the names of the leads you should know on what level the performances are. The rare horror movie with an A-list cast, it excels in basically every area. The scares are effective, the humor is effective, the cgi even works, and I imagine it'll stand up for a while at least. Mama is genuine scary as well as being an actual good film. A rare mix but a powerful one.

The Strangers (2008)

Honest to goodness, home invasions scare the living daylights out of me. Its like, you're in a place where you're supposed to be safe all the time except that space is threatened. Not only threatened but violated. I don't like the idea of it and I guess its my privilege that makes that specific scenario the scariest thing to me. What I am saying is, stay out of my house.

In The Strangers, we are set in an isolated house, strange to leading lady Liv Tyler, with her would-be fiance. After he leaves, Tyler's character begins to hear strange knocks at the door and windows. Then, quickly, things placed in her house, like her phone and piano, start moving when she's not looking. She and her quickly reunited boyfriend find themselves being terrorized by three masked people.

The Strangers is an excellent movie in conveying that sense of helplessness and lack of safety. It is legitimately scary with some excellent performances by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman. The film quickly falls apart in the second act, and leaves at the end with a "just another horror movie" moment. Fun, and scary, while it lasted.

Alien Resurrection (1997)

The Alien films are great. Alien is amazing, Aliens is super fun, and I even liked Alien 3 a whole lot. The Alien is a great horror monster. Giger's character design is perfect, the way it moves, the unstoppable nature of it. A force of nature. My adoration of the first three Alien films makes Alien Resurrection that much worse.

Two hundred years after Alien 3, a clone of Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley (and a clone of the Alien queen) awake on a United Systems Military ship, where the military is trying to, guess what, turn the Aliens into biological weapons. When a group of pirates, including Ron Perlman and Winona Ryder, show up with human hosts for the facehuggers to infest, all hell breaks loose and "Ripley" and the crew have to escape an Alien infested starship before it crashes into Earth.

Its a generic plot for a generic film, every inch as boring as Alien was exciting. All the things about the first two movies, the grime and dirt of the first, the corruption and devastation of the second, are presented in Resurrection as the complete opposite. Sterile, boring sci fi spaceship filled with tons of uninteresting characters. The writing is insipid, a Joss Whedon scifi hallmark, and the acting is even less convincing. Even Ron Perlman couldn't save this mess. What a boring movie and an unfortunate way to end a great franchise.

The Last Exorcism (2010)

The Exorcist is probably my favorite movie of all time. It hits every single note and it hits it incredibly well. There is nothing as terrifying as Linda Blair's performance and the story behind the film is nearly as haunting as the film itself. No film, let alone a wide-release exorcism film, can compete with the storytelling and fear cast by the Exorcist. The Last Exorcism doesn't try and that's why it succeeds.

Failed televangelist and professional exorcist, Cotton Marcus, hires a two-person documentary team to follow him on his final exorcism in the backwoods of Louisiana, a town rife with rumors of cults and voodoo, to expose the exorcism racket. Once there, he performs his fraudulent exorcism and tries to leave, but finds himself caught in the story of this girl, one horrifically abused and tortured, not by demons but by the people she should be able to trust.

The Last Exorcism is, for the most part, a good film. It doesn't make use of its faux-documentary conceit as well as something like Blair Witch Project or [Rec], obviously, or even something more pedestrian like Lake Mungo, and the film drags a bit in the late-middle, with the male lead constantly in indecision. However, Ashley Bell's performance as Nell, the ostensibly possessed girl, is brilliant and she absolutely deserves every single award she won/was nominated for. The film staggers whenever the supernatural is introduced, especially at the end when the pacing is destroyed, but given that over ninety-percent of the film has nothing to do with the supernatural, its fine. It reminded me a lot of Kill List in that way. Definitely worth seeing, and definitely not the schlock that wide-release horror films usually are.

Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)

Non-linearity in horror film seems like a huge gamble. Its a very straight forward genre. You go from point a to point b, as terrifyingly as possible. The Grudge succeeds with its non-linear storytelling by doing exactly that, going from point a to point b, but stopping at c and z along the way.
The sequel to a sequel to a direct-to-video horror film, The Grudge exists in a certain amount of Ju-On tradition. When a volunteer welfare worker makes a routine visit to an elderly patient in a seemingly ordinary house, she stumbles into an old, and deadly, series of murders and disappearances. The story unravels from the point of view of the people she encounters as well as the people the house encounters, leading to a climax that unites the story threads.
Ju-On: The Grudge is a slog. That's not to say that its not good, or not worth watching, because it very definitely is. But it suffers from some severe pacing issues, due to the non-linear nature of its storytelling. Some of the stories told in this film are just not worth telling. Some of the more boring segments are steeped in a level of Japanese culture and religion that is completely foreign, and to a point perplexing, to me, but might not be to you! There are some awesome shots in the film, a near complete lack of jump scares, and some legitimately terrifying moments. You can see how influential this film was on 00s horror in its aesthetics and its got worth in that alone.

The Wicker Man (1973)

I think we can all agree that imperialism is pretty bad. Early christian missionaries demolished indigenous cultures and, in some cases, eradicated native populations in the name of their god, their empire of heaven. There are things completely lost to us now, religious rites and fetishes, objects of both anthropological and social interest that we can never get back.
The Wicker Man is a film essentially about the danger of religious imperialism. When celibate christian police officer Howie (Edward Woodward) goes to an island off the coast of Scotland to investigate a missing person, he stumbles into a conspiracy. The towns people all deny the existence of the missing girl, including her own mother. Soon, he finds himself wrapped up in pagan tradition and worship, all under the watchful eye of the island's lord, played by Christopher Lee. As Howie attempts to criminalize their worship, he finds a depth of "depravity" he could never have imagined.
It is a story of an incredibly naive man, a man raised in an insanely insular fashion, who lives his life completely closed off to thought, trying to destroy the religious beliefs of a small community. When we learn the recontextualizing twist, that Rowan was a macguffin, Howie's reaction removes all sympathy. He switches from biological justification for his crusade, to religious justification so quickly, making his motivation to simply destroy that which threatens him. Perhaps Howie deserves his fate. As Lord Summerisle says, he can die a martyr's death, in his christianity as well as in the island's mythology.
The Wicker Man is a tremendous film. As the presence of Christopher Lee implies, it is a 70s British horror film, with all the baggage that entails. However, its almost entirely well-acted, the script is a work of genius, and the direction shows glimpses of brilliance. Its absolute a film worth watching, especially with an ideological eye.

Lake Mungo (2008)

There's a certain something with ghost stories. If its taken for granted that ghosts exist, you lose a lot of the mystery. If its solid and concrete that ghosts don't exist, its just Scooby Doo. Part of the key to a good ghost story is walking the line of, "is this real or am I crazy?"
Lake Mungo walks that line exceptionally.  This fictional documentary follows an Australian family after they lose their daughter in a freak swimming accident. After images of the dead girl are found in family photos, the family takes every step they can to keep their daughter in their lives, including setting up video cameras and hiring a psychic. As the months go by, they discover the many secrets their daughter hid, including ones that may have foretold her death.
Spoiling anything else about Lake Mungo is doing a disservice to a viewer as much of the suspense of the movie hinges on a few major reveals. The film is very droll and very methodically paced for a ghost movie but this adds to the documentary atmosphere. Its effective at what it is, not so much a ghost story as a story about dealing with grief and the consequences that follow. Its well-acted, any flaws hidden by the documentary style, and composited well. Keep an eye on the white space and be sure to stay through the credits.