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.