For the Devil Holds Fast Your Eyelids

Long time, no nothing. I tried finishing a ghost story in time for Halloween but didn’t make it. So now you’re stuck with this until the story's done. Enjoy!

The VVitch (2016)

I saw The VVitch in the cinema (with Zwolf) the weekend it debuted and loved it, but we could easily tell that it requires subtitles/captioning as the period dialect comes so thick and fast that keeping up is difficult. Compounding this is the film’s lack of explication (a good thing) and use of mostly natural lighting, which means, because the setting is 1630s New England, it’s dark a lot, even during daytime scenes. So I’ve now watched The VVitch perhaps 10 times, and I consider it both a modern masterpiece and one of the most satisfying films I’ve ever seen. The story revolves around a family of English newcomers to the continent who are, as the movie opens, being cast out of their village because the father is evidently too sternly religious even for these presumed Puritans. The family then establishes their own homestead out in the wilderness, where things go wrong immediately: their infant Sam disappears (quite literally); the crops are shit, so they’re courting starvation; the hilarious, proto-ADD twins Jonas and Mercy irritate everyone and sing creepy songs about Black Phillip, the family’s boisterous goat (above); the twins and older sister Thomasin persistently accuse each other of being witches; and so on. Then the oldest son, Caleb, becomes lost in the woods, and when he returns, he’s changed – “witched,” according to his mother – and that’s when everything really deteriorates. I don’t want to say much more because, if you haven’t seen this movie, you deserve an unspoiled watch. However, I’ll point out a delicious bit of IMDb trivia: “Although the film's plot was intended to be taken literally, director Robert Eggers has spoken about a few small hints him [sic] and the filmmakers left throughout the film that one might interpret as reasoning behind the events, beyond the obvious supernatural. For example, the rot on the corn is ergot – a hallucinogenic fungus.” The VVitch, in sum, is a gritty, realistic, and frightening film, with several scenes that will haunt you long after your viewing ends. I also highly recommend the soundtrack, which I purchased within an hour of seeing the film for the first time. It’s absolutely terrifying, right up there with Kronos Quartet and Glenn Branca’s Symphony No. 6 for sheer hair-raising power. (The VVitch, by the way, is currently included with Amazon Prime.)

Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors – Adam Nevill (2016)

Boy, do we love Adam Nevill on this site! Zwolf and I have sung the new master’s praises in several earlier posts, with the loftiest aves devoted to his pitch-perfect novels The Ritual and Last Days, though honestly anything Nevill writes is worth reading, as this new collection of short fiction makes even clearer. Some Will Not Sleep brings together previously-published stories from throughout Nevill’s career, so it’s worthwhile for the completionist fan (e.g., me) regardless of literary quality, but fret not about that quality – all of these tales are good, and several are superb enough to merit individual mention/inspection. “The Original Occupant,” with its Briton searching for a lost friend in Scandinavia (and finding......yikes), is an obvious antecedent for The Ritual (Nevill himself says as much in the “About These Horrors: Story Notes” section), and anything related to that book is going to be golden. “Yellow Teeth” is a longer story whose length expertly builds both tension and your own disdain for Ewan, the antagonist roommate/squatter whose maddening audacity drives the plot toward a horrific conclusion. Despite its flat, placeholder-ish title, “Pig Thing” is an enormously effective example of short fiction’s compact power: stretched into a novel, this story about a…well, yeah, about a pig thing stalking New Zealand villagers might easily become pedestrian, but in short form it’s taut and merciless. “What God Hath Wrought?” is equal parts Blood Meridian, The Dark Tower, and Nevill’s own Last Days, all in about 30 pages, and if this combination doesn’t get your attention, then you’re clearly visiting the wrong blog –here’s one story you’ll wish were longer. Although I'm not generally a fan of gore and the physically grotesque, the pseudo-post-apocalyptic futurism of "Doll Hands" is so intricately and cleverly detailed I didn't mind that I was reading a story centered on commercial cannibalism. 

And then there’s “The Ancestors,” what I consider the best selection in the book. When I finished this one – think of it as Toy Story plus Kôji Suzuki minus any trace of novelty or mirth – I felt I’d been gut-punched by a gigantic and sneaky fist. It does so much with so little (heh) in so few pages that I didn’t anticipate the enormity of the ending, and I doubt you will either. In a lifetime of reading, I can’t recall ever being this unsettled by a short story. Such is the power of Nevill’s writing. Worth mentioning too are the hardcover’s tactile pleasures: the dust-jacket texture, the luxurious paper stock, the super-creepy cover art (pictured above), the recurring Ritual Limited black-goatskull-of-the-woods sigil. So, yes, get this book. Your hands and eyes will thank you, even if its contents prevent you from sleeping. Buy it here: http://www.adamlgnevill.com/ritual-limited-shop/. (Nevill also has a new novel out, Under a Watchful Eye. Squee!)

Green Room (2015)

Touring hardcore band the Ain't Rights get set up with an impromptu gig and run afoul of murderous Nazi punks (including, naturally, Patrick Stewart). While it's touted as a horror film, Green Room is more suspense/thriller (similar in feel to Kevin Smith's superior Red State), with plenty of intense and gruesome scenes, including and especially the already-infamous boxcutter scene. I enjoyed this film, but I really expected more based on the hype. The ending in particular is disappointingly formulaic, and while Stewart's terrific in anything, of course, he's strangely and ineffectively tame in this role, leaving the meaty mayhem up to the youngsters. Still, the music/band-related details are surprisingly accurate (a true rarity), and any movie with Dead Kennedys, Napalm Death, and Slayer on the soundtrack has at least three things going for it right there. Worth a look, for sure.

Fences (2016)

Denzel Washington and Viola Davis reprise their Tony-winning roles as Troy and Rose Maxson in this adaptation of August Wilson's Tony- and Pulitzer-winning play about an African-American family in 1950s Pittsburgh. Washington and Davis are absolutely brilliant, as always – and I can't be the only one who now, post-Training Day, thinks Washington's characters are always nanoseconds away from bellowing "KING KONG AIN'T GOT NOTHIN' ON ME!" – but the real heart of this film is Mykelti Williamson (Bubba from Forrest Gump) as Gabe (left), Troy's war-wounded brother. It's a role that could be hopelessly clichéd (cf. "Simple Jack" and "never go full retard" from Tropic Thunder), but Williamson dissolves into this portrayal, making Gabe nuanced, poignant, funny, and essential. Fences is an incredible, complex movie all around. Highly recommended.

The Lobster (2015)

This one feels like an Anglo-Irish, world-weary Wes Anderson film. Single people in a vaguely dystopian near-future move into a highly regimented hotel where they must find a romantic partner within 45 days or get transformed into the animal of their choosing. David (Colin Farrell, right) chooses the lobster because, as he says, they "live for over one hundred years, are blue-blooded like aristocrats, and stay fertile all their lives. I also like the sea very much." The first half of this odd film is a clever, often hilarious satire of how society views single people and the pressure put upon them to couple up. (Here, "hilarious" means I guffawed with abandon perhaps eight different times.) The second half, though, goes a bit off the rails and becomes hard(er) to follow once a renegade group of singles escapes to the nearby woods and takes up with a truly renegade group called the Loners. Still, after the peerless In Bruges, I'll watch Farrell in anything, especially when he's alongside John C. Reilly and (mmmmm) Rachel Weisz.

The 2016 Presidential Election

In the gray, grim days after November 8, I spent a long time writing a real scorched-earth piece about the goddamned presidential election and its immediate aftermath, but, after revising and rereading it a dozen times, I decided it's just not worth posting. We're fucked, plain and simple.

However, just so I don't close on an entirely fatalistic note, as a tonic for my despair, I’ve begun writing an album of protest songs called Cheeto Hitler, the tentative track listing for which appears below:

1. Hillary Clinton Came On to Me at a Campaign Event and All I Got was This Lousy Wet Dream
2. Small-Business Saturday
3. Down in the Gutter (Where the Real People Stay)
4. Stacks on Stacks on Stacks
5. Cheeto Hitler
6. Put Out My Eyes
7. An Empty Culture
8. Fair-Weather Pacifist
9. A Disease Called Masculinity
10. The Mouth That Ate Us All
11. Rumination on the End

I Watched So You Won't Have To

Well, OK, you might want to watch some of them. It’s really up to you, innit? (All these are currently on Netflix Instant.)

The Bay (2012)

Another found-footage workout, this time involving some sort of ecological disaster in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay that embeds parasites in people, leading to gruesome deaths and community panic. The main and perhaps only point of interest for this film is how a director as renowned as Barry Levinson (Diner; The Natural; Good Morning, Vietnam; Rain Man) could helm such a titanic bowl of horseshit. I’m not too fond of gross-out horror anyway unless it’s done well, and this one certainly is not.

I know it seems like a copout, but I just don’t have anything else to say – this movie is an utter waste of time.

The Possession (2012)

A girl buys a dybbuk box at an estate sale and soon finds out, you know, that it houses a dybbuk. The girl becomes obsessed with the box and subsequently possessed by the dybbuk. One of the things I hate most about horror films is the fractured-family formula (fff): divorced/alcoholic/emotionally unavailable parents + anxious/emotionally troubled kids = bad stuff. There must be hundreds of films that follow fff or some variation of it, as if you couldn’t possibly conjure up scares without its comforting parameters (total hooey, of course). And this film follows fff so urgently it’s like the filmmakers think such a construction is their idea alone. So yeah, the premise and overall framework are dumb. The execution, though, is actually rather effective. As I wrote here, I’m intrigued by otherwise stale movies whose money shots nonetheless pack a solid punch, and that’s what happens here. You’re affected by the scary scenes even though you rightly could not give a frog’s fat ass about the story or characters. The actress who plays the possessed girl does a first-rate job of seeming alternately terrified and demonic, the special effects that manifest the possession are judiciously and skillfully used (especially in the MRI scene), and the Orthodox-Jewish-exorcism subplot is interesting (plus: Matisyahu makes for a likeable ʻqsʻrsʼast despite some of the worst dialogue ever). Not really a good movie per se, but I enjoyed watching it twice.

Twixt (2011)

Val Kilmer is a writer on a book tour when he stumbles into the mystery surrounding a young girl’s murder (ghosts, the woods, etc.). I could give you plenty more detail about the story, but I won’t. This is one of those films that simply shouldn’t exist: not because it’s so bad, but because it’s so goddamn pointless. It contains not one interesting thing – not the clunky E.A.-Poe-dream-sequence subplot, not the silly goth kids across the lake, not the paint-by-numbers crustiness of Bruce Dern’s sheriff, not the fact that Francis Ford Coppola (YES THAT FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA THE ONE WHO MADE THE GODFATHER I/II AND APOCALYPSE NOW) directed it – nothing interesting except perhaps the opportunity to marvel at how jowly Kilmer has become, as witnessed in this before-and-after:

(Many people get jowly – I know this from my own mirrors – but when you start as the svelte bastard on the left and turn into Beau “I Just Ate My Brother Jeff” Bridges AND you still make a living onscreen, well, you’re a target, pal.)

If you were to watch The Bay, one logical thought that’d cross your mind is “Nothing could be a bigger waste of time than this.” And you’d be right, until you watch Twixt.

Grave Encounters (2011)

A film crew for the fictional reality show Grave Encounters goes to shoot an episode in the also-fictional and allegedly haunted Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, and you can probably guess nearly everything that happens next: skepticism, skepticism-but-WTF-was-that?, disbelief, false alarms, crew members disappearing one by one, gradual explication, blood and gore, et al. Yet, I actually like this movie. Its setup and framework are as stupid as stupid gets, but there’s something about the way the hospital turns into an architectural Möbius strip that lures me in and gets me hooked – plus I like the scary faces the ghosts make.

 

Dumb overall but worth your time for the sturdy scares. (Stay away from the shit-stupid sequel, though.)

Apparitions (2008)

This British miniseries about a priest/exorcist battling the devil, demons, doubt, and Vatican hegemony is fantastic, and it’s only six episodes long, so the story is lean and tight, full of superb acting and genuine frights. I’m not even going to tell you any more than that. Just go watch it.

11-11-11: The Prophecy (2011)

Joseph Crone, a famous author, loses his wife and son in a fire and soon realizes that the numbers 11-11-11 seem to be cropping up everywhere. Shortly after a car accident from which he escapes unscathed, his brother summons him to Barcelona because their father is dying. While there, weird things start happening that involve (a) his preacher-brother’s church, (b) his ex-preacher-father’s church-related legacy, and (c) 11-11-11, numbers that are still consistently cropping up. For much of this film, I didn’t know WHAT in the hell was going on (a good thing), but once I figured out the drift, not much else that happened was surprising, which is OK because I liked it anyway. Like others in this list, it’s not a great film or anything (the acting and dialogue are awfully wooden), but the atmosphere is effectively creepy, and some of the visual frights are well executed. Worth seeing.

The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh (2012)

Leon, an antiques dealer, arrives at his deceased mom's house to sort out her belongings, an insane amount of which are statues of angels and saints. We also see very early on that he’s simultaneously coming to terms with some fff-type demons, though he soon finds they’re not the only demons in the house. Most of the talking in the film is done by Leon’s titular mother as narration, and here’s why this film works: (a) the voice belongs to Vanessa Redgrave, who has the requisite and classically trained gravitas to make you care about her lonely fate, and (b) even her narration is limited, meaning much of this film is tense silence punctuated by tasteful swellings of score. Her fate has something to do with what appears to be a cult-like religious community, and I say “appears to be” because this facet of the story is only suggested (again and often, a wise decision). The key scenes with Leon and his demon are quite scary, and the ending doesn’t tie up too many loose ends. Nothing life-changing but a solid, interesting movie nonetheless.

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

A recap of my case for PA 1-3 (again, made here): the usual genre qualms aside, PA 1 is a horror classic, PA 2 is a surprisingly worthy prequel that sometimes supersedes 1, and PA 3 falters but is mightily effective at times. Given this, it’s no shock that PA 4 fails to live up to its predecessors’ successes. One of the main problems with the found-footage genre is the ridiculous contortions to which filmmakers will/must resort to keep the cameras rolling – without a removed, omniscient, third-person camera, how else will the goings-on get captured? And while I’m apparently more willing or able than many to forgive such contortions, PA4 uses up all my forgiveness: once you resort to carrying around laptops (or hyperconveniently leaving them on) set to Skype/FaceTime, your well has run dry.

Or has it? One quick scene in PA4 is ingenious and effectively spooky. Katie, the demon’s target in PA1, now lives across the street from an unsuspecting family with the nephew she kidnapped in PA2 (then called Hunter, now called Robbie). Robbie befriends the family’s similarly aged son, and because the demon (who, we learn in PA 3, goes by Toby) sticks with Robbie now, Robbie brings Toby into their home. One night, while they’re playing a boxing game on Xbox Kinect (which employs no handheld controller – a camera picks up your movements and incorporates them into the game), they realize there’s an extra “player” onscreen – one more, in fact, than there are people visible in the room. This realization occurs quickly, almost in an offhand or sidelong fashion, which, of course, increases its effectiveness, since Toby’s presence is implied rather than explied even though at one point this extra player looks straight into the Xbox camera. (Why isn’t “explied” a word? You know what? I’m saying it’s a word. Fuckin’ prescriptivists.)

Otherwise, the best thing about PA 4 is the image they used in the ads.

The Awakening (2011)

Let’s get this out of the way right now: even if this movie sucked, it stars Rebecca Hall, and you’re hard-pressed to find a better use of 107 minutes than simply looking at her.

Fortunately, it doesn’t suck, in part because Hall is an incredible actress (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, The Town, Iron Man 3). She plays a famed 1920s debunker of the supernatural who’s invited to a supposedly haunted boarding school for boys, where she begins to see why they think it’s haunted. The story eventually delves into some hardcore fff, but this element comes near the end and is more than counter-balanced by the scary stuff’s effectiveness (and a few of these scary moments are VERY effective indeed). Highly recommended.

Be well! Eat pie! Bang your head!

(No Such Thing As) Too Much Horror Business

Who you callin’ “Spook,” Peckerwood?

Dracula the Un-Dead (Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt, 2009)

I don’t mind audacity as long as the payoff’s good. And this book is audacious: co-written by Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew, it seeks to reclaim the world of Dracula from Hollywood and popular culture, which apparently have muddled the story since 1897, in a sequel that, broadly speaking, pits the Harkers, Van Helsing, and Arthur Holmwood/Lord Godalming against Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who’s like an ignoble lesbian Dracula on steroids.

SIGH.

As with so many allegedly good ideas, this book is one big “Yes, OK, but…” The story basics are intriguing, but there are too many problems, including one huge problem that can’t be gotten around: the writing is terrible. I’m talking bush-league, Dick-and-Jane-sentence terrible. And once you take a familiar story with familiar characters in a familiar genre and add “terrible writing” to the mix, you get a book that feels for all the world like it’s been phoned in, as though the authors figured they could just ride Mina Harker’s coattails for 400 pages instead of really honing this idea into something special (and, also, instead of proofreading). Another huge problem is that the narrative keeps jumping far too quickly from one character’s crisis-ridden scene to another’s, mimicking that soap-opera trick of zooming the camera in on someone’s over-emoting face as the ominous music swells and then CUT to more over-emotive nonsense. Over and over and over. And then there’s the book’s inevitability, because you know from very early on EXACTLY how events are going to unfold and how the story’s going to end, though I’m certain this inevitability was not itself inevitable – the tale, in other words, could’ve been handled far more artfully and telegraphed far less. There are some good elements, like scenes of high-octane gore, an intriguing Jack the Ripper subplot, and, of course, the lesbian Dracula I mention above: despite the absolute crap internal and external dialogue she’s given, Bathory is a straight-up badass who probably deserves not only her own film adaptation but also her own film adaptation in which she’s played by Noomi Rapace (the original and superior Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Seriously, she could be awesome on screen, so long as Stoker and Holt aren’t allowed near the screenplay (but Holt’s a screenwriter, so fat chance there).

Honestly, don’t waste your time with this book. Read something else.

Horns (Joe Hill, 2010)

Ig Perrish wakes up with horns growing out of his head, and he soon discovers that these horns (a) make people open up to him in shocking ways, (b) cause him physical pain, (c) allow him to snort puffs of smoke, and, later, (d) summon snakes. The backstory for all this, told through chapter-length flashbacks, is the as-yet unsolved death of his beloved Merrin and the community’s suspicion that Ig killed her. One of the neat things about this book is that, although it’s predictable, Hill does such a good job developing these characters into complex, realistic entities that the story winds up being not so much predictable as natural, simply going where required by the characters’ machinations. There are several impressively realistic dialogue-heavy scenes, which is rare in my experience; usually, heavy dialogue tends to shout “EXPOSITION! I’M COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT PLOT POINTS THROUGH TALKING!” Not here, thankfully. There’s also a weird villain who easily could have been the story’s weak point but isn’t, and that’s rare too. His name is Lee Tourneau, and I’m positive Hill knew what he was doing when he gave this guy a name so aurally close to Mary Kay Letourneau, the creepy and felonious Samoan cradle-robber. The first time I encountered Lee Tourneau in the story, I literally groaned, and for that I say: well-played, Joe Hill. You should positively read this book, so I won’t spoil any juicy bits (and there are plenty) by giving them away here, but I must mention two nifty echoes:

1. Whether an intentional overlap or not, Merrin is the surname of Max von Sydow’s character in The Exorcist, who is, of course, an exorcist. Since Ig grows horns and involuntarily draws out the baser instincts of those he encounters, does Merrin somehow function as an exorcist for him? Kind of, actually. Not in a direct way, but kind of. Enough that I want to read it again from that perspective.

2. In Restoration and early Georgian English literature, literal and figurative horns connote someone who’s been cuckolded (which is also where we get the modern sexual notion of horny). This too has some layered and slightly off-center application to Ig.

Highly, highly recommended.

Insidious (2011)

Horror for me is a tricky genre. Like anything else I read or watch, it needs to be handled specifically and realistically, but specifics and realism sometimes tamp down what might be scary, since they tend to deflate the fantastic and phantasmagoric. It needs to play on ingrained, traditional, even limbic fears, so it needs a degree of familiarity, but few things will ruin a horror piece like overly predictable paint-by-numbers hooey. And it needs to be scary – it needs to create those magic moments where your fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in even though you’re sitting quietly on your couch or in a theater seat. (These are all broad-stroke opinions, of course. Feel free to disagree with abandon.)

Based on these ideas, then, I’ve rarely encountered a film like Insidious that provokes such contradictory reactions from me. It’s overflowing with boilerplate horror totems:

• Happy family in a new place
• Less-than-stable wife left alone too much with her young kids
• Unexplained occurrence involving one kid
• Bizarre and scary events possibly caused by said occurrence
• Recruitment of quirky paranormal investigators (complete with one warm, wizened female seer and two comic-relief technicians)
• Revelation of past and heretofore unknown macabre occurrences
• Epic showdown of Dark Forces versus once-happy family + paranormal investigators
• A partially happy ending

How many stories have I just described? Poltergeist is almost a perfect fit, and I’m sure there are dozens of others. Additionally, the mother and father are too good-looking (oh, but she’s Rose Byrne – mmmmmmmmmm…), the kids are too cute by half, a few important plot points are too thinly developed, and the soundtrack and sound effects rely too much on sudden-jolt shock value.

And yet I’ve watched this movie several times, always with delight, and am even now anticipating watching it again. Why? Quite simply, it’s because the scary parts are really motherfucking scary. Considered in light of my beefs in the previous paragraph, the scary parts are basically set pieces – it’s not that they’re unrelated to the overarching story, it’s that they have a power lacking in the non-scary scenes. Lovely as she is, I don’t really care that Rose Byrne’s character is lonely. I don’t really care that her husband (Patrick Wilson) seems overly distant and unhelpful. I don’t really care (forgive me for saying this) that their son is in a coma-like state for much of the movie. I don’t really care that moving to another new house (they rightly think the first new one is haunted) does nothing to stop the weird shit from happening. But I sure do care when Byrne’s character sees a hulking figure walk past her second story window directly into her bedroom and then literally screech toward her as she scrambles off the bed. I sure do care when she’s playing LPs while unpacking at the second new house, hears the needle scratch off the record, hears a different song playing, and then sees an ultra-creepy little boy/man running around, laughing. (And whoever picked Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” for this different song is a goddamn genius.) I sure do care during several other moments that I won’t spoil for you here – suffice to say they're scary even when I already know they’re coming.

Maybe this care/don’t care business isn’t so strange. I mean, I don’t care too much about Laurie Strode’s, Danny Torrance’s, or Jim the courier’s woes, but Halloween, The Shining, and 28 Days Later… remain terrifying years after they first appeared. I suppose what all these films share with Insidious is that their money shots are exceptionally effective irrespective of plot/character concerns. (I mean, to examine the other side of the coin for a sec, how many horror films have I watched with zero money shots that worked on me? [Answer: 1, 117. I counted ‘em just the other day!]) Consider another, even lesser-known example: The Messengers, a 2007 release starring Dylan McDermott, Penelope Ann Miller, and that piece of timber Kristen Stewart. Could you put together a less impressive cast? Maybe if you tossed in Keanu Reeves and Cybil Shepherd? And I swear to you the storyline hews to the list of totems I describe a few paragraphs above. Dumb as the floor. But the money shots? Hoo-boy. I paused on this movie while scanning channels a few years ago and was overwhelmed by its vapidity. Then a scene happened where Kristen Stewart is holding her baby brother in the middle of the night in their new house, investigating a strange noise, and we – and the baby – see a ghoul slowly approaching from behind Stewart. The scene drags on sparsely and mercilessly for I-don’t-know-how-long-but-it-feels-like-hours, and it is terrifying.

While they’re occurring to me, consider three more examples of weak horror movies with a handful of strong scenes:

1. Signs: I hate the lugubrious sentimentality in M. Night Shyamalan-a-ding-dong’s films so much I don’t even know what to say anymore, and this one is among the worst, with an asthmatic Culkin and Johnny Cash and a grieving anti-Semitic and his courageous return to his ecumenical collar at the end. But even all this silliness doesn’t stop a few alien-encounter scenes from being mightily effective (not the one of news footage on TV – that’s just comic).

2. Devil: Yeah, another Shyamalan schmaltzfest, which is a real shame because this one (five people trapped on an elevator with, apparently, the devil) could have been completely brilliant. The big reveal near the end, though, is a total masterstroke. I’m getting chills right now just thinking about it. Yikes!

3. The Others: This movie’s not bad – its creepy atmosphere is dense and enjoyably oppressive – but Nicole Kidman’s mourning for her dead husband and hyper-vigilance over her kids’ photosensitivity become irritating more or less immediately. There’s also a (wait for it) “surprise ending.” But the film has several genuinely scary scenes, including one near the middle with a veiled figure and a marionette whose fright value makes watching the entire thing (to that point) worthwhile.

Shit, add to this the entire Paranormal Activity franchise. I went to see the first one in the theater, lured by the very effective trailers, and, despite some perennial complaints – How convenient that the film centers on two TOTAL cutie pies! When do these people go to work? PLEASE STOP FILMING YOU DICK! THERE’S A MALEVOLENT PARANORMAL PRESENCE IN YOUR MIDST! &etc. – it scared the shit out of me. I literally didn’t sleep well that night. Then the second PA film comes out, and although I’m averse to sequels, the trailers once again lured me in and goddammit if I didn’t find the second one more effective than the first. (Let me pause and bluntly summarize for emphasis: there is some really fucked-up shit in PA2.) So then PA3 comes out, and I say aloud “There’s no way that’s going to be any good,” and I don’t see it in the theater, but I do watch it on Netflix, and………yeah, it’s not as good as the first two. But it gets a few money shots so very, very right – the sheet-ghost in the kitchen? UN. HOLY. HELL. – that I’ve watched it more than once, delighted every time.

Anyway, I was talking about Insidious. It's definitely worth your time if you haven’t seen it (on Netflix Instant, et al.), if only because I’d like to know if you find any of it effective. Among its tried and true formulae, it even adds a few legitimate and scary surprises. Unlike most films we discuss here, it’s rated PG-13, which is probably about right considering the amount of profanity, gore, and nudity it doesn’t contain, though I can’t fathom my 13-year-old watching it until he’s older (my 18-year-old passed on watching after I described it to her – she knows her limits).

That's all I got for today. Come check some of us out on Twitter if you like laughing.

The Good and the Bad and Ugly

 A couple reviews of things that just came out on DVD in the past couple of weeks, all from the hardcore no-fucking-around school of horror.  The first one I watched so you don't have to (really, truly, you don't) and the second two you should seek out.



The Human Centipede 2 [Full Sequence] - (B&W, 2011) Vile, grimy sequel follows a fan of the original film as he tries to re-create it, but with a dozen people instead of just three.  The lunatic is Martin, a toadlike retarded man with bulging eyes, a nasty cough, and perpetual sheen of sweat.  He's an attendant at a parking garage, and his job provides him with too much downtime, which he spends watching The Human Centipede on an endless loop on his laptop while masturbating with sandpaper; abuse by his father left him an extreme masochist.  Concocting a plan far too stupid to be realistic at all, Martin whams people over the head with a crowbar and takes them away to a filthy warehouse.  When he collects a dozen he tries the operation from the movie, but he's no doctor and people bleed more than he figured on when he tries cutting into them (although he does manage to sever knee-tendons in much more detail than you'd ever wish for), so he just staples his centipede segments together with a staplegun, lips to assholes.  And it doesn't turn out well...   This movie has very little in the way of a story and is just a childish attempt to gross you out, and it works, but that's easy.  While the first movie wisely showed some restraint, this one wallows in showing all the depravity in as much graphic detail as possible, and the ante is upped by adding such idiocies as rape with a barbed-wire-wrapped penis; if that's not excess for the sake of excess, what is?  Maybe a baby being stomped on seconds after it's born, and hey you lucky dog, you, you get that, too.  I felt sorry for the actors and actresses who had to jam their mouths into each other's buttcracks while pudding spews out, because that's something you can look at, but it's not a movie.  Showing bloated-ass Martin naked and his psychiatrist's out-of-control beard is really all the grotesquerie you'd ever need. To try to make all this seem "artsy" it's filmed in black and white, and Martin never speaks; he cries, coughs, and makes farting noises when he's trying to cheerlead his captives into defecating -- as sick as that was, I gotta admit I did laugh at his enthusiasm.  The film's very well-shot and director Tom Six does have filmmaking talent, but this glimpse of hell isn't a very good use of it; it's too silly to be scary, but it's not the kind of silly that'll get you laughing much, except maybe at yourself when you think about what you're sitting there watching.  The first film has some merit amongst all the sickness and is better than the concept would suggest, but this one-upsmanship just looks desperate for attention.  Please be shocked by it, pleeeease!









Dead, The (C, 2010) A war in Africa goes horribly wrong when the dead start coming back to life and eating the living.  While trying to escape the country a plane goes down and an American engineer/mechanic is the only survivor.  He manages to fix up an old truck and befriends an African soldier who's trying to find his son.  They drive through the African wilderness (teeming with the slowly-wandering dead) in search of a military base, but their supplies are running out and the hungry dead are everywhere.  The market's so oversaturated with zombie movies that there's definitely too much of a good thing, but this one stands out from the pack and makes itself welcome by doing everything right.  It's not that it's really that different -- other than the African setting it's pretty standard, simple zombie-survival stuff -- but it's strong in all the right places.  For one thing, it's not funny, at all.  No cutesy Zombieland/Shaun of the Dead ain't-this-fun clowning here; these dead are dead serious and a real threat.  They're slow, but there are a hell of a lot of them.  Also, it dispenses with any explanations of the causes of the zombie plague entirely.  Nobody really cares about that stuff, so this movie doesn't even address it; it's just happening, and why doesn't matter.  Also, any zombie movie sinks or swims on the strength of its zombie makeup.  If your zombies don't look creepy, you can hang the wreath.  Well, these are some creepy zombies; I'm not sure why their eyes turn white, but what the hell.  And the gore is powerful, Fulci-level stuff, with major head trauma and horrifying amounts of tissue loss from the bites.  The effects are extreme and very well done.  And it's not afraid to set a grim tone, either.   If they can still make zombie movies like this one, then I don't mind if they make more.

Not a very good trailer (the photography's not this dark) but, what the hell...




Woman, The (C, 2011)  Lucky McKee directed this adaptation of a novel he co-authored with Jack Ketchum, so you know it's faithful.  A feral woman (one of the tribe from Kechum's Off Season and Offspring) is captured by a family man who brings her home and chains her up in the cellar, where he and his family plan to civilize her.  But this guy's idea of civilized is more than a bit warped, and even though the woman is a murderous, savage cannibal, the family (especially the Corey-Feldman-looking dad and his Matthew-Laborteauk-lookalike son) are far more twisted than she is, and she's not even the craziest secret they're hiding.   Hell, she may not even rank third...   It's nicely made and pretty hardcore, more in terms of the extremely dark subject matter than the gore, which is splashy but rather cheap and clumsy (flesh doesn't stretch anywhere near that far, buddy, you're thinking of taffy).  The book is still better but this is a good adaptation and I can only imagine how shocking it might be if you hadn't read the book first.  The only real weak points come in the form of the truly terrible songs that keep showing up on the soundtrack; they're so pervasive that you get the feeling that Lucky was trying to showcase the band even at the expense of the film.  They soon get distracting and detracting.  But, small quibble -- overall this is solid and scary horror you won't want to miss.  But read the book first.



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