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REVIEW: Midsommar

07 Monday Sep 2020

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I rewatched Midsommar last week for the first time, and it was just as glorious as I remembered.

Ari Aster considers this his first horror movie rather than Hereditary, but I might be inclined to switch that around, if I had to. Hereditary was built almost like a haunted house story within the family home—with the family naturally being more haunted than the house—and a few nice jump scares. Plenty of people responded to Midsommar by saying it wasn’t scary, just because it didn’t have any notable scares, forgetting that not all horror is built that way. I’m a huge fan of slow-burn horror that unsettles more than scares, and if you like slow burn awash in sunlight, Midsommar should please.

If anything, though, Midsommar actually has some nice nods to classic horror, such as playing with slasher tropes in its punishing of young (American) tourists doing what they shouldn’t; the use of the Blood Eagle, which is a Viking method of execution, but Americans might be familiar with it from Silence of the Lambs; even Dani’s blanket, which seems to be a nod to carpet design The Shining, but I might be reading too much into that, which isn’t to dismiss the parallel descent into a kind of madness; and of course, The Wicker Man. Possibly The Serpent and the Rainbow, but I haven’t seen that one yet.

Midsommar took the emerging (re-emerging?) subgenre of folk horror and asked itself whether it could make a horror movie with nothing concealed, in full sunlight for most of the movie, because it takes place during the Midsommar festival of the Halga community. The answer is to whether you can make a horror film in sunlight is yes, but part of the side effect is that the result is trippier than scary. But it’s not the kind of horror that requires darkness, really. Supernatural horror, with monsters of the human and creature variety, depends on darkness to hide the monstrousness, but there are no real monsters in Midsommar. Folk horror, instead, often depends on the in-full-view nature of culture shock. Isolated communities have nothing to hide, but their profound differences from the prevailing culture of the audience causes the disorientation that can be so effective as a horror device—not to mention the literal mushrooms everyone’s taking.

The way that Midsommar ultimately works is in Ari Aster’s commitment to nonjudgment of the Halga community, which is aided by the fact that he wrote the script himself. While there’s a little contempt for the three ‘new blood’ male American visitors to the Halga, there was actually very little external judgment going into the story.

Except Christian. The eventual punishment may not have fit the perceived crime, but everyone agrees that Christian is a grade-A douchebag.

But although the Midsommar ceremony gets more and more horrifying as the movie progresses, Aster is careful to show how seductive the community is in spite of it, what it offers to an outsider like the protagonist, Dani, what void from the audience culture that it fills. It’s not too dissimilar to the intimacy void that most other cults claim to fill, except it goes to a less orgastic extreme, the delightfully odd sex scene notwithstanding.

The movie opens with profound disconnection between Florence Pugh’s Dani and Jack Reynor’s Christian. Within the film’s first act, we’re given every indication that this is a relationship that Does Not Work. They’re not communicating, Dani is minimizing her emotions so much that she feels like she needs to isolate in order to have them, and Christian has apparently been checked out for over a year by the time tragedy strikes Dani and he feels he can’t abandon her at that point. It would seem a kind act, except he was already so passive in the relationship, and it’s a lot easier to keep it going than take a stand and let it go. He’s ghosting her while still her boyfriend, in addition to subtle gaslighting and just outright ignoring her. Dani wants connection; Christian wants out, but not enough to shake a status quo that he understands.

Really, I could write for hours about how Aster sets the stage with the isolation experienced by all the characters:

– Dani’s sister commits suicide because, in her words, ‘everything’s black,’ and murders her parents with her, the ultimate attempt to quell the alienation and isolation that depression can cause.

– About ninety percent of the shots of Christian show him through a mirror, turned away in three-quarters profile from the camera, or parts of him cut off—subtle camera storytelling to indicate how disconnected he is from Dani and his friends but also to distance him from the audience.

– Christian’s friends pretend to be friendly with Dani, but she brings down the whole dynamic of the male bond between the five men—not that the friendships are warm and intimate to begin with, given the stiff way the boys sit with each other and eventually go off to do their own thing while Dani speaks with Pele, the foreign exchange student to the Anthropology Department.

In the beginning, that’s the only real moment of warmth, although it’s broken when Dani has to walk away to deal with her grief alone. Who’s she going to share it with? Her dead family, her sister whose emotional extremes led to the murder-suicide? Her boyfriend, who held her during her initial sobs but who showed the audience his thousand-yard stare of despair at being trapped in the relationship due to Dani’s grief? Every time, she walks away to be alone as she struggles to hold tears back. Which Florence Pugh is really good at, by the way. Kind of like Robin Tunney in The Craft, Pugh spends a good portion of the movie in a near or complete breakdown state, which isn’t emotionally easy at all.

This is something that hits me hard every time it happens in the movie, because I’m sure I’m not the only one to bottle up a powerful emotion until I can get to a place of relative isolation. People don’t know what to do with grief, sadness, frustration, anger, because in an aggressively optimistic culture, these feelings—all of which are quite normal—are seen as aberrations to be hidden and excised as soon as possible, weaknesses that must be shored up with a brittle smile. Our culture (although not ours alone) has no idea what to do with these emotions except scold them into submission, thus enhancing this sense of isolation with others and discouraging empathy or even just sympathy.

Which is why the Halga community offers something so tempting to someone from the outside. They don’t just forge intimacy through sexuality but through extreme empathy for the people they live with and through their connection to nature, which is the entire foundation of the movie. They’re a collectivistic rather than individualistic society, a family of sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, with defined roles for everyone. Really, aside from the Blood Eagle and human compost, what’s not to like? The way Pele immediately latched onto her as needing the community the most, because she’d lost her family and had no one with whom to share the load of her grief, the way they accepted Dani both in her quiet horror at the suicide ritual and as the community’s May Queen to bless their crops, ultimately to when the girls refuse to let her go off alone in her grief and instead cry with her, not just mockery but making themselves feel her pain… Because in the Halga community, no one has to be alone. The emotional turning point of the movie is when Pele says to Dani about Christian, “He’s my good friend and I like him, but… Dani, do you feel held by him? Does he feel like home to you?”

From what I can tell, Midsommar was Florence Pugh’s breakout role, and well-deserved, although she got another chance in something more mainstream with Gerwig’s Little Women. I’d apparently seen her in two other horror(ish) movies—Malevolent and The Falling—although I didn’t recognize has as someone I’d already seen when I saw her in Midsommar. Pugh is a master at withheld emotion, containing, pushing down behind her unique face, then finally letting it show.

I swear, she got this role on the strength of her almost exaggerated frown, needed to show the transition from her grief and loneliness to the moment she finally feels free and held by the community, laden with wildflowers.

At what cost? Aster doesn’t judge, but although Christian, Josh, and Mark all trespass in some way, the reason for the deaths of the UK couple seems a little less clear. The way I interpreted it was that Ingemar was punishing Connie for choosing Simon over him, which isn’t so much of a trespass as a personal vendetta. Perhaps their trespass was Simon’s far more vocal reaction to the suicide ritual. Or perhaps there wasn’t a slasher trespass at all and they were just bodies for the final ritual, which is far more disturbing and I can sit with that for a while.

Because of how slow-burn Ari Aster is with his movies, I’m a little afraid that executive permissiveness might lead to him making bad editorial choices in the future. But after Hereditary, it was a helluva thing to produce a sophomore movie just as masterfully disturbing as the freshman outing. I have no doubt he’ll be held up with Mike Flanagan and James Wan as one of the great horror directors of this era, and Hereditary and Midsommar remembered for the same artistry as The Shining, but with more heart.

REVIEW: Green Room

10 Monday Aug 2020

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Green_Room_(film)_POSTERIt’s difficult to begin a review of Green Room without mentioning the tragedy of Anton Yelchin’s death. Green Room was Yelchin’s last theatrical release prior to his death. For those, like me, who fell in love with him as the youthful Chekhov on the Star Trek movie reboot or perhaps as the disturbed teen with homicidal OCD on Criminal Minds, we lost a quietly charming, sharp-featured talent far too soon.

What I liked about this movie was that, although Yelchin’s character could be called the protagonist, the story didn’t rest on him, nor did he have to carry it. Yelchin is quite comfortable taking a humbler place, and it’s part of what allows him to blend in wherever he’s cast. He’s not a chameleon, but he’s undemanding, which really lets a story shine through whatever star power he could have if he wanted it.

Imogen Poots has horror cred, but Patrick Stewart was the real name in this movie. Yet not even Stewart overpowers the movie. The director’s use of him was smart, his choices more understated than the usual warmth and gravitas that he brings to a screen. In fact, it’s a completely unexpected choice. It’s hard to believe that we live in a universe in which Stewart plays a neo-Nazi leader, but not making him a scene-chewing villain saved this movie from being something forgettable.

Instead, our actors just play people. The band is completely out of their depth, with the strongest of them among the first to get cut down, because authority issues and a background in school wrestling aren’t that effective against fighting dogs and shotguns. Yelchin is just a pale, skinny cinnamon roll who is woefully out of his depth in a fight situation, which is a point he makes in a really good monologue peptalk about paintball (that was apparently based on a real event that the director experienced). And Stewart and the other neo-Nazis are utterly banal evil, their matter-of-fact racism an armor for greed. The kills are vicious and extreme but without fanfare, and unlike slashers, senseless.

Green Room is a stark, smart, tight, intense, realistic indie horror thriller. Completely recommend.

REVIEW: The Forest

22 Wednesday Jul 2020

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the forest movie(Not to be confused with The Woods. Different horror movie entirely.)

Being good can forgive a multitude of sins. Unfortunately, The Forest can never be forgiven. The only virtue in this movie is that I got to spend some time in the company of Natalie Dormer, who is quite pleasant to spend time with. Too bad it was in such a forgettable dud.

The Forest endured some well-deserved controversy for exploiting the real tragedies of the actual Aokigahara forest in Japan. Suicide, especially in highly ritualized places, has context, context that shouldn’t just be transformed into ‘the bad ghosts made them do it’ and that’s the end of it—sort of how ‘because they’re crazy’ shouldn’t be the end of the conversation.

There are a few other horror movies that tread a problematic line but recover—sometimes shakily—because they respect that line yet still tell a good story. If you’re going to exploit real people’s tragedies, you sure as hell better do a good job, or else you wasted everyone’s time and money AND pissed a lot of people off. Congratulations.

The Forest, however, brings absolutely nothing new to the horror table—just twin magic (the movie establishes that the main character is a twin multiple times over in the first thirty minutes, as though the first five times just weren’t emphatic enough), a series of jump scares that we’ve all seen before, getting lost in a forest that was much more unsettling when Blair Witch did it, Japanese demon makeup that we’ve seen done better, (American) tourists making bad choices, and no real understanding for why Aokigahara is a suicide forest in the first place.

I’m not going to belabor the point. The horror elements of this movie failed so hard that it really isn’t worth the effort.

Here’s what they could have done to make it better:

Scrap the Japanese suicide forest idea. The Grudge remake with Sarah Michelle Gellar did a decent job showing the disorientation of being in a different country, but The Forest barely addressed its setting except in the most sweeping, simplistic, inaccurate, and sometimes insulting terms. Why did the twins go to Japan? Because that’s where the forest is. That’s it. So scrap Aokigahara entirely. We have forests aplenty in America, Canada, and Europe that can have just as unsettling backstories (see: the blooming Folk Horror subgenre). You can make shit up and still say it’s ‘inspired by true events’ because Aokigahara was the springboard.

Next, respect the reasons for suicide locales. If you know the reasons why people go to specific places, and if you acknowledge cultural patterns of suicide, you’ll be able to create a richer mythology, because the tragedy will be real rather than exploitative.

Focus less on the supernatural horrors, especially if you don’t know how to do them properly. In movies like this, supernatural horror only exists to enhance the real kind. The most interesting, human part of THE FOREST was the guide who led the journalist (Taylor Kinney, if it matters to you) and Dormer into Aokigahara on his suicide rounds, a job that he does pro bono to help dissuade people from suicide if they’re still alive or mark where the bodies are if they’re not. It’s a thankless, joyless, incredibly poignant task. That’s where the emotion is, which is where the story wants to be.

The heart of horror is often sorrow, and horror should be human before it’s monster. When studios want to make a horror movie, their biggest misstep is usually prioritizing the monster over the humans, meeting the creepy visual and jump-scare quota to justify the genre label over producing a good story, because horror audiences will watch whatever commercialized crap they put out.

I’m not saying we won’t. After all, I didn’t go to the theater for The Forest, but I caught it on Netflix, hoping it would be better than I heard it was. I’m willing to watch a lot of dreck churned out by the horror movie machines, looking for hidden gems among the rubble, but this isn’t one worth repeating. It has no staying power, no potential to become a cult classic, and ultimately needs to be forgotten.

Someone get Natalie Dormer a good horror movie. I’ll wait.

REVIEW: Silent Hill: Revelation

17 Friday Jul 2020

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61123974_SH_6x8_1R1After all this time, there are a number of movies I’ve wanted to write a review for, but for some reason, I went back to a sequel of one I’ve already written about, because I was craving a bit of Silent Hill. Silent Hill is one of my favorite movies, and Silent Hill soundtracks accompanied me a great deal through the editing portion of Deep Down.

Silent Hill: Revelation is not nearly as good, which doesn’t seem to be all that important, because I’ve watched it more times than I should watch bad movies, so there must be something bringing me back, other than familiarity. Like most bad movies I watch regularly, I think what draws me is potential. Underneath all the roughness, there’s a gem, even if the people responsible for mining and shaping it utterly mangled the job.

Part of the problem was the same thing that drew Silent Hill down, which was the shoehorning in of men where they didn’t need to be. Sean Bean once again plays the part of Sharon’s father, and he technically has more screen time, but his role doesn’t really get any more useful. Then we see a young Kit Harington, youthful and a bit too Raphaelite for the setting, intended as a love interest of sorts, but Laurie Holden and Radha Mitchell had more chemistry without actually being love interests. But goshdarnit, we gotta have a man in here. And if Sharon’s going to be eighteen, goshdarnit, she’s gotta have a love interest. (Why it has to be Kit Harington, only the casting director knows.) Then throw in a PI and two cops who seem to belong to other movies altogether and disappear after the first part of the movie, completely irrelevant to the story. Malcolm McDowell has a notable cameo, but he was criminally underused in an attempt to bank on his horror legacy.

Perhaps I’m looking at it all wrong. Perhaps I should be encouraged that, although there’s more testosterone on the soundstage, they’re taking on roles typically saved for women—the husband waiting at home, taking care of the kid; the father getting kidnapped and held hostage; the stale, two-dimensional love interest that doesn’t rise beyond a few flat notes.

But frankly, the women aren’t much better. Whereas the original featured a strong core of complicated, fleshed-out female characters, here we have Deborah Unger reprising her role as Alessa’s mother in a far less necessary expositional cutscene. She literally brings nothing new to the table, and the makeup budget didn’t support putting her in her full original get-up, so I don’t even know why she was brought in at all.

Then we have Carrie-Anne Moss, whose motivations are all over the place and who’s more interesting when she’s the Missionary (i.e. Less Carrie-Anne Moss) (parenthetical #2: Not that the Missionary made much sense). Her brand of underacting doesn’t lend itself to the dramatics that the role required of her. I got strong hints of her channeling Miranda Richardson from Sleepy Hollow, but frankly, Richardson might have been a better fit. The role itself, however, was thankless and criminally under-considered, because an undeveloped villain gives our hero no real foil.

Adelaide Clemens, as grown-up Sharon, does a passable, committed job, although I wouldn’t call it a breakout. Clemens’ vulnerable strength and eerie similarity to Radha Mitchell make her an adequate inheritor of the lead adventurer’s role. (True, Sharon was adopted, but children often grow to look like their family anyway, biological or not.) She and Bean are the anchors in this otherwise churned-out, effects-driven money-grab.

The beginning stumbles, even more awkward than the original, with EX-PO-SI-TION! as tell-y rather than show-y as it gets. It felt like a cutscene from a video game, but the original Silent Hill worked best when it nodded to the games rather than tried too hard to fit into them. If an audience needs that much explanation for things to make sense, your story is in desperate need of some doctoring. Conversations through mirrors, special symbols on a secret box, half an arcane seal… Not even Bean could make this dialogue less cringe-y. You ever get the feeling the script was written in a day and never edited? There’s even a part where we’re EX-PO-SI-TIONED! that Silent Hill was built on ancient Indian burial ground. Seriously? Seriously?!

When a movie goes this spectacularly wrong, in spite of a wealth of potential built by the first movie and a squandered budget, I like to look at what could have been done to make it better. I think, for all the deviations from the story set up in the original (most notably, the ending), a sequel would have been better served by being a completely different story with completely different main characters. Then we wouldn’t need so much freaking explanation to try to fit it into movie- and game-universe at the same time. However, if they absolutely had to bring Sharon and her dad into the story, they would have benefited by not going back to Silent Hill, but instead focusing on how Sharon brings Silent Hill wherever she goes, because (spoiler) Alessa came out with Sharon at the end of the first movie.

The school scenes had some interesting elements and could have been even better with alterations. For instance, I couldn’t tell why Sharon’s outfit was any different than the rest of her classmates enough for the requisite popular kid to deride her for it. I mean, I’m not much into fashion, but Sharon was rocking trendy layers, so I’m not sure where the loss in translation happened. Chalk another one up to the cringe-tastic bad script and a wardrobe mismatch?

But there was something about the school scenes, especially with the disorientation within the windowless halls, as well as the mall scenes that reminded me of Nightmare on Elm Street. They really could have played up her hallucinations to show us how Silent Hill is just beneath the veneer of reality and Sharon/Alessa makes the barrier between them weaker. Rather than the Missionary as the primary antagonist, I would have her be the secondary, trying to destroy Alessa or possess her for her own power, while Alessa herself was Sharon’s primary antagonist—Sharon’s personal reality crumbling and bringing the rest of the world with her. It would have been far more interesting to see Silent Hill bleed into the real world than just go back to the town, which was somehow the same Silent Hill and another version of Silent Hill at the same time. The filmmakers couldn’t agree on that, so it ended up not working as either one.

If they were going to make it the same Silent Hill, they should have made it feel more like the original and less haunted carnival/underground cult/insane asylum. If they were going to make it different, they should have committed to that. Not going one way or the other led to disjointed filtering and a complete annihilation of anything approaching reality rules. Also, with so many versions of Silent Hill represented, the filmmakers never got to focus on any one, so the creepy creatures felt just as throwaway and disjointed as the characters and setting.

The original Silent Hill worked because it knew what its world was and what its rules were. If it had creatures, it focused on ones that had a specific, unsettling purpose to each scene—a kind of burned, decayed, mummified poetic justice, even if we didn’t know what it all meant at the time. Three-dimensional characters had a purpose at every part of the story, and the filmmakers took their time to show rather than tell.

The sequel, on the other hand, tried to be too many things and succeeded at none of them and couldn’t ground itself in any theme or plot line. It lurched from element to element, performing back-breaking gymnastics to try to fit them together, and left me nothing but good music, a few good visuals, and a serious hunger for better.

DOUBLE REVIEW: Cabin Fever/Cabin Fever remake

11 Saturday May 2019

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Cabin Fever 2002[SPOILER ALERT: There isn’t much, but there are a few later scenes referenced.]

I’m going to say it, and everyone is going to hate me.

The remake is better than the original.

Some of the shots are framed the exact same way, except flipped around. Some of the script is exactly the same. They didn’t even do anything new or reimagined with the remake. They literally remade the original CABIN FEVER. And it’s better.

Let me give you some context.

In college, I went a little horror-movie crazy (and I haven’t stopped). I bought all kinds of eighties slashers, cult classics, all the movies I’d wanted to see when I was too young or too high-strung for it. I’d been attracted by the cover for CABIN FEVER a number of times before I finally bought it, because it was a contagion movie, and that’s one of the things I’m legitimately afraid of in real life. When I watch ghost movies and supernatural villain movies, I can go to sleep afterward just fine because I don’t believe in ghosts or the supernatural (open-minded but skeptical). But diseases are real. They happen. And necrotizing fasciitis is a real, terrifying thing. So what a great premise for a horror movie, right?

Then I sit down to watch it.

The necrotizing fasciitis parts were suitably gory and effective. I think the opening credits are one of the best in the business. And that scene where the girl is shaving her legs and starts shaving off her legs is probably in my top twenty-five horror moments.

But that’s it. Those are the only good things I can say about the Eli Roth-directed CABIN FEVER. The man needs to stick with producing, because he’s decent at that. The whole film, though, from script to direction, just felt so…juvenile. The humor wasn’t funny. The weirdness didn’t have a point. And CABIN FEVER is filled with an unsympathetic cast of jerks. We root for precisely no one to survive–except maybe Winston, strangely enough.

A man is killed by a harmonica, and as a white girl in the suburbs, I literally can’t even.

It’s one thing to tell a story about juvenile people. It’s another for the director to be just as juvenile–you can feel it in all his immature choices. I can watch and even enjoy bad horror. I can enjoy campy horror. I can enjoy young people horror. But for Pete’s sake, I only enjoyed about three consecutive minutes of CABIN FEVER, and the rest was trash. I gave the movie away because I hated it so much.

About six months ago, all the CABIN FEVER movies were on Netflix at once, and I thought, Hey, I’m more tolerant of all kinds of horror these days. Maybe the original CABIN FEVER isn’t as bad as I thought it was. Maybe I’ve grown as a horror aficionado and can appreciate CABIN FEVER as the cult classic that it is. So I watched it again.

I still hate it. Totally my opinion. I feel like it was made by an emotionally stunted manchild for other emotionally stunted manchildren, and I have no place in its audience. So maybe it’s just not meant for me, although I seem to enjoy other horror movies obviously made for male audiences (the PIRANHA remake and THE BABYSITTER come to mind).

Seriously, when I get more out of the spectacularly gross, misogynistic, shallow CABIN FEVER: SPRING FEVER (yay, Marc Senter) and CABIN FEVER: PATIENT ZERO (yay, Currie Graham and Sean Astin) than the original movie, maybe the problem isn’t me?

cabin-fever-poster remakeEnter the remake–taking a good concept and bad execution and trying to execute it better.

The characters are still juvenile, but they aren’t as unlikable as the first set. They’re not completely lacking in redeemable qualities. When they make bad decisions, you get why they make them. Even when the least likeable of the group starts to show symptoms, I felt bad for him, because it’s a horrible way to die–unlike Jason, it’s not a villain you can outrun. It’s something that’s already inside of you, and it’s too fast-acting to treat even if they get to a hospital. The rash and the blood are more realistic. The claustrophobia is more intense. It’s as though a grown-ass man took Eli Roth’s original movie and shot it like a grown-ass director would. It’s a more mature film in every way.

The only real misstep they might have made was recasting Winston as a scarred Barbie doll whose obsession with partying seemed more creepy-coy than the original sex, drugs, rock-and-roll simple Winston. It was an interesting direction, but I’m not sure whether it worked with the more coherent tone of the rest of the movie. Sometimes I like it and sometimes I don’t.

My favorite bit of irony about this movie (both of them) was that it turned some of the slasher tropes on their head–probably why it’s a cult classic. In the old eighties slashers, sex, drugs, and drinking would have gotten them killed. But in CABIN FEVER, it’s drinking water instead of beer that gets them sick. It’s eating off of dishes cleaned with the bad water that gets them sick instead of being a dirty slob. Being bad doesn’t get you killed. The villain’s in the safe places, and there’s no saving you after that. I feel they play that up more in the remake.

Even if it’s not necessarily the best horror movie ever, I’d go so far as to call the remake a decent horror film, and I enjoy rewatching it when I need another dose of contagion fear and rereading The Stand just seems like it’ll take too long.

REVIEW: Grave Encounters

14 Sunday Apr 2019

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grave encounters[Warning: Here there be spoilers.]

I’ve been going in and out of wanting to write a review for this movie. I’m not entirely sure what I’m afraid of. That it’s not as good as I still think it is? That the review won’t do it justice? (Entirely possible. I’m still new at this.) I mean, it’s not perfect or anything, but I do get intimidated by good horror movies more than I do by explaining what’s wrong with the not-so-good ones.

For people with found-footage fatigue, I’m sure movies like GRAVE ENCOUNTERS don’t really help that, but I first saw GRAVE ENCOUNTERS when I opened my Netflix account, so I hadn’t watched nearly enough bad found-footage at the time to make me weary of the subgenre. And frankly, I have a fondness for that kind of low-budget horror, because it usually forces the film-makers to get creative with effects or eliminate them completely.

It’s worth noting that the effects of GRAVE ENCOUNTERS are its weakest points. They reference the obviously computer-generated effects in the sequel (please, miss that one—it offers nothing new, plus a dose of juvenile humor it didn’t need). They’re disappointing on every level, because in video that’s supposed to look real—kind of the whole conceit—the worst thing you can possibly do is show something that doesn’t look real. In the slight fuzziness and filter of movies, you can get away with minor CGI effects that you simply can’t in found-footage. It doesn’t matter how good the cameras are that they’re using. The slightest whiff of CGI ends up reading as fake, which takes a viewer out of the moment. If you’re going to use CGI, you’ve got to be dead careful. And the makers of GRAVE ENCOUNTERS were not. They would have benefited much more from judicious makeup, props, and unsettling acting rather than pay a small fortune on a small budget to get bad CGI.

But when they’re not stumbling in the computer-generated arena, GRAVE ENCOUNTERS is a solid offering in the found-footage arena, and it doesn’t—in my opinion—suffer from the same ending malady as most found-footage. And frankly, most horror.

Before even starting, GRAVE ENCOUNTERS ticks off a number of boxes that guarantee I’m more likely to enjoy it. For one, it got in my queue early, which means more things get compared to it instead of the other way around. I’d already watched a ton of horror movies by this time, between my college-days movie buying and back when FearNet was streaming, so I didn’t approach it in a vacuum. But other than BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and possibly PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (can’t really remember the timing), I hadn’t seen a ton of found-footage at the time. That gives it an automatic leg-up over its competition. But it’s stood up over time in spite of everything I’ve watched since.

Another point in its favor is the setting. I’m a sucker for psych ward horror, even though it’s often bad and ableist as hell. But being a person with mental illness who processes things through fiction, I’m entitled to like what I like. There are a lot of horrifying things about mental illness and a lot of horrifying things about what people have done to people with mental illness. GRAVE ENCOUNTERS has a few problematic moments, but it’s mostly about what was done to the people who were kept there rather than the mentally ill themselves being the monsters, and the movie makes everything more about setting, the building itself more the monster that keeps haunted people.

Abandoned buildings are amazing in general. If you haven’t seen Abandoned America’s photographs, I recommend checking them out. The movie probably only uses about three hallways and changes them just enough to make it seem like the gigantic building we see it is on the outside, but they also manage to convey a sense of claustrophobia and that disorienting feeling when you get lost—or worse, when things aren’t where they should be. Probably one of the more effective scenes is where they break down the front door, and there’s just more hallway. Then when they’re trying to get to the roof, and there’s just a wall halfway up the last set of stairs. This is why I like to emphasize practical effects. All they needed was a freaking wall to creep me the fuck out. If you’ve ever been lost, you know what that panic feels like. It’s one of the worst feelings in the world. Like that feeling you left your wallet or purse somewhere, but it doesn’t go away.

I feel like the movie really used its set to its full advantage, as simple as it was. And at its best, the scares themselves were simple. In found-footage, those work because of the conceit that everything is actually happening. A window opening by itself. Someone you don’t see pushing you down the stairs. A wheelchair rolling by itself. Blood in a bathtub. Waking up to patient ID bracelets on your wrists. Fog rolling in and people disappearing when it rolls out. Keep it simple in found-footage, and you’ll get a lot more mileage than a cheap-looking eye-and-mouth effects.

Like good found-footage, the cast doesn’t actually distinguish itself much. They’re a cast of regular people, the kind you would see on any reality TV show. The only one who feels polished is the lead, and since he’s the lead of a television show and needs a certain amount of charisma, that wouldn’t be unusual. Everyone’s slightly annoying at different times, but again, we’re watching footage of a television show that wouldn’t have actually made it onto the show.

When people get legitimately scared, they do get shrill. When people are legitimately exhausted, they do get emotional and snappish. And when they freak out, they do lash out. There wasn’t a moment in the movie when I felt the reactions weren’t real. They may not have been attractive or cultivated like in most other movies, but they were real, which is the best you can ask from found-footage.

One of my favorite moments is near the end, when Lance and Sasha are trying to look for a way out in the tunnels below the hospital. Sasha was sick, which being constantly scared, not sleeping enough, and not eating enough only exacerbated. She falls to the ground, vomiting blood, and just wails, “I want my mom!” It’s a striking scene in the movie, because the blood wasn’t CGI. You know she’s dying slowly and painfully and she’s scared and miserable, and you feel it. My heart aches every time she cries like that, because come on, if you’re honest with yourself, you’d probably say the exact same thing (unless your mom sucked, in which case I’m sorry—choose your own loved one).

Now, I said that the ending didn’t suffer from the usual dissatisfaction malady of other found-footage and horror movies, and it doesn’t. It’s vague. I’ll say that. But I didn’t find myself wanting more from it. I thought it was exactly the ending it needed. And how often do I say that about horror? (Answer: Rarely.)

So if you’re looking for some good found-footage horror in the midst of an oversaturated subgenre, GRAVE ENCOUNTERS really is worth your time. If you forgive it for the bad CGI and stay for the creepy building, you’ll likely leave satisfied.

REVIEW: The Uninvited

23 Saturday Feb 2019

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the uninvitedTHE UNINVITED is a strange animal in my collection. I saw the South Korean movie it was based on, A TALE OF TWO SISTERS, a few years before it, and I wish I hadn’t. Knowing the twist affects how you view a movie that depends on its twists. I had to watch UNINVITED again with my horror friend to determine whether the twist was sufficiently twisty. He didn’t predict the ending, by the way, which means he really wouldn’t have figured out the twist to TWO SISTERS, because TWO SISTERS is more twisted, which is why I wish I had seen it afterward. Because as a result, THE UNINVITED suffers a bit from comparison.

On the other hand, while I have a handful of Japanese and South Korean horror that I like, I’m afraid most of it leaves me rather cold. While culture shock plays a role, I think the primary reason is that they follow a different kind of storytelling and film making. To this American viewer, it feels disjointed and difficult to follow timelines. Angles and framing are different. Editing doesn’t feel like it has enough segue. The horror stories feel more dreamlike, impressional rather than literal. This isn’t a bad thing, but I don’t respond to it as well as I do American/European structures and standards, which feel less jarring in a hundred little ways. This is why I don’t mind when Hollywood remakes Asian films. When they’re bad, they’re still bad, but I tend to respond better to the method. Hard to apologize for that.

TWO SISTERS was twisted as hell, and it was R-rated for a good reason, while UNINVITED stays a pretty tame PG-13, but TWO SISTERS also had that trippy quality that’s sometimes hard for me to follow, so while I liked the movie, it’s not one that inspired repeated viewing, while I’ve watched UNINVITED multiple times over.

Here’s the thing: THE UNINVITED is perfectly serviceable horror. Do I wish it had gone a little farther and hit the R rating? Yeah, I kind of do. Because I think Emily Browning, Elizabeth Banks, and Arielle Kebbel would have had a field day going all the way with it, and the cast could have killed it, particularly Browning and Banks, on whose performances the movie really rests. I’m big fans of both of them. I think Elizabeth Banks, in particular, tends to get overlooked because she’s so reliable of an actress that she doesn’t stand out. She’s a total ensemble player, and I appreciate her work in everything she’s in because of it.

Emily Browning brought her usual china-doll delicate strength to the screen. Not going to lie, she’s almost painfully pretty, but she brings a lot of soul into her face – like Angelina Jolie with more innocence – and without it, I might not respect her as much as an actress. But even at eighteen, which was her age during filming, she’s a rock-solid, grounded performer. If the movie itself is a little weak, a good cast made it stronger than it had any right to be, because by the nature of the twist, they had to play the movie multiple ways at once – just like any good mystery, multiple possibilities need to be plausible until the ending is inevitable. That’s not an easy game to play, but they all manage to accomplish it.

Moreover, while some of the scares were lifted directly from TWO SISTERS, there were a handful that were legitimately creepy in spite of the rating, and gems like that are valuable in any horror movie. So much goes into a good scare that doesn’t depend on surprise or screeching violins, and even though they only last a little while, if it gets my heart racing, I gotta give them credit.

It’s a solid, respectable movie, good if you’re a fan of the PG-13 Asian horror remakes but also decent even if you aren’t. The psychological thriller/paranoia aspects make up for some of the weaknesses in the horror, and the legitimate scares make up for a somewhat weaker thriller ending than I would have liked. Even if the story gets slightly tired in places, the performances are so emotionally nuanced that you don’t mind. It doesn’t reach the quality of THE RING or even THE GRUDGE, which makes sense, because THE UNINVITED was made to try to profit off their trend, and the staleness shows. But the actors aren’t acting like it’s stale, and if you haven’t seen TWO SISTERS, UNINVITED might be a decent popcorn flick for some Saturday evening alone, and might even make better viewing the second time through. You might also follow it up with TWO SISTERS later – don’t worry, there are more than enough twists to go around.

REVIEW: The Wolfman (2010)

31 Monday Dec 2018

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wolfman coverWOLFMAN, the remake with Benicio del Toro, is one of those movies I keep watching in hopes that I’ll like it more. And to be honest, I do like it better than the first viewing, which is often the case for movies I enter into with expectations. There are certain things I want from a werewolf movie, and I’ve thus far been pretty disappointed with most of them.

Perhaps because werewolves don’t really seem to translate well on screen. I think the best I’ve seen so far were from UNDERWORLD, which in itself is a fun and pretty but not very good movie. But the werewolves were ones I believed, and in my opinion they were appropriately bestial and intimidating. In movies I’ve seen where the wolves were just giant wolves (like the TWILIGHT series), they suffer from being noticeably CGI or noticeably puppets. In movies where they’ve been more anthropomorphic and built around a human form, they just aren’t that frightening to look at. I’m not sure what it is. Is it the wet nose? I’m just not sure what it takes to make werewolves frightening to me, so maybe the answer to that is they should stop trying. As werewolf movies go, THE HOWLING is probably best, disjointed though the editing is. It really encapsulates the horror of the transformation and animalistic nature of the beast, and it covers how becoming a werewolf might bleed into the human life.

But I suspect that, despite all the fairly standard sex that seems to fill our screens in R-rated movies, we’re still quite shy about sex, and a person giving into their id just makes our Puritan little hearts nervous. You can’t turn a man into a beast and then cut his balls off and expect us to be intimidated by what he’s become–and more importantly, what’s in all of us. Which is supposed to be the real horror, I suspect: the Beast in us all. But where most books seem happy to detail the daily depravity we’re capable of in werebeast and human form, movies skirt around the worst of it whenever the id has to take shape. I think they worry we’ll be too shocked, I tell you, shocked, and they want a broader audience to make a broader amount of money. But that’s neutering the beast, and it just ends up not working quite the way it should.

THE WOLFMAN is no exception, although the cast is fantastic and the devotion to detail in setting, costume, and atmosphere admirable. The movie is awash in fur coats and stuffed beasts from the elder Talbot’s hunting days. The Blackmoor manor is strewn with leaves and shadows as though the wilderness is slowly taking over its palatial splendor. The palate runs a respectable moorland gray, and the movie isn’t lacking in bright red for the R rating.

But the movie suffers from a lack of identity, although del Toro takes on the Talbot role with the same bushy-browed, soft-featured intensity of Lon Chaney, Jr., in the original that would likely have made him proud. Anthony Hopkins is a delight in every mediocre role he takes. The first few viewings, I was sure he was phoning it in like he did in THE RITE, but subsequent viewings give me a chance to take in his more subtle choices. He latches onto every line with a sometimes quiet and sometimes growling ferocity. He commands every scene he’s in, which is why the man is an international treasure, despite the less than adequate meat in this movie to chew off the bone.

Emily Blunt, I believe, is the actor most ill used by a movie that doesn’t know whether it wants to be tragedy or horror. (WOLFMAN mostly goes with tragedy with bloody dashes of horror, but the joke’s on them, because good horror makes tragedy all the more intense.) Blunt is too good for the role, put into the movie as a shining beacon of perfect Victorian femininity, a bastion of purity that no beast should sully, a love more romantic from afar, an ideal rather than a woman. It’s disgusting in such a male-heavy movie to make the only woman such a representation of an abstract. Ideals are all well and good, but what people in a society ever really live up to them, especially in private? We wouldn’t need such strict rules and chaperones if people weren’t trying to break those rules at every turn.

At the beginning, Talbot calls a man’s character “a shiftable thing,” a statement clearly intended for the dramatic irony, but the sheer fact of the matter is that THE WOLFMAN doesn’t work because Talbot’s character doesn’t shift enough. It barely seems challenged by new appetites. He’s briefly distracted by Blunt’s bare neck (honestly, who wouldn’t be?), and dreams about a naked back. So salty. So animalistic. So…tame. Talbot mostly remains the mild-mannered man except when he is beast, when the point is supposed to be that Edward Hyde is Dr. Jekyll. Jekyll/Hyde stories tend to do werewolf better than werewolf movies – the Spencer Tracy version is superb and is one of the movies to better show Hyde’s glee, but it really plays up the good vs. evil that isn’t what the original story set out to tell. Instead, for an excellent werewolf tale, I actually recommend Jekyll/Hyde movie MARY REILLY with Julia Roberts and John Malkovich, which is a criminally underrated movie, if not necessarily a masterpiece (really, if you ignore the bad accents, it’s quite good). Like Bruce Banner said, he’s the Hulk because he’s always angry.

If the beast doesn’t exact the worst impulses of the man and if the man doesn’t exhibit the worst impulses of the beast, what’s the point of a werewolf movie? What the point of the blood and drama and confusion? If the presence of a werewolf doesn’t strip away the patina of respectability of all around him, you’ve missed the point.

I’m not saying I needed a Talbot/Conliffe sex scene to satisfy my own worst impulses (although I wouldn’t say no). But Talbot shows early nods to resentments, a festering anger from his childhood against the town, against his father, and a desire for his brother’s fiancee, none of which I feel come to a head in any real way once the transformation occurs. Was he supposed to seem virtuous for retaining his self-control? Is it to contrast with his father, who is, in his own words, more comfortable in the skin he is in, while Lawrence makes a living pretending to be other people? We get the glimpse of the wicked in Lawrence’s father, his willingness to allow himself to feel his baser nature rather than repress it, although he still retains some self-control while a man.

I just wish there was some transformation on the character level for Talbot to parallel the transformation on a supernatural level, that he didn’t only give in to the beast when the moon was full, that it infected his personal life in more interesting ways. Instead of the beast being an extension of him made manifest, it remains distant, the actions that of an animal rather than an id. I don’t think he would have seemed less tragic for the loss of control of his impulses–after all, he didn’t choose to be bitten, to have to fight harder against those impulses. He was paying for the sins of the father, which is never fair. Del Toro is perfectly capable of treading that line. In the one moment where the beast threatens to overtake Talbot in the presence of Conliffe, though he doesn’t do much, he’s frightening and alluring at the same time, wonderfully intimidating, and Blunt plays off that with a quintessentially Victorian response belied by the scared intrigue in her eyes. That moment is the closest I have to what I want from their dynamic, and it’s delicious. But it pulls away too quickly and never again treads near the same level of tension between man/woman and the beast in both, though brought to shallower waters in the man.

More than anything, the restraint shown by the script and the direction seems more a product of the idealization of the love interest, the sole female presence in the film–although the ghost of Talbot’s mother seems to hover over everything. As though a woman’s own red tides of anger, frustration, fear, grief, and lust would somehow mar her if it cracked her pretty portrait of a face. Moreover, I believe there’s a genuine fear underneath most werewolf movies of the beast that exists within women as well. Not just the female villains (most masculinized or hypersexualized or both into unrecognizability of what women experience every day). Not just the disposable, nameless, dehumanized prostitutes that we keep killing off like so many victims of so many Jack the Rippers. The Beast in us all.

I’ve seen one movie that didn’t seem afraid of freed, unfettered female sexuality. The remake of DRACULA (also with Hopkins, in a role he seemed to have much more fun in) may have just been Francis Ford Coppola’s feverish wet dream for most of it, but it’s one of the few movies I know of that seem to unapologetically acknowledge women’s lust in supernatural situations. Yes, much of it is downright shocking for this generations-removed Puritan, but quite refreshing as well when set against a slew of horror movies that are unapologetic in the amount of boobs they show yet somehow afraid of a woman actually enjoying herself in the midst of a fairly rigid social expectation that they don’t. If that’s the excuse why they kept Miss Conliffe the Victorian ideal, I’m pretty sure Lucy Westenra spits on that. If the point of werewolves is that there’s a beast in us all, the refusal to believe there’s a beast in Miss Conliffe seems the worst kind of oversight. It may have been unintentional, but it’s frustrating nonetheless.

If THE WOLFMAN is soft on sex, it certainly isn’t on violence, which is one of the movie’s only saving graces, although I would have preferred more substance and less flash to the chase scene in London. CGI is supposed to be a friend, not a lover, and it doesn’t work nearly as well as studios depend it will. But I have to say, the level of detail applied to the transformation scenes was professional as hell and believable, even if the final product loses some of that believability they put into the shifting. Still, the werewolf’s attacks are vicious, merciless, that of an angry mother grizzly, and it’s pretty spectacular as it’s happening.

But in the places between the transformations, the movie just seems unsure what it wants to do and where it wants to go. It’s the movie version of telling rather than showing, and though I’m inexcusably fond of asylum horror, THE WOLFMAN doesn’t linger there long enough for me to care as much as I want to about the hubris of doctors. It brings to mind DRACULA again (see Jack Seward’s asylum). WOLFMAN fails in almost every comparison with its classic Universal monster movie counterpart, even that of the beasts that the eponymous monsters become. The only place where it seems to shine more than DRACULA is in the sets and the cinematography, which is more a product of when the movies were made than a failing on Coppola’s part in his DRACULA.

It’s really a shame, because I want to like this movie, and like THE LAZARUS EFFECT, I think I keep watching it for the movie it could have been. It’s occasionally a decent script, and del Toro, Hopkins, Blunt, and a somewhat typecast but still devoted Hugo Weaving make the best of where the script weakens.

I just have Thoughts about what werewolves are in the pantheon of horror monsters, and I feel like the movie makers really missed the boat on this one, as they usually do with this particular monster. Almost as though they’re afraid to look into a mirror and really see themselves. They tend to do well with vampires, but with vampires, they don’t have to see their reflections.

REVIEW: Silent Hill

31 Wednesday Oct 2018

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Silent_Hill_film_poster[Warning: Here there be spoilers]

I agonized over what movie I would review for Halloween. I wanted it to be one of my favorites, one I really liked. The Descent? A 1408/Oculus double feature (because yes, they go together)? American Mary? Candyman? I ultimately decided on Silent Hill, one of the first movies I saw during my freshman year of college, when I started watching R-rated horror and really got on the horror train. (Yes, I waited until I was seventeen. Yes, I am that person.)

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m prone to really like my early introductions to things, because that’s before I get jaded. But despite the fact it’s not a perfect film, Silent Hill was surprisingly good, especially for a video game to movie adaptation. Although from what I hear, if you’re going to do a VG2M horror adaptation, Silent Hill is the one to go to. I’ve never played the games myself. I’m too prone to habitual behavior for me to trust myself around video games. So I don’t have any expectations of someone who’s played the game, but the movie pushes so many of my personal buttons. It wasn’t a critical darling, and I can tell why. It’s monster-dense, melodramatic, and as stories go, not very original. But for me it’s less about originality (although that’s nice, too) and more about execution. It may be derivative, but is it a good story? Am I entertained for the night? Am I satisfied? Can I watch it over and over and over again and never get tired of it? Silent Hill is one of those films for me.

This is as much a contemplative retrospective as it is a review. Okay, it’s just me rewatching the movie and geeking out. Bear with me.

One of the most wonderful things about this movie is that the cast was originally so woman-heavy, they had to give Sean Bean a somewhat extraneous side plot just to make men feel included. And it’s one of those rare Sean Bean roles in which he doesn’t die, so… But the movie is a powerhouse of female roles with actresses known for genre films. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this.

Despite being a generally misogynistic genre, horror also historically has these huge, powerful roles for women, especially with the Final Girl trope. But Silent Hill and The Descent, both movies with a majority female cast, are both in my top ten list of favorite movies, with layered, nuanced characters and all different kinds of strength. What’s more, while many of these women are sexy and beautiful, because Hollywood, the movies and their strength don’t derive from those qualities. Or rather, to me, the sexiness comes from the fact their strength isn’t from sex but from character and determination, if that makes sense.

We begin with Radha Mitchell, who is a wonderful, solid leading lady. One of the things you might keep an eye on in subsequent viewings is how her main outfit changes over the course of the movie. It’s supposed to be the same outfit, but the colors subtly change from scene to scene to fit the hue and mood and transitions during the movie. Props to the costume department for coming up with so many forms of the same outfit and making it feel seamless. (Another trivia side note, this is supposed to take place in West Virginia, but it was shot in Canada, which means a certain percentage of the cast needs to be local, so there are all these Canadian accents here and there. It’s a little hilarious, especially when the script has more regional dialogue.)

Mitchell’s character, Rose, and Bean’s character, Christopher, are searching for their daughter Sharon, who’s sleepwalked far from home, screaming “Silent Hill!” when they try to wake her up. This prompts Rose’s research into her adoptive daughter’s origin in the ghost town Silent Hill–a former coal town rendered uninhabitable by a fire–and her plan to secretly take Sharon to Silent Hill to see why she has these terrible night terrors and somnambulism episodes.

Seems like a wonderful plan.

Sharon is played by at-the-time child actress Jodelle Ferland, who’d already dipped her toes into horror by the time she did something as mainstream and big budget as Silent Hill. She was around ten or eleven during filming, and she was still a small girl, but some of her lines suggest that she was supposed to be playing younger, and it doesn’t always land well, maybe because she’s using a little girl voice in her higher register to contrast with the lower Alessa voice. She’s a convincing kid, but there’s a maturity to her that doesn’t really fit the age I felt she was playing. It works when she’s Alessa but not always as Sharon. Still, there’s a reason this girl keeps playing the devil. She’s very good at old-young, which is part of the reason she’s one of the inspirations behind my Snow White character, though she’d now be too old for the role. Nevertheless, her work in Silent Hill has led to me watching her career, and I’m rooting for her as she transitions into adult roles.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. One semi-abduction, police car chase, and car crash later, Rose wakes up on the edge of Silent Hill, surrounded by dense fog and ash floating from the sky like snow. Since I’m not familiar with the games, a lot of these atmospheric elements are new to me, and extremely effective. It’s a beautiful, muted visual. I’m a sucker for pretty horror, and Silent Hill has a lot of pretty and ugly-pretty horror for my needy little eyes. Among all the ash, Sharon is nowhere to be found, thus beginning the scavenger hunt portion of the movie.

I’m being flippant, but it’s actually a good conflict–mother seeking daughter and willing to do anything to find her and keep her safe–and that conflict plus a lot of what follows pays plenty of homage to the video games without feeling too much like one. Finding what’s lost is a classic video game device, and it works just as well in more linear storytelling. It’s basically an ‘into the woods’ quest, with all kinds of monsters and allies along the way.

Once in Silent Hill, Rose quickly discovers that this town is not normal. In Ash Mode, it’s just haunting, unsettling. But Rose follows what she thinks is Sharon into a warehouse. That’s when the emergency siren goes off, and the Ash world flakes away to reveal a hellish interior. It’s a pretty, darn good effect, and I’m not usually a fan of CGI. In Hell Mode (or Rust Mode), that’s when the monsters really come out to play. In the warehouse, it’s the Gray Children, which look like misshapen burning babies. Here’s where the CGI loses it a bit for me. People should be people whenever possible, because anything less than the best motion capture doesn’t move like living things actually move. In the special features of the DVD, I watched the green screen where a small female contortionist donned her Gray Child costume and moved around in it, and that’s honestly creepier for me. Upon another viewing, I think it’s because the proportion of the Gray Children to Rose keeps changing, which jars me out of the suspension of disbelief. However, the Gray Child was my least favorite CGI monster in the movie. All the others are better.

(When the Gray Children scene ends with everything flaking back into Ash Mode, Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” plays on a jukebox in the bowling alley. Everyone in the original theater laughed; good release of tension, and the only funny bit in the movie.)

After the more neutral Ash Mode (I’m sure there’s an actual name for these modes in the video game, but I don’t want to look them up at the moment) returns, Rose runs into Dahlia, a Miss Havisham-meets-Cassandra type character in the movies, although I understand she’s more of an antagonist in the games. Here, she’s the sorrowful mother, a broken woman heavy with cobwebs, dust, and regret, played by the gently altoed Deborah Kara Unger. She chews the scenery in a wonderfully maudlin way and gives us the first bit of exposition about Alessa, the child that was taken from her. When Rose shows her a locket with Sharon’s picture, Dahlia becomes agitated and insists it’s Alessa, her own child.

As Rose continues to look for Sharon and for a way out of Silent Hill, which seems completely cut off from the rest of the world–literally, with the streets out of town broken away and nothing but an abyss on every side–she runs into the cop that chased her into the town, Sybil Bennett, played by genre royalty Laurie Holden.

From what I can tell, people either love her or find her annoying. Silent Hill was my first introduction to her, and I won’t lie. When she first pulled off her helmet and started shooting at the Armless Man (much creepier than the Gray Child), I developed a serious crush on this woman, hardass cop notwithstanding. Sure, it seems ridiculous to us for Cybil to handcuff Rose with everything that’s happening, but as far as Cybil knows, she’s followed a parent kidnapper into Silent Hill, and it wouldn’t be the first (which is a nod to one of the games, apparently).

At this point, the Sean Bean side plot makes it perfectly clear that the ashy Silent Hill isn’t just cut off, it’s a completely different dimension existing parallel to the real Silent Hill, where it’s pouring down rain and police are searching for Rose, Sharon, and Cybil. Through the inspector on the case, we’re given a little more exposition about what happened to Alessa and to the town. But on their side, it’s just a normal ghost town–singed, smoky, dangerous due to the coal fires still burning and sending fumes up to the surface, but otherwise normal. When Rose is at her most distressed, Christopher senses her, which leads to a so-close-yet-so-far moment that I think played pretty well. Extraneous though it may be, I feel like the side plot does provide a much-needed atmosphere respite from the fantasy-horror Silent Hill world. The doses of reality offer enough of a contrast that the hellscape seems all the more hellish.

Rose follows the clues left behind for her by the child she keeps thinking is Sharon running away from her, all the way to a school marked by a curious-looking cross. Inside, there’s evidence that Alessa was decried as a witch even by the children and that something obscene happened to her by a janitor named Colin, given what this hell universe tends to do to the people who hurt her. Colin is dead, wrapped and contorted with barbed wire, and in his mouth is something Rose needed to find, a hotel key. But before Rose can leave, she discovers men in coal miner gear outside the bathroom. Their canary goes crazy right before the emergency siren goes off and Hell Mode returns, bringing Colin’s dead, desecrated body to life.

This is one of those cases where practical effects really paid off, and it’s no wonder that the same man who plays Colin is also the one who played Pyramid Head. He does amazing pantomime work, conveying so much with body language in roles where he doesn’t speak. Just as Pyramid Head is a pretty undeniable symbol of uniquely male violence (noticeable especially within a majority female cast), his Colin is a tortured obscenity. The artistry in his dual performances is a pleasure to watch.

With the cockroach-like Creepers and Pyramid Head after her in the rusty, bloody hellscape, Rose finally meets up with Cybil again, who can’t deny there’s something rotten in the state of Silent Hill. As soon as Ash Mode returns and most of the monster danger is gone, they continue following the clues the girl who looks like Sharon left behind, all the way to a hotel. The music they use on their way reminds me that I love the soundtrack of the movie, which borrows themes from a number of the games. It’s a great industrial sound that translates well to the movie.

At the hotel, we finally get a good look at Alessa, who’s the spitting image of Sharon except for the dark hair and school uniform. And we meet one of the first fundamentalists left over from the fire. They’re a sect off of Christianity, with theology built around witch-burning and maintaining purity in the community. In the case of Anna and most of the other members of the congregation, this is where the story tends to turn overwrought and overly simplistic. The only grounding influence is the cult leader Christabella, played by the wonderfully hypnotic Alice Krige, another member of genre royalty. Have I mentioned how stellar this cast is?

And how unique is it that this fundamentalist cult is run by a soft-spoken, steely woman instead of a charismatic man? What could have turned into something laughable is given a more solid foundation by Christabella, who is clearly a true believer of her own religion (also unusual in cult movies, where the man is clearly a con using his charisma to gain power and respect). She may be an antagonist and an evil person, but I respect true believers more than cons, and she has no reason to believe she’s wrong–after all, their people have remained safe, and the church remains a refuge from the darkness whenever Hell Mode settles over the town.

This fact alone raises a number of questions for me that are never answered. It’s clear that if Alessa hadn’t been burned as a witch, Silent Hill would never have been sucked into a hellscape by the demon that Alessa accepted inside of her, so Christabella is clearly the author of her own people’s destruction. But it’s curious that people portrayed as evil, as those who have twisted faith into something ugly and vicious, can still keep the demon at bay in their church. It’s curious that the church is still a sanctuary from the darkness. Demon!Alessa calls it ‘blind conviction’ that keeps her from entering, but is it really? Or does their ugly faith come with enough good intentions that it affords them some protection? Why would a demon not be able to enter everywhere in her own hell? Is their illusion of protection as much a part of the hellscape as their illusion of righteousness? They certainly don’t seem to be happy with either.

So many questions unanswered, but I’m not one to think that something a plot hole just because it doesn’t have an answer. I’d like to think that things are more complicated than good and evil, even in heaven and hell.

Once in the church, Rose and Cybil are questioned by Christabella, but despite some reservations and suspicion on both sides, Christabella agrees to take them to where the demon waits and might have answers about how to find Sharon. However, when Christabella discovers that Sharon looks like Alessa, she tries to stop the two women. Cybil sacrifices herself to the fanatics to let Rose continue down into the center of the hellscape, where we encounter the sexiest of the monsters, the iconic Dark Nurses. This is one of the places where the movie feels more like a video game, but it doesn’t suffer from comparison. Instead, it helps build the tension, and the fact that all the nurses are made-up people really helps bring the realism to the moment that too much CGI would have destroyed.

Then we enter the realm of pure exposition where we learn the full story behind Alessa, Sharon, and what happened to Silent Hill. We still have questions: Why does the inspector look the same thirty years ago as today? Who’s Alessa’s father? Why was some of Silent Hill sucked into hell and not everyone? How much of what the demon says can we believe? And again, why can’t the demon enter the church without being brought in? What caused Silent Hill to become a ghost town–the fire that burned Alessa or the demon sucking most of Silent Hill down into its hell? Because I originally thought it was the fire, but Alessa was put into a Silent Hill hospital. Ghost towns don’t happen overnight, but if the fire caused the coal mines to burn, one would think it would have been pretty quick. Maybe these answers were lost in editing. They’re ultimately irrelevant to the story, but curious minds still want to know.

The story reaches the climax back at the church, where the fundamentalists–miserable, judgmental murderers that they are–receive what seems like just deserts. The only quibble I have is Christabella’s fate, which seems gratuitously sexual to me. Don’t get me wrong, the whole movie is graphically violent, sometimes beautifully so. Brutal beatings, a woman skinned alive, torture totems, the burning of Alessa and Cybil, the Dark Nurses… I just felt that Christabella’s fate could have been more poetry and less rape. Please.

The weakest parts of even good horror movies tend to fall at the end. Sometimes I like Silent Hill‘s ending and sometimes I don’t. Ambiguity is a horror movie maker’s friend, but it often leads to a frustrated audience. Then again, a solid, safe ending can hit a supernatural rather than a horror note, which can be a bit jarring, and a dark ending can be kind of despairing. It’s really difficult for horror movies to win.

TL;DR: Silent Hill is a badass, female-dominated, visually horrific and stunning movie–far from a masterpiece, but in my opinion, a solid offering and one I don’t mind rewatching on the regular. The sequel, Silent Hill: Revelation, is a hot mess. I enjoy it and it has some good moments, but it’s a mess. I feel like a good Silent Hill sequel could be made, but I doubt it ever will. The original manages to stand strong, strange, and horrifying all on its own.

REVIEW: The ReZort

20 Saturday Oct 2018

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The Rezort[Warning: Here there be spoilers]

THE REZORT was one of those movies I didn’t expect much from, and I ended up getting a lot more than I thought I needed. I’m not sure whether the premise of the movie is original, but if not, I’m surprised it hadn’t been done before, because it made so much sense as a concept.

Basically, JURASSIC PARK meets zombies. And it’s surprisingly decent.

Great? Not so much. There are parts of the movie that seem far-fetched, although my threshold for disbelief is a lot lower than it used to be. Whenever I tell myself there’s no way anyone’s going to let a multibillionaire build a resort on an island where people can shoot zombies, I look at the world today, and I go, “Nope. There’d be protests and marches and debates, then they’d totally let her do that.” We have game preserves and hunting trails all over the world, dead people wouldn’t legally be considered people, and it would boost a post-apocalyptic economy. You think some of the lines in the movie regarding why the ReZort was allowed to happen are kind of ridiculous until you really start to think about them. Then you realize all the rhetoric is of the kind used in a number of other controversial but totally legal practices. Zombies aren’t real, folks, but if they were, it wouldn’t be too long before something like this happened.

There are parts of the movie that play a bit rote, with a cookie-cutter selection of side characters introduced to us: the immature gamers, the long-suffering soldier who misses the war, the pacifist-activist, the loving couple, the obnoxious businessmen, the evil billionaire. And these characters are put into a predictable string of zombie situations. I mean, it’s the ReZort. It’s a zombie theme park. You know it’s going to go wrong because you’ve seen JURASSIC PARK, and you know how it’s going to go wrong because you’ve seen at least one zombie movie in your life, and with few exceptions, they’re all really similar. But the actors bite into the meat of their roles, approaching the movie as though it’s more than it is, and so they make it that way.

Our main character Melanie is played by actress Jessica de Gouw, who’s on my celebrity doppelganger list as the spitting image of Rachel McAdams. I’d call her a poor man’s Rachel McAdams, and when I first saw her in the movie, that’s what I thought I’d be getting, but her acting chops hold their own. Come on, Hollywood, there’s a long-lost twin story in there somewhere.

We come into the movie post-zombie-war, when the world has fought its way back to something approaching normal due to a policy known as Operation Brimstone. In short, they firebombed the hell out of anywhere the zombies arose, which took a lot of innocent lives along with them and left thousands upon thousands of people without homes, causing a serious refugee crisis. The movie opens with a series of maddeningly realistic news clips from partisan channels bringing us up to speed on 1) what happened and 2) where the post-zombie-war controversies are. There are a lot of traumatized people. War equals trauma, and zombies equal personal trauma. There are soldiers adjusting to civilian life, because of the aforementioned war equals trauma. There’s the refugee crisis that’s moving at a crawl.

There are also people who challenge Operation Brimstone as causing too much collateral damage and those who challenge the concept of the ReZort as being callous with the dead. As activist Sadie points out, “If this is how we treat the dead, who’s to say the living won’t be next?” It has roots in pro-life and animal rights activism, but it doesn’t firmly hang its hat with either. It’s not a stretch to imagine how dead rights activists might address the zombie issue. After all, these are people’s families and friends that they watched change, sometimes right before their eyes, and it’s a moral and ethical dilemma what to do with them (and depending on spiritual views of life after death and how to treat dead bodies, it could be a religious dilemma,too). Like I said, personal trauma.

Melanie, who’s part of a post-zombie-war grief support group, and her ex-soldier boyfriend agree to go to the ReZort, a luxury hotel and game trail for people who want revenge on the zombie virus that upended their lives and killed their family and friends. Apparently, the controlled circumstances did wonders for someone else in her group, and she thinks it might serve her PTSD to indulge in some R&R and carnage—confronting her fears, but with cocktails.

Among the other resort guests, we also have a scowly, steely-eyed Dougray Scott, who most mainstreamers know from EVER AFTER, but who’s made something of a name for himself in the horror genre as well (hello, HEMLOCK GROVE, you pretty little mess). If anyone else is a significant actor, I don’t recognize them.

Their time at the ReZort begins with evening drinks by the pool, where the billionaire creator of the ReZort comes out and addresses her crowd. She’s definitely not what you expect, not least because the person who created an island retreat for zombie hunting is a woman. She’s trim, fastidiously neat and polished, like the owner of a tropical paradise hotel rather than one with a gruesome underbelly. She contrasts strongly with the zombie woman they bring out, shackled, dirty, and decayed. They stare each other down face to face (I’m pretty sure there’s enough slack on the shackles for the zombie woman to reach her if she lunges, but whatever), and it all feels exploitative as hell, especially since the zombie still has some soul in her eyes, although she acts like an animal. Everyone else is raucously cheering—”Every apocalypse deserves to have an afterparty!”—but Melanie’s clearly uncomfortable with how human the zombie still appears to be.

There’s only one other person there who seems just as ambivalent, the pink-streaked jilted fiancee supposedly there because the tickets were nonrefundable. But during the party, Sadie sneaks away to where she doesn’t belong and downloads some files in a personnel-only part of the resort. Because if everything went as planned, it wouldn’t be much of a movie.

The point at which everything goes wrong is where the movie is at its most predictable, and where it tends to falter. I would have liked to see more ReZort amenities beyond one day shooting at herds or at zombies set up in an abandoned compound like the guests are playing a real-life video game. What other sick ways do they use the dead? But there’s a twist toward the climax that I really like, because it’s just so awful and fits right into the post-Z world they’ve created, addressing an issue that you probably figured out already. I’m terrible at predicting twist endings (I’m getting better, which of course makes movies worse, so it’s a double-edged sword), and I didn’t see this one coming. Even if you do, it’s perfect enough to work.

Like I said, THE REZORT isn’t great. But when you turn it on just expecting the usual, getting the taste of a pretty darn juicy concept might just give you the popcorn evening in you’re looking for.