Spooktoberween #19 Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

I can't always count on Guillermo Del Toro. Directing, yes, he is my kind of storyteller. The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth are two of my favorite movies. Blade 2 is my favorite of the Blade movies (not a high bar to cross). Pacific Rim and the Hellboy movies are a lot of fun. He put his production stamp on Splice and directed Cronos, both of which I just thought were so-so. The Orphanage is another of my favorite horror movies. So, all in all, more hits than misses, even if he dabbles in genres I don't have a big interest in.

I had heard bad things about Don't Be Afraid of the Dark and that kept me away for a couple of years. Firstly, I am no Katie Holmes fan since she usually talks out of the side of her mouth like a stroke victim. She actually acquits herself well in this one. Guy Pearce overcomes a ridiculous haircut to do a decent job, too. The little girl is not one of the more sympathetic actresses that could have been cast but she kind of grows on you after awhile.

It was odd that I watched this right after The Hole as both are about families split by divorce and moving into a new house with a portal to unspeakable horror in the basement. While Dante keeps things light and devilish, Troy Nixey (in his big screen debut) makes things slightly more sinister and grotesque (fitting, given the subject matter). Although Arthur Machen gets a shout out, Lovecraft's The Rats In the Walls feels like the obvious ancestor to this story of a little girl who finds a race of fairy folk living in her basement. That they only eat the teeth and bones of children is no nevermind. In fact, I was kind of hoping this movie would tie into the Hellboy mythos since he fought these same fairies in Hellboy 2 (although they were designed very differently).

Pearce plays the disbelieving father, too wrapped up in his work to pay attention to his child. Holmes is Pearce's new girlfriend, who is trying hard to win the bratty little kid over. The creatures are creepy enough but seem as menacing as the Gremlins (which could get slightly nasty when needed). Their aversion to bright light also reminded me of Joe Dante's little beasts.

Not a bad movie. Of course, if it is Del Toro, don't expect a rainbows and lollipops ending. Worth a watch if bored and if you want to delve deeper into Del Toro's world.

My Spooktoberween reviews to date:

#18 The Hole
#16 and 17 Nine Dead and The Awakening
#14 and 15 Red State and The Bay
#13 Hatchet 2
#12 A Horrible Way to Die
#11 VHS 2
#10 The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh
#9 The Corridor
#8 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
#6 and 7 Atrocious and Fright Night
#5 The American Scream
#3 and 4 Transylvania 6-5000 and The Pact
#2 The Dunwich Horror
#1 Room 237

Spooktoberween #18 The Hole

Joe Dante has more than earned his stripes in the filmmaking world, he doesn't have anything to prove to me. I would also call him the king of family horror, if such a genre exists. The Hole is just creepy enough to not suck to adults but feels like something I should have seen on HBO in 1986.

The story involves two kids moving into a new house with their mother. The brothers make a new friend in the teen hottie next door and, at the same time, discover a hole in their basement that leads to...something. I really think Dante would want me to use that "When you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you" line but that is a bit high-falutin' for a movie that rips of Stephen King's Cat's Eye. Eventually, manifestations of the three kids' fears begin emerging from the Hole and terrorizing them (including a Japan-approved, jerky motioned dead girl and a jester doll where they use a practical effect instead of CGI). The lead kid has the emotional range of a toaster but the other actors do pretty well. Some Joe Dante favorites pop up in small roles, as well.

I don't think this will scare you too terribly but it may be a good horror movie to share with a younger family member this Halloween season (I would say ages 9 and up should have no problems with it).

Spooktoberween #16 and 17: Nine Dead and The Awakening

I decided to add some more movies to my watch list and work my way through them for the Halloween run. The first is the Melissa Joan Hart vehicle, 9 Dead. It is a cool little premise (not miles away from the Cube) in which 9 strangers find themselves abducted and locked in a room. A masked dude comes in and tells them that one will die every 10 minutes unless they can figure out why they are in the room. As people start getting offed, it gets harder and harder to figure out what they have in common. This is especially true as the first 20 minutes or so are wasted with people distrusting the premise or plotting to escape.

As the captives start spouting every sin they can think of to confess, a picture finally starts emerging. There is a Chinese woman, an insurance agent, a priest, a pedophile, an assistant DA, a gangster, a thief, a cop and an actor in the room so not a lot of immediate connections. Some revelations go nowhere and one character, in particular has a change of heart at a weird time. The ending is kind of weird and ambiguous when it doesn't need to be. All in all, not the worst way to waste 90 minutes but not a particularly compelling way, either.

Much better was The Awakening. Rebecca Hall (the not Scarjo chick from The Prestige) is a ghost debunker in 1920s England. Dominic "McNulty" West comes to her to ask her to investigate a ghost sighting at the school were he works. I liked the debunking aspects of the movie (as I wish Red Lights had stuck to the same idea a little better) as Hall's character is a like the Sherlock Holmes of fake hauntings. When the really creepy stuff starts going down, it doesn't reach super scary levels. The very British production kind of works as a cheeky bodice-ripping romance as West and Hall smolder at each other in between ghost sightings. The aggro groundskeeper was a subplot too many but there is a decent enough twist that is hard to see coming because they cheat it a whole lot.

If you like period romances or haunted house movies, you could do worse than The Awakening.

Spooktoberween #14 and 15 Red State and The Bay

I had this whole big preamble in my head about the different types of directors. The gist was that, after awhile, you get kind of pigeon-holed into certain categories. Often, directors look to break out of these constraints by taking a trip into a specific genre ghetto (Tarantino and Rodriguez both went Grindhouse and have yet to return). Today, I watched two flicks that provided their creators a chance to spread their wings a bit and try something outside their comfort zones.

Kevin Smith is mostly known for his dick and fart joke movies (which are, in my opinion, very funny). He puts just enough pathos in them to make them work as character pieces but they are mostly just delivery systems for intricate scatology. With Red State, he decided to branch out into "horror." Despite the first 30 minutes or so having a horror feel, this is really a movie about some of Smith's pet peeves. He has issues with the Westboro Baptist Church so he fictionalized them and extrapolated a Branch Davidian scenario wherein they are wanted for violating gun laws.

This ground was covered with a little more slickness in the Robert Sean Leonard movie Standoff and (even separated by 10+ years) this movie suffers by comparison. It is stuffed with fine actors and, as always, Smith has a great ear for dialogue. Melissa Leo, John Goodman, Anna Gunn, Badger from Breaking Bad, Stephen Root, Kevin Pollack and Michael Parks all turn in top notch performances (even if some amount to glorified cameos). Unfortunately, the movie doesn't hang together as a coherent statement. It feels more like Smith running down a checklist of "Points I Want To Make" regarding Christianity, Homosexuality, Government Incompetence, Government Evil and maybe a smidgen of "can't we all just listen to each other" thrown in. 

Three horny teen boys are lured out to a trailer with the promise of four way sex with Melissa Leo (which...really?). They are soon drugged and awaken to find themselves in a bit of a nightmare. There is a very long sermon from Michael Parks as the head of this extremely violent church. The events that lead the ATF to the compound all arise logically enough but a lot of the impact in the second half of the film relies on dramatic irony and actions from a character we barely even see in the first half of the film.

There are moments where Smith's wicked sense of humor can't help but peek through, but he mostly plays it straight. I understand he ran out of funding and had to ditch his originally ending, which could have played so much better than the talkathon that does serve as an overly-long coda. Some editing, some script tightening and just a tad more money to carry the whole thing through would have done this movie a world of good.

Barry Levinson has not been stuck in as narrow a niche as Kevin Smith but he has not been known for working in genres outside of drama and comedy. With The Bay, he jumps into found footage horror and proves he can handle it pretty well.

The Bay is a very ambitious found footage feature in that it is culled from a variety of sources. At several points, Levinson apparently just says "fuck it" and goes for old-fashioned third person filmed shots (there is a long shot at the end in particular that breaks the rules). Also, one of the perks of the found footage horror genre is that you don't get to lean on music cues to ratchet up the tension, but Levinson employs some here.

Presented as a compilation of classified footage that the government has worked to keep hidden for the past few years, it tells the story of a deadly outbreak in a small Maryland town on the 4th of July. Now, why the outbreak happens then, I am not entirely sure. The conditions that resulted in the outbreak were present for a long time before hand but I guess this is dramatic license?

Plot holes aside, the development of the affliction (I am purposely being vague because finding out the true nature of the problem is one of the better aspects of the movie) is handled with the strong hand of a master storyteller. I was worried, initially, that there were too many characters and plot threads to follow but Levinson keeps the balls in the air pretty well. We follow a family with a new born as they sail their boat into the bay, the mayor of the town, the police force, a local reporter who was just there to do a fluff piece on the 4th of July festivities, two researchers who are found dead two weeks before the events of the movie, a local doctor, a teen girl face-timing with her best friend and a variety of other sources that come and go as they are needed. At about an hour and a half, Levinson keeps things moving at a good clip. Of course, with all the characters and the low running time, you never really get to know any of them very well (so that drama such as a police standoff or the final fates of any of the characters don't have much of an impact). It won't tug at your heartstrings but it just might keep you entertained for 90 minutes.

Like Red State, The Bay has some finger pointing to do at the government as well as big business. When the immoral collides with the incompetent, evil wins the day. Both of these non-horror directors had something to say along those lines. One just said it a little better.

Spooktoberween #13 Hatchet 2

This is a title that has been hanging out in my Netflix queue for a minute so I decided to finally give it a spin. The original Hatchet (along with Behind the Mask, which gets a nice shout out here) looked like they might spark the rebirth of the slasher genre. That rebirth never really happened but the original Hatchet was (from my memory at least) a tongue-in-cheek gore fest with a likable cast. It was a bucket of fun, in other words. Adam Green (the director) went on to do one of my favorite man vs. nature horror movies, Frozen. So, I know he is capable of genuine scares.

This movie picks up at the precise second the last one ended. Anyone who survived the first movie is back (as well as the "brother" of one of the characters from the first). The set up is a little bit Aliens to the original's Alien in that, instead of a group of hapless tourists, we get to see a bunch of hardcore hunters and rednecks facing off with Victor Crowley (the monstrous wielder of the titular Hatchet). Tony Todd (Candyman) gets a bigger part in this one, which is always welcome. AJ Bowen (from Spooktoberween #12) appears as one of the hunters and he is quickly becoming one of my favorite horror actors. He should be way more famous than he is.

What would Freud say about this chainsaw?

The execution is pretty much in keeping with the first movie. There aren't any real scares or moments of high tension. The fun is in seeing the goofy ways the characters meet their fates at Crowley's hands. Outboard motors, belt sanders, wooden tables, gigantic chainsaws and, of course, the trusty hatchet are all employed to dispatch the cast in novel ways. The sense of humor is still firmly there (Bowen's sex scene with Alexis Peters is a particularly funny scene up until the gross out ending) and even a little less juvenile than the first movie. This movie won't change your life or make you appreciate horror if you don't already but it is a nice little love letter to fans of the genre. Above all, it should not be taken seriously.

Oh yes, and the Director of Fright Night has a role in this, just FYI.

Spooktoberfest #12 A Horrible Way To Die

I am slowly becoming aware of a group of upstart horror filmmakers who are all friends and appear in each others' movies. I was first hipped to their existence through Ti West (House of the Devil, The Innkeepers) who led me to VHS. That led me to Joe Swanberg and Adam Wingard. Swanberg directs a lot of indie comedy but appears in indie horror flicks as an actor. Wingard (and Simon Barrett, who seems to be his writing partner) are all tied up with this group, too. I have been trying to sample their wares and see what this little group is all about.

That led me to tonight's movie A Horrible Way To Die. In it, we follow Amy Seimetz (from Upstream Color) as she goes to AA, works at a dentist office and tries to forget that she once dated the most celebrated serial killer in the US. As she begins a relationship with a new guy (Swanberg), we also follow her ex as he crosses the country, killing pretty much anyone he runs across. The ex is played pretty wonderfully by AJ Bowen. His serial killer is one of the better takes that I have seen. More than charming, he keeps insisting his victims will be just fine even up to the moment he kills them. He is soft-spoken and gentle. He never reverts to the easy cliche of the killer who is seething with rage just under the surface. Great character work by Bowen.

Unfortunately, he is not really the main character. When he is onscreen, his dark antics are dreadfully entertaining. When we are following the awkward, blooming romance between Seimetz and Swanberg, the movie loses a lot of the narrative drive. This is mostly due to the fact that there is a "big twist" in the plot that I hope to God you see coming like a bullet train. It is so clumsily telegraphed in both the script and some of the performances that you can't help but get there waaaaay before the movie. Situations like that make movies hard for me to watch when you are waiting forever for the characters to catch up with what we know.

Really, the whole thing plays better as relationship drama than as a horror movie. One bit I found super annoying was the overuse of handheld cameras and using extreme close-ups on light sources to signal scene changes. I wish the movie had been called A Horrible Way To Edit. I hear You're Next (by the same guy) is pretty darn good but it is kind of hard to see the potential here. Skip it.

Spooktoberfest #11 VHS 2

Anthologies, difficult to execute in a satisfying manner, even if you gather the best collection of collaborators ever. Invariably, there will be some weak links in the chain. VHS was the seeming apex of the found footage horror genre. Even with Adam Wingard, Joe Swanberg and Ti West, the first movie presented a mixed bag of horror. The pedigree is kind of even more impressive this time out. Eduardo "Blair Witch Project" Sanchez, Gareth "The Raid: Redemption" Evans, Jason "Hobo With a Shotgun" Eisner, and...well, Adam Wingard again...these are the directors gathered for the four segments and the wraparound this year.

The wraparound is called Tape 49 and it follows pretty much the same pattern as the wraparound in VHS. This time, a private detective and his assistant break into a kid's house (on the orders of his mother) to find out why he has vanished. Unlike the wraparound for the first movie, this one actually makes sense by the end and creates a mythology for the franchise (if they wish to continue it). I would give this one a B-.

The first movie is called Phase 1 Clinical Trials (Wingard) and it is based on a Twilight Zone worthy idea. A guy who lost his eye in a car accident gets a cyborg eye implanted that records everything he sees. Unfortunately, he can now see dead people. The whole deal is very rushed and builds to an awkward ending. This is an idea that could have used more time to create a slower burn. C-.

The second film is called A Ride in the Park (Sanchez) and it also features a really novel idea. A helmet cam mounted atop a bicyclist records his transformation from hapless victim into full blown zombie. Although there is very little acting required in this one, what little there is rates below amateur. The actual arc of the main character is pretty well-written and conceived for a horror short but the actors can't quite pull off some of the emotional pathos required to make the ending resonant. B-.

The third film is Safe Haven (Evans) and is the longest out of any of the two movies so far. It follows a documentary film crew as they go inside a doomsday cult. The crew has some interpersonal drama going on and the leader of the cult is particularly delighted they are present. Things get super grim by the end but it all seems to end with a wackity-smackity-do punchline that doesn't fit the dire tone of the rest of the short. I will say, it seems to be a better Silent Hill movie than either of the actual Silent Hill movies. B.

The final film is Slumber Party Alien Abduction (Eisner). This one was pretty much all screaming, loud noises and confusion. It kind of highlights the worst aspects of the found footage genre (unclear action, undeveloped characters, bizarre filming choices). The first VHS saved the best for last but this one fizzles out. The title pretty much says it all as some prank happy teens find themselves the target of an alien invasion. I did like the design of the aliens (like huge, bestial versions of the usually fragile greys we see on shows like X-Files) but that is the best I can say for it. D.

Mainly, I think this one fails by focusing more on gore than scares. The haunted house story in the first movie marks the high point of the series for me, still. Maybe, if they keep cranking these out, they will hit a sweet spot. I mean, at least I didn't have to watch 20 minutes of a kid running through a garden maze at night. I would say skip this one unless you are a genre fanatic, like me.