Most horror movies aren’t too concerned with character development or acting. They just shoot for the lowest common denominator of gore and pacing. A Horrible Way to Die, from a startlingly talented young director out of Alabama named Adam Wingard, is the exact opposite. The trappings are straight-up genre stuff about a serial killer, but the format is a languid character study that lets three very good actors breathe as their relationships develop, coalesce, and finally do what they’re going to do.
The subject at hand is the worst kind of relationship PTSD, with Amy Seimetz’ frail performance as the emotional core of the movie. AJ Bowen, who is unforgettable in an indie horror triptych called The Signal, is the movie’s id, once again balancing a fine line between funny and gruesome. But the real star of this movie is Wingard’s bold camerawork. The handheld camera sways and struggles to find focus, like someone waking up from a dream, trying to find her bearings. If you want your camera on sticks for 90 minutes, with maybe the occasionally dolly shot and a crane shot right before the credits, you will hate A Horrible Way to Die. But if you accept that a camera is just as much a part of telling a story as a script or a performance, then A Horrible Way to Die is a provocative horror movie about three characters and how the director shoots them.
A Horrible Way to Die is available on Netflix here. I heartily recommend the gorgeous Blu-ray version.
(In case you’re wondering what this is, it’s my opportunity to recommend obscure horror films that you otherwise might have missed. I consider this a year-round job, but what better time to do it daily than the two weeks leading up to Halloween?)
Part of the expectation with found footage movies is that the you’re going to see a modest production that relies on creepy horror instead of effects or spectacle or anything too over-the-top. Found footage is often a shortcut for production values.
So that’s why the mostly not very good, but ultimately satisfying Grave Encounters is a refreshing change of pace. You have all the ingredients for a low-key found footage horror movie: bad actors left to improvise, a chintzy reality TV premise, a dumpy set, obvious humor, and reliance on gimmicks like a window moving ever-so-slightly. So it goes. They can’t all be Paranormal Activity.
But once you think you’ve got a bead on Grave Encounters, it pulls a fast one. Let me stress that you’re not getting a good movie. Instead, you’re getting a fun haunted house thrill ride. And in horror movies, that’ll do just fine.
Grave Encounters is currently available as video on demand. I recommend enjoying it with a group.
British director Neil Marshall had a memorable enough introduction with the amateurish but enthusiastic Dog Soldiers, which was Aliens, but with British soldiers in the woods instead of Colonial Marines in space, and werewolves instead of xenomorphs. After that, Marshall’s women-in-a-cave-with-monsters movie The Descent was a memorable entry in the genre of horror movies that don’t need dudes, but also don’t need to stoop to sorority house massacres. But then Marshall did the goofy goulash Doomsday, which was Aliens meets 28 Days Later and then unexpectedly stumbles onto Road Warrior and then gets tangled up with Ladyhawk on the way to the closing credits.
So what to expect from Marshall’s latest movie, a swords & sandals non-epic about Roman soldiers ambushed in hostile territory and then hunted by a Ukrainian model wearing someone’s Blizzcon costume? Pictured, of course. In Marshall’s version of ancient history, hot Pict chicks abound and the villain’s name is Gorlacon. Go ahead, say that out loud a few times. “Gorlacon”. Roll it around on your tongue. “Gorlacon”. It’s pronounced exactly like it’s spelled, as if it was an annual gathering of Gorla fans. “Gorlacon”.
At one point, the conveniently diverse band of surviving soldiers is hiding in a cave, exchanging backstory with each other over dinner. Michael Fassbender’s voiceover shuts up long enough to let everyone else talk. Liam Cunningham, the token older guy, says, “This was supposed to be my last tour. I had my eye on a farm in Tuscany.” That’s Latin for being two days from retirement. I wish I could write dialogue that bad. Centurion is easily the worst movie Marshall has made, and I suspect it’s a long downhill slide from here. Was The Descent just an anomaly?
If you must watch a swords & sandals movie, I heartily recommend Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle for getting right pretty much everything Centurion got wrong. Strong actors, a powerful sense of history and setting, and actual character development. About the only edge Centurion enjoys is its splatter sensibility. Marshall doesn’t shoot action scenes so much as he edits together gore effects. But The Eagle, which stars no hot Ukrainian models, knows enough to spin a great story around two talented lead actors who work really well together. One of the leads is Jamie Bell, so no surprise there, and the other is Channing Tatum.
And if you’re up for something more contemporary by about a thousand years, the enjoyably grim Ironclad, from director Jonathan English, is a real treat for the performances, the writing, the battles scenes, and the nifty historical angle in which Paul Giamatti, as a petulant English king, decides he didn’t want to sign the Magna Carta after all, so he’s going to round up a bunch of Vikings to take back England. It’s up to a hearty band of actually English actors and Kate Mara to stop him.
Sometimes I like to think I’m fairly sophisticated when it comes to movies. The cinema, really. The culture of filmmaking and its sociological implications and Louie Malle and whatnot. For instance, I read this article about the influence of Islamic cinema on the Arab Spring. I fully intended I would then watch some of those movies to be, you know, more informed and culturally aware and stuff. But the entirety of my takeaway from that article was “Wait, there’s an Islamic horror flick?”
After the jump, there is in fact a Pakistani slasher movie with zombies Continue reading →
I have watched and enjoyed some awful movies solely because Lucy Liu is in them. Cypher is one such movie. This 2002 release is director Vincenzo Natali’s transition from the sleek sci-fi horror of 1997’s Cube to the awkward Cronenberg me-too of 2009’s Splice. Jeremy Northam plays the dupe in a mind-bending game of corporate espionage that ends up exactly where you think it’s going to end up. Liu plays Morpheus, but hotter. She even gives Northam red pills. She will arrive dangling from a wire on a helicopter for a hilarious Liu ex machina.
Northam, a capable and British actor, sports an oddly brittle American accent. Liu, a lovely woman, sports a ridiculous unflattering wig. If Cypher is ever rewarding, it’s when these things are shed.
In this Dutch horror movie, a bunch of twenty-something teenagers with a Ouiji board party in a haunted Belgian mine. You know where this is going, so there’s really no need to watch it play out by actually seeing the movie. In the US, this movie is known as Slaughter Night because we rightly read Sl8n8 as “Slate Nate”, which isn’t the least bit scary and actually makes me think of Avril Lavigne’s song, Sk8ter Boi.
The most disappointing thing about this forgettable demonic possession/slasher movie is that it doesn’t have the slightest shred of identity that isn’t slavishly borrowed from crappy American horror movies. This is usually what happens when you pick through foreign horror films. You end up watching something that just apes American movies or, if you’re lucky, Japanese movies. But sometimes you’ll find something with a sense of national identity. In recent years, I’ve had the pleasure to discover Sauna from Finland, Let the Right One In from Sweden, The Backwoods from Spain, Isolation from Ireland, and Trollhunter from Norway, all with a distinct sense of national character in the story, the actors, the locations, and the situation. No such thing happens in Slate Nate.
However, I did learn a little Dutch. The Dutch word for “fucking loser” is “fucking loser” and the Dutch word for “fucking hell” is “fucking hell”. Also, when surprised by the obligatory corpse falling out of a closet, one of the twenty-something teenagers yells out, “Jesus!” According to the subtitles, this is Dutch for “Christ!”
The Debt is one of those movies where characters deal with a Deep Dark Secret from Many Years Ago ™. And, to be fair, these are interesting characters. Tom Wilksinson, Helen Mirren, and Ciarin Hinds are former Mossad agents credited with taking out a prominent Nazi many years ago during a mission in East Berlin. Cue Samuel Jackson making a gun-to-the-head gesture and asking “taking out”? Yes, taking out. Mossad, dontchaknow? The Debt is about something that happens thirty years later.
Well, at least that’s what The Debt is about before it spends far too much time with the less interesting younger versions of the characters, particularly Jessica Chastain. She’s certainly lovely, and we know from Tree of Life that she’s capable of gravity. But here she’s just lovely and not much else. The most interesting thing about her is that she’s going to grow up into Helen Mirren. She does demonstrates one hell of a way to take out a gynecologist who you might suspect is a former Nazi, but that’s still not as interesting as growing up into Helen Mirren.
I saw in the credits that Sam Worthington was supposed to be in this movie, but I don’t recall seeing him. Maybe he was in the Sam Worthington-shaped hole that was moving around on screen a lot. And I’m always up for watching Marton Csokas, who you probably know as Mr. Galadriel in Lord of the Rings, or the agent who Matt Damon kills with a toaster and a magazine in Bourne Supremacy. But it wasn’t enough to keep me from wondering when we were going to get back to Helen Mirren. And when that finally happens, the movie is nearly over, leaving just enough time to literally stumble to a silly and hurried finale in which Mirren demonstrates that she is the worst secret agent ever.
Hey, Hollywood, can I tell you a secret? People over 40 are inherently more interesting than people under 40*. I say this having been on both sides of the equation. Now if your goal is to get people under 40 to see your crappy movie, good job focusing on Jessica Chastain. But if your goal is to tell an interesting story, The Debt is doing it wrong.
* if I knew how to do footnotes, here I would cite episode 12 of season two of Louie
Shark Night, which features a scene in which a one-armed man wades out into waist-deep water and wins a hand-to-hand fight against a shark, introduces its cast with a pair of Tulane students playing Halo 3 in their dorm room. Microsoft’s shooter gets quite a bit of screen time, some map-specific discussion, and a generic Xbox shout-out. The word “pwned” is used unironically. And considering that the cast of this forgettable tripe is so uniformly unlikable — I was even rooting for the dog to die — I’m not the least bit surprised they’re the sort of people who play Halo online.
Remember in 1979 when the head of South Korea’s intelligence agency just up and shot the President dead one night?
Me neither. In fact, no one told me that ever happened. It seems like the kind of thing you’d hear about a country. But according to South Korean filmmaker Sang-soo Im, it’s a taboo subject. Which is why he made a movie called “Folks Back in Those Days”. That’s how the title is translated from it’s Korean title. But the US release is called The President’s Last Bang, which is where you’ll find it on Netflix.
Which you should do. It plays like a cross between a thriller and a black comedy, about a million miles away from a somber historical story like, say, Joint Security Area or Memories of Murder or The Host. For instance, it opens with a shot of a bunch of hot Korean chicks taking their tops off and it closes with a shot of the movie’s most enigmatic character just eating dinner. Everything in between moves among a set of different characters and different locations as the evening of the assassination unfolds through various stages of uncertainty, confusion, and resolve.
I hate to overuse this description — I can’t help but bring it up every time I talk about In the Loop — but there’s something so very Dr. Strangelove about The President’s Last Bang. It has an appreciation for the absurd without having to wink or point. It just lets the absurd be absurd. Because once you try to make the absurd actually absurd, once you start nudging, you end up with Oliver Stone’s W. Hey, look, Josh Brolin’s President Bush is stuffing his face with foot and Thandie Newton’s Condoleeza Rice is talking like Urkle and Richard Dreyfus’ Dick Cheney is exactly like Richard Dreyfus’ villain in Red, and it all pales in comparison to watching the real life Bush demonstrate his drive for the press in Farenheit 911, which isn’t unlike President Muffley asking the Soviet premier to turn his music down. Leave the absurd alone. Let it be. It’s already absurd, so making it eat a sandwich doesn’t add anything. Sang-soo Im knows this and it makes his movie great.
The style is very Western, with a careful sense of pacing and tension and even an eye for action sequences. But the setting is very Korean, and very Cold War. You won’t hear communism and Japan mentioned this way in any American movie. Like Denmark and Spain, South Korea is one of those countries with its own distinctive eye for moviemaking. Yeah, yeah, Taiwan, Japan, France, England, whatever. My theory is that Denmark, Spain, and South Korea have been on the periphery of enormity for so long that it has done something to them, something that bubbles up in their movies. They’re countries that have spent centuries watching terrible spectacles roll around them, occasionally lapping at their feet, like a bystander on a rock outcropping when a tsunami drowns everyone on the beach. The bystander is the guy to tell the story.
But never mind my penny-ante analysis of the national psyche of countries I’ve mostly never been to. If you want to see a latter day game of thrones, allow me to recommend The President’s Last Bang as political theatre of the absurd at its best.
The saga of [Rec] continues. When Sony bought the rights to this superlative found-footage Spanish zombie movie, they decided to cheaply remake it instead of banking on stupid Americans being willing to read subtitles. The result was Quarantine, featuring Dexter’s sister and a marked lack of appreciation for what made the original work. Protip: the cast. So that happened.
Then the creators of [Rec] made a sequel. [Rec] 2 effectively ignored what made the first movie good (did I mention the cast?) and even decided to jump genres, as if it hoped to get a head start on the resurgence of demonic possession movies that, for all we know, are hot on the heels of the occasional exorcism movie like The Rite and Last Exorcism. Stand by for that, I suppose.
Now there’s a sequel to Quarantine, the remake of [Rec], that wisely ignores [Rec] 2 and does its own thing. And in the process, it very nearly becomes the best thing you’ll see all week. Despite its middling cast and made-for-TV directorial style, Quarantine 2 has a good script and a solid sense for how to do horror in a post-9/11 air travel setting. This is classic Irwin Allen, but modern day, and with zombies instead of air traffic control mishaps. And for a while, it’s ratcheting up the tension, introducing its characters, hitting all the right beats, and generally getting it done. Way to go, Quarantine 2, written and directed by John Pogue, the writer of Ghost Ship! You may very well be the best thing to come out of a [Rec] movie since the original [Rec].
But then, like so many horror movies, it starts to come apart. It starts to explain things. It cracks. It starts to go over well tread territory. It crumbles. It forces a poorly conceived nightvision gimmick for no other reason than because it was in the original [Rec] and in the process it’s wishing so hard it was 28 Weeks Later, as the plucky determined stewardess and her frightened teenage charge grope their way through and into oblivion. But you simply can’t get there with this cast. And what’s with the late-game needle-into-eyeball squick factor? Really? 90 minutes of rampaging, virulent, blood-soaked zombies isn’t enough, so we’re going to take a break by sticking a needle in an eyeball? Oh, Quarantine 2. You could have been a contender.
Return in Red is, by nearly any metric, a bad movie. Bad. Director Tyler Tharpe is inordinately pleased with the simple act of moving the camera on a dolly without any regard for why or whether he should do it, much less how to cut around it. The lighting is alternately soupy, harsh, or tacky. It has no meaningful production values, shot mostly in people’s houses in Indiana. A barn set up with a couple of power tools stands in for a factory. The best thing you can say about the actors is that they’re occasionally relaxed. There is scarcely a frame of Retun in Red that doesn’t announce itself as an amateur production.
That said, I really liked Return in Red. It’s a textbook example of tension, suspense, and fear without resorting to the usual tropes. It has a canny sense for quiet menace. The opening narration is right out of the 70s, consisting of a simple quote about a program to study the effects of sound waves as a weapon. From here, we’re introduced to a small rural community, stalked by a strange white van with what looks like a satellite dish sticking out the side. Return in Red belongs in the tradition of The Crazies, or a far better version of The Crazies called Impulse, or an Alan Rudolph movie called Endangered Species, in which Dan Ulrich, JoBeth Willams, and Paul Dooley investigate UFO cattle mutilations.
And even though it’s bad, the amateurish quality gives it that raw grimy feel of 70s horror movies, especially when it starts to roll out the special effects. Like George Romero, Wes Craven, and Tobe Hooper before him, Tharpe is states and states away from from Hollywood, hundreds of miles from any movie studio, surrounded by and therefore working with actual people. As such, he has to come up with his own tricks. His desperate no-budget affection shows in every bleak and poorly lit frame he shoots. He’s like Mark Borchardt, but with a sense for subtlty.
I’m tempted to say Return in Red should have been a half hour shorter, maybe because I actually fell asleep a couple of times while watching it. Which isn’t the movie’s fault. My hours were messed up because of a time zone shift. In fact, my falling asleep complemented the occasionally hazy narrative. But ultimately, I don’t think you could trim anything from this slow and sometimes wet burn. The time it takes to breathe and meander makes the weird finale more effective. It gives the fate of the characters more weight, especially since they don’t seem like characters so much as people persuaded by Tharpe to wander into the frame from time to time.
But again, let me remind you that Return in Red is bad. I know that. I warned you right off the bat. But sometimes there’s more to a movie than being good or bad. Return in Red, available on Netflix’s instant watch, is one such movie.
Two things I loved early on about The Abadoned are how it looks — this is a gorgeous production design, smartly shot by Nacho Cerda, yet another Spanish director with a great eye — and a title card that reads “40 years later”. The movie opens with a pair of little babies showing up out of nowhere. So once the title card flashed onscreen, I knew this was going to be a movie about a forty-year-old. Now I like good looking young people as much as the next WB viewer, but you can only get so much mileage out of good looking young people. They’re dumb, they’re inexperienced, and they’re going to mope a lot about the other good looking young people. At some point, you’re going to need the cast of The Thing, or Andromeda Strain, or Jaws, or Don’t Look Now, or Burnt Offerings, or The Shining. I can only take so many Insidiouses and Amityville Horror remakes and Saws. So when the stately middle-aged stage actress Anastasia Hille showed up, The Abandoned earns major points.
So far, so good. But let’s talk for a second, horror movie. First off, please stop using that trick where someone walks across the foreground of the shot while the main character’s back is turned so that only the audience sees it. Making something scary only by virtue of camera placement is cheating.
Second off, horror movie, I will give you no more than ten minutes of the protagonist walking around a creepy locale while nothing happens. Ten minutes. That’s it. A lot of you go longer and some of you seem to consist mostly of people walking around in, like, the woods or a poorly lit house. Especially the woods. Over the course of an average horror fan’s lifetime, do you know how much footage we see of people walking around in the woods? Far too much. There’s a thin line between suspense and tedium. That line is now ten minutes long. The Abandoned very nearly goes over its limit.
But then something really freaky happens and I’m all, like, “ahhhhh!” and then Karel Roden shows up and all is well. I saw a Polish-language Western once in which Karel Roden sustains a head wound and cauterizes it with the gunpowder from his own bullets. He basically flash sears his own skull. That’s bad ass. He does something nearly that bad ass to a leg wound in The Abandoned. Dude is like the best field medic ever.
You can’t overestimate the value of some Karel Roden. Karel Roden is in exactly one scene in Orphan, and he’s not even really in it. He’s literally phoning in his scene. But he’s Karel Roden and Orphan is already a great movie by that point. But if Karel Roden had played the Tcheky Karyo part in Gravedancers, that movie would have been 45% less stupid. So The Abandoned has got that going for it. Together with Miss Hille’s gracefully carried years and Mr. Cerda’s keen eye and fantastic production design, The Abandoned turns out to be a memorable haunted house romp and very nearly the arthouse version of Evil Dead.
The Abandoned is available on DVD (Netflix link here).
In LA Noire, there are a couple of points where the game flirts with what must be one of the most maddening aspects of crime, and something you rarely see in pat episodic TV shows: sometimes you can’t know who committed a crime, because people lie and evidence doesn’t always tell the whole story. Unfortunately, LA Noire pulls its punches in this regard. It only dabbles in contrived ambiguity so it can set up a later reveal.
If I thought documentaries were real movies (they aren’t), it would bring to mind Paradise Lost, a pair of fascinating documentaries about the 1993 murder of three children in West Memphis, Arkansas. There’s a bit of an agenda behind director Joe Berlinger’s movies (the first made in 1996, the follow-up in 2000), but he doesn’t let it get in the way of telling the story and leaving you as unsatisfied as you should be. Probably the best cinematic example of this is David Fincher’s chilling Zodiac, an icily detached dramatization of the search for a serial killer in the 70s who (spoiler!) was never caught. I would have loved to have seen a little of that uncertainty and helplessness in LA Noire.
Most recently, I stumbled across an Australian movie called Noise, starring no one you’ve ever heard of and not to be confused with an American movie called Noise, starring Tim Robbins. To this day, I have no idea how the Australian Noise made its way into my Netflix queue. It just showed up one day and I had the good fortune to start watching it without knowing whether it was a horror movie, a romantic comedy, or a documentary (which isn’t a real movie anyway).
Noise is an unsettling experience from the opening scene to the final shot, but it’s an unforgettable study of how a crime unfolds and resolves, told from the perspective of a victim and a police officer, and the community they inhabit. It’s creepy, stylish, as unmistakably Australian as Picnic at Hanging Rock, genre bending, and flat-out unforgettable. For better or worse — you may very well hate it — it’s one of those movies that will bounce around inside your head as sure as the ringing in your ears after a gunshot.
Noise is available on DVD and Netflix’s Instant Watch .
It’s rare to see a low budget horror film carried so completely by the performances, but that’s what you get with Beneath the Dark, which I almost sort of recommend if you can stomach a slow-burn anti-thriller. The lead actor is the very Sean Penn-ish Josh Stewart (pictured, shirtless). He almost single-handedly saves a movie called The Collector, which is like Saw meets Home Alone. But unlike The Collector, there are four other good performances in Beneath the Dark, from a set of actors you’ve probably never seen before but are liable to mistake for James LeGros, Marisa Tomei, Virginia Madsen, or Catherine O’Hara.
You can figure out what you’re in for when, early on, a mysterious character offers Stewart a cigarette from a pack of Overlook Cigarettes. Besides, the road trip as a supernatural rite of passage is almost its own genre at this point. The concept was featured recently in Dark Country, an incredibly awkward Thomas Jane vanity project that tries to capture the look and feel of EC horror comics, and Altitude, in which the road trip is taken on an airplane. Ray Wise did a pathetic family road trip movie called Dead End several years ago in the same vein. One called Rest Stop was successful enough that it had a sequel.
Beneath the Dark is predictable and the direction is sadly artless, but it’s a decent script with five interesting performances. And although you know where it’s going, it reserves a nice surprise for the very end.
Beneath the Dark is on DVD and Netflix’s Instant Watch.
I should state up front that this isn’t a real movie. It’s a documentary, directed by and starring Eric Bana (above, right) and his Ford Falcon Coup. You know who Eric Bana is from his role as the jerkwad husband in Funny People. You know who the Ford Falcon Coup is from its role as the last of the V8 Interceptors in Mad Max and The Road Warrior.
Bana got the car as a beater when he was a kid and he ends up pouring his movie-star money into it and then racing it in a 5-day endurance rally in Tasmania. Twice. Bana doesn’t come out looking very good in Love the Beast. Spoiled, privileged, a bit full of himself. But the cool thing about this documentary is that it’s not about Bana and it’s not even necessarily about the car. It’s about his attachment to the car.
And because Bana is a movie star, he draws some Hollywood into his little documentary. He gets into Jay Leno’s obscene inner car sanctum. He subjects himself to a therapy session with Dr. Phil. And he refrains from punching Jeremy Clarkson in the face when Clarkson says, “All muscle cars are crap”.
The best parts of Love the Beast are the parts that reminded me of Shift 2 or Dirt 2, including footage of Bana and his navigator tearing through pastoral Tasmanian scenery in a gorgeous 70s muscle car. I don’t know enough about racing to watch an actual race — I mean, really, how dull would that be? — but I know enough about caRPGs to understand a man’s attachment to a car. I can relate when Bana interviews a driver who talks about the primal need to pass a car that has just passed you. And I can certainly appreciate a little 70s muscle car porn. So hot. I don’t think Bana has ever had a more attractive co-star.
Love the Beast is available on Netflix (instant watch here).
