At first, Citadel seems like a movie like Heartless, in which hooded demons prowl London and are mistaken for thuggish youths. Or Cronenberg’s The Brood. Or the part of Don’t Look Now that you don’t really know about until the final “WTF!” scene. The basic idea is that little people in hoods are scary because you don’t know what’s under the hood. Consider Phantasm. Or jawas.
But it turns out that Citadel isn’t just a monster movie. In fact, it’s a better Silent Hill movie than anything with the words “silent hill” in the title. This is a character driven story about an unprepared father coping with fear, and the Father whose help he needs. Furthermore, here is a movie unafraid to play with children in peril and perilous children. You would never see this in a safely American horror film that only imperils people over 18. Thank you, Irish director/writer Ciaran Foy.
In the main role, the distractingly good-looking and Orlando-Bloom-meets-Harry-Potter Aneurin Barnard spends most of his time shrinking, usually with his eyes shut tight. Is it really a good idea to make your main character such a coward? Given the point Citadel wants to make, there’s no way around it. This movie has no interest in whacking zombies with a crowbar. And in the one scene where that happens, the crowbar is ineffectual. It takes a mirror to seal the deal. Get it? James Cosmos — you probably know him from Game of Thrones — is a welcome variation on the usual priest monster-slayer. With a tiny blind child in tow, Barnard and Cosmos make for a memorable monster hunting party.
Citadel isn’t as heavy handed or action oriented as I might make it sound. It lolls around for a while, as an arthouse horror movie will do. This makes the shocking moments all the more shocking. There are about three effective scenes here that any low-budget horror movie would be lucky to have. Which makes Citadel at least three times better than most low-budget horror films.
Citadel is available on DVD and video on demand. Support Qt3 by watching it on Amazon instant video.
For a guy with three boring names, each more boring than the last, writer/director Paul Andrew Williams is utterly fascinating. If you’ve seen London to Brighton and The Cottage, you know what I mean. If you haven’t seen them, you should. Both of them. In any order. You pick. But see both of them. Because you can’t really get a sense for this British director’s talent without seeing both movies. And then, for good measure, see a weird arthouse horror movie he co-wrote called The Children.
All caught up? Good. Because now it’s time to see Cherry Tree Lane, Paul Andrew Williams’ grim horror thriller that you previously had to import from the UK to watch on a region-free DVD player. It was worth it. But lucky for you, it’s available today in the US where fine DVDs are sold and rented.
As you’re watching Cherry Tree Lane, you might think it’s a mean-spirited thriller preying uncomfortably on issues of race and class and how small the houses are in modern day London. You’d be partly right. But the point of Cherry Tree Lane — and I’m going to take pains not to spoil it beyond acknowledging it — is the last scene. Or, rather, the moment the last scene ends. The way the last scene ends. The musical cue on which the last scene ends, wanting only a thick red curtain dropped by a stagehand in the wings. All the building tension and pressure, from the very opening scene of water boiling on a stove to that last moment in the same kitchen, is entirely about how you as a viewer feel at that instant. I bet you didn’t know you had it in you? But Paul Andrew Williams did.
It looks as if Deep Silver is going to remove a gory bikini bust that was part of the Dead Island: Riptide collector’s edition. Which is hardly unexpected, but disappointing. Not because I want one. I don’t. It’s pretty gross. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I still don’t know what to do with my Connor statue, Bioshock 2 soundtrack LP, or pewter Half-Life 2 box. What am I going to do with some icky horror paraphernalia? I’m a horror fan — more on that in a moment — but not the type who wears it on his shelves. My Night of the Living Dead DVD sits inconspicuously between my Napoleon Dynamite DVD and O Brother Where Art Thou? DVD. Horror is just a genre. More on that in a moment, too.
But I find it disappointing that Deep Silver is caving on this issue for two important reasons. No, not those reasons. I’m going to be mostly serious.
After the jump, two important things. Not the ones you think I’m thinking of. Continue reading →
In The Strangers, freaky people in masks just show up and stab the protagonists. That’s pretty much all there is to it. I’ve never understood why some people find that movie even remotely entertaining, much less scary. Any good home invasion movie should have that early stage where the home invaders aren’t outed yet. For instance, in Funny Games, two dudes just want to borrow some eggs. In Straw Dogs, the local contractors are just a bit lazy. In Wait Until Dark, Richard Crenna is just a family friend. If you’re going to show up in creepy masks and just start stabbing people, I might as well watch Halloween.
In Their Skin, from first-time director Jeremy Regimbal and written by lead actor Joshua Close, is at its best during these early stages. It plays like a black comedy about the anxiety of meeting new people, about adjusting to unfamiliar social beats, about talking to people who seem like not-people wearing people disguises to study actual people. It’s the horror movie equivalent of a sitcom like Third Rock from the Sun, where the supposedly normal family is slightly askew in its attempt to seem normal.
James D’Arcy, whose interrogator was the least freaky non-Asian Asian in Cloud Atlas, is this movie’s greatest asset for his off-kilter eager friendliness and his fascinating Cumberbatch-esque face. But you also have to credit Rachel Miner — I didn’t recognize her, but she apparently had a stretch on Supernatural — for what she does with the usual supporting wife role. That’s the sort of look in your eye that only a good actress can fake. Her attempt at grief is one of the movie’s most startling moments.
Unfortunately, In Their Skin makes the mistake of ultimately being about the wrong group of characters. But until that happens, it’s a canny home invasion movie that takes the concept of class envy to a new level.
In Their Skin is available on DVD and VOD (watch it on Amazon.com here to support Qt3).
You might not know Spanish director Jaume Balaguero’s name, but surely you know his movie [Rec], a found-footage zombie movie. If “found-footage zombie movie” was a genre, [Rec] would easily be the best. But since it’s not really a genre, [Rec] is instead just a fantastic zombie movie.
[Rec] was co-directed by Balaguero and Paco Plaza. Plaza went on to do the ridiculous and not very effective [Rec] 3. Balaguero, on the other hand, has revisited the location and intimacy of [Rec] with a movie called Sleep Tight, set in an apartment building in Spain where something is going horribly wrong. The genius of Sleep Tight is how it unfolds the something going wrong, and how it puts the audience on the side of the monster instead of the victim. If this works, it is almost entirely because of an actor named Luis Tosar who plays the apartment building’s blandly brooding concierge. Sleep Tight isn’t so much a movie as a fascinating Tosar performance. Also, he has the most amazing eyebrows I’ve ever seen. You could make one heck of a fur coat out of those things.
Although Sleep Tight has some tautly directed sequences and even a few gratifying shocks, it feels inconsequential by the time it’s over. You can slot it neatly next to pretty much any movie about a psycho who does terrible things. Might I instead recommend the more memorable Montreal apartment building in Jacob Tierney’s Good Neighbors? Or just Polanski’s classic 1976 movie, The Tenant?
Sleep Tight is available now on DVD and VOD (support Qt3 by watching it here).
I met Phantasm director and writer Don Coscarelli once. Well, “met”. It was a screening of Phantasm at the Hollywood Cemetery, where he introduced the movie. I made my way over to where he’d been buttonholed by a few fans. When my turn came, I said something about how Phantasm was a huge part of my childhood.
“Must have been quite a childhood,” he said.
I suppose it was. So I feel awful that I don’t like John Dies at the End, an obvious labor of love from Coscarelli, a guy who’s early contribution to horror is infinitely more valuable than anything Wes Craven did before Nightmare on Elm Street. But for whatever reason, Coscarelli never had his own Nightmare on Elm Street.
After the jump, balls of silver only get you so far Continue reading →
Asylum Blackout was originally called The Incident. That title could apply to literally any movie. Now it’s called Asylum Blackout. You kind of have to admire that it’s so upfront, because it’s a story about a power outage in an asylum. Imagine One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest gone horribly wrong. Well, more horribly wrong.
I wouldn’t recommend this in-your-face disturbing movie to anyone who isn’t hip to the French new wave of beyond-gore horror. Inside, Martyrs, and Irreversible don’t just stop at physical violence. You’re going to be subjected to psychological violence as well. This will not end well. Maybe you should watch something a little less unsettling.
But these movies aren’t just raw shock value. They are refined shock value. Asylum Blackout has a great John Carpenter feel to it, but with a grim modern sensibility. It’s a tightly made movie with style, characters, and seriously enduring ick factor. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I should also warn you that although it strives mightily at Washington State grunge rockers — it’s a French production, but it’s an English language movie — the main actors can only hit the accent about 85% of the time. It’s kind of endearing. This must be what us Americans sound like when we assay English accents.
Asylum Blackout is available on DVD. You probably shouldn’t watch it.
Before I answer whether Zombie U (I refuse to call it ZombiU) is the best multiplayer game of the year, I am contractually obligated to talk about the single-player. Which is kind of a shame, because I couldn’t care less about the single-player, despite that it’s old-school bullet-by-bullet survival horror in the tradition of the original Alone in the Dark. It’s also is a bit like Dark Souls in that you’re gradually pushing forward into scary terra incognita, unlocking shortcuts to new areas, frequently punished by a permadeath system that means you can’t get too attached to your skill upgrades. You get to explore this world six bullets at a time, because that’s how many bullets you get each time you respawn with a new character. Six. You’ll be using the cricket bat a lot. How very English in a smarmy Shaun of the Dead way.
After the jump, isn’t this one of those new-fangled Wii U games? Continue reading →
Phantoms is forty five minutes of made-for-TV-level haunted house horror, and then forty-five minutes of scientificky sci-fi hoo-ha with soldiers and the dog from The Thing, but an adorable golden lab instead of an inscrutable husky. During the scientificky hoo-ha part, Peter O’Toole — not the sad old man from the movie Venus, but an elder version of the fiery young Peter O’Toole — is yelling at Ben Affleck — not the stridently soulful Hollywood celebrity who made Argo, but the dumbass kid who stumbled into too many leading roles in the 90s.
“This thing is what wiped out the dinosaurs and they were pretty tough fucking customers!” says O’Toole, describing the monster, which is basically sentient primordial tar. Later a bunch of zombies show up to make a zombie tornado that Ben Affleck shoots. Liev Schreiber is one of the minibosses. To beat him, you have to use the shotgun to shoot the syringe into his head.
Rose McGowan sits behind O’Toole, trying various expressions. That’s one of them up there. She doesn’t have any lines during most of the exchanges, which is a shame. I’ve seen Planet Terror about a zillion times. She obviously channeled her Phantoms experience to know how to make bad horror oh-so-good. She spends a lot of Phantoms hanging out in shots where she doesn’t have any dialogue. It’s as if the director — a guy named Joe Chapelle who would go on to work on TV shows including The Wire, which I’ve been told is good — has the presence of mind to know a watchable actor when he casts one. Not that you’d know this from the amount of screen time given to Ben Affleck and someone named Jennifer Going. Miss Going, who I thought was either Joanna Whaley-Kilmer or Ally Sheedy for most of the movie’s running time, has an apt name given her credits since Phantoms.
At the opening of the movie, the title card for Phantoms comes onscreen as follows:
Phantoms
Dean Koontz’s
In that order. Like it just wants to quickly remind you that these aren’t any normal Phantoms. They’re Dean Koontz’s. Based on his book. Dean Koontz’s. Made from his screenplay. Dean Koontz’s. And now you’re about to watch a hilariously incompetent movie. Dean Koontz’s.
As boys continue to make zombie movies, the female characters will continue to be boy fantasies. Danai Gurira’s character in Walking Dead, Michonne, consists mostly of tight pants and a samurai sword. Even Laurie Holden as Andrea confesses that she loves the thrill of the kill, which we already knew from how quickly she plunges knives into zombies. The most recent [Rec] movie exists only to show a woman in a wedding dress taking a chainsaw to a zombie, even if it’s a bit more than the actress can handle. In the Canadian thriller The Day, Ashley Bell (one of two reasons to see The Last Exorcism*) plays one of the most bad-ass zombie killing chicks you’ll see in any zombie movie with or without zombies, and she makes it worthwhile sticking around for the final scene. Michonne wishes she was that bad-ass.
But what kind of bad-ass zombie killing chick do you get when a woman makes an arthouse zombie movie? The answer to that is April in the very Scottish horror movie The Dead Outside, directed by Kerry Anne Mullaney. April is a closed book behind her needlepoint, her porcelain figures, her hunting rifles, and her steely blue eyes. This last character trait is the exclusive and invaluable contribution of Sandra Louise Douglas, an actress with only this film to her credits. She plays April with a raw unfocused anger and she does a remarkable job revealing something else as the movie progresses.
You have to watch The Dead Outside closely and you have to listen carefully. If the quiet sound mix isn’t bad enough, the Scottish accents can make the dialogue impenetrable to American ears. The cinematography is deliberately dreary. A nighttime scene is, sure enough, shot at night. And it’s slow because it’s about the relationship between the characters rather than April’s prowess with firearms. But if you want a new take on chicks killing zombies, The Dead Outside reveals that a tight outfit can’t hold a candle to the fire in Douglas’ fierce bright eyes.
The Dead Outside is available on Netflix instant watch.
* The other is Caleb Landry Jones who, as far I know, has never killed a zombie.
Jennifer Lynch probably hates being called out as David Lynch’s daughter. And really, it’s not very fair to her, since she’s pretty much doing straight up horror thrillers. Her best movie is Surveillance, a violent and energetic mind trip with a cast that’s clearly having fun. I particularly like how Bill Pullman seems to be in the stage of his career when he couldn’t care less whether people take him seriously. But then Jennifer Lynch made a horrible snake woman movie in India called Hisss (sic, by the way). Hisss’ only claim to fame is that it keeps the Spider-Man reboot from being the most embarrassing movie Irrfan Khan has ever made.
Lynch’s latest movie is an occasionally interesting but mostly just gross movie in which Vincent D’Onofrio plays a serial killer who keeps the child of one of his victims to raise as his own. To be a serial killer himself, natch. Maybe you haven’t seen Dexter. But to Chained’s credit, it’s not sexying up the serial killing. D’Onofrio is slow, loathsome, cruel, and — gasp! — out of shape. As Chained develops the relationship between D’Onofrio and a strikingly odd-looking actor named Eamon Farren, it has a few weirdly effective moments. But these eventually fall away, someone gets stabbed, and any goodwill Chained might have earned is squandered in a disgusting and unnecessary finale.
There’s a German movie from last year called Michael about similar subject matter. But it’s even grosser in that it doesn’t have any opinion on what the psychopath its doing. It’s neither sympathetic nor judgmental, which is an odd way to tell a story about a pedophile who holds a child captive. I could appreciate the craft of actor Michael Fuith’s disconcerting performance (check him out in the excellent German zombie movie Rammbock for a Michael Fuith palate cleanser), but I couldn’t get past how dispassionately the movie Michael portrayed a reprehensible person’s reprehensible deeds. At least Chained knows it’s gross.
Chained is available on DVD.
“Are you making this up?,” someone asks when looking at a picture of the source of an outbreak in Maryland detailed in The Bay. “This looks Photoshopped.”
Mockumentaries are a sub-genre of found footage in which the narrator — in this case a thoroughly blank actress playing a local TV reporter — explains what’s going on while the story is cobbled together from Skype calls, iPhone videos, Google image searches, text chat, police dashcams, security cameras, and web sites. The wind-up is tense enough, but like many horror movies, it falls apart as it shows and exhaustively explains the monster.
The stuff about the Coast Guard, FEMA, the CDC, and Homeland Security failing to protect or help anyone is far more relevant and horrifying than anything that creeps out of Chesapeake Bay because of waste from a chicken farm. But this is a movie where the government response and cover-up is just an afterthought. Instead, at the top of the agenda is ick factor, similar to Eli Roth’s flesh eating bacteria movie, Cabin Fever. Plus a couple of obligatory jump scares with blaring musical cues despite the fact that we’re watching found footage. Nothing undercuts found footage quite like a carefully calculated musical cue.
The Bay was directed by Barry Levinson. It was produced by Oren Peli, the director of the original Paranormal Activity who’s been slathering his name on bad horror ever since. It was also produced by the Strause brothers, whose digital effects studio Hydraulx has been instrumental in movies as diverse as Battle Los Angeles and Take Shelter. But The Bay plays like a product of the collected talent behind movies like Wag the Dog, Sphere, and Skyline, and the TV show The River.
At least it’s better than a similar movie in which Val Kilmer plays a scientist who joins his daughter to fight prehistoric bugs thawing out in the Arctic. If you guessed such a movie is called The Thaw, you win. One of the most memorable parts of Gina Kolata’s book on the flu epidemic of the early 20th century — if you guessed the book is called Flu, you win again — details contemporary scientists digging up flu victims who were buried in permafrost in Alaska. They needed samples of the 1918 flu virus and hoped to find them intact in the frozen corpses. But they had to consider whether this might unleash a new epidemic. Spoiler: it didn’t. But because disease and parasites are often unseen and misunderstood, they occupy for many of us a place where ghosts and goblins would have been centuries ago. The Bay works at this level for a while, but in the end, a microbudget movie about throbbing pustules is just a microbudget movie about throbbing pustules.
The Bay is available now on video on demand (Amazon.com link here).
Blood of the Zombies is one of those “turn to page 24 to go left, turn to page 69 to go right” choose-your-own adventure books. It’s a recent volume in a series called Fighting Fantasy that’s been around since the 80s. And now it’s on the iPad, where it’s exactly as dated and tedious as you’d think it would be.
I don’t mind the concept of a choose-your-own adventure book. In fact, I love the idea of talented writers using prose to let you pick your way through an adventure. But Blood of the Zombies is missing the “talented writer” part of the equation.
Thanks to English’s gender neutral second person pronoun, you don’t know whether the lead character is a dude or a chick. I guess the idea is that you’re supposed to associate with this graduate student of the supernatural who travels Europe asking random bystanders if they’ve seen any vampires or werewolves. He or she is fortuitously kidnapped by a mad scientist who’s turning people into zombies. That’ll make quite the thesis.
While paging through text, you’ll occasionally roll a D6 to tick zombies off a list based on what weapon is in your inventory. You’ll forage through stuff, most of which is useless. You’ll eventually rescue a damsel in distress and meet a few named enemies. You’ll hit plenty of dead ends that you would have no way of anticipating, or you’ll just run out of stamina points and die. When this happens, hope that you didn’t use your single save point — it’s a bookmark! — at some point after you went down the fatal branch. If that’s the case, start over from the beginning.
A game that relies on graphics to create a world should have good visuals. Similarly, a game that relies on words to create a world should have good writing. But this is the sort of writing you’d normally skip. Blood of the Zombies is mostly prosaic descriptions of zombies, corridors, doors, furniture. Not a single memorable thing happens. It has no personality. It’s like a dungeon drawn on graph paper. As you read, creepy music plays. There are sound effects and an occasional drawing in the style of a comic book, looking vaguely out of place for how rarely they occur.
In the 80s, these choose-your-own-adventure books were novel and exciting, particularly on your way to discovering some of the well written Infocom adventures. But today, on an iPad, Blood of the Zombies is a tedious relic, not unlike playing Adventure on an Atari 2600 emulator. It might sound like a cool idea until you’re actually doing it. Some things are better off remembered instead of experienced.
1 star
iOS
Bait is everything wrong with modern horror movies. It doesn’t know how dumb it is, the cast is terrible, and the CG is soulless.
The premise is, in fact, not supposed to be a joke. A tsunami floods a supermarket. Then a shark swims into the supermarket, trapping some survivors on top of shelves and in a submerged car in the parking garage. In a way, it reminded me of Tremors, which I’ve just rewatched. In both movies, people are trapped while something unlikely swims around beneath them (Bait and Tremors both have the besieged survivors attempting a fishing trap for the monster). Unlike Tremors, which was mostly a comedy, Bait has no idea that it’s dumb. Except for a few scenes of unfunny comic relief, Bait takes itself entirely seriously. If Bait doesn’t let me laugh with it, I will instead laugh at it.
The cast of Bait isn’t so much a cast as an intended demographic. Lead actor Xavier Samuel, who was perfectly cast as a lobotomy victim in another Australian horror movie called The Loved One, is certainly pretty and pretty vacant. He is exactly the wrong actor to establish the backstory and to carry the emotional weight. Yes, Bait thinks it has emotional weight. Don’t ask. At some point in the last twenty years, horror movies were overrun by dumb good-looking teenagers. Tremors, released in 1990, has no teenagers. In fact, its supposed college student was played by a 30-year-old actress.
But everyone in Bait is forgettable and disposable, even when they’re played by good actors like Julian McMahon (one of the leads in Nip/Tuck and the villain in the Fantastic Four movie) and Dan Wyllie (hilarious and memorable as the family lawyer in Animal Kingdom). Tremors is mostly carried by Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon goofing around. But I’d forgotten how adorable it is watching cute little Reba McEntire shoot guns, especially the way she screws up her face like she’s never fired a gun before. Or maybe she’s just trying to look grim. Whatever the case, it’s adorable. And you can’t beat a line like, “You didn’t get penetration even with the elephant gun!” I can listen to Reba McIntyre pretend to talk about guns all day. But I couldn’t wait for the models/actors in Bait to get eaten so they’d stop talking. Not that they do. Too many modern horror movies are too unwilling to kill many of their victims.
The CG in Bait is entirely divorced from the filming. The underwater scenes have no sense for how much room is actually in the flooded supermarket. Instead, it’s just random footage of a CG shark in deep water. Consider that image up there of the shark breaching to eat one of its victims. How is it supposed to leap that far out of water that shallow? Bait doesn’t care. And even though Tremors looks cheap, it comes from a whole different era when you could almost see the love that went into practical effects. Tremors almost literally uses sock puppets for its monster. I find it tremendously endearing to imagine some guy sticking his hand up into a latex tentacle puppet. I don’t find it so endearing to imagine the employees at a contracted visual effects studio at their keyboards.
Bait is available for video on demand, including Amazon Instant View.
“This is just like Raccoon City all over again,” someone says in Resident Evil 6. I’m not sure who it was. Chris? Leon? Doug? Kevin? But when someone invoked Raccoon City, the place where the series was bogged down for so long before breaking out into Spain, Africa, and decent gameplay, I couldn’t have agreed more. Yes, this is just like Raccoon City all over again: stilted, awkward, ridiculous, embarrassing, tedious. Except for the parts where it’s like Call of Duty, which are equally stilted, awkward, ridiculous, embarrassing, and tedious, but with more NPC soldiers milling about. Resident Evil 6 is thoroughly oblivious to so many of the things that make a good game these days.
After the jump, slow boat to China Continue reading →
