I was surprised to see this show up on Amazon’s Instant Video and iTunes as new releases, since I’d already seen it a few years ago and didn’t really care for it. It’s not that I don’t enjoy a little horror in my Westerns. Josh Brolin was good enough as a zombie cowboy, even if he did have to talk around that silly scar make-up. But it was ultimately too goofy, too poorly paced, and too cheap looking. Speaking of which, Meghan Fox was in it. She wasn’t nearly as memorable as the horse with twin mounted gatling guns.
But then I realized I was confusing my Biblical Name + Laconic One-Syllable Name movies. It turns out Solomon Kane is not a comic book, but a lesser known character from Conan creator Robert E. Howard. Who knew?
The movie opens and ends with sequences that any Diablo player will appreciate, but it’s got an awfully muddled midsection as it traces Solomon Kane’s journey from ruthless pirate (!) to reluctant monster hunter to avenging lawful good paladin. It takes a few suitably grim turns, but the script is too obvious, with an all too predictable third act twist. Furthermore, it mostly looks like the cheap Czech production that it is.
However, it is much better than Jonah Hex, and the similar Season of the Witch, and the shamefully bad Conan movie with Jason Momoa. Solomon Kane even has a little Postlethwaite, a touch of von Sydow, and a solid performance from James Purefoy in the lead. Purefoy knows how to scowl Jackmanly under the brim of a Puritan hat, tuck a flintlock resolutely into his belt, swoop his cape, and stride off into a flurry of CG snowflakes. Overall, he lends Solomon Kane a lot of its endearing dopey earnestness, which reminds me of 80s fantasy fare like Conan, Beastmaster, and Warlock. I can’t help but think that Robert E. Howard would be pleased.
From a solid zombie movie to an inexplicable demonic possession retcon, the [REC] series of Spanish horror movies went from great to “huh?” in short order. Now the third movie plunges deeper into “huh?” territory by veering further from what made the first movie good. [REC] 3 opens as a wedding video, which sets an ornate stage for a zombie apocalypse. But when it arrives, it’s mostly just a big gory goof, played weakly for laughs. Perhaps the biggest laugh — and I can’t tell if it was supposed to be funny — is how [REC] 3 decides to stop being a found footage movie shortly after the zombies arrive. After all those found footage movies when you wonder why they don’t just drop the camera, someone finally decides to drop the camera.
What should have been the signature scene (pictured) as well as a cool reveal is splayed out on the box cover, so you know it’s coming. When it finally arrives, it’s not nearly as gratifying as it should have been. As the bride, the lovely Leticia Dolera doesn’t have the physicality necessary to make the scene work. The poor woman can barely lift the chainsaw. Furthermore, it doesn’t really go anywhere. If you want to see a blood-spattered bride slicing up zombies with a chainsaw, you’ll have to visit a wedding chapel in a Dead Rising game and go to town. [REC] 3 will just disappoint you.
[REC] 3 is available on video on demand.
V/H/S is an example of how horror can live comfortably outside the usual narrative structures. This is an anthology, but it’s also a cool variation on the found footage concept. The idea is that a single tape has accumulated and sometimes overlapped footage of various horrific events, starting with a Halloween fun house (?) in 1998 and working its way in reverse order to a wraparound device involving the tape itself, which starts the movie. Cloverfield played briefly with this idea of a reused tape where you learn something when the old footage bleeds through. V/H/S is based entirely on it. And given how everyone uses digital storage these days, it’s a concept with a limited shelf life, like phone booths and television snow.
These stories are mostly morality plays that would be right at home in an R-rated splatter version of Twilight Zone, but with a latter day YouTube aesthetic, where the video artifacts, poor resolution, blurred lights, and bad sound are an asset. The best segment is “Amateur Night”, contributed by David Bruckner, one of the three directors of the brutal and brutally funny The Signal. “Amateur Night” unfolds like some sort of Girls Gone Wild gonzo porn segment, rolling along during a night of partying, accumulating hangers on, and eventually winding up in a motel hell of overthrown sexual power. It’s a nearly perfect example of how horror can combine nudity, gore, and shocks. Amateur Night, I like you. I like you.
A Horrible Way to Die director Adam Wingard contributes a lot of the movie’s connective tissue. Ti West’s segment, “Second Honeymoon”, has one of V/H/S’s strongest single moments, but it doesn’t have much payoff. Joe Swanberg’s “The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger” applies the found footage concept to people connected over videochat, an extra layer that ironically makes it even more intimate. And if you’re going to slaughter a bunch of teenagers in the woods, “Tuesday the 17th” (get it?) has just the video trick to do it.
These are mostly well written vignettes, and the directors are good enough to know they need good actors. Hence Hannah Fierman’s bird-like succubus, Helen Rogers’ frail girl-alone-in-a-dark-house, and an assortment of believable victims. Found footage like this is the new cinema verite, and it gives horror a distinctly relatable touch. This isn’t just a movie. This is people going about the business of taping their daily lives. And you’re gazing into the mundane, waiting to glimpse something fantastic and terrible. V/H/S will oblige you.
V/H/S is currently available on video on demand.
“Heist meets horror”. Surely I’m not the first person to come up with that phrase? It’s a subgenre of horror, where a bunch of characters doing a heist accidentally stumble onto the stuff of a horror movie. I’m not sure how or why it started, and I’m not sure why it’s a formula. As near as I can tell, it’s more established than “romantic comedy meets horror” or “buddy cop movie meets horror” or “historical epic meets horror”. I can think of an example of all of those three things, but not enough examples to consider them subgenres.
After the jump, what if a bunch of bank robbers got possessed by a demon while fleeing a slasher? Continue reading →
If you bought the Xbox 360 version of Dragon’s Dogma — you did buy Dragon’s Dogma, didn’t you? — then you have access to Capcom’s Resident Evil 6 demo today. Here’s what you get:
Play as Leon S. Kennedy alongside Helena Harper and explore the dark confines of the Ivy University campus and the zombies that fill its hallways. Select Chris Redfield’s mission and head to China for an intense encounter against the deadly J’avo with BSAA colleague Piers Nivans on the rooftops of Lanshiang. The third mission shifts the action to the war-torn Eastern European state of Edonia and sees Jake Muller and Sherry Berkin trying to escape the relentless pursuit of the Ustanak, one of the new B.O.W.’s being introduced in Resident Evil 6.
Helena Harper, Piers Nivans, Jake Muller, and Sherry Berkin? The J’avo? An Ustanak? One of the hallmarks of a Resident Evil game, clearly demonstrated in that screenshot above, is that I have no idea what the hell is going on.
Home invasions are low hanging fruit for horror movies. It’s one of those timeless fears: What if a bunch of dudes break into your house, your sanctuary, the place where you’re safe and relaxed, and have their way with you? It’s the ultimate “what if they get in here?” scenarios. One of the earliest home invasion movies I know is the original Desperate Hours with Humphrey Bogart, which holds up well even if it has a charming civility as far as home invasions go. Among the worst recent ones I’ve seen are Trespass, which isn’t a home invasion movie so much as a Nicolas Cage movie, and Secuestrados (Kidnapped, in English), which is the sort of tasteless pointless stylish trash that gives good horror movies a bad name. If I had to pick a favorite, I’d go with Paul Andrew Williams brilliant brutal Cherry Tree Lane, which isn’t available in the US yet. Someone get on that. It is the Straw Dogs of the 21st century.
Until that time, there’s Mother’s Day, not to be confused with the original Troma film it’s supposedly based on. Speaking of trash. The original Mother’s Day was one of those gross 70s rape movies that recreates the feeling of stumbling across Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s porn stash. But this remake — which is absolutely not a remake — is a mean lean smart script about colliding systems. On one hand, a veritable beer commercial of good-looking fun-loving privileged friends. On the other hand, the eponymous mother and her brood of mismatched white trash kids. A literal and figurative tornado is brewing.
Briana Evigan, recently locked in a house with a tiger in Burning Bright (get it?), is locked in a house with a whole other kind of tiger this time. The icy menacing Rebecca De Mornay isn’t mad; she’s just disappointed. She’s like the crocodile in Black Water, just waiting, watching, keeping her prey in place until she’s ready to either pounce or saunter off. It could go either way. She’s as sexy as she was in Risky Business, as dangerous as she was in Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and as sexy as she was in Risky Business. Did I mention that she’s sexy? With an unlikely brood at her beck and call — wait, she had all those kids? — she is the biggest baddest wolf since Cate Blanchett in Hannah.
Mother’s Day is out on DVD this week.
The premise of Area 407, yet another found footage movie, is that a bunch of actors who are really bad at improvisation do a lot of improvisation (i.e. screaming their dialogue) when their flight to LA crashes onto a secret government breeding ground for camera shy velociraptors. This movie is notable for having somehow secured the back half of a ruined airplane (pictured). That apparently ate into the budget that would have been spent on CG velociraptors.
I like how sky marshals are now a trope. According to Hollywood, every flight has a sky marshal, and therefore an easy way to introduce a gun. Just pick the most unlikely character on the airplane. That’s the sky marshal. In Bridesmaids, it was the nerdy guy sitting next to Melissa McCarthy. In Area 407, it’s the hot chick with the on-again/off-again Australian accent.
Area 407 is available on video on demand, but don’t bother. For a far better movie about plane crash survivors stalked by predators, check out The Grey or the first episode of Lost.
Some of the best horror movies veer off in unexpected directions. There’s nothing quite so nice as having absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next. And there’s nothing quite so dull as watching a supposedly scary movie line up the plot points and knock them down like dominoes.
But, really, there’s no point calling Penumbra’s unfolding mystery a horror movie. This Argentinian gem reminds me more of Martin Scorcese’s miniature urban odyssey, After Hours, with the same black humor and the same off-kilter sense of place. Penumbra’s main claim to being a horror movie is the prior body of work of the brothers who wrote and directed it, Adrian and Romiro Bogliano. Their last movie was Cold Sweat, a goofy potboiler about creepy old men who use social media to lure young people and then kill them with nitroglycerin. The kidnapped heroine is slathered in the volatile stuff, so she has to be rescued by slowly dragging her out of the building on a blanket so she won’t explode. But only after removing her clothes because, you know, they’re soaked in nitroglycerin. There hasn’t been a more perfect marriage of narrative and disrobing since Saffron Burrows stripped out of her wetsuit to electrocute a shark in Deep Blue Sea. The hero in Cold Sweat wears a shirt that says Sorcerer. Get it? If so, you’re exactly the kind of person who doesn’t deserve Cold Sweat.
Penumbra could easily get by with a nod to a couple of classic thrillers of the 70s. But if I told you what T-shirt the hero would wear, it would be a spoiler. The delight of Penumbra is having no idea where it’s going. That’s the point. It’s a smart, sexy, slow burn with a bit of subtle social commentary, a flawed and unlikable main character, a great sense of mystery, and a satisfying payoff.
Penumbra is currently available wherever fine videos on demand are sold. And for another example of why Argentina is a country worth watching for nifty genre movies, I also recommend the thoroughly charming Phase 7.
Game of Thrones fans might know Kate Dickie (pictured) as a mother who doesn’t have a grasp on how long you’re supposed to breastfeed. But she’s so much more than that, as anyone who’s seen the Scottish thriller Red Road can attest. And in Outcast, she is to female magic users what Gandalf is to dude magic users. I shall henceforth name all my female magic users after her character in Outcast.
Outcast is a supernatural thriller from 2010. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s a horror movie. Not your usual horror movie, to be sure. It’s Scottish, drenched in the bleak grey of Scottish weather, lore, and low rent housing. It’s got a great cast, most notably Dickie as the druidic version of Alice from Martin Scorcese’s 1974 movie, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Dickie’s character is on the run from what we assume is an abusive husband. Only this abusive husband can be deterred by blood glyphs on the walls. The cast also includes James Nesbitt as an Irishman out of his element in Scotland, a nuance that will be lost on a lot of us Yanks, along with the piker vs. gypsy subtext. But you can’t deny Nesbitt’s appeal as a slightly confused magician. He certainly looks the part. There’s a thin line between “wizard” and “homeless”. Together, Dickie and Nesbitt are the Sarah Connor and Arnold of celtic Terminator plots.
This is ultimately a movie about a custody battle, but with spells. And I love the way magic is portrayed here. Grimy, unpleasant, painful, requiring clean up afterwards, and with rules beyond human ken. Real magic means that when someone tells you to eat bony roasted pigeon flesh, you don’t ask what for. As Nesbitt says during the obligatory shot from The Shining — you know, with the camera look up from underneath as he leans his head against a door and roars at the person on the other side — “Them’s the fucking terms!”
You’ve also got some young lovers and it’s such a relief that they’re not awful, which would have been the case if this were an American horror movie. However, as with most horror movies that have the courage of their convictions, Outcast will get a bit ridiculous before it’s over. As Christopher Lee would have told you while prancing merrily toward the end of the original Wicker Man, “Them’s the fucking terms”.
Outcast is on Netflix instant view.
The point of zombie movies is partly that the people we know and love will track us down and kill us. Everything else — whether they walk or run, whether they’re dead or infected, what they eat, how they got that way — is incidental. If you use that primal fear as a starting point, if you’re not the type who denies 28 Days Later is a zombie movie, then movies like The Crazies (both of them) and the underrated Impulse (the 1984 one) are a subset of the zombie genre.
That’s where The Signal comes in.
After the jump, enter the mind of a “zombie” Continue reading →
What had me most excited about The River, ABC’s latest post-Lost paranormal activity, is the team behind it. One of the creators is Oren Peli, the director of Paranormal Activity, a horror movie every bit as effective, iconic, and ill-suited to a franchise as Blair Witch Project. The first two episodes of The River were directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who put some creative visual styling into his House of Wax remake. But where he really got my attention was with Orphan, a splendid slice of latter-day Hitchcock with some really good actors thrown in for good measure. When Peli and Collet-Serra are pressed into service for TV, I want to be there.
But executive producer Steven Speilberg, fresh off executive producing Falling Skies and directing Tintin, should have been a red flag. Because The River is thoroughly TV in the worst sense of the word. It has no edge. It plays out with a soft safe made-for-TV feel, from the Lostly lush locale; to the ghost-of-the-week episodic format; to the convenient found-footage conceit recalling dopey reality TV ghost hunters; to the blandly telegenic and unremarkable cast. It’s all as menace-free as horror can be. Nice try killing the Jewish guy in the first episode. It’s so obvious that any character’s lifespan is proportionate to the number of lines he or she has.
Furthermore, it even fails as a haunted house fun ride. Peli uses tricks from Paranormal Activity, like fast forwarded film, sleeping people dragged out of bed, and bodies flung forcefully, usually at the camera. I expect footprints in flour next week. When the only memorable scare — and it’s not a scare so much as a mildly creepy shudder — is a monkey peering out from under a mask, I might as well just watch that scene from The Omen where baboons freak out on Lee Remick’s car.
I honestly can’t tell you how I ended up watching Pitch Black on Netflix. It’s one of those things that just happened, not unlike waking up in Bangkok with a tattoo on your face or a shaved head. I might have mistakenly remembered that it’s a cult classic and that my sense of disappointment from seeing it in theaters over ten years ago was misplaced. That way lies madness. That way lies rewatching things like Soldier, Dune, or Stargate.
Pitch Black is awful. The writing is terrible, the production design is cheap, and the dramatic tension is entirely artificial. The cast mostly flounders, particularly poor Vin Deisel under the misguided notion that he’s the most bad-ass intergalactic criminal since that guy who didn’t like Mark Hamill either. When Deisel goes nose-to-nose with a space bat, lunging left and right to stay in its blind spot as it turns its head, Pitch Black loses its last faint shred of credibility. The worst sin any movie can commit is to betray its own conceit. Here is a movie about terrible terrible space bats that will eat you if you venture into the dark, except for all the times various characters venture into the dark and don’t get eaten.
It’s kind of cool seeing Claudia Black considering how much I hear her in videogames like Uncharted, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. And I’ve always liked Radha Mitchell, who somehow seems to rise about the various genre stinkers she’s been in. Which reminds me, hey, she was in that Silent Hill movie! That wasn’t so bad, was it? Maybe I should watch that again, since I actually ended up with the Silent Hill DVD somehow, which is a bit like waking up in Vegas with a missing tooth and a tiger in the bathroom.
With The Sitter, Director David Gordon Green obviously intended a latter-day Adventures in Babysitting. Take a charismatic lead, add a handful of adorable kids, and send them out for a night on the town where they run afoul of criminals. The twist? A hard R-rating, which Green undercuts with one safely sappy facile redemption after another.
If there’s any reason to see The Sitter, it’s to re-affirm that Max Records is a kid to watch. In Where the Wild Things Are, he was easily as fascinating as those enormous weird puppets, and whatever payoff that movie offered came from how good he was in his final scene with Catherine Keener. Records is one of those rare expressive child actors with a very adult grasp on what he’s saying, and how to express it even when he isn’t saying anything.
In The Sitter, when it comes time for Jonah Hill and Records to have their convenient redemption scene, you get good writing, two lovely performances, and surprisingly delicate subject matter for such an obtuse movie. It turns out Records’ character, a 13-year-old kid with psychiatric issues, is merely gay. Hill explains this to him, and Records lashes out and says he doesn’t want to be a “faggot”. “Don’t say shit like that,” Hill admonishes. He then explains to Records that, look, high school is really going to suck, but once he gets to college, no one will care that he’s gay. And then he’ll get an awesome job in the entertainment industry. Facile? Sure. But it’s the sort of scene that deserves a far better movie.
Also, The Sitter is a little fascinating for Sam Rockwell hopelessly miscast as a vicious drug dealer. No one handles being miscast with as much enthusiasm as Sam Rockwell.
So you might not think to look to children’s fare to find good examples of horror. And you certainly wouldn’t expect much from a cartoon, for Pete’s sake. Especially one with Spielberg and Zemeckis’ names on it. But if this means you missed Monster House, you missed out.
Don’t be fooled by the fact that the protagonists are kids. This is a grand spooky adventure with just enough of a dark twist to take off that sugary Halloween aftertaste. I’m actually pretty surprised it’s a straight-up PG. It features some really wonderful and imaginative, uh, creature design for lack of a better word. Because — spoiler — the creature is actually a house.
Furthermore, all the stuff with the kids is really well done. In fact, everything Super 8 attempted, Monster House does ten times better. It even uses the same motion capture technique that Zemeckis pressed into service for Polar Express, but it doesn’t make that movie’s mistake of trying to look photorealistic. By presenting animated characters instead of creepy lifelike dolls, Monster House skips nimbly over the uncanny valley.
If you can dig on Nightmare before Christmas, Coraline, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, and Costume Quest, then I promise the sadly overlooked Monster House will be right up your alley.
My esteemed colleague and fancy-pants film auteur, Tom Chick, likes to make fun of me for liking grandpa movies. I admit I like a lot of black and white movies, especially horror. Well, let me rephrase that. I like black and white horror movies that don’t involve actually seeing the monster. We all know how crappy the rubber suit monsters looked.
For me, picking a horror movie wasn’t an easy task. I wanted to talk about Devil’s Backbone and the original The Thing (as well as John Carpenter’s), but when it comes to scary movies, The Haunting always wins out. Set in a giant, haunted mansion, the movie is really great at establishing a cold and unwelcoming tone. The main characters have been invited to the house by Dr. John Markway, a college professor and paranormal investigator, to prove the existence of ghosts.
After the jump, I do believe in spooks! Continue reading →
