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).
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.
Carny is about a travelling carnival that manages to get hold of a (the?) Jersey Devil for one of its exhibits. The beast looks about as dangerous as a fat old bulldog with stumpy wings. Think Pete’s Dragon. Of course, it gets loose. Local sheriff Lou Diamond Phillips has to deal with the creature, which is what local sheriffs do all the time in horror movies. Furthermore, Lou Diamond Phillips has experience as a local sheriff dealing with creatures. You saw the Bats, right? That was about bats, as you can probably tell from the title. When I was a kid, killer bat movies had much better titles. For instance, Arthur Hiller’s Nightwing. Would you rather see a movie about killer bats called Bats or Nightwing? I rest my case.
So Lou Diamond Phillips does some forensics work with a tape measure. He says the line, “If it bleeds, we can kill it”. Finally, he uses his pick-up truck and a ferris wheel to kill the Jersey Devil. I think he falls in love with a fortune teller, who rushes to his side as he’s dying. She says to him that he didn’t have to do this, and with his dying breath he basically says that, yes, he did. “I did what I had to do,” he says while letting fake blood drool out of his mouth. What a jerk. She was trying to be nice and he shoots her down like that.
The real sin of these Syfy creature features is how little craft or even attention is put into them. They reek of made-for-TV. And that’s a very different quality than low-budget. Low budget almost necessarily means there’s going to be a degree of care, if not craft, in a movie. Low budget is often passionate, or at least charmingly oblivious. But made-for-TV is just product, slapped together, quick and dirty.
At one point, Lou Diamond Phillips punches the villainous carnival owner. The punched actor snaps his head to the side and sprays out a mess of fake blood across the side of a trailer. The stuff spatters and drips down. Did they mean to use that much blood? It’s like Lou Diamond Phillips just punched a gallon jug of red syrup. They’re really going to use that take? Yes, they are, because this isn’t just low budget. It’s made-for-TV. Oh, and the point of this movie, is that the real monsters are…us! It’s kind of depressing that someone wrote a script and intended a message, yet it gets made with all the care of an actor spitting far too much red syrup on the side of a caravan.
(Carny is available on DVD. But so are plenty of other movies you’d be better off watching. Such as Chupacabra Terror.)
There’s a drawn-out scene in Bitter Feast in which a woman goes about her business. She’s being stalked by an evil force, played here by James LeGros, a chef upset at the bad reviews he’s gotten from the woman’s boyfriend, a food blogger.
She opens the medicine cabinet. Then she closes it and, there in the reflection, standing behind her, is…no one! Gore Verbinski closed the medicine cabinet on this gag with the unsettling opening of his Ring remake, in which two girls are stalked by a mysterious presence we never see. Amber Tamblyn opens the refrigerator, obscuring our view of the rest of the kitchen, and then when she closes it, we see standing there…nothing!
It’s the fake-out, based entirely on the audience knowing the usual horror movie tricks. It’s about other horror movies. This works in The Ring, which is a movie about watching a movie. But unless you’ve got some sort of meta commentary going on, it’s just pointless filler. Which pretty much describes Bitter Feast, a borderline torture porn, borderline comedy, and borderline commentary on the role of the critic.
The most fascinating thing is the moment that you realize — this might not happen until you look it up on IMDB after having watched Bitter Feast — the guy playing the victim is Josh from Blair Witch Project! The other fascinating thing is how awful James LeGros is as the prissy murderous psychotic TV chef. Oh, James, really? It’s come to this?
Actually, you could do far worse than this stylish English indie horror movie, because those are four words you don’t often see clustered together in front of the word “movie”. The plot, about a working-class English family coming to terms with a missing child, is pretty predictable. But for such a predictable movie, it doesn’t seem to think it’s tricking you. It understands that you’ve figured it out. Despite its similarities, this is no Sixth Sense or The Others because of how it lays its cards on the table without having to announce them. And although the resolution is oh-so-pat, it has just enough lack of resolution to be memorable.
The great thing about The Disappeared — and this is a really great thing if you watch as many bad actors in bad horror movies as I do — is the lead actor, Harry Treadaway. If you saw last year’s Fish Tank, you’ll recognize him as Katie Jarvis’ boyfriend. He looks like a sullen hoodlum, with a bit of Toby Maguire’s nondescript good looks. But he’s incredibly expressive, intense, and sincere. I get a strong River Phoenix vibe watching him act. The Disappeared’s director knows he’s got something special in Treadaway’s performance, and he fixes it front and center throughout the movie. Come for the bad horror, but stay for the fantastic lead actor.
The Disappeared is available on DVD or Netflix’s Instant Watch.
Sybil Danning, who looks great for a 90-year-old, is running some sort of secret program to make a deadly H1N1 virus. People get kidnapped and infected to cultivate the virus, which is then studied by a crack team of scientists, who aren’t hip to the kidnapping part of the endeavor.
These scientists are played by the sorts of handsome young actors who pass for scientists these days. Remember when scientists used to look like the actors in The Thing or the original Andromeda Strain? They tended to look fifty, sleep-deprived, and intelligent.
Anyway, our young scientists are obliviously lunching in the break room when an abducted prostitute who’s been infected escapes from her cell. A freaky assassin dude with an accent and a blonde wig for no good reason* (pictured) gives chase. In an unintentionally hilarious scene, the prostitute bursts in on our young lunching scientists. When the assassin dude shows up, he shoots the escaped prostitute, which sprays blood on all the young scientists, putting them off their lunch and infecting them with a deadly strain of H1N1 virus. Oops. Sybil Danning orders the doors locked so they can be studied. Now they have three days to find a cure and hook up — there are couple of sex scenes — before they all succumb to the H1N1 virus, which apparently makes you bleed from your eyes and act kind of like a zombie.
For a far better movie about handsome young people dealing with a virus, I recommend Carriers, starring Chris Pine and Piper Perabo. No joke. That’s a great movie. Virus X, not so much.
* I blame Dan Brown for putting a deadly albino monk in DaVinci Code.
A couple on their honeymoon in China takes a wrong turn and gets chased by naked bald men coated in talcum power. Or “moon demons”, as the movie calls them. Of course, it’s moon demon-infested rural China, so there’s no cell phone service. However, Seventh Moon does something I’m seeing more often in horror movies. The cell phone without any reception becomes a source of light, as Amy Smart has discovered above. This is way better than a flashlight for a horror movie. The unfocused light from a cell phone illuminates the actor and it also makes for a more unsettling and unpredictable effect, because something scary could be just outside that soft sphere of light. Like, say, a moon demon!
Director Eduardo Sanchez makes the moon demons “scary” by lighting them poorly, shooting them out of focus, and jerking the camera around. Splice in footage of people running through the woods and, voila!, you’ve got a horror movie.
Sanchez got a lot of mileage out of people running through the woods when he made Blair Witch Project. But that running through the woods was given context with an eerie backstory, good actors, and masterful use of its unique twist (the “found footage” concept was novel back then). None of that is present here. Instead, we have a production that managed to get Amy Smart for a quick shoot in China and, uh, not much else.
For the better follow-up to Blair Witch Project, see a movie called The Objective by Sachez’s co-director, Daniel Myrick. It’s a flawed low budget horror movie, but it demonstrates that Myrick knows what made Blair Witch Project good and he’s capable of doing it again from a very different perspective.
One of the prerequisites for being a zombie fan is that you must have low standards, because you’re going to be watching a lot of junk. Take, for example, Wicked Little Things. Please. The twist in this zombie movie is that it’s zombie kids, out for revenge because they were exploited for their labor in Appalachian coal mines. Now that’s not the most outrageous zombie twist I’ve ever seen. That distinction goes to a British movie called Devil’s Playground, where the zombies do Parkour.
To its credit, Wicked Little Things tries to be about three strong female characters. Unfortunately, two of those strong female characters are played by the wooden Lori Heuring and the sullen Scout Taylor-Compton. The movie’s best claim to a redeeming feature is a young (well, younger) Chloe Moretz. She plays the equivalent of the little girl in Poltergeist who’s in tune with all the scary stuff the adults don’t grok. She ends up being an emissary between the kid zombies and the grown-up humans. It’s pretty stupid and it involves pouring a lot of blood on the actors for no good reason.
Another thing this movie has going for it is the title. Wicked Little Things is about as good as horror movie titles get, even if it does put me in mind of Denise Richards and Neve Campbell making out in a swimming pool. Speaking of which, is it weird to feel protective of Chloe Moretz? I cringe to think of all the pitfalls in store for an actress with her talent. Hopefully, it won’t get any worse than last year’s Let Me In.
Days of Darkness is a no-budget horror movie (Netflix instant view here) about a comet that turns people into zombies whose penises fall off and are replaced by baby zombie embryos. The movie manages about ten people to play its zombie horde [sic] because, I presume, most of the budget went to raw meat for a handful of gross-out autopsy scenes.
After this 2007 bit of dreck, writer/director Jake Kennedy will go on to do the truly tasteless Penance, which is sort of like Showgirls meets Hostel. But in Days of Darkness, there are signs that he doesn’t take himself so seriously. For instance, the token minority is a car salesman who, at one point, takes off his shirt to tend to a wounded survivor. Later in the scene, he asks if anyone has a clean shirt.
“I do,” says the straight-laced young girl who will, of course, take her shirt off later in the movie.
Cut to him dressed as above. You’ll note that he’s weilding the blade from one of those paper cutters like they have at Kinko’s (I believe a movie called Operation Endgame — think The Office meets Battle Royale — will use that same trick a few years later). There’s almost nothing to recommend Days of Darkness, but the above taste of Dead Rising nearly made it worth my while.
In The Hive, some dudes suit up (pictured) and shoot a blue laser gun at killer ants from outer space attacking a Third World country where it’s really cheap to shoot a low budget movie. During an early scene, as the dudes sally forth to zap ants, someone proclaims, “Okay people, let’s liquify some endoskeletons!”
Now I’m no ant-ologist, but I did take two years of Latin in high school. So I know that an endoskeleton is something on the inside, like people have. Ants, on the other hand, are bugs and therefore have skeletons on the outside. Exoskeletons. It probably takes about a hundred people to make a movie like this, yet none of them knew the difference between endo- and exo-? “Okay people, let’s liquify some endoskeletons!” made it all the way through production, and then all the way through post-production where someone could have dubbed in the correct syllable?
But that’s not the best line in the movie. That comes during the scene when an exposition man is explaining the situation. People are being massacred by ants! “Ants killing humans in large numbers is almost unheard of,” one of the ant killing dudes observes sagely.
Almost unheard of. Because we’ve all heard of the Great Ant Massacre of Borneo back in 1984, when ants did kill humans in large numbers. I believe upwards of 1,000 humans were killed by the ants. But other than that, the guy in the movie is right. Ants killing humans in large numbers is almost unheard of.
The Hive is on Netflix instant view.
