My aunt and uncle live in Lake Tahoe, CA and they've been skiing all their lives. The way I heard the story, my cousin was leaning too far forward and just fell face-first off the lift. I used to think about that incident when I family went on skiing trips. The chairlifts in Tahoe never had safety bars and the weight of boots on your feet almost pull you out of the chair. I used to be terrified that I'd get tangled up in someone's boots or tilt too far forward and pitch myself off into the icy ground below.
Anyway, I didn't much care for Frozen.
Frozen tells the story of two dudebros and a girlfriend who get stuck on a chairlift. The rest of the movie is spent alternating between attempts to get down and moments of introspection. Eventually things work out and some credits roll.
I wasn't that big a fan off Hatchet, the movie that made Adam Green famous. It's a classic among horror fans, but I thought it was too derivative and playing too much to the crowd. I'd heard about Frozen when it first toured theaters, but I wasn't particularly interested. The whole premise sounded like the hoary old theatrical trope of a small group of characters locked in a room and being forced to confront the truth about themselves. To pull that old chestnut off, you have to really good at dialogue and characterization and those elements weren't Hatchet's strong points.
So I do have to confess to a bit of bias even before I sat down to watch the movie. But I didn't enjoy it all that much.
A couple of things really didn't work for me. First, the earlier parts of the movie feel like a low-rent MTV special. There's a lot of montage shots of the characters snowboarding around set to obnoxious pop-punk. The dialogue is really bad, especially in all the bits where Green is trying to establish the relationships between the character. One guy is all "you've changed, man" and another is all "dude, leave my girlfriend alone" and there's a bunch of resentful passive aggressive sniping and by that point I was playing scrabble on my laptop.
Ultimately, the movie relies on too many cheats. I had a hard enough time believing that the perfect string of coincidences could happen to get these characters trapped in the first place, and once the superwolves started their hideous siege (all filmed in tight close up) it kinda lost me.
It's basically a movie about three boring, unpleasant people stuck in a bad situation. I just couldn't bring myself to care.
This post is part of the Final Girl Film Club. For those of you who dug this post, welcome to my humble little blog. I'm a big horror fan and I like to apply my highly-honed bullshitting skills to the stuff I enjoy. I cover movies, books, games, and music. Welcome aboard!
You know, when I think "cutting edge horror", I don't really think "kitschy Lifetime-style '70s television movie." But Final Girl called the tune and I can dance with the best of 'em.
I tend to be irony-adverse and my first impression of The Initiation of Sarah was largely negative. The music is disco, the camera work is zoomy, and everyone's hair is so feathered. I cooked up my Trader Joe's-brand pasta and settled in.
Turned out the movie wasn't half bad.
Okay, it ain't scary. Things are a little too bright and cheerful to really get under the skin, but it's a fine little story. While many of the characters in the movie are bitchy sorority stereotypes, I found that I genuinely cared about the lead characters.
The story revolves around Sarah and Patty Goodwin, two incoming freshman trying to get into the prestigious Alpha Nu Gamma, which their legacy mother has been pushing them to join since childhood. The charming Patty is immediately accepted, but the withdrawn Sarah is cruelly rejected and sent to Pi Epsilon Delta, the nerd sorority. The basically decent Patty starts becoming subsumed by her bitchy sorority sisters and an increasingly isolated and angry Sarah comes under that thrall of a creepy sorority mom with a daaaaaaaaaaaaa.....
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa....
rrrrrrk secret.
The movie hits the exact same story beats as Carrie as the troubled outsider slowly comes into her own power, but unlike poor doomed Carrie White, Sarah winds up leading the surly outsiders of Pi Epsilon Delta and teaching them how to stand up to the society bitches of Alpha Nu Gamma. She also forms relationships with other people, particularly the squirrelly young violinist with the obvious crush on Sarah (don't try to deny it) and the sleazy older teacher's assistant.
Overall, I liked the movie. It ain't scary, but it's well-written and acted, particularly with the legendary turn by Shelly Winters as the diabolical Ms. Hunter, who interjects a certain satanic theatricality to the proceedings. It's worth seeing The Initiation of Sarah for her alone.
Also, Morgan Fairchild looks hot soaking wet.
Here's my question: where are the telekinetic payback movies for dudes? These angry teenage psychic stories tend toward stories of repressed feminist rage but high school screws everyone up. I would love to see a reimagining of Elephant with rage-fuelled telekinesis.
This post is part of the Final Girl Film Club. For those of you who dug this post, welcome to my humble little blog. I'm a big horror fan and I like to apply my highly-honed bullshitting skills to the stuff I enjoy. I cover movies, books, games, and music. Welcome aboard!
There are some stores that contain tremendous depth, with rich characters and fascinating mythologies and engaging narratives. The people who created these stories were trying to create something with more layers than simple fear, and I keep going back to the best examples of these works. I keep going back to stuff like The Shining and Romero's Zombie movies and Clive Barker's output. There's a lot to explore and take in.
But under Horror's dark wing exists the campfire tale. You're sitting in the dark, the fire is crackling, and that seductive voice whispers to you, sketching out the tale. The storyline is direct and primal, with very little to get in the way of the horror. Which is not to say that it's shallow. When done right, the campfire story is an engine, precisely crafted to scare the living crap out of you. Every once in awhile you get something really well made, where the craft of constructing tension and suspense raises up to the level of art. Some campfire stories have the grace and poise of ballet.
In other words, I really liked The House of the Devil.
I'm really late to the party. Many other people have lined up to kiss this movie's ass and they did a better job than I can. There's really not much to say about HotD other than it's brilliantly made and I want to see what else this Ti West guy can do.
The Tension
One of the first things that struck me after I finished HotD was how effectively scary it was.
A long stretch of the movie involves Samantha, the desperate-for-cash girl who takes a really sketchy babysitter gig in a creepy house on the outskirts of town, wandering around a creepy old house by herself. In terms of narrative stuff, not a lot happens. She pokes around the place, watches some TV, and wanders down some creepy old corridors. When written, it sounds boring, but the way Ti West filmed it lead to an atmosphere of almost unbelievable tension. I realized something while watching Samantha in the house: this is the kind of horror I can relate to.
I'm typing this update after hours in my office in New York. I'm alone in this large hollow office space, with only the hum of the building's heating engines keeping me company. It's eerie. I've felt these feelings a thousand times in my life but horror rarely explores the discomfort of being in a strange place with the depth and patience of HotD. Like many movies that rely on atmosphere, I don't know how worthwhile repeat viewings would be, but watching her explore the Bad Place was incredibly chilling. The 80s
HotD is set in the 80s and a lot of people have commented on the little touches outlining the setting, from the 80s-inspired opening credits to the feathered hair and the big-ass Walkmans Sam totes around. Most of the commentators I've read are kids of the 80s and those little touches bring back fond memories of watching crappy VHS movies.
The setting never feels like a gimmick. Part of the reason West set his story in the 80s is that he wanted to circumvent the whole stupid "there's no cell phone signal" thing. I think this is brilliant. Horror depends on isolation and cell phones have made it too easy to call for help. Someone someday will come up with a brilliant permanent fix for this problem, but HotD's trick of setting the movie before the technology became commonplace is a good dodge.
Satanism
The other major reason West set the movie in the 80s was due to the cultural paranoia around Satanism. I remember those days. We didn't really worry about Satanists growing up in hippy-dippy San Francisco, but I remember talk show TV "exposes" on Satanist cults and all the movies from that era. There really was a cultural paranoia about the hidden Satanic cult next door looking to sacrifice your baby. In retrospect the whole thing seems goofy, but it's fun stuff to tap into.
In retrospect, the movie isn't particularly Satanic. It takes a long time to get to the pentagrams and the rituals and the hypnotized victim. When Sam is confronted by the head cultists in the graveyard, he speaks of Satan very indirectly. I thought this was a nice touch as many movie cultist-types tend toward the gloating villain speech. In HotD he implores Samantha to return with him and he sees her violation as a great gift. He's not a very threatening figure and his neediness makes him a great character. Self-Referential
I've gone on rants about how horror directors who have too much fondness for the genre tend to make campy, over-the-top horror with varying degrees of success. They're often fun to watch, but they usually end up feeling a little too self-aware and reverential. I'm really happy that West, a clear genre enthusiast, took the atmosphere seriously.
HotD doesn't constantly wink at you. The gore is present and nasty but it's not as theatrically excessive as many horror fans seem to prefer. The emphasis was clearly on atmosphere and it accomplished the job delightfully. The actors aren't hamming it up and the characters aren't reference-laden quip machines. They're likeable and jokey without being buffoons.
Samantha
I really liked Samantha. She reminded me, in a lot of ways, of Jamie Lee Curtis's character from Halloween, in that we got as much of a sense of her practicality as her social restraint. People love analysing what Final Girls mean but I think one of their defining attributes is that they tend to be grounded, practical people.
A lot of her personality comes through as she deals with her desperate financial straits. Maybe it's because I just moved to a new city and I'm broke as fuck right now, but I empathized with the hassles Samantha experienced in finding a new place and I probably would have taken the creepy old man up on his offer, too. A lot of movies love to harp on the whole "money is the root of all evil" chestnut, but the simple fact is that money is like food: you need it to get by.
The other thing I really liked about Samantha is the fact that, like the capable Ms. Strode before her, she can kick a surprising amount of ass when called to. She isn't an invincible superchick, but when the hammer falls she does real damage to her pursuers. I was really impressed with the way the character handled herself. She truly was heroic. While I don't want to give away the ending, I gotta say that it took cojones to do what she did. It's out of my league.
Also, while I'm on the cast, props to Tom Noonan as the creepy old guy who offers Samantha the job. He's that right mix of being harmless and just a little off. I really liked his work.
The Pacing
The last thing I wanted to talk about is the most divisive issue of the movie, which is the slow pacing of the narrative. The runny-runny-stabby-stabby stuff all happens within the last half-hour or so, so most of the movie has a slow-burn effect as Samantha takes a really sketchy job and explores this creepy old house.
West has said in interviews that he was trying to ape the narrative structure of many classic horror movies, especially the original Halloween, where the big payoff didn't happen until the tail end of the movie. Some detractors say the movie is too slow-paced and nothing happened, while others say that the first group is a bunch of simpletons who only care about gore and guts and shallow instant gratification.
Me, I'm on the fence.
A slower, most classic sense of pacing doesn't automatically make a better movie. I've seen other filmmakers try it and was bored to tears by the result. However, most of the people who want hard, fast, relentlessly gory horror often have lost their capacity to appreciate anything with any subtlety. I have spent years defending The Blair Witch Project against these kind of arguments.
Ultimately there are going to be people who are turned off by HotD but there was enough meat on those bones to keep me thoroughly entertained.
Go check it out. And keep an eye on this guy. I like his style.
This post is part of the Final Girl Film Club. For those of you who dug this post, welcome to my humble little blog. I'm a big horror fan and I like to apply my highly-honed, liberal-arts education bullshit shellacking skills to the stuff I enjoy. I cover movies, books, games, and music. We also got a podcast here. Welcome aboard!
You know those movies that everyone at the party has seen and can hold forth long discussions on and when you sheepishly say "Oh, I've never see it" and they all look at you like you're some backwoods yokel more suited to watching NASCAR than discussing fine works of art?
That's the way I felt about The Wicker Man.
Never got around to watching it. I really should have, as it's got so much stuff I absolutely adore: occultism, paganism, murder mysteries, nude British chicks, Christopher Lee in Cher drag, gay innkeepers and their slutty daughters, sleepy Scottish hamlets, corpse unearthing, and people randomly breaking into song. The Wicker Man is almost a musical, full of those sorts of dippy folksy hippy songs that would be considered some minor form of assault if performed in public.
More to the point, I love weird towns full of people acting strange. I was at a party recently and a friend of mine mentioned that she didn't like zombie movies because she didn't understand what was particularly scary about crowds. You could look outside any day and see crowds of people. "Maybe crowds of violent cannibals charging at you might not set you off," I should have said, charming my lovely companion, "but what if you were surrounded by perfectly polite, charming people who are thinking and communicating in a completely alien way."
Yep. Having those kinds of conversations keeps my social life active.
Anyway, yeah, Wicker Man.
Most of this flick doesn't have much in the way of tension. The jerky moralistic cop doesn't stagger around a lot of dark basements, waiting for a cat to jump out at him. Most of The Wicker Man takes the basic structure of a murder mystery. Sgt. Howie arrives on Summerisle searching for a missing little girl. First the townfolks say they never heard of the missing girl, then they admit she's dead, finally Sgt. Howie begins to suspect that they're keeping the girl locked away for a horrifying ritual to appease the island's ancient pagan gods.
And then there's a twist.
This is one of those rare horror movies where the hero isn't particularly likable. Sgt. Howie is an uptight, bullying prick, the kind the Empire would have tasked with destroying planets, and on top of all those winning qualities he's a religious zealot. When he's not butting into people's jobs and offices and homes, he is staring aghast at naked women and screaming "heretic!" at people. He's really quite the prick, but he's an ideal navigator for the island's weirdness. The movie goes quite deep into the islander's strange spiritual beliefs and it's amusing having an utter asshole haranguing against them every step of the way. It also makes Howie's eventual fate especially horrific. The villagers and their goofy religious beliefs seem harmless and kind of fun at first, but the horror really creeps in when we realize exactly what they need to do to keep their crops bountiful.
...oh, fuck it. SPOILER ALERT They stick Sgt. Howie in a big wooden man and burn him alive.
There's a reason I don't go to Burning Man, even though I have plenty of Burners among her friends. I'm the curious type and I do love strange, strange groups of people but I've always had this weird primal fear of the crowd of hippie/raver hybrids turn against me and stick me in their elitist counterculture temple when all I want to do is take drugs and have filthy mudsex. There's something about crowds of reasonable-seeming people doing something terrible and irrational to an outsider that holds a very instinctual fear in me. As previously stated, most of The Wicker Man is fairly unscary and staged like a tea room mystery. Towards the end, when the final ghastly parade begins, I suddenly sympathized with the doomed officer.
Definitely go check this movie out. Apparently The Wicker Man is considered to be one of the best movies that ever came out of Great Britain. Beyond that, alls I can say is don't watch the seduction scene with an older relative in the room, unless you want a really uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinner.
This post is part of the Final Girl Film Club. For those of you who dug this post, welcome to my humble little blog. I'm a big horror fan and I like to apply my highly-honed, liberal-arts education bullshit shellacking skills to the stuff I enjoy. I cover movies, books, games, and music. We also got a podcast here. Welcome aboard!
Watching Amityville 2: The Possession was like listening to a mix tape full of nothing but cover bands. Nothing was particularly original and everything was done better by someone else, but it's still surprisingly entertaining.
The house does all the typical haunted-house shit. Blood still pours from faucets, doors still slam shut and plates still flies off of shelves. There's the priest, struggling with his doubt in the face of absolute supernatural horror. There's the whispered voices and the mysterious chamber hidden under the stairs. And there's a teenager possessed by what appears to be deadites, flying around the walls and screaming blasphemies at the poor inhabitants. There was even the flying demon's eye view camera straight from Evil Dead. All this spookshow stuff is almost quaint next to the real horror of the movie, which is an almost unbearable atmosphere of abuse and repression.
Even before the Montellis take their first step into the house, it's clear that the family is barely holding together. Most of the animosity centers around the father, a toady little brute fond of guns and military terminology. Combined with a milquetoast, constantly apologizing wife and you have scenes of familial disharmony more chilling and uncomfortable than any z-grade slasher flick. There's one awesome scene early in the movie where the family is sitting down to dinner and a mirror inexplicably drops. Their first reaction, rather than alarm, is to quickly blame one another for the faulty nail. Yet underneath all the screaming we see the quiet teenage boy slowly falling under the house's spell.
So it turns out that the house was always fucked up, that the Montelli's murder was only a link in the chain, not the start. The murderer isn't even responsible for his actions. He goes through the house, methodically executing his loved ones, wearing a demon-face. If the movie is guilty of anything, it's that the narrative loses focus. If the filmmakers centered on the horror of the possessed boy as he corrupted and murdered his family, this could have been a great movie. Instead, the movie divides its attention with the family and the doubting priest, a character done better in The Exorcist.
Anyway, there's a lot of neat stuff in this movie. The cinematography is amazing, and captures the quiet discomfort of the unholy home better than most haunted house flicks. For me, one of the scariest images in the movie was a shot of the kitchen table after everyone had gone to bed. There's something creepy in the way the image is framed, with the silence and the stillness having a predatory quality to it. It takes talent to pull off that level of subtlety and the movie pulls it off.
So, yeah, this movie was a pleasant surprise. If this stuff doesn't appeal to you, there's incest. Lots and lots of creepy incest. Enjoy!
This post is my humble contribution to the Final Girl Film Club, of which I'd contributed one other review so far. If this your first turn in my carousel, welcome. Fakeademic horror essays are my shtick, and I do it pretty well. Stick around, we've got all kinds of neat stuff in the future.
Must not be flip. Must not make some obvious comment about the apocalypse being started by Joe The Plumber.
I didn't have high hopes going into The Beyond. It's a big movie among our people but everything I've heard about it fell along the lines of "The movie doesn't make sense, but the GORE! The goooooorrrreee....." followed by salivation and general unpleasantness on my shoes. I got the sense it was one of those imprint movies people watch during their younger, easily impressed years and its outrageousness leaves a warm place in the viewer's heart regardless of the actual quality of the work.
Turns out I was pleasantly surprised.
Synopsizing The Beyond is kind of pointless. A bunch of stuff happens for no particular reason or explanation, people die horribly graphic deaths, and a couple people wind up staggering around in hell. There are creepy old hotels and swamps and unattended coronor's examination rooms. It felt a little bit like going on a dark ride; there was some vague theme tying the whole thing together, but mostly you puttered along happily while shit jumped out at you. According to the wikipedia entry the formless nature of the story was a tribute to Surrealist Antonin Artaud, who wanted theater to be less about linear narrative and more about 'cruel' imagery used to shock audiences into action. This all sounds a little high falutin' and "let's add meaning after the fact" but there's no denying that The Beyond is genuinely creepy.
Yeah, this flick ain't exactly Robert Wise at his prime, but it's a nifty little popcorn movie. The directing style is all wild zooms and sudden scene cuts, the acting is mostly master-of-unlocking level, and the gore is really outrageous and over the top. You got your eyes popping out, your mannequin faces dissolved in acid, your dogs tearing out blind women's throats, and all the really good, really over-the-top stuff.
Then there's the tarantula scene:
I'm not a huge fan of spiders in general, and the agonizingly slow pace these hairy little fuckers swarmed over that poor bastard's face made my skin. friggin'. crawl.
Which isn't to say that the movie is all ripped latex and bubbling blood. Fulci builds up some genuine, beautifully filmed tension. The scenes involving the strange blind girl Emily and her connection to the Lovecraftian Book of Eibon were chilling. Even after subjecting myself to the gristly delights of The Beyond, my favorite scene is when Emily is surrounded by a circle of the walking dead, begging not to be dragged back to hell. Finally, I like how Fulci chose to end the movie, with the doomed heroes walking blind into the oblivion previously depicted by the murdered painter. Fulci really does have an artist's eye for shot composition and there's a lot of gorgeous stuff in this ghastly playground.
I won't lie, I definitely bring prejudices and expectations to the stuff I see. I really wasn't expecting to like The Beyond, but the over-the-top insanity and strong visual style won me over. This is totally a movie I'd see over pitchers with my lunatickier friends. Fulci does indeed live. Bee eff eff.
Anyway, this is my first post in the Final Girl Film Club. To people who find their way here from her site, welcome! As a greater being than I said, "We have such sights to show you."
Side thing: I don't normally listen to DVD commentaries, but the David Warbeck and Catriona MacColl have a very funny, very British commentary track available on most DVD releases.
Posts
