30 Days of Nightmares #30: ANTIVIRAL (2012)

The Story: A young man selling celebrity diseases to obsessed fans gets caught in an elaborate web of industrial piracy after infecting himself with a famous actress's terminal illness. 

Expectations: Proof that David Cronenberg's son Brandon is just as warped as his old man.

Reaction: Some time ago, I got into a discussion with a friend of mine about the difference between obsession and addiction.  He didn't make much of a distinction between them, but I do.  To me, the term "obsession" does not necessarily connote adverse health effects.  "Addiction" does.  This distinction is at the heart of Brandon Cronenberg's directorial debut.

In the perverse world Cronenberg has created, people are not merely obsessed with celebrities; they are addicted to the possibility of physical intimacy with those celebrities.  It's not enough to watch or read about celebrities, or to follow every move they make, or to meet them in person, exchange a few words and shake their hands.  These addicts literally graft celebrity skin cells onto their bodies, consume celebrity stem cell steaks for dinner, and inject celebrity diseases into their bloodstream so that they can feel "closer" to the objects of their affection.  Such habits obviously have adverse health effects, to say nothing of the psychological effects.  Malcolm McDowell has a great cameo as a doctor/addict who notes that he doesn't believe in God, but who argues that such habits bring him closer to a God-like "collective I."

I can't remember the last time I saw a horror film that had such a brilliant and daring story concept.  I really liked the idea behind THE PURGE (it sounded like the setup for an early Richard Bachman novel), but -- to me, at least, ANTIVIRAL is more believable.  We are, after all, already living in a culture where a lot of people feel entitled to some kind of intimacy with celebrities... and where most people will do just about anything to become a celebrity.  At what point does obsession turn to addiction?  How about when a culture eliminates the perceived boundary between the two?  In the end, addiction knows no boundaries. 

Fans of David Cronenberg's early work will undoubtedly be pleased with this film, because it has the intellectual weight and the visceral impact of movies like SHIVERS and RABID.  It also has an aesthetic quality and an emotional tone reminiscent of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.  Lead actor Caleb Landry Jones reminds me a lot of the young Malcolm McDowell... or maybe even a young Brad Dourif (WISE BLOOD era).  In short, this is a worthwhile film for serious horror fans.  It's not perfect, but it's ambitious enough to make me forgive any shortcomings. 

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: Like the best horror movies, this one offers a finale that tops everything that has come before it.  A good note to end on.

30 Days of Nightmares #29: I SAW THE DEVIL (2010)

The Story: A sadistic serial killer picks the wrong victim, and incurs the wrath of an equally sadistic hitman.

Expectations: I didn't know anything about this movie, but the Netflix kept insisting that I would like it. 

Reaction: Two and a half hours of consistent brutality is an endurance test for even the hardened horror fan.... but there's something about the slow pace of this film that makes it seem lyrical rather than simply vicious.    At times, I felt like it made the violence seem more real.  At other times, it made the violence seem surreal.  For example, when the police discover the first female victim, one of the detectives is practically hypnotized by the sight of her decapitated head floating in a stream.  The shot of her face, unmarred and overwhelmingly lifelike, lingered long enough for me to feel the same way.  Then a bunch of sleazy news journalists -- literally dozens (are murders really so rare in South Korea that the reporters will climb over each other for a photo?) -- swarmed the scene, shattering the mood.  As a whole, the sequence was genuinely disorienting.

I can't say that I got invested in the story, however, until about an hour in.  By that point, the female victim's lover is pursuing her killer.  At first, it seems like a straightforward revenge scenario... and it's hard not to root for the hitman, who kicks the shit out of his quarry.  Then comes the twist: The hitman leaves the killer injured, but alive.  Not because he's a noble guy, but because he wants his victim to suffer.

Up to this point, the film has been about the serial killer's displays of power.  Now we see that power get stripped away from him.  Is it fun to watch the brutality because this guy really deserves it?  Sure.... at least up until the scene where the hitman uses a blunt tool to sever his Achilles tendon.  I won't give any more details, but I will say that when this happens, there is still a full hour left in the movie.  The cat and mouse game between hitman and serial killer continues to escalate into cat vs. ninja, hellhound vs. ninja, etc.  For a while, I had the sense that it was becoming a film not about revenge, but about reform.  The hitman says he wants to make the killer recognize the pain and fear he has caused others... but the level of sadism in his demonstrations still implies angry revenge.

By the end, I wasn't sure how I felt about what I was watching.  Torture as entertainment is one thing, but torture as entertainment pretending to be moralizing is something else.  I SAW THE DEVIL is a  well-acted and visually captivating film that raises plenty of worthwhile questions... but its final answer to everything seems to be violence and more violence.  That left me feeling cold.

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: Worst Achilles tendon injury since Pet Sematary.

30 Days of Nightmares #28: CITADEL (2012)

The Story: After a young man sees his wife get attacked by feral "children," he suffers from agoraphobia and struggles to protect his own child from the same threat.

Expectations: This film has been getting a lot of buzz lately.  First-time filmmaker Ciaran Foy has told several interviewers that the story is based on real-life experience, and reviewers have suggested that this accounts for the truly harrowing quality of the film.  I have been equally intrigued by the comparisons to Roman Polanski's REPULSION and David Cronenberg's THE BROOD, two personal favorites.

Reaction: The film hooked me in the first few minutes, with its bleak and ominous setting -- an abandoned low-income housing development in Glasgow.  There is a sense of almost apocalytpic horror about the place... sort of like a combination of CANDYMAN's Cabrini Green and Henry's apartment in ERASERHEAD.  This immediately sets the tone of the film, which is one of crushing isolation and despair.

I've noticed that great horror movies often have an element of despair.  Beyond the visceral impact of immediate physical threats, they reveal a sadness about life -- rooted in the way that we casually and habitually separate ourselves from one another.  Such films propose that our survival (our psychological survival, if not our physical survival) is dependant on our willingness and ability to connect to other people, and even to fight for them.  CITADEL hits all of these notes, if not always with perfect grace.

The storytelling does get a bit clunky at times. The second half of the film focuses on a foul-mouthed priest and his blind son, who ally themselves with the main character to fight back against the feral children.  We never learn much about the priest and his son.  Why are they still living in the projects?  How did the kid go blind?  Is the priest genuinely crazy (as his reputation suggestions) or just surly?  We never even learn much about the "children" -- although I'm clinging to the idea that they are escaped products of the rage experiments in Cronenberg's THE BROOD.  Bottom line: this is not a logic-based story.  Everything in this film serves an allegorical function.  The monsters are manifestations of Fear.  The priest and his blind son exist simply to help the main character overcome Fear.  The main character's child exists only to stimulate his instinct for Protection.

Personally I would have preferred more realism... a bit more of the filmmaker's personal experiences and a bit less of his horror movie influences... but there's no denying that the best moments in CITADEL do have raw power and real feeling.   This is a sincere horror film. 

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: As Ciaran Foy says in his interviews, the most haunting thing about the monsters in this movie is the fact that we never understand them.  We can't control the things that happen to us.  We can only control how we respond. 

30 Days of Nightmares #27: WARM BODIES (2013)

The Story: "There are a lot of ways of getting to know a girl.  Eating her boyfriend's brains is an unorthodox method, I know..."

Expectations: I was prepared to hate this movie.  The term "zomromcom" doesn't really sit well with me, and I had it in my head that this was going to be the TWILIGHT of zombie movies.  I acknowledge that zombies have become so thoroughly mainstream that it's almost impossible to make them scary anymore -- SHAUN OF THE DEAD and ZOMBIELAND sealed the deal on that -- but that doesn't mean I want filmmakers to stop trying.  I'm curious about WORLD WAR Z because from what I can tell the filmmakers have tried to reinvent the monster for jaded audiences, turning "fast zombies" into a force of nature -- and thereby bringing the zombie back to its thematic roots in the George Romero movies.  (I can't actually say how good the movie is because I haven't seen it yet, but I'm intrigued by the idea.)  I should add that I'm not opposed to zombie comedies.  I loved SHAUN OF THE DEAD and ZOMBIELAND, and RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD and RE-ANIMATOR before them.  But there's something about a romantic comedy with zombies that seems lazy to me. 

On the other hand, WARM BODIES is a zombie movie that my wife actually wanted to watch.  So there's that.

Reaction: This movie turned out to be interesting for the same reason that WORLD WAR Z interests me, and it succeeds for one of the main reasons that SHAUN OF THE DEAD succeeds: In its own way, WARM BODIES is a zombie movie for zombie purists.  That may sound strange, because the movie turns George Romero's braindead-by-definition monsters into thinking, feeling, even talking creatures....  but anyone who remembers DAY OF THE DEAD and LAND OF THE DEAD knows that this is sort of where Romero's long-term vision was headed anyway.

The initial theme that distinguished NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD -- a film that's not so much about zombies as about how human beings collectively respond to zombies -- is being played out here.  Over the years, Romero has talked about his Dead movies in decidedly simplistic terms.  Of the zombies, he says, "We're them and they're us."  In other words: If a bunch of braindead corpses can get along and work together, why can't we?  In DAY OF THE DEAD, he shows that zombies can learn and emote.  In LAND OF THE DEAD, he proposes a kind of "live and let live" agreement between humans and zombies. 

WARM BODIES takes these ideas a step further, suggesting that "un-death" can actually be reversed by love.  On the surface, it's a silly idea.  So are zombies, I guess.  But, in a metaphorical sense, it works.  Zombies have become the movie monster of the 21st century because they are a recognizable metaphor for the dehumanizing effects of a culture that values material wealth over compassion.  WARM BODIES, like Romero's films, proposes an "exhumation."  There's a lesson to be learned, and a better state of existence to be earned.

I don't mean to get too heavy.  This is after all a comedy, and not without its flaws.  Admittedly, the film is annoyingly cute at times (I have mixed feelings about the voiceover, and the Romeo and Juliet connection is unnecessary), and the internal logic is just plain lazy.  Example: The lead zombie gets emotional again because he eats someone's brains.... but why doesn't this happen to all brain-eating zombies?  His human lover is able to trick the zombies into believing that she's already dead by doing the cliched zombie shuffle... but the filmmaker has clearly established that zombies can smell the living, so why can't they smell her?  (She solves this by smearing a bit of dead blood on her face... but that's a half-assed answer.)  And then there's the all-too-convenient distinction between zombies that are "too far gone" ("Bonies") and the human-ish zombies that can still be redeemed....

Clearly, I'm still thinking about this too much.  This is not a movie that's meant for detailed analysis.  I suppose I should just be happy that it's not completely braindead.  It develops an interesting theme, and it's genuinely fun.  I'll consider that a win.

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: I guess, the slurping brain-eating sounds.... if that sort of thing bothers you....

30 Days of Nightmares #26: PREY (2010)

 
The Story: Four hyper-masculine men go on a wild boar hunt with high-powered rifles.  Shit happens. 

Expectations: A friend recommended this monster movie to me.  I didn't know much about it, except that it's French and French filmmakers have produced some of the most extreme horror films of the 21st century.  I had a feeling that things would get messy.

Reaction: There are plenty of disturbing things in this movie, not least of which is the way the characters treat each other.  The four main characters are, technically, family -- and with family like this, they don't need enemies.  Once they find themselves among primal beasts (not one boar, but a whole herd of mutant boars), the men become equally primal.  In many ways the story unfolds like THE DESCENT, with the hunted humans turning into monstrous hunters -- although PREY lacks the mythic quality that distinguishes THE DESCENT and so many other great monster movies.  The scare are simple but effective, and the film bodes well for first-time direction Antoine Blossier.

(Gordon, you're 3 for 3... I'll welcome movie recommendations from you anytime!)

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: When one of the men realizes that the boars hunt by smell, he implements a gag-worthy plan to disguise his humanity. 

30 Days of Nightmares #25: THE REEF (2010)

The Story: A group of Aussie boaters gets stranded in shark-infested waters.

Expectations: Just a few days ago, I was writing about how it's impossible for me (and I don't think I'm alone) to watch a movie about demonic possession without comparing it to THE EXORCIST.  Likewise, I knew it would be hard for me to watch THE REEF without comparing it to JAWS.  I can't imagine that any movie about a shark attack could possibly have the kind of deep, lasting effect on me that JAWS had.  Which begs the question: Do new horror movies have the same kind of deep, lasting effect on younger generations that the "classics" and "modern classics" had on earlier generations?

As I binge on horror movies, I'm realizing that a lot of the recent horror films I'm watching are technically more impressive than the "classics."  Many of them seem (to me, at least) a bit derivative, storywise, but maybe that's mostly product of my age?  It's been said that there are only seven basic plots, and I'm old enough to have seen many, many variations on all them.  That doesn't keep me from enjoying new variations, but I suppose it does make me a bit more analytical.  A film like THE REEF can only seem so new to me...   I digress.

Reaction: THE REEF is a lean, mean thrilling machine.  It has a familiar man vs. wild setup in which the characters are not simply pit against a shark, but against an ocean and all the secrets that are hidden beneath its surface.  The filmmaker is judicious about how often he uses the CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON / JAWS underwater POV... For the most part, we only see what's under water when one of the characters sees what's under water.  That keeps the story focus on the psychological states of the characters, and it kept me tense for most of the running time of this film.  In other words, THE REEF isn't simply a bunch of scare sequences broken up by lulls.  It is one long scare sequence... because, as viewers, we can never be sure what's going to happen or when.  The unpredictability makes for a very engaging experience.

Will the film have a lasting effect on me?  Probably not.  I was equally impressed with the similar OPEN WATER (2003), but that film hasn't really stayed with me.  I still prefer a film like JAWS, with its classical structure and catharsis, or a man vs. nature film like TOUCHING THE VOID, which has a strong metaphysical component.  THE REEF is a simpler film, about the primitive struggle for physical survival.  As such, it's a great 94 minute rollercoaster ride. 

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: Unlike ROGUE (another JAWS descendant that I recently reviewed), THE REEF is surprisingly un-gory.  There's blood, but not much carnage... and I think the film actually works better as a result.  In JAWS, we see a severed leg fall down to the ocean floor.  In THE REEF, what we get instead is a man floating in a sea of red, quickly going into shock, too-casually saying, "My leg is gone."  His inappropriate casualness, combined with the lack of visual payoff, is somehow much more startling -- because it holds us in the immediate experience.  There would actually be some relief in cuting away to a gore shot, but THE REEF leaves us instead with the idea of pain and loss.   Kudos to the filmmakers for getting that one right.

30 Days of Nightmares #24: THE ABCS OF DEATH (2012)

The Story: Ant Timpson, programmer of the New Zealand International Film Festival, and Tim League, founder of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, put together this anthology of 26 different horror shorts -- each one reputedly made on a budget of $5,000.  As with the MASTERS OF HORROR anthology, the filmmakers were given complete creative freedom.  

Expectations: Variety.  This film serves as a who's who of cutting-edge horror, and includes shorts by Marcel Sarmiento (DEADGIRL), Angela Bettis (MAY), Andrew Trauki (THE REEF), Ti West (THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL), Banjong Pisanthanakun (SHUTTER), Bruno Forzani and Héléne Cattet (AMER), Simon Rumley (RED WHITE AND BLUE), Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett (A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE), Srdjan Spasojevic (A SERBIAN FILM), Ben Wheatley (KILL LIST), Xavier Gens (FRONTIER(S)), and Jason Eisener (HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN).  It's much easier to sit through this film if you know who at least some of these filmmakers are, and you're curious to see what they'll do with this opportunity.  If not, THE ABCS OF DEATH will be an endurance exercise.

Reaction: This is a Halloween candy grab-bag.  The stories range from surprisingly clever to annoyingly absurd.  There was way too much toilet humor for my taste (at times, I felt like I was watching the DUMB AND DUMBER of horror anthologies), but I have to admit that I was rarely bored.   The film displays a lot of talent, and plenty of wild visions for the future of horror... I only wish that some of the shorts were actually scary. The only filmmaker who really succeeded in making me shudder was Xavier Gens ("X for XXL")... but that might have been partly because the music in that short reminded me of REQUIEM FOR A DREAM.

High points for me were Sarmiento's hypnotic (if illogical) "D is for Dogfight," Yudai Yamaguchi's hilariously goofy "J is for Judai-geki," Pisanthanakun's darkly comic "N is for Nuptials,"  Gens' gruesome "X is for XXL," and Eisener's ultra-stylish "Y is for Youngbuck." 

Low points were Noboru Iguchi's ludicrous "F is for Fart," Andrew Traucki's effortless "G is for Gravity," Ti West's insulting "M is for Miscarriage" (really, Ti, really??), and Yoshihiro Nishimura maddeningly incoherent "Z is for Zetsumetsu."

The varied quality of the shorts makes for a somewhat frustrating viewing experience, but die-hard horror fans will have to see this anthology on basic principle. 

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: Well... there's a claymation toilet with teeth...

30 Days of Nightmares #23: V/H/S (2012)

The Story: An anthology of horror shorts bound together by the (nostalgia-inducing?) gimmick of being shot on crappy VHS cameras.  The brainchild of Bloody Disgusting's Brad Miska. 

Expectations: Following THE THEATER BIZARRE, V/H/S seems to suggest that horror anthologies are making a comeback.  A friend of mine has observed, "They're only coming back because it's a cheap way to make a film -- give a bunch of hungry filmmakers a little bit of money and hope that one of them comes up with something good."  Cynical but astute.  Sometimes, of course, anthologies turn out to be memorable.  Done right, when the stories are bound together by a particularly compelling theme and/or a particularly strong storyteller, it's a fun format.  V/H/S doesn't have a theme, just a gimmick... and the found footage angle will undoubtedly turn some viewers off...

Reaction: First of all, I think wraparound stories are bound to suck.  They have the unenviable distinction of being broken up multiple times, so they have very little chance of engaging the viewer.  Wraparound stories are basically commercial breaks.  Nobody likes commercial breaks.  The best bet is to try to build interludes around a charismatic personality... but V/H/S avoids that lesson.  The wraparound segment, written by Simon Barrett and directed by Adam Wingard, tries to tell its own story... but mostly it seems like a series of commercial breaks.  As for the other stories...

David Brucker's "Amateur Night" kicks things off pretty well.  The shakey camera effect gets old VERY fast, and the characters are that most annoying of horror movie stereotypes (horny frat boys), but the monster is interesting and the finale is well-executed.

Ti West's "Second Honeymoon" takes that momentum and runs with it in a low-key, genuinely creepy second act.  West is consistently good at crafting suspense, but some viewers argue that his payoffs are weak.  I found that to be the case here.... The ending sort of reminds me of that stupid riddle about the kid who's in a car accident with his father.  (When he gets to the hospital, the doctor says, "I can't operate on him because he's my son"...)  Still, I can't argue that West knows his craft.

Glenn McQuaid's "Tuesday the 17th" is, in my opinion, the weakest of the bunch -- and maybe that's why it's the middle entry.  You wouldn't want to start with this, or leave people thinking about it at the end.  The title says it all... Despite some interesting visuals, it's derivative in an obnoxious way. 

Simon Barrett gets his shot at redemption in "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger."  This one updates the VHS gimmick to the 21st century, playing out the action entirely via webcab.  The filmmaker wisely exploits the one thing that is potentially scary about webcams -- the fact that, despite the illusion, you are not physically in the room with the other person.  And Barrett gets bonus points for taking this story in a completely different direction from where I thought it was going.  This is solid storytelling.

"10/31/98," directed by a group of filmmakers under the moniker Radio Silence, returns to that obnoxious frat boy stereotype again.  Were it not for the tiresome characters (and the increasingly tiresome found footage format), I think the ending of this segment would have blown me away.  There's nothing particularly inventive about the story, but the practical effects worked well... and would probably work even better for someone who hasn't seen Polanski's REPULSION. 

All in all, this is a relatively worthwhile experiment.  Obviously I'm not the only one who thinks so.  The sequel is due out in October.

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: I was always creeped out by those "reality"-based long takes in the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY movies.  Often it's the waiting that draws me in to a horror movie.   Ti West and Simon Barrett craft the same kind of suspense here, utilizing found footage format to its best effect. 

30 Days of Nightmares #22: THE THEATER BIZARRE (2011)

 
The Story: An anthology of six horror shorts in the Grand Guignol style.  

Expectations:  Being a horror fan is like panning for gold.  Sometimes you strike it rich.  More often, you don't.  But if you love the genre, you become the kind of determined and discerning viewer who can spot gold dust in even the smallest quantities, and who can tell the good stuff from the fool's gold.  It's that mentality, I suppose, that draws me to anthology horror films.  I go into a film like THE THEATER BIZARRE thinking that I'm getting six movies for the price of one.  I'm not expecting to strike it rich... I'm just hoping for the thrill of some small discovery.
 
Reaction: This film begins with a wraparound segment featuring horror icon Udo Kier as a pasty-faced marionette (Guignol?).  Kier is always a bit creepy, but he doesn't have much to do here.  His main audience is Virginia Newcomb, a perpetually frightened-looking patron of downtown L.A.'s Million Dollar Theater.  After a few segments, her wide-eyed reactions become pretty tiresome, and the wraparound story becomes unnecessary filler.

The  shorts themselves are a varied bunch.  Buddy Giovinazzo's "I Love You," Tom Savini's "Wet Dreams" and David Gregory's "Sweets" are all gruesome peans to bad relationships.  The female characters in these shorts are cold and cruel; the men are desperate and crazy.  There's something refreshing about the frankness of the dialogue in Giovinazzo's piece, and Savini's self-analysis prevents his segment from being completely misogynistic... but these stories exist entirely for protracted scenes of ultra-violence.  David Gregory's "Sweets" trades in the grue for an absurd extended metaphor.  Occasionally the surreal imagery is downright brilliant, but unfortunately there's no story to hold the images together.  

That said, "Sweets" is still more interesting than Richard Stanley's "The Mother of Toads," a simplistic Lovecraftian setup with boringly predictable characters.  Since the title of the short forecasts the old gypsy's identity in advance, I was hoping that the bland American tourist who idiotically follows her home would somehow turn out to be just as strange as she was.  No luck. 

Karim Hussain's "Vision Stains" has a thought-provoking premise, about a woman who uses "simple surgery" to import the final thoughts of dying people into her own head.  It would have had a much more visceral impact, however, without such a pretentious voieover.  I found it difficult to get emotionally involved while being bombarded by grand philosophical musings.

The best of the bunch -- by far -- was Douglas Buck's "The Accident," a beautiful and powerful tone poem about a young girl's first experience of death.  This short really doesn't belong among the others.  It's not an example of Grand Guignol, but of a style of horror that's much more subtle and sophisticated.  Admittedly, I'm revealing my own biases... Am I being too hard on the other segments because I prefer a more subtle brand of horror story? 

I guess that's the thing about being a horror fan.  One fan's gold is another fan's tailings.  For me, an anthology like THE THEATER BIZARRE is worth watching for just one worthwhile discovery.  So I'm not complaining.... but I can't recommend this anthology to anyone except the miners.

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: If you have even the slightest aversion to eyeball trauma, you will have a VERY difficult time making it through "Vision Stains." 

30 Days of Nightmares #21: MAMA (2013)

The Story: Two young girls are orphaned in a cabin in the woods, but manage to survive with the help of a protective spirit they call "mama."  When they are discovered after five years in the wilderness, they have trouble readjusting to human behavior.

Expectations: As I said in my review of SPLICE, Guillermo del Toro's name-brand can draw me into anything these days.  His track record as an executive producer is a little spotty, but I was hoping for something a little more like THE ORPHANAGE and a little less like DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK.

Reaction: What this film reminded me of the most was a 1980s supernatural thriller called LADY IN WHITE.  I saw that film when I was about ten years old, and it scared the shit out of me.  There's a nice creepy Halloween setup, and then a vulnerable-looking little boy gets locked in a cloak room overnight and witnesses a murder there.  Here's the catch: The murder happened years ago, and what he's seeing is a supernatural replay.  The transparent image of the murdered child is unsettling enough, but then comes the revelation that the killer is still alive -- and part of the boy's everyday world.  Late in the story, he encounters a second ghost.... but I really shouldn't give away any more. 

I recently watched LADY IN WHITE as an adult, and I found it hard to suspend my disbelief because the visual effects are so in-your-face.  My adult mind is more easily spooked by the "less is more" approach to ghost stories.  Having said that, the first half of MAMA worked very well for me.  The second half, not so much.  The film has a great slow build, likable characters, and del Toro's trademark fairy tale quality.  In my opinion, the second half relies too much on CGI to visualize the threat.  At times, it seems like a film grasping for a consistent tone -- Are we aiming for J-horror (the black hair and general Rorschach quality of "mama" suggests so) or Tim Burton? 

I suspect the goal is was to appeal equally to both younger viewers and adult audiences.  My memories of watching LADY IN WHITE suggest that MAMA would have worked very well for my ten-year-old self.  Up until the last twenty minutes or so (when the CGI becomes overbearing), it also worked pretty well for me as an adult.... mainly because of solid characterizations.  Jessica Chastain's performance made me forget all about Katie Holmes's boring turn in DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK.  In the end, it's a film completely worthy of Guillermo del Toro's name. 

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: Every time that "mama" is in the room, there is a palpable sense of dread.... but I found myself most engaged in scenes where we see the long-term effects of "mama" on the girls.  There's a powerful scene in which Jessica Chastain finds the younger girl sleeping outside, and uses her body to warm the little girl.  At first the girl tries to get away, but when the reluctant mother breathes warm air onto her hands, the girl becomes still and awe-struck... allowing the viewer a moment to understand that this is the first time she has really felt the warmth of a living human being.  Scenes like that make MAMA much more than a casual campfire story.  At its best, this is a human story interrupted by a ghost.  Because the human story is so poignant, the ghost is genuinely scary.

30 Days of Nightmares #20: A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE (2010)

 
The Story: A serial killer escapes from prison and makes his way toward his ex-girlfriend, who is struggling to cope with the revelation that he is a murderer.

Expectations: This film got some pretty significant buzz at the 2010 Fantastic Fest in Austin, and director Adam Wingard seems to be a name that horror fans are watching closely.  That was reason enough for me to sit down and watch the film... in spite of my general lack of enthusiasm for the serial killer subgenre.

Reaction: In the early 90s, I was rattled by a cheap, direct-to-video biopic about Jeffrey Dahmer.  It wasn't a good movie, but there was something so surprising about the way the story was told -- focusing on the mundane details of the killer's everyday life  -- that I took note.   Around the same time, I read a biography of Ted Bundy that was written by a woman who knew him.  The author said that she never would have guessed that Bundy was a serial killer.  He seemed too... polite.  According to her, he even had relatively normal relationships with women (the ones he didn't kill...).  

Stories like these made me think that being a serial killer must be like being possessed; that there's something mysterious inside just waiting to get out.  Most of the time that thing remains hidden, and most people don't even know it's there... but, I figured, the monster must know that it's a monster.  I figured that the worst part of being Dahmer or Bundy must be living with the knowledge that they were monsters.

I'm not sure I believe that anymore.  Today, I tend to think that sociopaths are emotionally insulated from the damage they inflict.  Their warped nature protects them from understanding how selfish and cruel they are.  And maybe, because of that, the people closest to them -- family members, friends, even spouses -- are less likely to see the truth.  And maybe they suffer twice as much when they finally realize it. 

These are not usually the type of thoughts that a serial killer movie prompts.  In my experience, this subgenre generally asks the audience to identify with the would-be victim (in order to experience the thrill of escape) or with the cop chasing the killer (in order to experience the thrill of the hunt), and doesn't give much serious thought to a killer's loved ones.  A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE isn't a film about hunting or escaping, nor is it as exploitative as the title implies.  It's a character study. 

Unfortunately, it's not a terribly compelling character study.  The main characters are depressed people living unremarkable lives... and they all seem to be on the exact same predestined collision course.  In fact, I was so convinced that I knew where this film was headed that I almost turned it off.... which would have been a mistake, because the last 15 mintues are the most interesting part of the movie.  If only it had started there... 

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: The image that will stick with me the most is a guy getting stabbed through the chin.  When he opens his mouth to scream, the blade is visible inside.  Within the context of most horror movies, this image would have seemed ridiculously gimmicky.  In this film, it seems real. 

30 Days of Nightmares #19: THE DEVIL INSIDE (2012)

The Story: A young woman learns that her mother murdered two priests and a nun during an exorcism, and travels to Rome to find out if mom is really demonically possessed.

Expectations: THE EXORCIST remains, for many people, the scariest horror movie ever made.  That explains why so many films in recent years (THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE, THE LAST EXORCISM, THE RITE, et al.) have tried to duplicate its success.  An argument can be made that exorcism movies are scariest for viewers who already believe in the possibility of demonic possession.... but if that's true, it seems to me that there are a lot of believers out there.  Is that why it's easier for horror filmmakers to scare people with talk of demons than with, say, aliens?  Maybe. 

I'd like to point out, however, that THE EXORCIST does not work simply because of its subject matter or its timing (1973).  It works because of William Peter Blatty's storytelling and William Friedkin's filmmaking technique.  Both clearly know how to build character, how to build suspense, how to get under our skin.  That's why, 40 years later, every exorcism film that comes along inevitably gets compared to THE EXORCIST.  I can't even pretend to watch something like THE DEVIL INSIDE without holding it up against the gold standard of demonic possession movies... and those are some big shoes to fill.

Reaction: Despite almost universal rejection by critics, THE DEVIL INSIDE isn't a bad film.  There are some solid scare techniques at work here, and the filmmaker manages to effectively build suspense in a few key sequences.  The problem is that the film, overall, feels lightweight and predictable. 

The first setback is the BLAIR WITCH documentary film gimmick.  I recognize that this is a cost-saving measure that allows low-budget filmmakers to do their thing, and that THE DEVIL INSIDE probably couldn't have been financed as a bigger production... but I also recognize that the gimmick has been used more effectively in films like THE FOURTH KIND, LAKE MUNGO, even THE LAST EXORCISM.  The limitations of lower budget filmmaking can sometimes help to heighten realism, but only when the story is believable. 

Like many other paranormal horror films in the past few years, this one claims to be "inspired by a true story."  I don't think that claim has any kind of real effect on moviegoers these days.  Even if the events in this film are "true," they nevertheless follow a predictable horror movie formula, right up to an abrupt and unsatisfying ending.  (If you had problems with the end of BLAIR WITCH, don't even bother with this one.)  Again, I'm not saying that this is a bad film.  But compared to something like THE EXORCIST, it's trite... and, like I said, no informed viewer in this day and age can avoid the comparison.

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: Two sequences employ contortionists to illustrate "preternatural movement."  These are probably the images that will stick with me longer than anything else from the film.  I guess that doesn't say much about the subtler aspects of the storytelling.  To be fair, I suppose people talk more about the pea soup  and the spider walk in THE EXORCIST than about pervasive feelings of dread... but I think that's only because it's hard to articulate feelings of dread.  For me personally, THE DEVIL INSIDE didn't conjure any lasting feelings of dread.

30 Days of Nightmares #18: AMER (2009)

The Story: Sex + Death, Euro-horror style

Expectations: I rented this movie because it has been favorably compared to the early work of Mario Bava and Dario Argento.  The cover art also reminded me of Jess Franco's THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF.  So basically I was expecting a visually audacious, slightly incoherent, perversely erotic film about horrific obsession.... with lots of water imagery, closeups of eyeballs, and a bold use of primary colors. 

Reaction: There's almost no dialogue in this film, so it lives or dies on its imagery.  That makes it a difficult film to write about.  In fact, I don't really want to write about it at all.  Instead, I want to share what it reminded me of.  I encountered the following story in Ingmar Bergman's autobiography The Magic Lantern...

“When I was ten, I was shut inside the mortuary at the Sophiahemmet… One sunny day in late winter, Algot [the caretaker] lured me into the inner room and pulled the sheet off a corpse that had just arrived.  It was a young woman with long dark hair, a full mouth and round chin.  I gazed at her for a long time while Algot was busy doing something else.  Suddenly I heard a crash.  The outer door had slammed shut and I was alone with the dead… I banged on the door and shouted for Algot, but it was no use.  At any moment, one of them might rise up and grab hold of me.  The sun shone through the milky white window-panes, above my head accumulated the stillness, a dome that reached the sky….The young girl who had just been treated lay on a wooden table in the middle of the floor.  I pulled back the sheet and exposed her.  She was quite naked apart from a plaster that ran from throat to pudenda.  I lifted a hand and touched her shoulder.  I had heard about the chill of death, but the girl’s skin was not cold, but hot.  I moved my hand to her breast, which was small and slack with an erect black nipple.  There was dark brown on her abdomen.  She was breathing.  No, she wasn’t breathing.  Had her mouth opened?  I saw the white teeth showing just below the curve of her lips.  I moved so that I could see her sex, which I wanted to touch but did not dare...

“Then I saw that she was watching me from under her half-lowered eyelids.  Everything became confused, time ceased to exist and the strong light grew brighter.  Algot had told me about a colleague of his who had wanted to play a joke on a young nurse.  He had placed an amputated hand under the covers on her bed.  When the nurse did not appear for morning prayers, they had gone to her room, where she was found sitting naked, chewing on the hand.  She had torn the thumb off and stuck it into her hole.  I was now going to go mad in the same way.  I hurled myself at the door, which opened by itself.  The young woman let me escape.” 

30 Days of Nightmares #17: THE LOVED ONES (2009)

The Story: A disturbed teenage girl, with the help of her equally disturbed father, kidnaps the boy of her dreams... and tortures him.

Expectations: I first read about this Australian indie film in Rue Morgue magazine, which noted that it had been "kept underground and away from public eyes" for several years.  The reviewer added: "That's a real shame, because THE LOVED ONES ranks up there with the best horror films of the last twenty years."  I couldn't resist a tease like that, so I immediately put the film in my Netflix queue.  While I was waiting, I read a Netflix review that praised the filmmaking, but questioned the filmmaker's intentions, asking: "Why did you spend three to five years of your life making this film? What did you want your audience to think and feel?... I don't understand what pleasure one gets out of making this type of film, or watching this type of film over and over." I am not a fan of movies that are simply mean-spirited for the sake of being mean-spirited, so I wanted to find out if THE LOVED ONES had an ansswer.

Reaction: There are three interweaving storylines in this film, and the differences between them will probably determine whether or not a viewer likes the film as a whole.  The first story is about Brent, a troubled teen who inadvertently caused his father's death and has been suffering from extreme guilt ever since -- a fact that prompts his girlfriend Holly to call him "emotionally retarded."  The second story is about Lola and her father, a pair of delusional sadists who kidnap Brent and torture him at their own deeply twisted three-person prom.  The third story is about Brent's friend Jamie (a humorous fuck-up) and Jamie's prom date Mia (a hot fuck-up).

The first story is surprisingly poignant, and I think it provides the answer to the Netflix reviewer's urgent questions.  At the beginning of the film, Brent is ready to give up on life.  In one scene, he very nearly commits suicide, out of a desire to escape from overwhelming emotional pain.  He is also shown cutting himself, a physical form of release.  When Brent is kidnapped and tortured, he displays a grim determination to endure whatever pain is thrown at him.  Why?  Because it's easier to endure physical pain than it is to endure certain kinds of emotional pain.  And because that's how we all survive -- by enduring.  I don't want to get too pretentious about this, but let me just say that I found Brent's suffering and his escape from suffering to be convincingly real.  That's what made the film worthwhile to me.

I'm tempted to say that the black comedy revolving around the savage prom queen (the "PRETTY IN PINK" story) and the comic relief related to the fuck-up couple diminish the power of the main story... but in fact they probably help to offset the overwhelming intensity.  I was occasionally annoyed by the ridiculousness of Lola's prom night charade, feeling that it was too gimmicky... but maybe I needed that distraction.  I'm reminded of a film I saw a few years ago called THE GIRL NEXT DOOR, an unremittingly bleak and realistic torture movie.  There was no catharsis in that movie; it was as depressing as an unresolved real-life murder, and it left me feeling completely empty.  THE LOVED ONES at least avoids that effect.

The third story exists mostly independent of the other two.  It unfolds alone, like outtakes from a completely different movie.  Well, that's not really fair.... Tonally, it belongs to the same movie. ( It isn't as out of place as that ridiculous chicken truck scene in LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT or anything.)  Actually, it manages to balance the solemnity of the first story with the jagged humor of the second... and, in its own subtle way, to set the stage for the possibility of an ending that is hopeful and even -- dare I say it -- sweet.  It shows that the filmmaker actually cares about his characters.

Like the Netflix reviewer, I don't want to watch this film over and over.  But I have to say that I'm glad I watched it once, and I'm glad the filmmaker took the time to make it.  I wouldn't rank it as "one of the best horror films of the last twenty years," but that might only be because the savage cinema (I can't bring myself to call it "torture porn," because the misleading designation suggests a very coldblooded motivation on the part of the filmmaker) is not my favorite subgenre. 

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: Where to begin?  I guess the power drill sequence...

30 Days of Nightmares #16: THE PACT (2012)

The Story: A young woman returns home to find her missing sister, and confront her (abusive?) mother's ghost.

Expectations: I didn't know much about this movie going into it, but it had pretty high marks on Netflix and I'm always game for a good ghost story.

Reaction: There are two main reasons why I liked this movie.  #1. The filmmaker understands that a good ghost story depends on nuanced sound design.  Silence and a subtle score are used here to genuinely startling effect.  #2.  The filmmaker understands that it is easier to intrigue the audience with a good mystery than with ghostly visual effects.  This is a classic gothic ghost story, about a restless spirit trying to reveal dark secrets from beyond the grave -- but there is more to this mystery than the ghost.  There's also a flesh and blood serial killer... which leads me to the thing that kept me from loving this movie. 

The revelation of the main character's dark family secret is a truly disturbing moment, but also an unbelievable one.  There has been so much talk about the possibility that insanity that it's difficult to accept what she discovers in the third act as a hard reality.  In fact, when it happened, my wife turned to me and asked: "Is this supposed to be a dream?"  I couldn't answer.  I didn't know.  And yet it doesn't seem to me that the filmmaker intended the viewer to have such doubts.  The film consistently takes for granted that ghosts are real -- not only real, but physically very powerful.  I can accept that as the internal logic of the story, but it's not as easy for me to overlook the absence of logical explanations about the secondary threat.

Because of the apparent inconsistency, the overall effect of this well-crafted thriller was initially diluted for me.  By the time the credits rolled, I was distracted by too much "WTF?".   Reflecting on the film a day later, however, I'm considering things in a slightly different light.  I realize that maybe my expectations -- for a traditional, straightforward ghost story -- skewed my reaction to a more unique film.  My advice: Try watching this as a fairy tale about a broken family with some very real monsters in their closet.  I think that's the level on which THE PACT really works. 

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: I know the serial killer should have been the most disturbing thing in the film, but it was the vision of the headless ghost that got me.

30 Days of Nightmares #15: ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE (2009)

The Story: One reviewer describes it as "THE O.C. meets FRIDAY THE 13TH."  I guess that's as good a logline as any. 

Expectations: I first heard about this film a few years ago, and I was immediately intrigued.  The film was apparently made in 2006, and received some pretty enthusiastic reviews for an indie horror film, but yet it had not been able to land a U.S. distributor.   It seems to me that in this day and age, a horror movie has to be pretty bad to avoid getting picked up by one of the dozens of small-scale distributors.  There are plenty of releasing companies that will happily buy a relatively slick-looking product for the right (low) price... and ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE appeared to be a slick-looking product.  So what gives?

Flash forward to 2013.  Amber Heard has made a name for herself with appearances in THE INFORMERS (panned by critics, but I liked it), John Carpenter's THE WARD, THE RUM DIARY, and the Nic Cage laugh-fest DRIVE ANGRY.  Maybe that's why MANDY LANE has now found a U.S. distributor.  It's due out in August, but I confess I couldn't wait.  I turned to Youtube, because... well... let's be honest... All the boys love Amber Heard.

Reaction: This movie is exactly what it promises to be.  A slickly produced, surprisingly well-edited slasher movie.  With a twist.  I won't spoil the twist (it's easy enough to see it coming once you get started), but I will theorize that it's probably the reason that the film went so long without a U.S. distributor. 

The tag line sets up the story: "Everyone is dying to be with her.  Someone is killing for it."  Based on this, I was expecting something like CARRIE in reverse -- a film about the frightening power wielded by a beautiful girl.  Something like GINGER SNAPS, TEETH, JENNIFER'S BODY... all films that I enjoyed.  The comparison to JENNIFER'S BODY is especially apt, because the filmmakers of MANDY LANE fetishize Amber Heard even more than the makers of JENNIFER'S BODY fetishized Megan Fox.  Ogling her is perhaps the main reason the movie exists.  The horror story seems secondary. 

The filmmakers do start getting their hands dirty in the last twenty minutes or so, but I feel like there's a disconnect between the hauntingly lyrical study of the leading lady and the annoyingly familiar "ten little indians" slasher movie scenario.  The opportunity to tell a real story is neglected in favor of run-of-the-mill slasherisms.   Beautifully shot slasherisms, but still.

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: For me, this movie never gets any better than the opening sequence, where a drunk teenage jock practically sacrifices himself to the beauty of Mandy Lane.  It's not an intentional sacrifice, but it made me think that intentional sacrifices would follow.  The film implies a question that's genuinely tantalizing: Just how far is the average teenage guy willing to go to win the affections of a beautiful girl?  It's disappointing that the film is not actually about any guy's internal debate over that question, or about Mandy Lane's debate over how she should wield such power.   The answers are foregone conclusions. 

30 Days of Nightmares #14: SPLICE (2009)

The Story: Two scientists secretly breed a mutant creature that can physically adapt to any environment.  For some reason, they're surprised when their little experiment goes awry.

Expectations: I was initially drawn to this film because it boasted Guillermo del Toro's name as executive producer.  (So did the tiresome DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK, but I still maintain that del Toro has the best track record of any modern-day master of horror.)  At the same time, SPLICE bears the mark of Joel Silver's Dark Castle Entertainment.  I look forward to Dark Castle horror movies the way I look foward to Platinum Dunes horror movies.  In both cases, the results are usually entertaining but almost never scary.  Call me crazy, but I like my horror movies to be scary...

The tie-breaker on this mutant creation is director Vincenzo Natali.  Natali's claim to fame is the 1997 indie movie CUBE -- for my money, one of the most ingenious horror films of the 1990s.  And if you were a horror fan in the late 1990s, you know that the word "ingenious" was not often used in connection with horror films during that period.  So... what do you get when you Frankenstein these three filmmakers together and ride the lightning?

Reaction: The first half of this movie was so annoying that I almost turned it off.  Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley lack any kind of chemistry as husband-and-wife scientists who are breeding prehistoric sea slugs.  The sea slugs are so gross that for a moment I thought I was watching an old Cronenberg movie instead of a mainstream Warner Brothers release... but that only buys so much good will.  Then the two scientists put their heads (among other things) together and create a completely new species -- part human, part amphibian, part... ostrich?

The visual effects are top notch, but I couldn't get past the fact that Brody and Polly are the most unprofessional and irresponsible scientists on the face of the planet.  Actually, it's worse than that.  They make James Franco in RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES look like Albert Einstein.  That said, their shortcomings as scientists are nothing compared to their shortcomings as parents. 

The good news is that their unlikability eventually becomes an asset to the bold latter half of the film.  More than once, I was simply stunned by what I was seeing on the screen.  I don't want to spoil any of the surprises, so I'll just say that everything that happens is related to wildly dysfunctional family dynamics.  Again I was reminded of Cronenberg's early work, particularly THE FLY.   I'm not sure that this madcap quality redeemed the movie as a whole, but it certainly kept my attention.

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: For me, the scariest thing in this movie is Sarah Polley's instant transformation from nurturing mother into vindictive surgeon.  What that says about her character is more unsettling than any special effect.

30 Days of Nightmares #13: LEFT BANK (2008)

The Story: A mysterious illness disrupts the rising career (not to mention the body and spirit) of elite runner Marie, forcing her to reasses her priorities in life.  Soon after, she begins having an affair with Bobby, an expert archer whose Antwerp apartment building sits on top of a bottomless pit that seems to amplify her troubles.

Expectations: I didn't know much about this Belgian horror film, but the synopsis intrigued me.  It sounded like an existential horror movie rather than a formulaic monster flick -- the type of thing that's hard to sum up in a logline.  Different is good.

Reaction: In many ways, this film is a ROSEMARY'S BABY for the 21st century.  There are similarities in plot, but the most important similarity is the tone.  Like Rosemary, Marie finds out that she's living in a cursed building, in an apartment formerly occupied by a woman who suffered a mysterious fate.  The environment seems somehow to amplify Marie's illness, combining Cronenberg-esque body horror with the vague specter of occult forces at work.  The filmmaker wisely keeps the emphasis on atmosphere, characterization and psychological horror, casting a subtle spell over the viewer rather than going for overt scares or explanations.  The main issue, as in ROSEMARY'S BABY, is whether or not the heroine is really experiencing something supernatural, or simply going mad.

The revelations in the final act seemed disjointed to me, but because I was so invested in the character and so enthralled by the ominous tone of the film, that disjointed quality left me feeling unnerved rather than disappointed.  I probably shouldn't say anymore, because I heartily recommend this one and it's worth seeing without knowing too much.  If you're feeling particularly adventurous, this would make an interesting double bill with Hideo Nakata's DARK WATER or the recent Hammer film WAKE WOOD.

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: Knee injuries always make me a little queasy, and what happens to Marie's knee in this film caused a lot of wincing.

30 Days of Nightmares #12: BLOOD CREEK (2009)

The Story: Two brothers hunt an undead bloodsucking Nazi on the verge of completing a ritual that will make him all-powerful.

Expectations: I was intrigued by the fact that this is director Joel Schumacher's first horror film since FLATLINERS.  Plenty of people would scoff at the mention of the name.  Schumacher makes an easy target since he did, after all, give us BATMAN & ROBIN and 8MM, both of which were embarrassing beyond words.  To be fair, however, he also made THE LOST BOYS (which is not as good as NEAR DARK, but it'll do in a pinch) and PHONE BOOTH.  And I confess I have a soft spot for FLATLINERS.  It's a little too touchy-feely, but I still love it.  So, I find myself wondering, what would this guy do with a story about a Nazi zombie/vampire?

Reaction: Perhaps the most disappointing thing about this film is the fact that so few people have seen of it... because it's actually a respectable creature feature.  Michael Fassbender turns in a solid performance as the Nazi monster, who uses human blood and ancient runes to bring the dead back to life.  For nearly a century, a West Virginia family has kept him contained by using his own magic against him... but that changes when Victor Marshall, a hateful Iraq War veteran, shows up to destroy the monster once and for all.  Little does he know that his hatred can only fuel the fire.

It's a good premise, although Victor's story is a bit annoying.  He enlists the help of his loyal brother Evan in a supernatural battle... but stupidly doesn't tell Evan (or us) what he's up against.  Why?  I guess this lack of information is meant to build suspense... but it also makes Victor pretty unlikable, since his tight-lipped manner causes a lot of tactical problems that could have been easily avoided.  If you can get past that initial bit of silliness, you're in for a wild ride.  When the villain shows up, the film becomes a top-notch freak fest.

The villain is slick and genuinely unnerving.  He's sort of like Pinhead (HELLRAISER) crossed with The Creeper (JEEPERS CREEPERS).  That might sound a lame, but it works.  In fact, the monster is so cool that I'm willing to forgive this movie a really bad CGI evil dead horse.  For the most part, the effects are solid and the filmmaker weaves an interesting mythology around the central ideas about the corrupting effects of hatred and power.  The ending does a particularly good job of driving home those ideas, while setting the stage for a sequel that will almost certainly never happen... but which I would actually like to see.  Frankly, I can't remember the last time a horror movie made me actually want a sequel.

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: As with many of the great modern-day horror franchises, the "unmasking" of the villain turns out to be a moment of surprising power.

30 Days of Nightmares #11: ROGUE (2011)

The Story: JAWS in Australia, with crocodiles.

Expectations: The reason it's taken me so long to see this film is because of the Dimension Extreme poster (pictured above).  The lack of subtlety in this poster made me expect a very un-subtle movie with bad CGI and tongue-in-cheek humor, something more along the lines of ANACONDA or PIRANHA (the remake) than JAWS.  This is director Greg McLean's followup to WOLF CREEK, the film that earned him membership in Hollywood's "splat pack," so I also expected plenty of gore.

Reaction: I am pleasantly surprised to say that this is a very well-crafted, genuinely scary film.  Not terribly original, mind you, but it does everything a good horror movie should do.  The filmmaker takes the time to establish a realistic setting, with exotic footage worthy of a nature documentary, and sets up the characters as more than bait.  There are cliches aplenty (the lead is a slightly obnoxious young American tourist instantly at odds with a backwoods culture) but there are also quite a few beautifully subtle moments, like the guy in the back of the boat discreetly saying goodbye to a loved one... before the killer croc even rears its head for the first time.  The film builds slowly, and brilliantly, in the second act by keeping the monster in the shadows and relying on the familiar POV angles from CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and JAWS.  Then it pays off the suspense big time in an intense -- and only mildly ludicrous -- final act.  Oh yes, there's blood.  Plenty of blood.   But the storytelling is serious, the CGI is well-hidden in darkness, and the movie as a whole captivated me from beginning to end. 

So... for the reader who requested a review of this film during the last "30 Days of Nightmares" marathon: Joe Bob says check it out.

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: I think the scene that will stick with me the most is an early scene where the survivors have to climb across a rope suspended above croc-infested waters.  The scenario is obviously intense because of the lurking monsters, but the hostility between the characters makes the sequence almost unbearable. 

30 Days of Nightmares #10: ROOM 237 (2013)

The Story: This definition of paranoia is "not believing in coincidences."  This is what happens when paranoid people watch Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of THE SHINING.

Expectations: A few years ago, I met Joe Turkel at a horror movie convention.  Turkel's most famous roles were Eldon Tyrell in BLADE RUNNER and Lloyd the Bartender in THE SHINING.  Joe is a cool guy, gracious and seemingly ageless.  We talked for a while about Kubrick (he is the only actor to have worked with the notoriously challenging director three times, beginning with THE KILLING in 1956), and then he signed a photo for me, from THE SHINING.  As he signed, he told me about the filming of the scene pictured.  He said that he was aware of exactly four people in the room with him when the scene was shot.  Then he told me to count the number of people in the photo.  There were five.  Now, maybe the guy was just pulling my leg... He has to say something entertaining to fan-boys who come up to his table at a convention, right?   But I prefer to think that maybe there were real ghosts at the Overlook Hotel, contributing to the overall aura of weirdness in THE SHINING.  If this film hasn't earned the right to that kind of mystique, what film has?  (Certainly not THREE MEN AND A BABY.)

Reaction: This isn't a documentary about the making of THE SHINING. It's a documentary about people who see connections in everything.  The human brain is wired to look for patterns. When the wiring is off, some people see patterns everywhere.  I'm not judging.  I accept that "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't after you."  But, in this case, one of the interviewees believes that the government is going to audit him next year because he found proof -- in THE SHINING -- that NASA faked the moon landing.  After revealing this belief, the guy laughed nervously in a way that made my skin crawl.  Something about his nervous laughter is scarier than anything that's actually in THE SHINING.  It reminds me of the overwhelming power of belief.  Belief in ghosts made Jack Torrance want to hack up his wife and son with an axe, and belief in Stanley Kubrick's secret agenda seems to have made at least one viewer sacrifice his job and strain his relationship with his wife and son, in favor of spending countless hours studying the background details in THE SHINING.  Cue nervous laughter.

Paranoia can be entertaining.  I'm fascinated by the idea that one person views Kubrick's narrative as an allegory for Native American genocide, while another person views it as a hidden message about the Holocaust.  There's a hilarious bit about Kubrick's secret message to Stephen King, and a pretty cool sequence where one viewer plays the entire movie backward and forward at the same time in order to illustrate the parabolic nature of the narrative.  This sort of reminded me of the "Dark Side of Oz" mash-up, which is entertaining enough when you're really stoned. 

In the end, I was most impressed by the filmmaker's ability to build an entertaining film entirely out of movie clips used under the fair use doctrine -- which I know from experience is a real challenge.  Did ROOM 237 change the way I think of THE SHINING?  Not really.... but it did make me want to see THE SHINING on the big screen, so that I can look for my own damn ghosts in the background.

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: (Cue nervous laughter.)

30 Days of Nightmares #9: VANISHING ON 7th STREET (2011)

 
The Story: A major blackout in Detroit leaves a small group of survivors searching for answers and running from shadows.  (I know, this is a vague synopsis... but, trust me, it's better that way.)

Expectations: I was imagining something like a supernatural version of THE TRIGGER EFFECT.  With Brad (SESSION 9) Anderson in the director's chair, I figured on plenty of well-crafted suspense. The cast also seemed promising.  I'm not crazy about Hayden Christensen, but I like John Leguizamo and Thandie Newton.

Reaction: The film plays out a classic TWILIGHT ZONE "what if" scenario.  What if everyone in the world suddenly disappeared... and the shadows came alive? The visual effect of the "shadow people" reminds me a bit of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's film KAIRO, about a computer virus that turns people into Rorschach ink stains on the wall.  That sounds silly, but it's pretty unnerving because the filmmaker knows how to create an atmosphere of existential dread.  In the end, KAIRO takes an emotional toll by providing an emotional approximation of purgatory, devoid of hope and meaning.  It leaves you with the overwhelming feeling that life is full of suffering and death is not the end. 

VANISHING ON 7th STREET is not as powerful, although the filmmaker seems to be aiming at more or less the same effect.   This too is a film about entropy.  Ever see THE NEVERENDING STORY?  The shadow people in this movie are kind of like The Nothing... They consume everything.  When four survivors are finally boxed in by the encroaching darkness, one of them decides that their only hope is to will themselves to keep existing. 

It's a great intellectual premise, but it doesn't quite work because none of the characters seem particularly strong-willed, and no other attempt is made to explain what's going on.   I like a good existential mystery as much as anyone, but I need something to hold onto.  What caused everyone else to disappear?  John Leguizamo talks smack about particle physics and the Lost Colony of Roanoke... but mostly he seems like a paranoid crank who didn't know what was going on in the world before everyone else disappeared.  Why are only these four people left?  Thandie Newton talks about how "we've all done bad things" and suggests that maybe they are being punished... but, since the film never offers any details about those "bad things," it seems like she's just paying lip service to an old horror movie cliche.  How do these characters grow and change over the course of the story?  They don't, really.  At the beginning of the film, Hayden Christiansen is a self-absorbed jerk (it takes him a ridiculously long time to even notice that everyone around him has literally disappeared), and in the end he tries to save a kid... and that too seems like a half-hearted concession to a familiar storytelling structure.

There's no question Brad Anderson knows how to create a creepy atmosphere, but this movie illustrates that you can't really frighten viewers unless you create a believable story with sympathetic characters.  One of the most obvious -- and most frequently overlooked -- truths in horror cinema is that characterization is everything.  Even in a bad zombie movie, you can only have one or two characters falling for the delusion that the zombies are still their friends and loved ones, then getting eaten because they're too blind to accept the truth.... If everyone behaves that way, then they deserve to get eaten.  In VANISHING, when the shadows try to lure the characters to their deaths by whispering familiar or convenient truths, every... single... character... falls for that shit.   After a while, I realized I was watching a movie about a group of people who deserve to die became they can't cope with the new reality.   Maybe I was supposed to be horrified by that realization.  Instead, I was left feeling that an ambitious setup like this deserves stronger characters.

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: For me, the movie peaked early, when I realized that the shadows were alive.... and constantly reaching out for the living, like the shadow of Nosferatu.  It's a brilliant concept, and the visual effects work well.

30 Days of Nightmares #8: RUBBER (2010)

The Story: A telekinetic serial killer is stalking the inhabitants of Antelope Valley, littering the desert with headless corpses.  Oh yeah, and the serial killer is a car tire named Robert.

Expectations: A blog reader pointed me toward this film when I was doing the last "30 Days" blogathon.  I was intrigued by the concept, which is completely off the wall...  I expected a schlocky horror film with a lot of laughs.

Reaction: From the opening scene, it was clear that the filmmaker was not going for schlocky horror.  Aside from the spectacle of exploding heads (think SCANNERS), this is an arch comedy.  As such, it is alternately ingenious and annoying, hilarious and (forgive me) tiresome.  It would have made a great short film, but padded out to roughly 90 minutes, it overstays its welcome.  To be fair, of course nobody would have seen it as a short film... so I guess I can't be too hard on the filmmaker.  And I have to admit that this is the most unique genre film I've seen in a long time.  It was genuinely suspenseful in the sense that I never knew what was going to happen next.

You know what it reminded me of more than anything?  The beach ball alien in John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon's student film DARK STAR.  Just imagine if that entire film had revolved around the alien.  And imagine if the other characters became aware that they were in a movie with a beach ball alien, and then started commenting on their situation -- not unlike the way that Lt. Doolittle talks phenomenonlogy with a "smart" bomb in DARK STAR.  Clever, yes, but also designed for a very particular sense of humor / a very narrow audience.   I'd like to recommend this film to my friend Carlton, who lives for old episodes of FAWLTY TOWERS and RED DWARF, and never tires of discussions about phenomenology.  As for the rest of you... well... in the spirit of the film: Why the hell not?

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: Are you kidding?

By the way, Robert's cousin says hello.

30 Days of Nightmares #7: THE HOLE (2009)

 
The Story: Three kids discover a bottomless pit in the basement of a suburban tract house... but their biggest problem isn't the danger of falling in.  It's the danger of what comes out.  Reminds me of that old Nietzsche adage... "When you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."

Expectations: I've been hearing about this movie for a few years now.  Initially I was very excited about seeing a new horror film from Joe Dante, who made some of the most memorable sci-fi/horror movies of my youth (including GREMLINS, EXPLORERS, INNER SPACE and THE 'BURBS) and who recently directed two of the best episodes of MASTERS OF HORROR.   Then THE HOLE... well... fell into a hole.  It took a couple of years for the film to get a U.S. distributor, and I must admit that while I was waiting, my enthusiasm waned. That's not really a fair reaction, but I'm being honest.   When it looked like the film might not get released at all, I started to wonder if THE HOLE was tonally-challenged.  Joe Dante's films have always straddled a fine line between family-friendly playfulness and dark (sometimes savage) humor... and I sometimes think that his sensibilities as a filmmaker may be stuck in the 1980s, when films like GREMLINS and THE GOONIES (films that, as Harlan Ellison pointed out, could be both mean-spirited and "family-friendly") didn't seem so out of place.

Reaction: THE HOLE is not mean-spirited.  It's also not scary, which may explain why the film was so hard to market.  About halfway through the movie, I decided that THE HOLE would have made a good anthology TV series in the 1980s.  In each episode, a new character would find the bottomless pit.  When they looked inside, their deepest, darkest fear would come to life.  In the film version, there are only three characters and three main fears.  The first owes a lot to the best-known segment of TRILOGY OF TERROR, as well as POLTERGEIST.  (Killer clown dolls are a reliable gimmick, but it's been done better.)  The second is sort of a lightweight J-Horror episode.  (Again: It's been done better.)  The third has the most potential dramatic weight, but because the filmmaker plays out the conflict almost entirely within the realm of fantasy, the scares are ultimately not very affecting.  The sum total is a perfectly entertaining film, but not one that left a deep impression on this viewer's mind.

Honestly, I wish I had stronger feelings about the movie.  I like the concept, and the theme about overcoming one's fears by facing them.  The acting and the visual storytelling are accomplished.  But the whole thing was a little too light for my taste... too much Harry Potter, not enough real horror.  That said, I can't help wondering what I would have thought of THE HOLE if I had seen it in 1985.

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: The spectre of child abuse hangs over the story, but remains in the shadows.  I suppose I should look on that as an admirable attempt to help younger viewers cope with a serious subject matter without causing them nightmares.  

30 Days of Nightmares #6: BLACK SHEEP (2006)

 
The Story: Night of the Living Dead + The Wolf Man... with sheep. 

Expectations: Once upon a time, Peter Jackson invented the Kiwi horror movie -- an utterly outrageous hybrid of black comedy and cartoonish gore.  I first heard about this cinematic mutation from Fangoria magazine, via an article on the filmmaker's 1992 slapstick zombie movie DEAD/ALIVE.  Fangoria advised, "You've got to see it to believe it."

There's nothing remotely believable about anything that happens in DEAD/ALIVE, but that's not the point.  If you were a horror fan, you had to see it anyway.  After that, I tracked down Jackson's earlier efforts, BAD TASTE and MEET THE FEEBLES.  I will never forget watching MEET THE FEEBLES -- an X-rated farce about angry, horny Muppets with V.D. -- with a group of high school friends.  We were all a bit traumatized.  Since then, Peter Jackson has gone on to slightly bigger projects... but the sensibility of his early films is alive and well -- in BLACK SHEEP.

Reaction: This picture delivers what it promises.  It is chock full of ironic characterizations (the heroine is an animal rights activist, who wants to rescue the flesh-eating sheep), sight gags (a half-naked man alone in a room with a well-groomed ewe doesn't require a punchline -- thank god), and gruesomely inventive practical effects, courtesy of Peter Jackson's company WETA.  Obviously this film isn't for everyone.  If you've read this far, then you've been warned.  You already have a pretty good idea of whether or not this is your kind of entertainment.  All I can say is that it will make for interesting dinner conversation.

Most Nightmare-Worthy Moment: You haven't lived until you've seen a zombie sheep bite off a man's you know what.  (Yup.)