Tag Archives: horror

Chronicle Chronicle 5 star

April 19th, 2013 by surlaroute

Tags: , , , ,

“A lion doesn’t feel guilty when it kills a gazelle; you do not feel guilty when you squash a fly.
And I think that means something. I think that really means something…”

Posting this review I feel a little like I’m finally catching up with myself. When I first saw Chronicle last year it was the Kick-Ass of that year, the movie where I just thought, “well that’s it, nothing’s gonna beat that…” but of course it was early days and there was so much more to see and I was in a place where I just wasn’t writing as much as I’d like to, so I told myself I’d have to watch it again “sometime” in order to really write about it. Before I watched it today again it’d slipped all the way down out of my top ten of 2012. Just wrongness all over and further reason I’m glad I didn’t even post that list yet even if it is April (it’s coming, I promise…)

If Batman Begins was the superhero movie stripped back to its core, I don’t know what Chronicle is… it strips it back so far that it melds with other genres and makes it more pertinent than even the best of other recent efforts could hope to touch. A young man who has as hard a time at home from his father as he does from fellow students at school decides to start filming everything – as evidence, as a journal, just because, who knows? His cousin in an effort to bring him into the world takes him to a party – he meets a couple of people more on his level at the party who show him a weird hole in the ground – the next thing we know, they’re all starting to develop strange powers…

The most incredible thing about Chronicle – even more incredible than its budget – is its under 90 minute running time. I’m always impressed by a 90 minute running time, but the scope of the story here is something else. The way things build from cheap home videos to Jackass style pranking to full on airborne effects extravaganza overwhelms me. The Jackass phase of the movie rings particularly true, the pranking in the supermarket made me laugh as much a second time as I did the first even when it gets a little too mean. Of course eventually one of the boys (Andrew, the one with the troubled homelife) goes too far and ends up causing a car crash – perhaps meaning to just give the vehicle beeping at them on a harsh turn a scare, perhaps not.

It’s an early indicator of the inevitable end those who know these stories might see from the start. As I’ve said many times, I think there’s a difference between predictability and inevitability in movies, especially where tragedy is concerned. Tragedy is all the more tragic if you know what’s going to happen but you can’t do anything to stop it. There’s much in Chronicle that owes a debt not to comic book superheroes but psychological horror – in my limited knowledge on that (I’m sure there’s a much earlier common source because there are so many common details) I’m talking about Stephen King and David Cronenberg in particular. John Farris/Brian De Palma’s The Fury comes to mind too. In the troubled young Andrew there are powerful echoes of Carrie or Firestarter‘s Charlene – a body gifted with an ability completely beyond their mind’s comprehension and led astray by the only ideas at hand of how best to use it. It touches on that basic Twilight Zone-y type fear, like what if a toddler had their finger on the big red button? When Andrew talks about the “apex predator” theory, including the line I opened the review with, that’s when this movie really gets scary and beautiful for me.

The powers of the boys are conveyed with startlingly simple but effective visual effects. Even when occasionally they fall outside the realm of believability the images are so grounded in ideas that they still completely capture the imagination. People bundle this movie into the “found footage” genre because of the way it all happens to be filmed by the characters’ own various cameras (going so far as CCTV footage in the final sequence) – I really think this misses one of the movie’s greatest inventions. As the movie progresses Andrew – who has a surprising knack for the more delicate aspects of his power, a fact that makes some of his friends green and jars wonderfully with his wicked leanings – learns how to hold the camera in midair at a distance. This results in the camerawork becoming more cinematic as the movie progresses, as his power grows. We end up watching from what we would usually term a “crane” angle in scenes ending with Andrew flying up towards the camera and grabbing it to take with him as he passes. We associate the camera with Andrew so completely that in the end (without spoiling things), Andrew becomes the camera. Despite how cutting edge this movie is, I find something about this to be completely, almost profoundly, cinematic.

There are astonishing images in this movie – Andrew blowing apart a spider into its component parts with the muffled sound of his dying mother coughing in pain in another room; or the Space Needle in Seattle, its lights going out, the glass shattering into a mist from which Andrew emerges. What really makes it one of the best movies of 2012 for me, though, is the strength of character that makes this so much more a tragedy than a spectacle. There are no good or bad people here – just victims of circumstance, opportunity and instinct. It’s incredible to me how anyone squeezed so much joy, sadness, scale, and minutia into just 80 minutes.

Evil Dead Evil Dead 3 star

April 19th, 2013 by surlaroute

Tags: ,

Anyone who knows me or reads my reviews will know I’m not the “how dare they?” type that some are when it comes to remakes, especially horror ones – heck, I even have a place in my heart for Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake (I have a review of that but not Hitchcock’s original; just like I’m posting this while there’s only one of my old “barely a” reviews from 2004 of the original on the site, which I guess says it all…). So I’ve been pretty excited about this one for as long as it’s been rumoured, to say nothing of more recently as the buzz started coming in.

For a movie that’s been hyped as the “most terrifying film you will ever experience”, Evil Dead starts boldly slow. After a kind of unnecessary flashback (which sort of reminded me of the opening scene of Exorcist II now I think about it) establishing the “history” of the book that will cause all the trouble (surely just the sight of the flesh-bound tome is enough to tell you all you need to know?), there’s even more kind of unnecessary contrivance to get to the meat we’re all here for. Though a girl going cold turkey is a pretty good excuse for her and a bunch of her friends to hole up in an old cabin in the woods for a while – no matter what condition it’s in upon arrival – it’s evident from the start here how thin the characters are. The brains (brainy enough to have a good stab at interpreting the contents of the evil book, but not strong enough to resist the many warnings scrawled within its pages), the brawn, the blond, etc – I actually found myself wondering how many, shall we say, less informed viewers will see this and think it’s maybe somehow ripped off or at least related to last year’s Cabin in the Woods.

Much has been said of this movie’s more “serious” approach compared to the original which people remember as being as funny as it was scary and I’ve found myself agreeing with the bemused likes of Robert Florence on Twitter who wrote, “I don’t get these reviews that criticise the new Evil Dead for not being as ‘fun’ or ‘funny’ as the original. They’re thinking of ED2 right?” In an interview on Mark Kermode’s Radio 5 film show, the film’s director Fede Alvarez claimed that Sam Raimi had said he always intended for the original to be plain scary while Kermode countered quoting Raimi from an earlier interview of his where Raimi said he always intended for it to be “the three stooges with blood and guts for custard pies”. I think what we need to do is wonder why Raimi made the much more genuinely funny Evil Dead 2 more of a remake itself than a sequel and I believe it’s likely, like any artist, Raimi was striving for a very particular tone that was an exact degree to one side of the line between comedy and horror – two genres that have always been intertwined (another horror legend Wes Craven has often stated he directs “scares” with much the same attention to timing as the greatest comedy minds) – and he felt after the first movie and given more resources that it was worth another shot.

None of this changes the fact that the first movie, on its surface, is more scary and nasty than it is funny. The laughs come (for me, at least – and I’ve watched it twice in the past couple of years – and again, tonight, just to check – with no diminishment of its impact) because its pace, the sheer barrage of horror, is just so relentless, particularly in the last half hour, and that’s the one thing that this new rendition is frequently lacking. There are so many places where the action slows or stops completely for more discussion and explanation of what’s going on – enough, at least, that my mind wandered, and I began mentally composing this review. Which is great because I didn’t want this to be another movie I fail to write about, but of course doesn’t speak well for the movie.

But I’ll be honest, what I really wanted from this movie was what I’d heard about in recent weeks – a number of horror directors/fans on Twitter have raved about how gory the movie is, and when those people are raving about such things, it’s hard not to get one’s hopes up. On this count, at least, and it’s really the only count that matters, Evil Dead does not disappoint. Almost all varieties of squeamishness are catered for, including my own which is pretty niche in the genre. My personal squirm inducer? Needles, craft knives, small, seemingly innocuous things. One of the horror films that always gets to me is the original 1981 Halloween II – in that movie, set in a hospital, people are variously killed by syringes, scalpels, one person simply slips in blood on the floor and bangs his head badly on the floor (oddly the worst one for me, completely non-violent, just awfully unfortunate and sad). Here, you get almost all those things (the scalpel replaced with the aforementioned craft knife) in just one scene – with a girl cutting her own face off as an aperitif. All of this, as has been mentioned often in promotional interviews, is done with practical effects, not computer effects, and this is probably this movie’s killer move. To make one of my wild comparisons, the practical gore here works in a similar way as the live singing did in Les Misérables (whatever my personal feelings about that movie are). Though live singing – especially as thorough as they did on Les Mis – had rarely been done before, practical effects are almost as rare these days so they come as just as pleasant a surprise. Couple this with some fantastically claustrophobic set and sound design and it’s really hard not to recommend this one despite its relative emptiness, and it’s one I’ll probably watch again more often than needed. There’s plenty of homage to the original to keep the fans happy (and stick around till after the credits to be real happy) and it bodes well for the future of mainstream horror.

Exorcist II: The Heretic Exorcist II: The Heretic 3 star

March 12th, 2013 by surlaroute

Tags: ,

“Does great goodness draw evil upon itself?”

(I just found this whole review in my drafts, I think I wrote it some time between Halloween and New Year – I think there’s a lot to be written about this movie regarding the plot, as messed up as it might be… I think the movie really has a lot to say based around that line above, it just majestically fails to say it… it won’t be the last time I watch it though…)

I’m sort of surprised I haven’t written about this one before, then again, slightly not. It’s a tough one. For while I agree that compared to the original this is barely worth the celluloid it’s printed on, I think taken on its own merits it’s nowhere near as bad as its reputation either. Director John Boorman has spoken of the fact he deliberately made a movie that was practically the anti-thesis to what audiences at large mistakenly perceived (and continue to perceive, alas) as the original movie’s raison d‘être – to shock and be nasty. It’s not worth really talking about how wrong this starting block was except to mention it – if you don’t see the great good in The Exorcist, I feel sorry for you…

So this doesn’t fit into what I would consider as the real Exorcist series – which would be the original, William Peter Blatty’s mostly unrelated follow-up The Ninth Configuration, and Exorcist III which re-united us with Damien Karras and Detective Kinderman – so what? What it does offer is the return of Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil, now troubled by her vague memories of what happened in the original movie; also the return of Kitty Winn as her mother’s assistant Sharon; a brief glimpse of Max Von Sydow out of old age make-up doing the “first exorcism” that is spoken of in the original (and would feature in the prequel “The Beginning” / “Dominion”); a haunting return to the house in Washington, standing just as we left it (for a time, at least…); some stunning photography by William A. Fraker; frankly incredible visual effects in the final reel (notwithstanding the awful recreation of Regan’s possession make-up/voice…); and a simply awesome score by Ennio Morricone.

If a lot of this sounds like mere aesthetic pleasure, I’ll be honest, it mostly is. Plotwise the movie frequently falls down. I’ve seen both versions and they both feel like they’ve been tampered with in a desperate attempt to make it all cohere (the short version only available on VHS is far worse in this regard, I seem to remember, though), and yes there are parts that are downright laughable. But if you don’t get just a little unsettled by the opening scene, or that strange first appearance of “possessed Regan” grappling with the doctor’s heart; or moved by Morricone’s “Regan’s Theme” over the autistic girl, Regan on the rooftop, or the closing moments; or just drop dead at how gorgeous Blair is here (okay, maybe just me, but I had to mention it: she’s never looked more beautiful), I really think you’re missing something slightly wonderful, albeit disastrously fleeting.

Twixt Twixt 2 stars

February 12th, 2013 by surlaroute

Tags: ,

I’ve been meaning to watch Twixt for a long time but I didn’t really know what form it would be best consumed in. Francis Ford Coppola planned to take the movie on the road as Kevin Smith did Red State with an added twist (hence the title, I suppose): many alternate takes and scenes were shot during production and the movie would be assembled “live”, remixed (hence the title, I suppose), in front of different audiences to produce a different film every time. How this could be reproduced in a home format is anyone’s guess (although I’m sure it’s possible). So, I don’t know if the version I saw is the best version.

A “bargain basement Stephen King” writer (played by Val Kilmer, looking even more like he could play Jim Morrison at death’s door, especially as he swigs liquor) enters a small town to sell his book (the town is so small that there is no bookstore: he sets up in the hardware store). The tone is strange, tongue-in-cheek-ish, thanks to a Twilight Zone-like narration by none other than Tom Waits. Kilmer meets Elle Fanning, seemingly his only fan in town, but for some reason she won’t (or can’t) come back with him to the place he’s staying at to get a book signed. By the way Fanning is shot (hauntingly but beautifully) it’s pretty clear what’s going on. Then he runs into Edgar Allan Poe…

Twixt is full of beautifully shot images (and one extraordinary moment I’ve never seen before – fangs pushing braces off a person’s teeth as they grow) but the remix concept shows. Perhaps, as I wrote of the similarly conceived Tracey Fragments (Tracey: Refragmented), if there’s so much other footage maybe one day a more coherent movie will emerge of it. I watched it in a double bill with Hick and it falls into the same category for me – forgettable movies lifted higher than they deserve by a couple of my favourite young actresses.

Room 237 Room 237 4 star

February 12th, 2013 by surlaroute

Tags: , ,

Room 237 opens with a surely deliberate attempt to cheekily mislead. We see footage from Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut, only… is Tom Cruise looking at a poster of The Shining? People less familiar with Kubrick might accept it as actual footage, like the rest of the footage that makes up the bulk of the image portion of this documentary, perhaps knowing or having heard of Kubrick’s more subtle intertextuality (a 2001 soundtrack album is hard to miss in one scene of A Clockwork Orange, for example; Quilty refers to himself as “Spartacus” at the beginning of his Lolita; there are many YouTube montages of breathtakingly similar shots from all his films). Even Kubrick fans, though, might think to themselves, “I can’t have missed that… can I?”

The Shining poster doesn’t appear in Eyes Wide Shut but this moment does come back into one’s mind later when some of the more visual theories about The Shining (the one that really knocked me back was the pattern of the carpet reversing from shot to shot) are discussed and footage is shown as “evidence”. I don’t doubt for a second that the other footage presented here is untampered-with, but I guess what I’m saying is, boy does this documentary make you want to go back and watch the movie again (and I’ve watched it a lot recently, working through Taschen’s Kubrick Archives book and the recent Movie Geeks United Kubrick series).

Speaking of those other extraordinary Kubrick works (the Taschen and Movie Geeks United podcast series – particularly the latter’s episode on The Shining – both musts for any Kubrick fan), what most impressed me here was that Room 237 never felt redundant. Even when discussing theories I’d heard before, the use of Kubrick’s own footage only hammered it home all the more. There’s an enormous disclaimer right at the start of the movie and I’m assuming it’s the only way they could get away with using so much of the man’s own imagery in conjunction with often controversial ideas of what he meant by it. It’s one of those documentaries that benefits hugely from this somewhat official blessing – like the use of the Sherman Brothers music in a documentary I recently watched, The Boys, or the slick old horror documentary Terror in the Aisles hosted by Donald Pleasence, it makes it so much more than if it were just a series of talking heads (which is essentially what the soundtrack consists of). It’s more a jumping off point for infinite further discussion than a definitive collection of theories and interpretations, but the fact that it managed to thrill me so much by the end after having heard so many of the stories before is the highest recommendation I can give.

Excision Excision 5 star

February 11th, 2013 by surlaroute

Tags: , , , ,

“If I do get into heaven, and my relatives have been watching over me, a lot of relationships may have been compromised.”

I can’t exactly say this wasn’t what I expected because from first shot to last, Excision is as blood-drenched as any horror movie I’ve seen, and that’s all I really wanted or expected from it. Shortly before this, I saw American Mary (which I’ll review soon – I intend to watch it again first) and from the first scene there I really expected this decade’s May, but in the end wasn’t exactly satisfied. It was a thrill then, with every passing minute of Excision, to realise that the weirdness I craved was right here. Having watched it twice now, and with few notable titles yet to see from last year, I’m fairly sure this was my favourite movie of 2012 by a long way.

To explain the story without spoiling anything, it actually resembles American Mary in a lot of ways. A young woman with aspirations to be a surgeon finds the more standard route to that profession, shall we say, blocked to her (in American Mary it’s more of a money/misogyny thing; here, the young woman is the high school weirdo). Where the Mary of American Mary is (initially, at least – but compared to Pauline here, totally) balanced even in her alternate pursuits, however, Pauline here is clearly troubled inside. The first shot of the movie is one of many insights into her mind that punctuate the film, and where most of the gore is seen – two Paulines face each other in a clinical blue room. One of them seems to be in horrific pain, blood pouring from her mouth – the other is quite the opposite, seemingly more orgasmic with every drop of blood she sees come out of the other. Pauline often comes out of these grotesque visions visibly aroused – there’s no question she’s not “normal”. Whether you take this movie to heart as much as I did I guess will depend on where you draw the line between fantasies and reality.

AnnaLynne McCord’s Pauline here is played to lip-curling precision, if anything in fact out-weirding Angela Bettis’s May, but the focus isn’t just on the oddball teen. The surprise here is the equal attention given to the parents (Traci Lords – I thought she was Hope Davis till I saw the credits! amazing performance – and Roger Bart). Their own struggle in dealing with one daughter who’s a misfit and another with cystic fibrosis is given so much weight I imagine my sympathies will shift each time I watch this movie in future in the same way as when I watch The Bad Seed depending on my mood. The mother is a horrible character, spouting unbelievably narrow views at each dinner scene (where the movie most clearly pays homage to American Beauty), and in a flashback to Pauline’s near-drowning telling her father (after he gives her a last minute kiss of life), “You have a cold sore on your lips, you should’ve waited for the lifeguard!” But there is something there that tells you she can’t help it any more than Pauline can, that she’s doing her best with everything she’s been directly or indirectly, for better or worse, taught is right.

I’ve seen a lot of comments on the movie saying the ending was predictable but I think that’s kind of the point – the inevitability of the final unbearable scene underlines even the funniest moments leading up to it. Myself, I had an inkling of where it was going, but not of who the real victim would wind up being, and that reveal broke my heart profoundly. The writer/director Richard Bates, Jr joked on Twitter recently, “Some people say Excision’s a horror film. Others say it’s a comedy. I call it a period piece.” You’ll get it when you see it, but I can honestly take it as a serious statement too – with its precise tonal balance of extreme gore, the darkest comedy, and final tragic pain, it speaks volumes about how unbalanced people end up actually acting out the horrific things in their head at this precise moment in time. It’s the American Beauty of horror movies.

I Am Nancy I Am Nancy 4 star

February 1st, 2013 by surlaroute

Tags: , ,

“I’m Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street.” “Oh really. Where’s Robert?”

You’d think I would’ve had enough of Nightmare on Elm Street extras after the 8 hours of Never Sleep Again and all the other Elm Street stuff I spent weeks watching a couple of years ago but I’ve actually been looking forward to seeing this, which has now seemingly been rebranded as “Never Sleep Again 2”, for over a year now. I don’t really know which is the higher praise – that it more than deserves to sit beside the vast array of material in Never Sleep Again, or that it made me appreciate again the original movie – which I’ve said before is one of those movies that have kind of grown a little stale to me over time through over-watching – more than any other horror documentary I’ve ever seen.

As the title suggests, this is billed as Heather Langenkamp’s story but in all honesty her contribution is not as total as I expected. The documentary is split into two major parts: footage of a horror convention celebrating the original Nightmare’s 25th anniversary where Heather spends most of her time asking people “what about Nancy?” and looking for an action figure of herself (one that doesn’t suck – she finds a “freezing cheerleader” in one Nightmare board game but no Nancy), and a great extended interview with the creator of Freddy and Nancy, Wes Craven. This interview is intercut with another interview with his daughter Jessica, holding a baby daughter of her own – Jessica explains that she may have “inspired” Nancy by saying of Craven’s Swamp Thing 2 years before Nightmare, why are the girls always falling down in your movies?

The documentary reaches some real moments of honesty towards the end – I’m incredibly cynical about emotional moments in these things since the whole reality TV boom but (though not quite as tragicomic as Best Worst Movie) there’s an awkwardness to the human interactions here that I believe can’t be faked. The parade of fans lining up to get her autograph in the convention segment is really something to behold – a worrying moment has one fan pull out a machete to be signed, then there’s a deaf girl with her father, a lot of young children, a guy who wants to tell Heather all about his recent break-up, and most notably a British girl in a wheelchair who moves Heather to tears telling her what Nancy and the Elm Street movies meant for her. Langenkamp’s mission is to get all these people, and us, to “be Nancy!” through the dark times – it sounds corny, but I couldn’t believe how good this movie made me feel.

Summer of Fear aka Stranger in Our House Summer of Fear aka Stranger in Our House 3 star

February 1st, 2013 by surlaroute

Tags: ,

Wes Craven says in the DVD commentary (which is actually more enjoyable than the movie itself) that he views Summer of Fear as an important movie in his career because it was his first 35mm production with a studio that got him into the Director’s Guild. So I guess you could say it’s important in the sense that Cop Out was important for Kevin Smith (albeit for opposite reasons). For me, it’s a TV movie that probably should’ve disappeared, but what are you gonna do? It stars Linda Blair and fans (including myself) are going to want to watch it.

The story is essentially Poison Ivy (which I realise came later but for me is pretty hard to beat for what it is) with a little witchcraft thrown in, which ironically kind of makes it less scary. The use of Blair so soon after The Exorcist isn’t wasted – one scene actually has her in bed screaming “Motherrrrr!” as her skin erupts in boils. I love Linda Blair but she’s not too good here excepting one scene featuring the death of an animal – unsurprising given her commitment to animal rights, PETA, etc in later life (producer Max Keller says in the commentary she brought “45 dogs” to the set even then). Aesthetically she’s as nice to watch as ever, if not as adorable in the horse scenes as in Wild Horse Hank (was that really made a year after this?) or as shameless in the trashier scenes as her later more exploitative work like Savage Streets.

Particularly in the effects laden (and you can imagine how hilarious that is on a 70s TV budget is) finale it’s odd Wes Craven followed his hyper-real debut Last house on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes with this, but it clearly served its purpose for him and it’s not a complete waste of time if you have an interest in any of the participants.