My semi-annual festival of horror films has begun. Aren’t you excited? Can’t you smell the garish red corn syrup? Hear the resounding echoes of the tortured shrieking? Envision the amputated limbs, wriggling as they hit the shag carpeting? ‘Tis the season!
I began the other evening with a Swedish vampire flick called Frostbitten, and as the title suggests, it relentlessly plays to the sort-of-funny, nerdy-teens-going-vampy, hip-slash-gory low-budget conventions of eight thousand Hollywood versions. Yet there’s something there, for the fan. As a starter, the disc opens with coming attractions for “classic” vampire movies–two old cool-looking Hammer flicks, and another piece of low-budget trash from an earlier decade. That got me right in the spirit of things. I had hopes during the opening credits, which used some cool animation of snow falling (with hints of something moving about in the background, about to emerge), that the film would explode into innovative, genre-bending fun. Instead, it gave a small firecracker pop and became some very familiar, but still reasonably entertaining genre-bound fun. The last ten minutes seemed strangely incoherent, as if the budget had run out and they’d just strung together various shots without fills and any sense of logic. Still, it is WAY more fun with the same so-north-that-night-lasts-a-month premise than the yawner 30 Days of Night, and it has a goofy sensibility (some great dog jokes) that makes it worth a Halloween look.
I’ve talked to myself about Alex de la Iglesia before (and the sole stray comment from Gio, while nice, suggests that I’ll be talking to myself again here), and I’d note again that he has an impeccable eye for the Hitchockian composition, and he approaches the melodrama of suspense and horror with the almost-comic glee of an Almodovar (his one-time producer). As part of a series called 6 Films to Keep You Awake, his The Baby’s Room is alas a pretty conventional, relatively tame (not much gore, not much sex, not much of the lurid sensibility that colors his other films) but (huzzah) pretty entertaining, reasonably spooky ghost thriller. It has a great central premise, plucked from any number of J-horror films: the spooky ghost appearing on video or in mirrors. The kicker here is that the thing pops up on the baby monitor, looming over the infant. The film is never terrifying, remains too familiar to shock or truly spook. But I enjoyed it. (The disc comes with two films, and the second — Jaime Balaguero’s “To Let” — has a rep for being great, so I’ll post on that soon. And more thereafter….)
It’s Jaume. And J. Balaguero’s To Let is a slick, fast, fun (in genre terms fun) horror — a couple show up to see an apartment, whereupon they endure, and endure, and endure, and endure.
But unlike a lot of the Saw (no good) or Hostel (not too bad) variants on torturing the well-to-do, this one has real empathy for its protagonists and seems to be having a ton of fun with the suspense more than with the excruciating depiction of excruciation. A kick. So–all told, the Spanish series 6 Films is off to a heckuva start on this first disc. (Two films per.) I have heard great things about Paco Plaza’s A Xmas Tale, so it’s jumped up the queue–and I have Balaguero’s longer The Nameless hopefully for the weekend…
Mike, on the vampire theme, are you watching True Blood, or are you not currently an HBO subscriber? It is certainly not character-driven, and almost everyone is playing a stereotype (the sassy black girl, the dumb redneck, the kindly grandma, the gay bartender). Even the two leads are weak (Anna Paquin’s accent slips more often than Sarah Palin says maverick). But I’m enjoying the vampire world, and the analogies between that world and an underground gay culture (starting with the “God hates fangs” intro) are interesting, if not terribly original. Anyone else watching?
I’m HBOless, but I’ve heard things much like what you say about True Blood — that it’s better, or at least more fun, than the sum of its parts.
There’s apparently something of a vampire resurgence. (Did they ever go away? Go bug Pat Day.) I’ve been reading these raves about a Finnish vampire flick called Let the Right One In…
Skip Balaguero’s The Nameless. Its set-up is sort of intriguing — first a murdered daughter reappears, calling her mom out of the blue, asking for help. Then investigations reveal a sinister cult interested in pure pain as a route toward pure evil, with a goal of …
… but there endeth the fun. I am not really sure what mutilation, scarring, and pain would get you; there were hints of a Lovecraftian reach, that some Things would be awakened, but that was maybe just me seeking a more intriguing punch to the bland concoction I was watching. Even the slow revelations about the cult drag, ’cause we learn in the tiring horror-story mode of experts/informants giving long tracts of exposition. It’s got one nice little kick at the end, but the film never really gets under the skin, or freaks you out. And there’s a whole maudlin subplot where two main characters are grappling with grief.
All of this probably played quite effectively in the original novel by Ramsey Campbell.
COMING SOON: Feast II (holy shit! didn’t even know the first had a sequel), another in the Spanish 6 films, a collection of horror shorts from Fantastic Fest, and this odd little b-movie many people love called Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer. I may try The Happening, too, but I think that’ll be a different kind of horrible.
No, no, no– The Happening is more tedious than horrible. Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel give two of the worst performances you’ve ever seen (though Zooey is lovely). Perhaps M. Night was going for some kind of Brechtian alienation thing…
oh goody! it arrives tomorrow!
Sped through The Happening in about a half hour (mostly at 60x speed). Man this is horrible. Tedious yes, but uninspired, flat, and poorly–even embarrassingly–written (it seems to be about menacing clouds or trees or something). Do you think it was a joke? A contractural fart in Hollywood’s general direction? Usually you can rely on M. Night to provide some high end craft, and hell, Tak Fujimoto is the DP, but this far exceeded my low expectations. Open the envelope, reseal, and rush to the post office. If you’re lucky it may arrive in time for a good film (Noise!!!) to get out before the day concludes.
Paco Plaza’s A Xmas Tale was great fun, an homage to crappy horror films (one egregiously terrible zombie/action film recreated at key moments through this story), to being a kid in love with crappy horror films (and/or The Karate Kid), to movies about kids in love with crappy horror films, and a fine little funny/thrilling diversion on its own merits. Five friends find a woman dressed in a santa suit at the bottom of a hole in the woods, at first apparently dead, but soon revealed to be alive–and a dangerous criminal, on the run with loot from a bank hold-up. The kids decide (fueled on too much crappy film knowledge) to keep her there until she gives them the money…. and away we go.
It’s shot with great good humor, in script, direction, and acting. (When the santa-bedecked criminal is first revealed to one of our heroes, in a gorgeous overhead crane shot framing him at the edge of the hole, the red-suited body splayed below, he mutters “Guess that means no presents this year.”)
This might even appeal to you non-horror fans — it’s never really scary/horror, and it’s a blast to watch.
Feast 2 will convert no one to a newfound love of horror. But its cinematographic pizzazz and astute self-mocking love (and deconstruction) of genre conventions will perhaps counterbalance its equally firm commitment to relentless (and relentlessly silly) gore.
In a nutshell, horny beasts are unleashed on a town. In the last film, the protagonists tried to figure things out from their entrapment in an isolated bar; in this one, the protagonists are unable to find safe haven, and are on the run for even temporary respite from the limb-tearing skin-dissolving love of the creatures.
This goes on too long, and I’m less surprised and excited by the flashes of style and wit than I was with the first one. It’s mainly pitched directly to nutjobs like myself, already deeply in love with this genre of gory-creature-black-comedies.
That said, there’s a late scene of heroics involving a baby (who turns out to be the director’s nephew, and the actual son of the actor ostensibly saving him) that is gleefully, perversely horrifying. My friends, Feast 2 earned my respect as that child met his untimely end.
Ah me. Stuart Gordon’s Stuck quite literally gives the estimable Stephen Rea almost nothing to do except moan in pain and register another layer of surprise at how he’s being treated. Stuck starts with the true story of a woman who, having hit and severely injured a man late at night, drove home with him embedded in her windshield, and let him die in the garage. Fearing that the implications (about narcissism and modern culture blah di blah) might not be clear enough from a man left to die in a fucking windshield in a garage, Gordon’s film sets up a back-story whereby Rea’s man is kicked around by a landlord and by a job interview and is homeless (and only finds any compassion from another homeless guy–and later a family of illegal immigrants–get it? you picking up on this? no? well, then…) and also encourages the minimally-talented Mena Suvari to go bigger in her performance (no, even bigger. Almost there–a bit more?). Shite.
The Danish The Substitute is a pale imitation of The Faculty which makes little to no sense, but at least has a cold open with an omniscient narrator telling us about the alien culture without love which sends an emissary to infiltrate and steal from us that one characteristic that makes us truly human. And, trust me on this, that is some cool fucked-up shit when it’s intoned in Danish over a picture of the globe. After that, the film gets increasingly wearisome.
The Onion A.V. Club just ran a feature on straight-to-dvd horror films, and noted two “keepers,” so I grabbed one of ’em, the Italian The Last House in the Woods, which makes Eli Roth’s campy karaoke versions of ’70s exploitation horror seem like Bergman. God damn you, AV Club–so normally trustworthy! Actually, this is really bad, a bad made worse by a vague sense that the filmmakers might know it’s “bad,” might be smirking about how bad it is, but not knowing it’s really bad, and not just “bad,” which makes it worse yet.
Re-Cycle The Pang Brothers (2006). Watching Executive Koala gave me a hankering for some weird chunk of Asian horror cinema, so I gave this one a go. The Pang Brothers directed the original Hong Kong horror film The Eye, The Eye 2, and apparently The Eye 3, which is also known as The Eye Infinity and The Eye 10 (insert joke about LA’s real-life horror of traffic on the I-10).
They also made the laughable looking Bangkok Dangerous, but laughable for doofus Nicolas Cage more than anything else. Maybe their early Thai version of the film is decent?
So anyway,here we have a pretty woman writer, famous for her romance novels. At the premier of a movie adapted from one of her books, it slips out that she’s switching from love stories to ghost stories. Creepy things happen in her apartment… So far there’s nothing much going on even worth mentioning. But after getting into an elevator which forces her out on the wrong floor, the whole movie goes ape. There are witches, zombies, floating mountains, junkyards full of giant toys, graveyards, magic bridges, a mountain of books (that rains more books) and one really creepy bit that could never ever be put into an American horror movie. I think even in Hong Kong this plot point might have caused a bit of controversy. Re-Cycle is by no means classic, but it has more than a 100 visual tricks, and a lot of them work really well. Alas, they also go on for way too long, as if the Pang Bros. were in love with their own images. A good edit could have shaved some more minutes from it with no harm.
The two main actresses are surprisingly strong. (the lead, Angelica Lee, was in The Eye).
Also, it was the closing film in the Un Certain Regard competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, according to Wikipedia. Whadayaknow.
I didn’t expect much from this at all, but it’s definitely got style.
how gory is it?
It’s not gory at all. Creepy. The one scene that I am purposefully not describing too much might be considered a bit gory in a Cronenberg kind of way. But there’s no blood splatter anywhere in this. It’s actually as much of a fantasy as a horror film.
Feast III was bad. What’s interesting is that its shittiness somehow surprised me.
Alien Raiders, on the other hand, worked some low-budget wonder with a tightly-conceived and -constructed story — cold open on a crew of gun-carrying folks in a van, who soon thereafter seize and hold hostage a smalltown supermarket in Arizona. There’s nothing terribly new, either in plot or shot, but it’s damn fun on a small scale, surprising in its efficient technique. I was reminded of great ‘eighties low-budget fun like The Hidden, ‘though be warned that this is even lower-budget, and (perhaps as a result) less loopy strange delight.
Writing this makes me want to see The Hidden again.
Who thought I’d be contributing to this thread? Actually I’m only using it because it has a True Blood reference and there is no thread dedicated to True Blood. The second season ended last night, and I kept watching, but overall I found the whole season deeply disappointing. Apparently the ratings were very high, by HBO standards, which I find surprising, or perhaps I don’t.
The basic problem for me this season was that the series got away from its core concern with the tensions and contradictions surrounding the integration of vampires into human society. One subplot involved a church that was trying to foment a war with the vampires, and a few scenes dealing with a suicide bomber were quite powerful, but it was marginal to the overall story arc. And we never found out what the vampire political reaction would be (though again, there was one lovely scene of an ancient vampire killing himself at dawn in remorse).
Instead a ridiculous story about Maryann, some Dionesyian goddess, took center stage. Nothing happened for several long episodes except mass orgies among the good people of Bon Temps. It appeared to be inserted into the series only to satisfy the “frequent nudity” rating.
And the two nominally central characters — the vampire Bill Compton and his lover, Soukie Stackhouse — became increasingly irritating. They sucked the life out of every scene they were in, so dull and repetitive were their professions of mutual love. I kept hoping the vampire Eric would kill off Bill so that a marginally more interesting character could get some screen time.