Category Archives: Film

My Bloody Valentine (2009)

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MV5BMTkzMDk4MDU0NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODM5MjUxMg@@._V1__SX1859_SY893_You know, I learned something about myself while watching the remake of My Bloody Valentine, presented in 3D and starring that one guy from Supernatural. (No, the other one.) Anyhow, what I learned is that if you create a movie in which a pickaxe goes through someone’s skull and his eyeball shoots halfway into the theater instead of just sitting flatly on the screen, that is pretty much everything I need that movie to do. If it chooses to also include a naked lady running around in anger and/or terror for a solid five minutes of screen time, well, that just goes to show that they understand what 3D is for.[1][2]

Now, would it be nice if they had also included solid dialogue, decent acting from anyone outside of the two male leads, and sufficient direction to get the actually good acting I’ve seen both of them perform in the past? Would it be nice if they had included a little bit more murder variation than the ubiquitous “pierced by pickaxe”? Obviously, yes; but I want to point out, again: eyeball halfway out into the audience. That is some awesome shit. Plus, y’know, completely gratuitous midget. I wonder if there is any full-on midgetsploitation in the horror genre? That could be worth seeing.

[1] That said, 3D porn I think might be a little scary.
[2] I will be the first to admit that I completely lose at feminism when it comes to horror movies. That part of my brain was hardwired long before I realized that there was even a question about gender equality, much less the second or three later when I came down on the side of yes, let’s do that equality thing. So, when I see a naked lady holding a gun on a scuzzy truck driver, or running away from a maniacal pickaxe killer, even though these things are objectively horribly exploitative and would basically never happen to a dude in a horror movie, I don’t care, because that’s what horror movies are, and while I’m probably wrong, I love them for it. I point this all out not so much in my own defense[3] as to give context to the end of the scene, when the naked lady is under an old, crappy motel bed, and the mattress is ripped off, leaving her to fend off the pickaxe killer with only a rusted mattress frame that basically made it look like she was naked and terrified in a chicken-wire cage.[4] It turns out that this is where I draw the line between “Awesome, horror movie nudity!” and “Dude, that’s kind of creepy and uncool.” Now you know!
[3] Because, it’s a really terrible defense. “No, your honor, it’s not that I’m okay with killing people. It’s just, in the context of me not liking this particular person, he pretty much had to be killed by me. Oh? Still guilty? Huh.”
[4] Which is the problem with the movie in a nutshell. It couldn’t decide whether to be campy, or a creepy torture-fetish thing, or psychological, or a mystery, or what. You can turn any of those into a pretty awesome horror movie, but you cannot turn all four of them at once into one. You’d be hard-pressed to pick two and succeed.[5]
[5] And now I’m including actual review material in the footnotes? That’s not cool.

Perkins’ 14

The last Horrorfest review has been delayed, by virtue of the fact that I am a lazy bastard and finally didn’t have a big stack of behind staring at me. A little behind, that’s okay! Um. To be clear, I am referring to my having a backlog of reviews to write, not to Baby and the positive and negative aspects of her back-capacity. Of course, now I’m all distracted by the Jonathon Coulton music in my head.

So, anyway, I saw the last movie, right? Right. Perkins’ 14 has barely a shell of a plot, if you look at it very closely. There’s this guy who kidnapped a bunch of kids ten years ago, for, you know, some reason (which may or may not have been made clear), and now they’re all back to destroy the town they were stolen from, which they do mostly by running around, grabbing people, and eating them. But I’m pretty sure they weren’t zombies. The inexplicably dark and/or flickering sets make it difficult to be sure, of course. And there’s a cop with a dark history related to it all who’s trying to atone for a crime nobody but he believes he committed. A metaphorical crime, you understand. At least, now that I’ve told you. Because, honestly, that would’ve been unclear, right?

But it’s the mood and the philosophical underpinnings that make it work. I read the Thomas Covenant books sometime during early high school at the latest, I think, and almost nothing has stuck with me, except that one book in the second trilogy was too depressing to read, white gold is cooler than yellow gold, and of course the infamous and somewhat inexplicable rape scene right at the start. But what did stick with me was a line from early in… well, one of the books, probably the start of the second trilogy. It explained that there’s only one thing you can do to hurt the man who has already lost everything. You give him something back, but broken. So, one of the things I liked about the movie was that it was entirely based on that premise. It may have actually not had anything but that, so if you don’t find that this resonates with you, the rest of the movie probably won’t work.

Also, though, it kept reminding me of playing Resident Evil 2, and that’s always cool. ‘Cause, you know, chased into and through a weirdly laid out and defectively lighted police station, by things that want to bite you and kill you. So.

Du saram-yida

MV5BMTM0NDU2NzgwMF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMjQxNjQyMw@@._V1__SX1859_SY847_I could look really cool right now, if I had mentioned in a review what I thought at one point over the course of the weekend, that it was odd how in the past 16 Horrorfest movies last year and this year, there have been no more Japanese horror entries since Reincarnation the first year. Then, to my surprise, Voices was populated with Asian people speaking in subtitles! They turned out to be from South Korea, though. And more importantly, it turns out that Korean horror has no particular relation to Japanese horror, which is probably pretty reasonable of an outcome, when you think about it. But during the first moments, I felt unrecognizedly prophetic.

So the deal is, members of a certain family believe they are under a curse, because they keep killing each other for no particular reason. The deaths are scarier than what I’m used to seeing because they’re very matter-of-fact. No dramatic build-up, no terrorized flights through darkened woods, because the people killing you are people you have no reason to distrust, people who have no motive, no beef against you. They just suddenly strike. So, anyway, this is happening, and it’s confusing and motiveless, and maybe there’s a curse, but maybe not, and maybe there’s a surprisingly Western-feeling trickster spirit involved, which I mention not to accidentally spoil things so much as because I’m interested in either the connection between the trickster characters I know about and Korean ones, or else in the parallel but unrelated development of the archetype in vastly divergent cultures. (In particular, I note that Chinese trickster characters I’m aware of are usually beneficial or somewhat heroic, as opposed to the Western ones and apparently Korean ones.)

Interesting movie, in any event, but more for the underpinnings than as a scary movie in its own right. As a scary movie, it was basically fine, in keepng with the expectations I have for Asian horror movies. They are either brilliant, or else acceptable. I suppose I may never see bad ones because of the exportation filter, but for now, my knowledge indicates they are much better craftsmen than we are. Good for y’all, Asia!

Slaughter (2009)

I know what I just said about Autopsy being my favorite. As a pure horror movie, yeah, it was. But I think Slaughter was the best movie I’ve seen so far this weekend. And I’m pretty sure it’s too complexly layered for me to explain why. Although the fact of it is a pretty good indicator, I guess? Without going into the spoiler-laden detail, it tells the story of a troubled girl trying to escape from her abusive past who befriends a younger and possibly more troubled girl who seems to be following the classic Dr. Drew scenario of looking to older men for the approval that her father never gave her. Which would be more Lifetime than Wolf Creek[1], except for the fact that her father seems to be paying rather more attention now! I mean, there’s no proof that he’s killing the men she brings home and feeding them to his pigs. But… well, let’s be honest, I saw this movie at Horrorfest. It’s a good bet he is, all other data being equal. I think that might be what was happening even if there weren’t any pigs, or in fact an isolated, picturesque and yet creepy farm to feed them on. That’s just the way we roll, y’know?

[1] A) I really can’t stop referencing that movie. I guess it made quite an impact! B) The description I read reminded me of Wolf Creek more than the actual experience of Slaughter did, but there’s still some good parallels to be drawn.

Autopsy

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From the frenetic photo-documentary beginning, Autopsy was a movie that knew exactly what it wanted to accomplish, and knew how to do it, too. No screwing around with a long introduction to characters that we all know are mostly going to die soon, or a backstory about how they ended up in a drunken car crash on an abandoned highway. Just some odds and ends of credits, and then bam, plot! Which was about a creepy abandoned hospital in which this one dude is performing experiments to keep his wife alive in some ill-defined and ultimately irrelevant-to-the-story way.

What is relevant is that teens are being separated from each other, experimented on, covered in gore, and otherwise abused for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and thusly falling in with psychopathic medical criminals. And I guess partying at Mardi Gras and consuming alcohol is enough low morality to justify a horoor movie fate. But I could wish for some gratuitous nudity to seal the deal. All that said, I think this was my favorite movie of the Fest so far, because it made no bones about being anything other than what it was: a pure, unadulterated old school horror movie. And yay, that.

The Brøken

Horrorfest III, day 2 opened with The Brøken, starring modern Sarah Connor as the daughter of an American embassy worker in London who wanders the city in a cloud of foreboding and dramatic strings instrumentation. Things happen, for sure. Like, there are doubles climbing out of mirrors to wander around confusing people about one person being in two places at once. And there’s a mysterious car crash where nobody seems interested in the other victim. And most important for our purposes, Lena Headey is pretty sure that her boyfriend has been replaced by a duplicate. Which, considering the mirror-people, is a bit more plausible than anyone around her thinks.

Mostly, though, we have foreboding thoughts, weird flashbacks, dramatic strings, and ominous London backdrops. Let me throw out an example that is representative of what I’m talking about: Lena is going somewhere on the Underground, only she gets scared by an ominous bag lady who is saying foreboding things about the other passengers right before staring at Lena in ominous confusion. So, Lena gets off at the stop, only to discover it’s closed at the surface, the only notice being a handwritten sign at the locked gate. So she wanders around the hallways, easily getting lost despite claims from people I know that the London Underground is easier to navigate than John Doe’s family tree, because that would be the ominous thing to happen. Except for the bag lady perhaps giving a clue about the mirror people, nothing else of plot- or character-advancing status occurs in this entire three-to-four-minute scene. I’d never watch it again, but there’s something very compelling about waiting and waiting and waiting to determine whether there’s a movie buried under all the ominous, strings-laden foreboding.

Dying Breed

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I liked this movie better, I think, when it was Turistas, or maybe Wolf Creek. Or maybe even that Anaconda sequel. But, for the record, there are these research people who go to Tasmania to find evidence of the extinct Tasmanian Tiger, which I guess is a real animal? If it wasn’t for all the pesky animal-bonded cannibals as foreshadowed in the opening scene, they probably would have just done a little dance, made a little love, and generally got down tonight, only to leave empty-handed a little bit later. Instead, you know: terror! So, that happened.

Butterfly Effect: Revelation

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Sometime before I started reviewing things, I saw a cool sci-fi movie in which Ashton Kutcher can relive his past, modify events to make things better, and then wake up out of his memories to find a world of improvements, right? Except, there’s always some kind of unintended consequence that makes things worse, and he just missed the intervening years, so he has to figure out what went wrong, and then go back and fix it better, which will work this time, right? And yeah, it’s pretty cool. You should see it.

I missed the sequel, but Butterfly Effect 3 was my second movie of the festival, and, well… if I wanted to have some minimal grasp of the underpinnings of the world, it’s a good thing I saw the first one. Plus, it’s not really much like they followed exactly those same rules anyway, but at least I knew in advance there’s a dude who came jump back in time and then wander around changing things if he feels like it, despite knowing that it’s usually a bad idea. Only, his murdered high-school girlfriend’s sister comes to him requesting assistance in discovering her murderer. And that can’t hurt anything, right? He certainly won’t accidentally create a serial killer for whom he is usually the police’s prime suspect! …right?

If you can ignore the physics-underpinnings part and just accept that he can go to whenever he wants, etc., the plot is a pretty nice mystery that I figure took me over half the film to work out. Watch for Rachel Miner as a threepeat Horrorfest actress. Good for her!

From Within

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Remember back in November, when I didn’t go to the third Horrorfest and then review a massive pile of movies, and it was very concerning and you were kind of sad to miss out on an entire new batch of movies you will never, ever see yourself, but you at least kind of want to know what it would be like for someone who likes the idea of that kind of thing. Well, there’s good news! As part of an apparent line of mistakes made by the people in charge, whoever they are, it didn’t happen until this weekend instead. So, here we are.

The first flick, From Within, is a real improvement over last year’s mediocre opening. There’s this small generic town that’s dominated by a mega-church, which, come to think of it, is maybe implausible? And one day, a goth-looking guy reads some Latin out of a book, which everyone knows means shit is about to go down. Except, instead of doing anything cool and magical, he kills himself. And then, his girlfriend dies under apparently suicidal but certainly mysterious circumstances. The rest of the movie follows around a girl present at the first girl’s death who is trying to figure out what happened, the dead goth’s brooding brother with a dark past and a pretty plum role as a recognizable teen on the Sarah Connor Chronicles, and the holy war that is about to hit Grovetown. Mostly, though, the brooding! I’m pretty sure this was a fraction of what seeing Twilight would have been like, only without the irritating audience and with enough entertaining violence to balance the tweeness.

Best part, though, is the brooding dude’s cousin, who is sufficiently full of snark that she plays piano chords of doom when we learn about the horrible thing that is about to happen to our plucky heroine. I may be in love.

Gran Torino

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Except for the fact that I’m willing to see it again, this might get me in trouble with my father. But after several intriguing previews in front of all the art house flicks I’ve been seeing in the past couple of months, I went to see Clint Eastwood’s new movie, Gran Torino. And it’s good! Eastwood still sees himself as incredibly bad-ass, which seems ridiculous for a 79 year-old man. Yet, either through weight of history, gravelliness of voice, or sheer force of will, he can still pull it off. Hell, the gravelly moans were as much an extra character in every scene as the titular vehicle was.

So Eastwood lives in his house in Detroit, in the neighborhood he hasn’t left since the Korean War ended, and he has gradually watched his friends move away or die and be replaced by a bunch of Asians that basically all look alike to him. His family is useless and his wife has just died, which leaves him a bitter racist, alone with nothing but time on his hands and his sweet, sexy sports car that he never drives. Oh, and his dog who is old like him, but I’m sure nothing bad will happen to, right? Right?

The downside to all this, if you leave out his existential twilight, non-stop racist anger, and the Catholic priest who won’t stop hanging on the bell day and night, is that there’s a Ricer gang terrorizing the neighbors (well, really the neighborhood in general, but he probably wouldn’t know if it weren’t happening in his front yard), and once he’s scared them off, he becomes the last thing he wants to be: a hero. After that, things start to get complicated.

There are moments of cringe-inducing uncomfortableness, genuine warmth, understated hilarity, and raw-edged fury. But as much good acting and scripting as was crammed into the film, I think what I like best about it is that it isn’t a story of redemption where the crusty old racist learns a valuable lesson and loves everyone. It might be cool if it happened in real life, but the truth is, that kind of thing mostly doesn’t, and I’ve seen it often enough on screen that it was refreshing to see something different. I think Eastwood-the-director only took the easy way out of a scene once in the entire film, and more power to him for it. I like movies that aren’t perfectly easy to watch or perfectly easy to pin down and categorize.