Tag Archives: horror

Still Wakes the Deep

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Sometime after I learned that there’s a game about Lovecraftian horrors on an oil rig, I learned that there’s a TV show about strange goings on in the all consuming mist (which may or may not be Lovecraftian or for that matter Kingy[1]; I wouldn’t know, as I have tried to avoid spoilers for The Rig since it seems cool enough to look into), and I have no point other than that’s a weird coincidence. Like, even if they aren’t both Lovecraftian, what are the odds that two media regarding oil rigs would both come across my radar at the same time, much less of both tweaking my interest?

None of that is I suppose especially important to Still Wakes the Deep, a game named after a particularly evocative phrase from a Scottish poem and set on Christmas Day 1975 on an oil rig in the North Sea. This is how I learned that oil rigs are not just built in relatively shallow water, but that rather they float. It is horrifying in its own right to be floating on the surface of the ocean, connected to the surface below not by four legs, but just by the drill with which you are penetrating the earth’s sunken crust. Imagine how much more horrifying, then, were the pocket you opened to contain not oil, but instead colors out of space, growing tentacles, and madness.

Caz McLeary is a man on the verge of losing everything, and his new job as electrician on an oil rig is partly effect, partly cause of this imminent loss. At least, that’s what he seems to believe and what all the evidence in the early game shows us, as he reads an angry letter from his wife, and then faces a somehow even angrier boss waving an arrest warrant in his face. But moments after that scene plays out, we and he learn that in fact he was nowhere close to losing everything, at least not then. It’s all a matter of properly defining “everything”. …and for that matter, “lose”.

I wasn’t expecting this to be a walking sim. That did not make it a bad game, but I sometimes wished for a little more control over events. Just a little, you know? Actually, as I think about it, the most proper audience for my plaintive request for more control over the events of December 25, 1975 is one Cameron “Caz”[2] McCleary, innit?

Is it apparent I liked this game? Well, I did. It was both mostly likable and immensely affective. Definitely worth a look.

[1] Why don’t we have a proper adjective for the way King writes? Probably because he doesn’t mostly write in a specific way, other than when it’s about the human horror of small towns. But it still feels like he deserves one, is all.
[2] British (in the imperial sense) people are really bad at name-shortening. Cameron = Caz? Jeremy = Jez? Come on, chaps, get it together.

The Quarry

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Did you ever want to take the movie Friday the 13th, put it in a blender with a choose your own adventure novel, and put the resulting mash into a not-quite walking sim video game? I mean, I hope you wanted to. Who even are you, if you didn’t?!

The Quarry documents the events of the night after the last night of summer camp at Hackett’s Quarry in upstate New York, in the summer of 2021[1]. All of the kids have returned home, and the counselors are cleaning and packing up to vacate the premises themselves (other than the two counselors who never showed up for the summer, after vanishing ominously in the prologue). Of course, nothing ever goes quite as planned when you’re high school on the cusp of college-aged summer camp counselors in a horror movie, does it?

The gameplay is a mixture of walking sim while looking for clues and things and the choose your own adventure interludes I mentioned, either interrupted occasionally by fairly forgiving quicktime events[2], timed CYOA decisions, wildly infrequent gunplay, and occasional exercises in hiding and trying to decide when to stop holding your breath. Oh, and also interrupted by chapter breaks when a creepy fortune teller attempts to influence your path. If this all sounds like mostly minimalist play in which the actual story is the real star, well, there’s a mode where you can have it just show you the movie with randomly determined outcomes, if that gives you an idea of what you’re in for.

All that said, I’m leaving out the piece of the game (aside from the actual story) that I found the most compelling. You can’t just go back and fix the decisions you regret. No take backs! I’m not sure why I’ve never envisioned such a possibility in interactive fiction before, but I haven’t, and it seems nobody else had either, since this is the first time I’m finding such a thing. It’s especially well suited to a horror movie, where people that you wanted to survive die tragically all the time, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.

I need to let some time pass, but I very much want to play this again, and that is not something you will catch me saying very often, anymore. Strongly recommended, unless you hate horror movies on the face of it or will feel really bad when the characters die and it’s your fault. But honestly it’s not very scary, even though it is occasionally shocking and definitely violent as all get out.

[1] Or 2022, I forget. Like it matters. This is not a game world that experienced COVID, y’all.
[2] Example: I think I managed to catch multiple of them even though I had set the controller down for a moment

Gojira

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So this is super weird.

I know I’ve seen the Raymond Burr Godzilla (which is perversely difficult to find on streaming (not that I particularly wanted to), as compared to how easy it was to find on any given Saturday afternoon in my youth), and I would swear I’ve seen Gojira as well, or even if not, it’s the same movie minus inserted Raymond Burr footage, right?

But, because it has been a while, I figured to myself that I would watch the film in advance of the horror movie podcast episode about it, and it turns out that either they diverge wildly, or I just have not seen this movie after all. I remember the people running along trails to hilltops to see Godzilla approaching, and Burr giving close-up commentary on the moment, and I remember him (Godzilla, not Burr) smashing through buildings and elevated trains and such in Tokyo, but I had minimal to no memory of the family drama / romantic subplot between the paleontologist, his daughter, her scientist fiance, and her fisherman lover, and I had completely no memory of how the movie ended.

For example, and this is a spoiler for a seventy year-old movie, so with that said, did you know Godzilla dies at the end?? There are like ten or a dozen or more other Toho movies in this series, the vast majority of which he is alive in, and I have no idea how! It never crossed my mind that he could die, that was the one thing I was certain of!

Like, I used to be sure that (before he became a guardian instead), Gojira was a metaphor not only for the dangers of nuclear testing, but also for the learned hopelessness of the Japanese people a mere nine years past Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nation of people in all the world’s history who were the most thoroughly crushed by opposing forces. But if they can just turn around and kill the supposedly undefeatable nuclear behemoth, that particular metaphor flies right out the window.

It’s like learning that Rosebud was his wife’s middle name, or that Rick and Elsa had never been to Paris. Everything I know is wrong, and what can I even do with this information now?

Hunted (2020)

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Don’t hold me to this, but I think Hunted is a French movie. This is apropos of almost nothing, except that I will later use it to explain my problems with the movie, which are for the most part a little unfair.

So there’s this girl out for a night on the town, and she’s getting her flirt on, and before you know it she’s consentingly in the back seat of a dude’s car, when it suddenly turns out that he and his friend who climb into the front and starts driving, they do not have the noblest of intentions. And then she improbably escapes (not for the last time), and the hunt is on!

Anyway, French I said. One thing that I do not know is if the movie is dubbed. I think it maybe is not, but a lot of people in it, especially the primary antagonist, have incredibly annoying voices. Are their voices annoying because they do not match the person talking? I mean, that could be a sign of dubbing, but it could also just be a sign of someone with an unlikely voice. And since I already kind of hate my own voice, it feels crappy to rag on someone else’s, and yet… it was a distraction.

But the main problem is that it put me in mind of two other movies, both of which are substantially better. First, because of the woman’s ubiquitous red jacket, I thought constantly of Little Red Riding Hood, which in this context means I was thinking of Freeway[1]. And second, for pretty obvious reasons, I Spit on Your Grave[2]. And it is possible to make a mashup of two other movies stand up on its own, but this one, for whatever reason, just didn’t work for me.

Not to say Hunted did not have its charms. Here I am especially thinking of the survivalist bow-hunter mother and son, and the incredible uses of that one arrow. The pair of scenes to which I am alluding were very nearly enough to turn me around on the whole flick, so if you’re still curious, it might be worth your time after all.

[1] Unreviewed here because I saw it on The Last Drive-In, with Joe Bob’s full commentary supplanting my own, but I kind of loved it is the short version. Maybe the only dark, grimey for the sake of grime movie I’ve ever felt that way about. Starring Reese Witherspoon before she was anybody and Kiefer Sutherland before he became somebody the second time around.
[2] Which, as you know, I saw at the Alamo Drafthouse hosted by Joe Bob Briggs, back before his comeback was fully established.

Blacula

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How, you ask, have I never seen Blacula? The truth is, I really don’t know! I’d swear I got further than the Bs in the horror section of the College Station Hastings during my mid ’90s tenure. (I suppose they might have just not had it, though? Weird.) Anyhow, now I had to watch it, since the horror movie podcast did. And for the most part, hooray?

I mean, I’m not saying it’s good. But it for sure has its charms. In 1780, Prince Mamuwalde and his wife Luva are visiting Europe in protest of the slave trade, and they come to the castle of a certain Transylvanian count, who is not sympathetic to their goals by virtue of being a massive racist. And also a vampire.

Approximately 200 years later: Mamuwalde wakes up in exactly the kind of overstereotyped Los Angeles you’d expect out of an exploitation movie, and goes on a vampiric spree while also trying to win over the doppelganger of his long-dead wife. And… I mean, that’s pretty much it. The plot is just so very thin[1]. But the acting! I mean, to be clear, it’s not good either, but it’s comfortable. There’s scenery chewing by an African vampire prince, there’s a club fuckboy named Skillet, there’s a completely insane undead cab driver, there’s Icepick from the old Magnum PI series as a coroner with a gratuitous hook hand. You can’t make this shit up, except that it was the ’70s, and anyone who knew a dentist could not only make this shit up, but get it financed, filmed, and released! It was a glorious age, and we will never see its like again.

[1] unless you’ve never seen one of those “you are my reincarnated spouse, therefore you must disregard all red flags and love me” stories before, I suppose

The Pale Door

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The Pale Door opens with a Poe quote containing the phrase, making it clear that it’s a metaphor for death. So I think you know what you’re getting into. Anyway, there’s this criminal gang in the Wild West, led by an older brother who doesn’t really want his younger brother to be a part of this life (although obviously he’s fine with the younger brother seeing all the benefits). But the younger brother is all, “we’re family, so I’mma help you on this train job.”

As you might expect, things go wrong along multiple axes, and they end up fleeing through the night to a lady-infested town in the middle of the woods. And here’s the thing. I am not opposed to movies about witches. Do they know magic? Do they consort with Satan? Are they good, or evil, or just misunderstood? Whatever it is, I’m here for it.

But these guys found one I’m not here for. Spoilers ahead, but you should probably read them anyway, and I’m sad for the guy who plays Rick on the new Magnum show that I cannot recommend this movie. But I cannot, and here’s why: if you are going to give your witch settlement[1] a backstory where they were originally from Salem, Massachusetts (and we all know how that turned out)? You are not allowed to make it so the people running the witch trials were right. Come on! It’s one of the blights of American history! What is wrong with you people?

[1] probably New Salem, Colorado? I can’t prove it, but it needs to be true.

Pearl (2022)

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I should say first that this post contains semi-spoilers for the movie X, which I watched as the first half of a Friday night double feature last night. So if you read beyond this paragraph, I recommend you have seen that movie first.

So in X, our first viewpoint character is the recently cocaine-addicted stripper / girlfriend of the strip club owner, named Maxine. She wanders around the farm where she is shooting her first feature porn, in short overalls and nothing else, except when she’s skinny-dipping or sleeping or on camera, if you know what I mean (and I think you do). At one point, she crosses paths with Pearl, the wife of the owner of the farm. Pearl is ancient in a way that people made up to be old look moreso than people in real life ever seem. But Pearl still has… longings. She shows to Maxine pictures on the wall of herself in the full bloom of girlhood, before her husband went off to World War I, and tells Maxine that she should appreciate it while she’s got it, because someday she will end up just like Pearl. And the image on the wall photograph is the spitting image of Maxine, in a way that I thought was clever and telling; but in reality I did not know the half of it.

For you see, Pearl and Maxine were played by the same actress, one Mia Goth. And in the wake of that stunning realization, we learned that Ti West had made a prequel named Pearl, immediately after X was finished while they were still in New Zealand. And it was also available for streaming, so we immediately watched the next entry in what appears to be a trilogy, although Maxxxine isn’t out until later this year.

I spoke at length about the visible influences on the prior movie, so I should say of this movie that it has the imprint of The Wizard of Oz all over it. The palette is just drenched in oversaturated colors, Pearl in a dress on her bicycle immediately evokes Miss Gulch[1], and there’s a scene with a scarecrow that I really should let you experience for yourself.

Anyway, as the daughter of German immigrants near the end of the Great War and the height of the Spanish Flu, Pearl is having a rough time. She’s married, but her husband is off to the war. She hates the farm, but is trapped there by circumstance and her mother’s iron will. All she really wants is to show the world her dancing talent, get into the movies, and never come back home again.

If only her father weren’t crippled. If only people weren’t so distrustful of her German mother. If only she were free to do whatever she wanted.

If only she were sane…

So, down to the nitty gritty. This movie isn’t as tightly plotted and nowhere near as unsettlingly filmed as X was. The end of this movie as it relates to the beginning of the prior movie, it just makes no sense at all. I cannot imagine how you get from here to there. And yet… Mia Goth just sold Pearl to me, in a way I’m not entirely sure I would have believed was possible. Her  descent, her yearning, to be accepted, to be loved, to be free. It was what you would call, if it were the kind of movie people took seriously, a tour de force performance. I am truly impressed by this actor, is what I’m saying.

And my god, that smile. You’ll know the one I mean.

[1] Margaret Hamilton when she was in black and white in Kansas, instead of black and green in Oz

X (2022)

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Friday night double feature! Even better, unexpected double feature, but I’ll get to that.

The first movie was lent to me by Ryan a number of months ago[1], but the time was finally right, so, hooray. Here, I was about to launch into a brief plot synopsis, but the problem with those is if I start with the title, I will inevitably say “Title is the sensitive story of” and it feels less like an homage and more like a ripoff, even though its not my fault I’ve read and heard so many of Joe Bob’s reviews that the phrasing is just lodged in my brain. In any event, I’ll start over.

After a scene designed in every way to evoke The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we fade in on a strip club owner and two of his employees, hopping in a van[2] with a few other folks on their way out of Houston to the rural remote wilds of southeast Texas (or arguably New Zealand) to shoot the first direct-to-video but also high-minded and artistic pornographic feature, set on a farm owned by an aging, nay decrepit, couple named Howard and Pearl. The house[3] and barn reflect the owners’ decay, but the rented cabin a few hundred yards away is actually kind of nice, I think by virtue of not having been occupied over the past who knows how many decades.

The remainder of the film would be the shooting schedule of The Farmer’s Daughters, complete with the sexual liberation of Jenna Ortega and lessons on film editing and assorted X-rated shenanigans, except for the air of disquiet that hangs over the remote farm. I think it’s fair to say that if our merry band of videographers aren’t careful, they may find themselves on a collision course with that opening scene I mentioned, set 24 hours after they got into the van.

So aside from how on the nose (but in a good way) I found the setup and payoff to be, I was sincerely impressed by a lot of the acting and cinematography choices[4]. Some of the cuts were very disquieting, and this may be the first time I’ve experienced a successful jump scare that was set after the victim’s death.

But honestly, the single most unsettling aspect of the film was a casting choice that is frankly a spoiler for this movie’s mood, if not per se its plot. However! I think I can talk about it in the next review. Like I said: double feature.

[1] long enough that it’s since on Netflix and I did not technically need the lend, so, um, oops
[2] All van scenes also shot with Chainsaw in mind.
[3] Also, the layout of the house’s entryway? Immediate Chainsaw flashbacks.
[4] and also the soundtrack was baller

Deliria (1987)

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I cannot say that I know much about the history or evolution of gialli, so when I claim that StageFright is a late stage giallo, you should fully understand the credentials that I’m bringing to this claim. But it’s the first movie from a guy who previously assisted Dario Argento, and it is definitely on familiar terms with “stylish”. I call it late stage because the mystery trappings have been completely left behind; you know who the killer is before a single person has been butchered. Nevertheless, you can really see the historical underpinnings between there and here.

See, there’s this extremely off-Broadway musical about female empowerment against a serial killer? rapist? who wears a giant owl head as a mask. And via a series of improbable circumstances, a crazy actor breaks out of a mental facility and gets locked in with the cast and crew while they are finalizing their rehearsals in advance of opening night. So the introductory scenes are the musical, followed by improbable circumstances, and these are followed by some relatively by-the-numbers killings throughout act two. But then in the last 20 minutes, it just absolutely springs to life. Owlhead, the last survivor, the key, the cat, the fan blowing the feathers around… it’s as though without the weight of all the rational people caring about who is doing this or why or if they can survive, keeping things tethered in their own personal trauma, the true insanity of the situation is permitted to fly free.

I know not all of them can be hits, not even all of them from the ’80s, but I really was prepared to be disappointed here, and then, suddenly, I wasn’t. Bravo!

The Lighthouse (2019)

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The podcast I’ve been listening to determined that their theme for “this” week should be Edgar Allan Poe crossed with an aquatic monster, and as you may or may not know, there’s not really a lot of that. Which is how I learned that his last unfinished story is about a guy on remote lighthouse duty. Lighthouses in the past, you see, were mostly manned by practically nobody, in long shifts. I guess via the Navy?

So anyway, these two guys (a master and an apprentice, but for lighthouses instead of ruling the galaxy) named Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson arrive to a remote island off the coast of New England, in artistic black and white, and proceed with their month or so shift at keeping the light on for passing ships. The thing is, the ocean and the seagulls and the mermaid figurine and the solitude and the lack of solitude gradually take their tolls on the sanity of one or both men, and in conclusion, I would really love to read Poe’s original story, wherever it is catalogued in Dream’s library. It would not have been this movie, but I believe it very much might have been in the spirit of this movie. Or perhaps more accurately, The Lighthouse is in the spirit of Poe.