Shards of Delirium

Tag: horror

  • Ju-on

    Lots of horror movies out these days, which means lots of chances to see Sarah Michelle Gellar taking a shower while a creepy Japanese curse causes fingers to appear out of the back of her head (or something like that) in previews of the latest Japanese horror remake, The Grudge.

    I haven’t had a chance to see Ringu yet (it’s in my Netflix queue), but thanks to the delightful people who run the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain I had a chance to see Ju-on last night, a few weeks before the American remake hits theaters.

    In any case, this one was a good, scary atmospheric piece. There’s this house, where it is established in the opening credits that a man previously went crazy and killed the hell out of his wife, son, and pet cat. Now people (the residents, remote family members, social workers, and police) wander in and out of the house for their various reasons, and some very angry dead people aren’t willing to stand for it.

    The narrative is split up into randomly-sized and ordered chunks exploring the consequences of each individual’s passage into the range of the grudge. This works really well for the first hour and change of the movie. Unfortunately, the last two such scenes don’t make a lick of sense, and I left the movie with no idea how things had turned out or what the ultimate cause behind the evil was, or even if I’m supposed to know these things or not. But that’s okay, because I went for the creepy atmosphere, and got that in spades.

    I’m still going to watch the remake, though. My hope is that an American director will insist on some coherence near the end. If I’m really lucky, it will cohere and also explain what was going on in the original, instead of just cohering by him making something entirely new up instead. Plus, Buffy in a shower. I mean, by far not my first choice of BtVS characters to see nekkid, but neither will I turn down what I’m offered. (Anyway, I’m sure there will be no nudity and that I’d have gone to see it no matter what. But you never can tell.)

  • Shaun of the Dead

    mv5bmtu2nja0ndk0nv5bml5banbnxkftztcwota0otqzmw-_v1_sy1000_cr006211000_al_Back some time ago, one of my first ex- girlfriends returned to Dallas after a few years’ stint in the Air Force and being married and then divorced. Because of how badly her current life sucked, she was looking to reconnect with elements of her previous life, and I was one of the addressees on that particular email. Then, because of how lazy I am with email, about a year went by. But I found myself unexpectedly in Dallas yesterday, so we got together for a movie and a catching up.

    The thing about her is, she really wanted to get married, back in the day. I say this not out of a sense of disgruntlement or even armchair psychology, but by simple math. She was married, at age 18 and mere moments after high school graduation, about 10 months after she broke up with me (who wanted to get through college first). I know all of this seems dreadfully pointless, but I like to set a good background.

    Anyway, after making me promise to give her veto power if I picked a chick flick, we settled on Shaun of the Dead. This is the story of me. Well, okay, it’s not, and I’m very bitter about it, because it should be the story of me. It is pretty much dead on with how I imagine that my life is going, and how it ought to go.

    Shaun is 29, has a go nowhere job, and spends the rest of his life commuting back and forth with other dead-eyed Brits, playing video games with his roommates, and taking his girlfriend to the same pub every night. As girls in movies are wont to do, she gets fed up and asks for a change, which he flubs as hopeless 20-something slackers in movies are wont to do, and then she dumps him. This is well-trodden cinema fare.

    But then, the lucky bastard wakes up the next morning to find that zombies have taken over the landscape, and it’s up to him to fight them off and gather his loved ones together for safety until everything is back to normal. Herein lies my existential angst. I now have cinematic proof of what I’ve always believed, that every problem in my life would be solved by a handy mass dying off of the population due to zombification and subsequent assault on the living.

    So, right, the review. It was really funny. A bit gory. A couple of jump in your seat scares. Plus the whole theme they had going where it was impossible to tell that anything happened at first because the dead-eyed zombies were an exact match for the dead-eyed Brits. Good stuff. Most people don’t get ‘zombies as social commentary’ right, but this one does the job. Better movie than the Resident Evils, even without any shoulder-mounted rocket launchers.

    Although the movie was great, it’s not really the best part of the story. No, that came early in the zombie onslaught, when Shaun picks up the phone to call his girlfiend and gets a busy signal. “She’s engaged,” he reports to his roommate, who replies “That seems a bit fast, doesn’t it?” Even as Shaun glared at him for making a joke at a time like that, I was awash in schadenfreude sitting there next to Kim, sharing a popcorn. I don’t think she noticed, though.

  • Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid

    MV5BNzc5MDg1NTkxNl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNTcyNjA3._V1__SX1859_SY847_So, right, two movies this afternoon, I said. To give you an idea of how unnecessary this sequel to 1997’s Anaconda was, I had absolutely no memory of the plot of the original, despite having seen it in the theater, too. Not that there’s anything wrong with putting out unnecessary sequels to uninspired monster movies. The direct-to-video market brings in piles of cash every year.

    There definitely are things wrong with Anacondas: The Plurality, though. For one thing, it’s not direct-to-video. That’s right, someone thought this movie needed a theatrical run. Despite multiple reasonable opportunites, nobody gets the slightest bit nekkid. And they have one of the most ridiculous logic failures I’ve ever seen.

    The plot has two main turning points that get the C-list actors in place so that the snakes can start chowing down. The first is the rarely blooming MacGuffin orchid, which has the power to grant eternal pocketbook growth. So the research team goes to Borneo and hires the one guy crazy enough to take them upriver to where the orchid blooms, during the dreaded rainy season. Then, in the second turning point, the upriver trip is cut short when the boat accidentally goes over a waterfall. One of those rare against the current waterfalls, I guess. Morons.

    So, I spent pretty much the whole movie mentally re-writing the dialogue so that it could reach the obvious potential and mentally undressing the two female characters. Not because I really cared how they looked naked, but because the plot so clearly demanded it. I mean, they were both wearing white shirts, the were both constantly soaked, one of them had implied sex before the boat went over the waterfall, and there was even a scene with leeches being removed from people! And yet, nothing. A crime against the genre, by God. PG-13. Geeze.

  • Resident Evil: Apocalypse

    mv5bmtc1ntuxmzk0nl5bml5banbnxkftztcwndq1mdizmw-_v1_sy1000_cr006721000_al_Mmmm. Zombies.

    I’ve been waiting for this movie since the end of opening day for Resident Evil, when they left a big blatant hook for a sequel. And I waited. And I waited. Then there was a teaser preview that literally jerked my head toward the screen when I realized what they were advertising, but that was over a year ago. So naturally, when the time came, I ended up having to wait three days before I could finally go see it. Then again, this is a movie about dead people getting up and walking around, so maybe three days is appropriate.

    I’m obviously a fanboy for both this kind of movie and for the Resident Evil console game series, so I’ll try to temper that. One thing I’m not a fanboy of is videogame-to-movie adaptations. I mean, I invariably go and see them, but then I almost as invariably bitch about how awful they were. (See Mortal Kombat or Super Mario Bros., say. Or more to the point, don’t. Really.) So I went into the original movie with lowered expectations, and was very pleasantly surprised by it being both an excellent zombie film in its own right as well as a pretty good adaptation; they avoided the trap of basing things too heavily on the game.

    This time, as above, yeah, I had high expectations. And this time, they didn’t avoid the based on a game trap. Particularly, Jill Valentine and the Nemesis creature looked like they had been lifted straight out of the game. (The saving grace is that both looked perfect, not just like an attempt gone awry.) On the bright side, this is almost my only complaint with the movie. There was too much hand-to-hand combat for a scenario where being wounded by a zombie turns you into a zombie, and the combat they had was choppily edited.

    Everything else about the movie was gravy, though. Good (if unoriginal) plot: Everybody is trapped in the city by the evil multinational pharmaceuticals corporation that fucked up and released an unstoppable viral zombie outbreak. The few survivors make alliances inside and outside the city in an attempt to find a way out. Meanwhile, an unstoppable mega-zombie (excuse me, biological weapons project) armed with a rocket launcher is stalking the people skilled enough to survive all the zombies and zombie Dobermans. Good acting, which is to say it was never quite overwrought with farcical camp drama, but also not overwrought with laughable attempts at real drama. And let’s not forget the randomly zombified topless dancers.

    Basically, it comes down to the genre. If you like zombie movies, you should see this one. It’s a nice break from the remake mania that has plagued the last couple of years, even if it isn’t quite as scary as the first Resident Evil. If you don’t go for the particular zombie subgenre of horror, this is nowhere near enough horror movie to pull you in on its own. See Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead instead, as those are both brilliant character study pieces, with zombies merely as the backdrop. (Only original Romero will do.)

    And if you don’t like horror movies at all, well, that’s just crazy talk. Honestly, I don’t even know what to do with information like that.

    Added note for fetishists: No zombies were frozen in the filming of this picture.

  • Ginger Snaps: Unleashed

    MV5BMTgxNjI0MzQzOF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwOTA3NDY3._V1__SX1859_SY893_Not long ago, I had the great pleasure of Netflixing a pretty decent werewolf movie in Ginger Snaps. Sure, okay, the metaphor of lycanthropy being analagous to puberty has gotten quite a bit of play in my lifetime, from Oz in Buffy to Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf. And if you listen carefully, Lon Chaney’s voice breaks more than once in the original Wolfman. But Ginger Snaps had a lot going for it in the anti-charisma of its gothy stars, Ginger and her younger sister Bridget. Without going into the details, preppy cheerleaders were killed and snarkily buried (and their little dogs, too!), wolfsbane was freebased, and a couple of werewolves ended up dead.

    Ginger Snaps 2 starts off about six months later, with Bridget hitting books and still freebasing wolfsbane (technically, a weaker related plant, monk’s hood) in a desperate attempt to delay or halt her seemingly inevitable transformation, while being haunted by a horny male werewolf and her demons from the previous flick. Things take a turn south when she’s found unconscious after the other werewolf attacks and is admitted against her will into a drug program for girls. She’s supposed to be only 16 or so, but I guess since her only ID was her library card, maybe they didn’t know she was a minor and that they maybe needed parental permission. (Also, it could be that her parents died in the original. I forget.) Despite these legal issues and the fact that her “drug” of choice is completely legal and available in craft stores, they hold her, and of course keep the needles and distilled wolfsbane away from her. The eventual outcome is predictable, but there are a few good twists after she is helped to escape from the facility by Ghost, a comics-obsessed little girl without any kind of drug problem who lives there for somewhat contrived reasons and has free run of the place.

    Even though they were clearly going for the same older/younger sister relationship that worked to such effect with Ginger and Bridget in the original, it never quite gels between Bridget and Ghost. Likewise, the metaphor of lycanthropy to drug addiction fails more often than it succeeds. In recompense, the dialogue has the same occasional gleam of brilliance shown in the original, there’s more gore than last time around, plus a gaggle of teen druggies masturbating in a group exercise guided by one of the facility counselors.

    If that isn’t enough to draw your interest (and who could blame you?), stick with the original. There’s also a prequel, just released direct to video. I’ll have it in a while, so I’d wait on that one, too.

  • Placer Sangriento

    mv5bmti5mjq1njiwnv5bml5banbnxkftztcwmtkzodeymq-_v1_A few months ago, the Alamo Drafthouse was showing Night of the Bloody Apes on the Weird Wednesday midnight show. I was all prepared to go and had talked Laylah into joining me, but she had to be on a plane the next morning and didn’t want to miss the sleep. Luckily, Netflix had it. Unluckily, she hasn’t had time to come over and watch since it arrived, what with the law school thing going on. But, in the meantime, I’ve watched the rest of the DVD, which included Feast of Flesh and a wealth of special features designed solely for me.

    Lots of previews for movies far too bizarre to remember anything of. Four short subject films, including a burlesque of a stripper (eventually down to pasties and whatever passed for a thong in the 1950s) being carried around by an ape, a short of four topless chicks bathing with each other in a stream on film stock that would have embarrassed Zapruder, a female wrestling championship round announced by the most condescendingly misogynistic man I’ve heard in a really long time, and, um, a fourth one.

    As for Feast of Flesh, it was your average Phantom of the Opera knockoff where the masked organ player stalks the 20-something party set on the beaches of Argentina, first hypnotizing young women in dated bikinis with his music (which, to be fair, had a haunting quality to it) and then overdosing them with heroin once they annoy him and leaving their bodies strewn on the beaches. And he might have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those pesky cops!

    The plot has nothing to recommend it; I was just barely able to keep my attention on it over the three days it took me to watch, and I’ve reconstructed some of the particulars from the imdb link above. It’s not impossible that I simply made up other details. If you can watch it and get a more accurate summary of what happened, then you’re a better man than I.

    The reason to watch this, aside from the outstanding extras from a bygone movie era, is to laugh at what Argentinians and Americans considered shocking in 1963, including topless dancing girls, topless ocean swimmers (in all cases, the nudity can only be verified in slow-motion or frame-by-frame), bodies with large hypodermics sticking out of the chest, and lipstick lesbian volleyball players. According to imdb, that was enough to earn an X-rating in the United States. In any case, I’ve revealed every interesting point the movie has to offer, so unless you’re actually me (I’ve found that very few people are), give this one a pass.