June 2013's Footstones

Being a List of the Assorted Horrors I've Consumed During the Month of June, 2013.

V/H/S/2 (2013) dir. Eduardo Sánchez, Adam Wingard, Gareth Huw Evans, et al.

The loathing at the foundation of my being that I felt for the first film in the V/H/S anthology series was generated by three salient facts about its production: 1) the repugnant "ironic" misogynism derived from its meathead fraternity party tone, 2) its lack of interest in the found footage genre as anything but a cheap delivery system for "BOO!s," and 3) a disinterest in employing the horror anthology format to create a coherent world for its stories. Sadly, my complaints matter very little to anyone, and V/H/S was a resounding financial success on VOD and home video, especially considering its scrappy roots, and thus a fast-tracked sequel was greenlit soon after its general release. The infernal spawn of this newly fledged series, V/H/S/2, featuring a new crop of established horror directors trying their hands at the shaky cam, is embarrassingly bad.

All of my complaints about the original are present here, supplemented with some new ones. As a found footage film, it hardly registers as attempting a semblance of verisimilitude. We find tapes edited together from multiple cameras, nonstop lazy fantasy camera gimmicks, non-diegetic scores and Inception foghorns, and the requisite post-production camera malfunctions. Like that of the previous film, Simon Barrett's wraparound story makes no attempt to connect the individual stories into a larger fictional world (which appears to now contain winged demons, zombies, aliens, ghosts, and a goat-headed Antichrist) or explore the origins or purpose of the bizarre underground VHS tape fetishism club that is the film's flimsy conceit. The existence of these perfunctory wraparound stories in the V/H/S films is a head-scratcher. If the filmmakers don't care about developing a unified world for these short films, why bother with including this weak connective tissue? Why not simply present them as a collection of short films? The only conceivable answer is that the filmmakers wish to include a believable, realistic narrative framework to explain how the audience is seeing the shorts, but this effort is made to seem ludicrous when contrasted against the films' copious technical  dismissals of logic and reality. Otherwise, the wraparounds simply provide more opportunities for between-story cutaways to quick shots of figures lurking in the background, and that's always a plus, right? Right? As is the case with the initial film, if this is not an entirely cynical appeal to the lowest common denominator's wallets then I am extremely depressed.

The shorts in brief: Adam Wingard's "Clinical Trials" displays the same oafishness as his contribution to the last film, including-- as it does-- the suggestion that ghost attacks can be prevented by having sex with a nude woman while a literal voyeuristic male camera eye watches the action. How did this man also make the wonderful A Horrible Way to Die (2010)? Eduardo Sánchez, fresh off the fantastic Lovely Molly (2012), takes a huge step backwards in his subgenre efforts with his short "A Ride in the Park," which is an only partly clever concept stranded without a story (and half of that concept is swiped-- almost certainly unintentionally-- from the insufferable Last Ride (2011)). Jason Eisener's short "Alien Abduction Slumber Party" is an obnoxious riff on Alien Abduction: Incident at Lake County (1998) with trying-too-hard dog-splatter shock value. I'll give a hesitant seal of approval to Gareth Huw Evans's section, "Safe Haven," which contains an ounce of narrative and is at least amusing in its nonsensical mayhem, but it's clear that this short (already the film's longest by a good margin) could have benefited from the fleshing out that a full-length feature could provide.

As a whole, this is the worst sort of creatively barren dreck. It closes with a shotgun-blasted tongue wagging, a thumbs up, and a split-second frame showcasing some bare breasts. Bravo. I'm being harsh about this film and its makers but that's because there's some (seemingly) talented people behind it and their efforts are no more complex than a Youtube "REAL GHOST" video with mediocre production values. The FF mode of storytelling fascinates me because of its potential for subtlety and unique storytelling possibilities, but more and more often lately it's being used (and abused) by hack filmmakers to create so-called "visceral experiences" that are so calculated, phony, and devoid of story that it prevents any sort of immersion within the cinematic world. And being that immersion is what these filmmakers seem to want to accomplish with the aesthetic, what's the fucking point if you ignore reality and narrative coherency for the sake of convenience and lazy thrills? I don't think the people behind this movie are stupid, so my only guess is that they don't care. They see (correctly, unfortunately) that teenagers and indiscriminate horror fans flock to low-budget, low-effort FF films with copious jump scares, so they set out to make some (quickly, cheaply) in that mold. I think the V/H/S films are a high profile demonstration of how allowing FF to become pure aesthetic rather than a mode in which to tell a story produces nothing of any value. Anthology horror films, by their nature, can often be slight, but this thing is non-existent.

Hatchet III (2013) dir. BJ McDonnell

Imagine if the opening scene of Jason Goes to Hell (1993) had been stretched out into two feature length films. Now crawl into a ball and begin muttering to yourself while swatting imaginary flies wearing "Hatchet Army" t-shirts. Adam Green has done well for himself against the odds, establishing (on the strength of really only one film and a tacky seasonal online short) a coterie of genre fans who salivate over his work and defend it with passion. This adoration has elevated him to the status of a bonafide genre personality (he co-stars in a sitcom about himself, for Gozer's sake!) and his chief creation, the ghostly disfigured hillbilly Victor Crowley, into the pantheon of iconic indestructible slasher baddies. It's important to note how remarkable an achievement this is, regardless of the quality of the films that Green has had a hand in. There are three Hatchet movies. How did this happen, especially after the critical, financial, and PR disaster that was Hatchet II (2010)? Scott Glosserman tried to create a new franchise villain for the genre the year before Green with his superior film Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) and has unequivocally failed, so such a task appears downright herculean in the post-'80s horror landscape. And yet Hatchet is now a trilogy. 

The initial Hatchet is a fun enough film, and though it's steeped in juvenile humor it also manages to overcome those groans and become (on occasion) genuinely frightening, primarily due to our uneasiness over the hulking Crowley and his abilities. Hatchet II finds the navigation between humor and horror more arduous: misogynist "jokes" dominate and the practical gore is played exclusively for "laughs." Worse, we're shown too much concerning Victor Crowley's convoluted background, which demystifies this spectral baddie while trying to make us sympathetic to his plight. Hatchet II was not well received outside of Green's core fan base, and the unrated film was pulled from the several dozen cinemas it was playing in after only a few days. Perhaps the experience of that sequel soured Green from taking directing duties on this third chapter, though he remains on staff as writer and executive producer. (However, Green clearly has a sense of humor about himself: he cameos in Hatchet III for one brief shot as a man in the Sheriff's drunk tank who gives an offended look when the Sheriff (Zach Galligan), after being told the events of the previous two films, comments that the yarn is the stupidest he's ever heard.) 

Hatchet III is directed by Green's cameraman from the two previous films, though this passing of the reins makes very little difference: this is every bit what you'd expect of a second Hatchet sequel, if not somewhat less than. It lazily repeats the "mercenaries hunting down Crowley" story from Part II and does nothing else with it. The film even continues to take place on the very same night as the other two, as if the filmmakers are incapable of evolving their story out of familiar swamps, or perhaps hesitant to experiment with their barely-there formula and risk not giving those Hatchet Army standard bearers exactly what they want. Consequently, the film is littered with dumb jokes, excessive gore (of which some is bolstered with cheap computer VFX, effectively tarnishing the series' self-avowed practical effects cred), and too many glimpses of its invulnerable villain, who is less an agent of fear than a walking threshing machine. Seeing a welcome  yet bulkier Zach Galligan struggle through a Louisiana accent isn't enough of a draw to make the endeavor a worthwhile one. This, like its predecessor, is DTV garbage. The fact that-- technically-- it's not is one to admire, but I don't have to be happy about it.

Pacific Heights (1990) dir. John Schlesinger

Pacific Heights, John Schelesinger's high anxiety thriller about the horrors of financial responsibility and the sociopathic viciousness of those aspiring to maintain personal wealth, is one of the finest horror films of the 1990s. It's that almost unheard of thriller that manages to set its audience to squirming without resorting to egregious shock tactics. Rather, it taps into the subconscious nightmare of anyone who has ever had a monster for a landlord or tenant. Michael Keaton's sparse but perfect performance as the tenant from hell is effective because of his absent presence: he's the unseen monster making ceaseless noise behind the locked door. Worse, he's the monster with the legal right to be there. Although Pacific Heights seems to me to be pointedly critical of the desire for upward mobility, the foremost charge levied against the film is that it's a horror film for yuppies. But so what? I can't think of anything scarier than being a yuppie. 

May 2013's Footstones

Being a List of the Assorted Horrors I've Consumed During the Month of May, 2013.

Black Rock (2013) dir. Katie Aselton

Director Katie Aselton's new women-in-peril survival horror film, Black Rock, has received some derisive twittering ever since it played the Sundance and BFI film festivals early last year. Alongside more positive (and dare I say more perceptive) reviews, it has been called "a terrible, generic stalk and kill thriller," "rushed and sloppy," and "a so-so action movie." But among genre fans the brunt of the ire that's being thrown at the film seems to have been stirred by Aselton's public comments about her disdain for contemporary horror films, with their stock situations and, more importantly, their shift away from emotional conflict. Because those allegations about the bulk of contemporary horror are largely true, it seems bizarre to take issue with her statements. In that linked interview, Aselton discusses her film as a sort of response to Neil Marshall's widely loved women-in-peril survival film The Descent (2005), noting that Black Rock is what she wanted The Descent to be. Attacking that recently forged Golden Calf may have been her biggest mistake in winning the allegiance of genre fans: though an often shocking and engaging monster thriller, The Descent has also tricked some folks into believing it's a sophisticated, emotionally complex feminist horror film with strong female leads. But it's not. The Descent is a film with superficially strong female characters who, when not murdering or plotting to murder each other over extramarital affairs, wind up as monster chew toys. Its "strong female protagonists" are thrust into a harrowing situation and aren't allowed to see past their own destructive, petty cattiness. 

If Black Rock is a reaction to The Descent, it is so in its refusal to cast its women as male fantasy props: strong babes literally willing to kill each other over a man's affection. Two of Black Rock's trio of women (Aselton herself and co-star Lake Bell) have a similar touchy past relationship beef (Bell's character once slept with Aselton's character's ex-fiancee), but the film dramatizes the rekindling of their friendship through adversity rather than exploiting its deterioration for snappy thrills. The women, stranded on a chilly island and preyed upon by a duo of emotionally damaged and deranged veterans, learn to forgive past transgressions, accept their own flaws (and those of each other), and embrace their bond of friendship in order to persevere through their terrifying predicament. The film acknowledges (in many agonizing, suspenseful scenes) that its women are not superheroes able to individually defeat their stalkers. The final conflict between the women and the lone surviving villain, a 2-on-1 brawl that it is horrific in its slow, labored violence, aptly demonstrates the need for their unity in order to pull through this ordeal. It's not a perfect film (it makes overtures at political and gender critiques that it never follows up on) but it is a great one, and while its basic structure and situation is well-trod-upon ground in thriller cinema, its emotional thrust is unique: many other modern horror films would have had the mutually triumphant women slitting each other's throats by the end. The horror that Black Rock presents is the horror of healing, of forcing you to realize that your emotionally dramatic conflicts with others, those conflicts that take on such tremendous, insurmountable gravity in your own mind, mean nothing when juxtaposed-- violently-- against true fear, pain, and suffering.

Jennifer's Body (2009) dir. Karyn Kusama

Though I hadn't exactly been avoiding it because I share the fiery Diablo Cody hatred that so many souls seem to harbor post-Juno (2007), Jennifer's Body (like a majority of mainstream horror films from the past decade) was still pretty far down my list of urgent things to devour. I decided to give it a chance after listening to a thorough and intelligent discussion concerning it from the ever-thorough-and-intelligent ladies of The Faculty of Horror podcast. My reading of the film's very definite (and, to some, surprising) feminist leanings falls almost entirely in line with theirs, so you might as well listen to them rather than watch this paragraph grow ever larger as my fingers blather on. However, I will make clear a couple issues I had with Karyn Kusama and Cody's film, both in its themes and in its position as a horror film. Firstly, while very much a feminist narrative about the dangers of some women's self-propagation of the male exploitation of female bodies (e.g. the case of Jennifer (Megan Fox)) and the appeal of a sexually free but self-assured and independent alternative female identity (e.g. Needy (Amanda Seyfried)), the film falls back on a-- by this point-- cliched rape-revenge resolution by having that ideal alternative female personage exact revenge for violence committed against women by committing violence against men. Aren't we past this, culturally, as the ideal  cathartic release for this sort of tale? Sure, the murderous Satanic indie rock scumbags of the band Low Shoulder deserve some sort of cosmic comeuppance, but must it be accomplished through a reaffirmation of the cycle of violence between men and women? Jennifer's Body is a clever film, so it's a shame it wasn't as clever when dishing out this justice. (I'm now imagining some alternate scenario in which Needy helps ensure the band's Sophomore Album Slump, sending them spiraling into depression and substance abuse.) Secondly, Kusama and Cody have crafted a pretty lousy horror film. It's a decent comedy with thoughtful satire, but there's not a frightening or uneasy moment in here. Much of this is due to the Heathers-lite comedy undermining any tension, but it's also because those bits of horror that the filmmakers have decided to employ are as stock and generic as one can find in modern horror and are filmed with no visual panache (prepare for lots of silhouetted murders and Jennifer popping out from around corners). The best horror films are those that put the actual depiction of horror as a priority while still embedding ripe themes and subtext. By abandoning the subtlety of its narrative and thematic intentions, a horror film loses its ability to frighten: the horror elements become a mere vehicle for the greater message. Jennifer's Body is tattooed with its own noble but blatant intentions; its horror is a flimsy sheer garment providing it some narrative cover.

Dead Silence (2007) dir. James Wan

James Wan and Leigh Whannell have hit my horror sweet spot. Insidious (2010) provided the duo with a commercial success to distance them creatively from their earlier creation of the often maligned Saw franchise, but they'd developed an even bolder departure a few years earlier with their immediate follow-up to Saw (2004), Dead Silence. This film taps into a vein of retro horror that most modern filmmakers leave untouched: the extravagant, potentially corny, earnest shriek shows of the 1950s and earlier. Though updated for contemporary sensibilities in terms of its violence, editing, and cinematography, Dead Silence is virtually a hyperactive episode of The Twilight Zone mashed up against an EC horror comic. Its locations are moody and sound-stagy, giving the viewer the impression that the long abandoned sets of classic Hollywood horror were resurrected, having been twisted by time into even more expressionistic structures than they were before. The nursery rhyme mythology that the film creates for its villain, coupled with the story's frequent violations of mimetic narrative logic, hint that this is a film best suited for the fertile and accepting minds of a younger audience, eager to squeegee away such perceived flaws in favor of soaking up its excess of imaginative qualities. The film's R-rating implies either a miscalculation on Wan and Whannell's part or the inability of the MPAA to understand how desperately the thirteen-year-old crowd needs exposure to this sort of nightmare. They are, after all, our horrifying future.

The Watcher in the Woods (1980) dir. John Hough

A film I wish I'd peeped as a child, John Hough's Disney-produced The Watcher in the Woods was filmed shortly before he made The Incubus (1982) with John Cassavettes, a film about a demonic entity raping women to death. Though Hough had already made the fairly strange Witch Mountain films for Disney, the director of suggestive, sexually-charged films like Twins of Evil (1971), The Legend of Hell House (1973), and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974) is still a peculiar but welcome choice as a director of children's cinema. Appropriately, The Watcher in the Woods, adapted from a pretty odd-sounding 1976 young adult novel written by Florence Engel Randall, is more bizarre and frightening than anything I've yet seen from the house that Mickey built. One part Nancy Drew mystery and two parts alien-encounter-masquerading-as-a-haunted-forest trans-dimensional mini-epic, the film is-- even in its toned down theatrical version-- pretty wild. The studio's post-production tinkering with the film's ending has been well documented, but both of the alternate versions of the ending must be seen for the viewer to achieve a full understanding of the trippy, horrifying, head-scratching cosmic insanity the filmmakers were intending. Besides these joys, the film also presents young viewers with the positive role model of a brave, inquisitive, and independently-minded female protagonist in the character of amateur sleuth Jan Curtis (Lynn-Holly Johnson, in a performance that loosens Carroll Baker's usual stranglehold on the award for most wide-eyed overacting in whatever film she's starring in). If Disney had refrained from meddling with it in post, The Watcher in the Woods could have become a minor classic, terrifying and transporting the minds of its child audience to new planes of cinematic existence and possibility. As it exists, it's that sort of weird and confusing Disney movie half-remembered from many childhood VHS rentals.

Meltdown 07: Found Footage Rewind (Part V)

Long Pigs (2007) dir. Nathan Hines & Chris Power

Nathan Hines and Chris Power's Long Pigs would probably seem more revelatory in a world that didn't already possess Man Bites Dog (1992). Sub out a murderous thief for a murderous cannibal and the situation prodding forth the narrative in Long Pigs is nearly identical to that of its spiritual predecessor: a documentary film crew chooses as its subject a dangerous criminal and becomes complicit in his crimes while documenting him as he demonstrates his process and extolls the virtues of his own twisted life philosophy. Yet, this substitution of the documentary subject's profession leads Long Pigs down some unique pathways of contemplation concerning (of all things) the morality of our dietary choices. The need for food-- or, more specifically, the desire for tasty food that provides gustatory pleasure in addition to sustenance-- creates in some human beings the mindset that exquisite cuisine is an unalienable right afforded to those who can acquire it. The moral dimension of consuming other living beings merely for the taste that they provide is neglected entirely by the connoisseur mindset. The dictum become "I eat others because I can." This is a position not unfamiliar to the majority of Western citizens who, whether consciously or not, eat cheeseburgers while driving their children to the petting zoo, and who turn a blind eye toward the mechanized horrors of the slaughterhouse they purchase from while being unable to inflict the same damage on a living animal to produce a meal for themselves. For these people, the taste of meat overrides any ethical quandaries that would stand in the way of enjoying it, which allows them to never meaningfully engage with the cognitive dissonance they should be experiencing. But there is also a more advanced specimen of this mindset, the civilized hunter, who is so deeply deluded by his desire for new tastes that he no longer views other creatures as anything but objects, products, and walking foodstuff. 

Long Pigs' cannibal subject, Anthony (Anthony Alviano) has simply taken the unreflective carnivore's consumption practices to the furthest limit they could possibly achieve, tossing off the final shred of human morality in his quest for good eats. In one scene Anthony calmly, almost lovingly field dresses the corpse of one of his human victims, narrating his progress and stressing the importance of tying off the anus in order to prevent contamination of the meat. In a later scene, "The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" plays over sped up footage of yet another human field dressing. He tells his documentarians, with assumed authority, that "one animal is as good as the next," and that there's no point in considering the morality of what we eat when "even broccoli has feelings." His logic is obviously daft, but what frightens is that though he may be attempting to justify his horrific eating practices to his observers, he needs no such justification for his own conscience. If we independently decide or are culturally indoctrinated to look at animals as nothing more than food, and if we simultaneously recognize that humans are merely animals, what is to prevent one from not assuming that the consumption of other human beings is not also acceptable? Despite this blatant subtext, the film does not at all resemble a smug, satirical tract against the consumption of animals on the grounds of ethics. Though it's an exploration of a character who has chosen to ignore the taboos of society and twist its own assumptions (perhaps accurately) to satisfy his own greed, the film doesn't appear to take a very clear position against anyone other than the exploitative filmmakers, who get what's coming to them. This ambivalence leaves the film unanchored to any solid basis of ethics, but not necessarily to the film's detriment: the character of Anthony remains a personification of the philosophical ills of society that we are all, in fact, complicit in. How can we mount an argument against his practices that is not, at its base, hypocritical? And when his practices include killing and eating a child, it's safe to say that we have a problem. Though the film is disinterested in the formal experimentation and metafictional genre probing of similar Man Bites Dog-influenced mockumentary horror films like J. T. Petty's S&Man (2006) and Scott Glosserman's Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), Long Pigs nevertheless makes an intriguing and often disturbing entry into this curious emerging sub-subgenre.

100 Ghost Street: The Return of Richard Speck (2012) dir. Martin Andersen

Examining their upcoming slate of feature films reveals that The Asylum production studio does not appear poised to revitalize their poor reputation. The company was founded upon the production of an endless stream of what has been dubbed "mockbusters," or films that feature titles and content roughly similar to recent major studio fare, released concurrently if not before the bigger pictures they're aping. Though the studio has branched away from this formula on occasion, it's clear that creativity is not their strong suit. In recent years they've produced seven FF films (what they call, amusingly, "reality" films), and while not every one of them has a clear blockbuster that it's mocked up to resemble, they all still manage to capture the general trend of the genre at the moment. Their latest, 100 Ghost Street, is in the Grave Encounters haunted asylum mode and, perhaps astonishingly, is really no worse than any of the other films sporting that featherweight premise. It's a shallow and mostly unengaging film, though dotted throughout with moments of, if not outright fright, certainly the desire to produce fright. The recurring motif of a plethora of black feathers discovered in bizarre locations (inside the asylum's walls; in its toilets) is almost creepy, and the discovery of a trail of fresh blood leading from the floor, up a wall, and into a hatch in the ceiling certainly is. As is the case with most of The Asylum's "reality" films I've seen thus far, 100 Ghost Street is needlessly exploitative, using sexual violence to titillate rather than disgust or unnerve. (I will take this moment to remind you of the tasteful scene in their earlier effort 8213: Gacy House (2010) in which John Wayne Gacy's ghost anally rapes a young man.) In this case, the film features two fits of repugnant The Entity-styled ghost rape (the second of which being, at the very least, a surprising narrative callback to the legend of the titular Richard Speck, made all the more icky by the fact that the person assaulted is a corpse). The lousy CGI, though present throughout, is understated in a way that The Vicious Brothers obviously weren't capable of when creating Grave Encounters, so in that one respect it's an improvement. But, ultimately, all we're doing is applauding a perpetual failure for failing slightly less spectacularly this time around.

Paranormal Entity (2009) dir. Shane Van Dyke

 

Paranormal Entity was The Asylum's second blatant FF mockbuster, coming a year after their Cloverfield homage, Monster (2008). Because it's essentially a domestic drama spurred on by a ghostly demon infestation, Paranormal Entity contains some slightly more interesting thematic content than the bulk of the studio's FF offerings, but only very slightly, signalling that any weight we detect was probably accidental, at best. Its opening text Revelation of Fate spoils all of what's to come after, as it doesn't take long for us to realize that the rape and murder of Samantha Finley (Erin Marie Hogan) by her older brother Thomas (Shane Van Dyke) is supernaturally tinged and not at all influenced by the sleazy doubly incestual angle that it hints at once or twice. At certain moments Paranormal Entity appears to be poking fun of its source material's lapses in logic by humorously amending them: in this film the characters at least try to go to a motel after the ghost shenanigans begin to intensify (though it does not go well), and at one point an exorcism of the house is about to be performed by a psychic before the scene smash cuts to a shot of the same psychic lying dead on the ground. But mostly this is an earnest affair, the filmmakers replacing Paranormal Activity's successful bits with worse ones. Ineptitude is running pretty high when the most frightening static shot jump scare you can muster is a crucifix falling down from a wall.

 

Invasion (a.k.a. Infection) (2005) dir. Albert Pyun

Albert Pyun, director of Cyborg (1989), Captain America (1990), and Dollman (1991), is a master of schlock and Invasion is that exactly. It rides (literally) on its one-take, COPS-inspired police cruiser dashboard camera gimmick. Though, unlike the also seemingly one-take Last Ride (2011), I detected many points in Pyun's film at which a cut could have occurred, and I suspect they did. Unfortunately, any such cuts don't help to make the film less of a drag. Communicating much of the small town alien invasion story through police dispatch banter is a novel concept, making the film feel like an effective radio play bolstered by occasional on-screen action, but all too often even the dialogue drifts away and we're stranded inside the car as it cruises up and down forest dirt roads. At these moments, accompanied as they are by the film's over-dramatic orchestral score, you'd be hard pressed to find an FF film more sleep-inducing. Budget stock sound effects, alien slugs that crawl into people's ears, and a nuclear holocaust fill out the rest of the story. (What's frightfully unclear is how exactly the footage from the police camera survives the atomic blast. Do police cruisers double as refrigerators?) Invasion concludes with a perhaps record-setting 20 minutes of end credits. What more need I say?

Next time, a tsunami of Japanese found footage: Noroi: The Curse (2005), Occult (2009), & Shirome (2010).

When Horror Came to Shochiku (1967-1968) dir. Kazui Nihonmatsu; Hajime Sato; Hiroshi Matsuno

When Horror Came To Shochiku, The Criterion Collection's 37th release in their Eclipse Series, which strives to provide under-appreciated cinematic gems in moderately inexpensive no-frills DVD collections, is their first dedicated strictly to horror. Though the Criterion Collection is no stranger to Japanese horror cinema-- having previously released Godzilla (1954), Jigoku (1960), Onibaba (1964), Kwaidan (1965), Kurnoneko (1968), and Hausu (1977) in the mainline series-- the four films contained in this new Eclipse set are struck from an almost totally unique vein of genre referents. Those other Criterion horrors belong to a long tradition of Japanese horror cinema that finds inspiration in Japanese cultural mythology, tradition, religious practice, or (in the case of Godzilla) uniquely Japanese ecological concerns. Shochiku Studio's horror output (these four films making up the sum total of it) is more clearly derived from Western cinema, with its multinational casts and decided avoidance of blatant Japanese cultural signifiers leaving each film feeling as if it has been primed for international export. But it would be wrong to call the films mere imitations of horror films with Western sensibilities. Rather, the films engage an assortment of disparate genre conventions from both East and West--ghosts (maboroshi), aliens, giant monsters (dai-kaiju), UFOs, doppelgangers, killer insects, vampires, mad scientists, nuclear disasters--in their frenzied, low-budget madness, producing a quartet of simultaneously goofy and thrilling films that are, frankly, unclassifiable.

The X from Outer Space (1967) dir. Kazui Nihonmatsu

A cloyingly mirthful romantic comedy (in space!) meets a most preposterous giant rubber-suited monster movie, The X from Outer Space is Shochiku's attempt at mining the lucrative kaiju pot and winding up with one of the more bizarre and schizophrenic (though cheerfully optimistic) entries in the canon. It opens at the headquarters of one of those ideal Star Trek era international, multicultural space programs, which, for reasons left sketchy, sends a happy-go-lucky shuttle team into the void of space on a mission to Mars. Six previous missions have failed due to inexplicable UFO interference, and this expedition turns out much the same, with a UFO that looks akin to "the world's largest fried egg" bungling communications and forcing the "astroboat" to take respite on the moon, upon which her unfazed crew flirt with each other and bounce around to the tune of Latin-flavored ballroom music. Soon after the crew set off again, coming into contact with the UFO once more and having their ship's hull covered with blinking, frosted eggs. Scraping one off for a sample and bringing it back to Earth results in the astronauts unleashing the swift development of a gigantic space monster... possessing all the visual ferocity of an antennaed chicken with ruffled sleeves. This monster, dubbed Guilala, birthed in a shower of fireworks and lava, soon makes short work of a cardboard and plaster city, stumbling his gangly way towards the nearest power sources while floor-punching buildings and letting fighter jets crash into his head all the while. He consumes electricity and nuclear power for energy, see, (looking as if he's mindlessly orgasming while doing so), and it'll take the military's combined strength to cover him in shaving cream before he wreaks irreparable damage. In the Eclipse set's liner notes, critic Chuck Stephens pokes fun at the notion of reading any deep themes emanating from either the film's slight interracial romance drama or glowing space omelet. He's right, but I can't help but be floored by the wistfulness with which the survivors talk about Guilala in the immediate aftermath of his killing (probably) tens of thousands of people and the glib lesson that the experience of the frilly chicken monster has taught to blonde-haired astronaut Lisa (Peggy Neal), who then applies it to her love life: "All things should remain where they belong."

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968) dir. Hajime Sato

Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell has the distinction of being the the most visually audacious of the Shochiku horrors. Commencing on a jetliner coasting cautiously through a blood red sky full of blood red clouds, it's no great surprise when events take a turn for the grisly and extravagant. Multiple birds suicide against the windshield, shady deals begin to unfold between the passengers, and a mysterious man attempts a hijacking. The plane loses control and crashes into a mountaintop before anything is resolved, but the situation only escalates from there: the hijacker's body is overtaken by an alien entity in the form of a slithering pile of silver metallic goo that enters him, quite graphically, through a yonic wound it creates on his forehead. The vaginal imagery in this wound is explicit, and the hijacker's campaign of alien-fueled sexual vampirism (enacted indiscriminately on both men and women) complicates the usual gender-specific vampire/victim relationships in an equally interesting and bizarre manner. Also of note is the film's blanket condemnation of human aggression, here pointed squarely at the conflict in Vietnam. The specter of the Vietnam War hovers over everything in the film: a blonde haired American passenger is traveling to pick up the body of her deceased soldier husband, another passenger is an arms dealer setting up dubious exchanges, and the Vietnam War gives the invading alien species the justification it seems to require in order to initiate the genocide of humankind, in a sort of "you-had-it-all-and-screwed-it-all-up" mass shunning. The alien envoy offers "no repentance" to the irresponsible humans and neither does Goke. Innocents die in extreme and merciless fashion, a black and white photo montage of images from Vietnam reminding us of the source of its resolve. As the film ends on a breathtaking apocalyptic tableau, there's little question that director Hajime Sato has painted a bold political critique on his brazen and tawdry genre canvas.

The Living Skeleton (1968) dir. Hiroshi Matsuno

Shochiku's most fascinating genre mashup, The Living Skeleton combines elements of murderous pirates, haunted boats, vengeful ghosts, mad scientists, disguised psychopaths, and wayward bats. The only of these films shot in black and white, its delectable cinematography casts a rain-soaked melancholy over this outwardly simple yet increasingly convoluted tale. It's also the most charmingly spartan production, its hokey special effects (misshapen plastic skeletons floating at the bottom of the ocean, toy boats caught in bathtub storms, rubber bats on strings being thunked against windows) never detracting from the poignancy of the tale in any meaningful way. An initial scene of a group of pirates machine-gunning a boat's restrained passengers segues to events transpiring three years later. Saeko (Kikko Matsuoka) is a young girl taken in by a priest after her identical twin sister (one of the victims in the opening scene) disappeared at sea without a trace. When the long-missing ship that her sister was a passenger on reappears off in the distance of the waters of this seaside village, Saeko and her boyfriend take a disastrous boat ride out to it in a storm. In the aftermath, a ghostly doppelganger begins to take bloody, brutal vengeance on the pirates, most of whom have established themselves as "respectable" members of society with the booty they acquired from the heist. Through this section the film is comfortably formulaic. But, after the surprise strangulation of a main character and the reveal of the sadistic and hypocritical murderer's true identity, The Living Skeleton forgets itself in its perverse ride towards its conclusion. This is assuredly a good thing. The film's most unsettling sounds and images arise from this wild abandon: a sunken-eyed doctor who sleeps on an abandoned ship curled up next to the mummified corpse of his wife with a syringe in his hand and a tape recorder playing the sounds of her orgasmic/tortured moans on a table in the background; a possibly sentient but expressionless corpse clinging with unearthly strength to a man's leg as he drags her along; a boat's superstructure literally melting into the sea. Only in its final, mournful moments does it feel like its contemporaneous Japanese ghost story brethren-- what came before is far too strange and indelibly Western (placing a certain emphasis on Christianity and go-go clubs) to warrant such a simple classification.

Genocide (1968) dir. Kazui Nihonmatsu

The year after helming The X from Outer Space, director Kazui Nihonmatsu returned to Shochiku for another science fiction/horror hybrid, which turned out to be his last for the studio. Genocide is in every way a more accomplished effort than Nihonmatsu's previous film. Its apocalyptic horror derives from a wildly absurd scenario that tops Goke's while sharing a basic resemblance: as nuclear tensions between the Eastern and Western blocs heighten, colossal intelligent swarms of genetically modified insects decide that they would rather wipe out humanity first than risk obliteration at the whims of irresponsible and reckless human beings. No lie, the clever, evolved insects actually communicate this exact intention to a character while he's in a poison-induced trance. The misanthropic ecological message is bolstered by the film's characters, who prove themselves to be all too eager to betray and murder each other, even when facing the total extinction of the human species. Even the character who one would imagine to be the most sympathetic-- a (surprise) blonde-haired Jewish woman named Annabelle (Kathy Horan) who was raped and witnessed the deaths of her whole family while imprisoned in Auschwitz (and who spouts a line that would proudly grace the cover of any lurid 1950s Men's Adventure magazine: "Nazi Soldiers Made Me Their Plaything")-- actively seeks the eradication of humankind because she doesn't "trust humans beings anymore." Because Annabelle, when not scheming, is also the deceitful "plump white butterfly" lover of one the film's main characters, a married Japanese man, the film is also making a more pointed condemnation of interracial relationships than The X from Outer Space could-- sunbathe with a blonde white girl and you just might be precipitating the Insect Armageddon. In addition, there are a slew of unnerving moments here, particularly the bloody mess that the swarms of insects leave when they decide to suicide en masse against the windshields of planes and the agonized sounds of monkeys being wantonly killed by the insects, overheard by two characters as they await their own imminent fates under the protection of a flimsy wooden shack. The film concludes, swiftly, with a murder, a suicide, a plane exploding, an H-bomb detonating, most of the main characters perishing, the insect menace still very much a reality, and a lone pregnant woman stranded in a boat staring at the scorched sun and sky. The events serve as an echo of one of the film's earlier sentiments: "The world in indeed full of chaos and danger."  

Without Warning (1980) dir. Greydon Clark

a.k.a. The Warning; It Came Without Warning

Logline: Some camping teens run into the middle of a small scale alien invasion. As they're stalked by a lumbering alien creature, they must band together with the eccentric townsfolk to survive. Saving the world never felt so quaint.

Crime in the Past: Not applicable.

Bodycount: 9, most covered with fun new toothy appendages.

Themes/Moral Code: Alien morality is a myth. Fornicators die, but so does a boy scout troop leader (though, curiously, the boy scouts remain unharmed-- I suppose even aliens, or director Greydon Clark, have limits).

Otherwise, thematic content is sparse. There is the presence of Martin Landau as a deranged Vietnam vet suffering from flashbacks and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which make him imagine that everyone (particularly our young heroes) are infernal body-snatched aliens. So while that's obviously a bad thing, his rampant paranoia also makes him the only person in town willing to believe and prepare for the alien invasion. (Unfortunately, the sum total of his preparation for the invasion includes walking towards the alien in disbelief and being swiftly murdered). Regardless of how Landau's nutball character is portrayed, I don't believe the film is attempting to provide some honest commentary on Vietnam vets or PTSD-- if anything, he's just an alternate menace to keep our heroes running so that the filmmakers could save up their hokey alien costume for the "explosive" conclusion.

Killer's Motivation: Our killer is an alien from the deep reaches of space, so this isn't exactly the standard psycho-sexual or inheritance-driven motive. (Though the fact that our silent alien chucks little parasitic creatures that resemble disembodied vagina dentata at his victims is certainly something). Its role is that of a one-alien vanguard with the mission of taking over a backwoods, rural town in order to set up a home base from which to stage a larger invasion of the planet by its species (who will presumably join our alien soon; really, sending one alien for the job of many seems like an oversight or a bout of overconfidence-- in any case, I'd guess our killer drew the short straw). This plan is at least what all of the characters assume their new alien pal is up to, in a scene of exposition where they confidently surmise its hypothetical motivation. Considering our alien never bothers to explain itself with its own grunts and chirps, we are forced to believe them.

Final Girl: The final girl is Sandy (Tarah Nutter). She's pretty cool, if the fairly standard virginal tomboy with a sensitive side (early on, she refrains from skinny dipping; in one later scene, during a pause in the action, a music box makes her cry). At the beginning of the film, she's dateless but quickly begins to form an innocent though developing bond with the also dateless Greg (Christopher S. Nelson)-- in one cute scene, they run around holding hands. Silly, Greg! Becoming a potential sexual partner for the final girl is rarely a smart move in these sorts of situations, and Greg soon turns up dead, a parasitic sucker latched onto his cranium. Sandy then spends the rest of the film hanging out with the rugged Taylor (Jack Palance, who for once plays a hero, but is never quite convincing as the owner of a rural car shop and gas station). Sandy proves to hold her own in the final act's hunting of the alien when she manages to re-wire a faulty dynamite charge and blow the alien back to whatever blasted galaxy he came from-- such an action takes a little more skill and know-how then lugging an axe at a killer's head. So kudos, Sandy.

The Good, the Bad, & the Cheese:  At first blush, you probably wouldn't mark Without Warning as the backwoods slasher that it is. Instead, your mind would probably land on other cheap '80s Alien takeoffs, something like Xtro (1982) or Nightbeast (1982). But what we receive is assuredly a slasher, if a somewhat bland one: a group of teens partying in the woods, eccentric locals being all creepy and suspicious, a shadowed killer lurking about and picking random characters off, the presence of a final girl. All those traits are dominant, and their usage within a science fiction context predates that other science fiction quasi-slasher, Predator (1987), by quite a few years. Not that I'd want to toot the horn of Without Warning's originality-- it's a typical slasher but with a new villain, and that's its problem. It's a by-the-numbers production, never quite surprising or exploring ground outside of the formula. The overstuffed cast may be a partial saving grace: Jack Palance, Martin Landau, Cameron Mitchell, Sue Anne Langdon, Neville Brand, Ralph Meeker, and David Caruso. Palance and Landau are the particular standouts, going all out in their manic performances (despite being well-respected and talented actors with long careers) for a film that basically amounts to a paycheck for them. (Palance is especially loveable and committed in his final scene, in which he rushes across a field towards the poor sap stuck in the alien costume while yelling, repeatedly, "ALIEN! ALIEN!"). Director Greydon Clark is responsible for one of the filthiest films I've ever seen (his Porky's-at-a-video-arcade film, Joysticks (1983)) and one of the most preposterous (his killer-cat-on-a-boat-with-George Kennedy film, Uninvited (1988)). Without Warning can't really boast the title of "most" anything, but in comparison to those two it's startlingly competent. For reasons that should be apparent in a moment, I look forward to checking out the slasher spoof Clark directed two years later, Wacko (1982), featuring the acting talents of Joe Don Baker, George Kennedy (again!), and Andrew Dice Clay. Oh, how I look forward to that one.

Lovely Molly (2012), Seventh Moon (2008), Altered (2006) dir. Eduardo Sánchez

The Blair Witch Project is an important film for me. I'd caught the horror bug young-- I was wearing out VHS copies of Gremlins, Critters, and The Monster Squad as a toddler and before I graduated to the double digits I'd moved on to fare like Halloween and The Blob-- but it was on Friday, July 30th, 1999 that I beheld The Blair Witch Project on the opening day of its wide theatrical run and horror started to really matter in my life. I'll leave the discussion of that singular film to another time and place, but I would like to spend some words catching up with its two directors, Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, who have each been quietly establishing their own careers in horror in the years since. Upon seeing the initial trailer for Sánchez's Lovely Molly earlier this year, it dawned upon me that I had not seen a single film by either director since that debut collaboration. Why would I so completely ignore the current work of two filmmakers whose first film I hold in such high esteem? I can tell you it wasn't an intentional avoidance, and there are probably a couple of external factors contributing to it: a) besides their loose involvement in the Blair Witch sequel (which I've always enjoyed on its own merits) and the television/Internet hybrid series Freakylinks (of which I was a major fan back when it was airing (I may have run a fan site (I'll never tell))), both Sánchez and Myrick sat inactive in the immediate wake of their mutual success, the former not making another film until 2006 and the latter not until 2007. b) All of the films that both Sánchez and Myrick have directed since then have been released either direct-to-video or through small theatrical runs. I would have had to have been paying pretty close attention to catch them. So, egg on my face, I've decided to rectify my ignorance by viewing all of their films and covering each here on the blog. First up is this post, dedicated to all three of Sánchez's: Altered (2006), Seventh Moon (2008), and Lovely Molly (2012). A second post chronicling my experience watching all of Myrick's should arrive sometime in the next few months. Without further excuses: 

Altered (2006)

Altered, a somewhat unusual alien encounter film, is not the strongest start Sánchez could have had to his solo directing career. It has that unmistakeable mid-noughties horror flavor that accompanies a film trying to be jokey and grimly serious in equal measure. That's an almost impossible ratio to juggle, and so (no surprise here) the film falters in its tone throughout. Worse, the majority of the humor is just crass and groan-inducing, rendering most of the quipping characters a tad repugnant. (IMDb tells me it was originally scripted as a comedy entitled Probed. For once, I totally believe the information IMDb is providing). Moreover, this stale, omnipresent humor also detracts from the few attempts at generating legitimate tension: an alien slowly unraveling a character's intestines to the other side end of the room is, despite what you might think, funny. Nevertheless, it's those aforementioned twists on the typical alien encounter formula that kept it of some moderate interest to me. It's structured in media res, the entirety of the film playing out as a prolonged third act, leaving much back story and character motivation to unravel over time through inference rather than blunt exposition. In a film such as this, I found the use of my brain--in whatever limited capacity--to be refreshing. The characteristics and technology of the alien visitors is also quite well-conceived, and (though we see far too much of him) the primary alien even manages to be fitfully creepy. There's a certain pleasure to be had in watching a rubber-suited alien prancing about on screen in a film from as late as 2006, but that's a small recommendation.

 

Seventh Moon (2008)

 

Although possessing its own share of issues, Seventh Moon is, without question, a more accomplished film than its predecessor. For one, it has its tone figured out. Seventh Moon is only concerned in its situational horror elements, to the point of willful simplicity. At the expense of character and story, the film acts like an eager voyeur waiting to see what will happen when it places mice and snakes into the same maze. It can't be called a sophisticated storytelling approach, but it does make for a gripping viewing experience. While its integration of (actual?) Chinese folklore and traditions makes it somewhat unique (and so of interest on that score alone), I found myself most enamored with the film's eccentric cinematography. Like the later Chernobyl Diaries, Seventh Moon appears to be directly inspired by the aesthetics of the found footage movement without ever explicitly being one. Particularly in its opening act (but to a lesser extent throughout), the camerawork develops an extreme amateur handheld style, filming the protagonists from an uncomfortable distance and  picking up their voices through the camera's mic alone-- at one point, the camera even gets knocked over! Even though no one is actually filming the events in the diegetic world, the style results in the unshakeable feeling that there might be some camera-strapped voyeur present, which smartly reflects aspects of both the film's M.O. and plot. Fortunately, the film's mission to frighten is competently accomplished by the hungry Chinese ghosts that chase our protagonists across the Chinese countryside-- they're terrifying in their voraciousness and (unlike Altered) the film wisely keeps them obscured or out of focus for the majority of their appearances. The film's flaws derive less from its inherent situational/survival horror aspects than from its insistence on trying to complicate that simple formula with emotional resonance for its story and characters during the conclusion. Some rather obvious and conventional final act plot revelations and scenes of Amy Smart mourning do little to elevate the material, so instead sort of bog things down. I'm not convinced we desire emotional closure in a film like this; we only want to see if the mice are going to find their way out or not.

Lovely Molly (2012)

 

Something about "third times" and "being charmed."  But, honest: Lovely Molly is a tremendous film, one of my favorites released so far this year. Aesthetically, this is a continuation of Sánchez's retrieval and reconfiguration of found footage methods. Instead of mirroring the camerawork this time, he has his characters utilize a handheld camera when necessary and logically appropriate-- say, during a wedding, or when trying to capture proof of a ghostly entity. The film even begins with its lead actress, Gretchen Lodge, facing down the camera Heather Donahue-style and giving a crying confession, but besides this obvious connection the remainder of the FF sequences never feel shoe-horned in simply because Sánchez is the Blair Witch guy. They feel organic to the film, a familiar and fitting way to throw us off balance and, in moments of great distress, help us to identify with Molly's terror. The transitions between the found footage and traditional cinematography are seamless, which demonstrates that a touch of skill and finesse can pull it off without frustrating the viewer-- hopefully this will prove the antidote to [REC] 3's bad faith/camera smashing. (Sánchez's next film, a found footage Bigfoot film entitled Exists, is filming now. I can't wait to see where he'll take the form in this context). 

The story in Lovely Molly has the depth and resonance missing from Altered and Seventh Moon: Molly, a newlywed and recovering drug addict, moves back into her unoccupied family home with her often-absent trucker husband. Unexplainable late night break-ins and other unexplainable supernatural occurrences transpire, leading Molly to believe that the vengeful, demonic ghost of her abusive father has returned from the grave to continue his work on her. While attempting to prove and understand his ghostly reappearance, Molly begins to lose her cool (an understatement). A definite ambiguity hangs over the events: is the demonic paranormal activity real, or merely a psychological manifestation of Molly's heroin addiction? (The recurring horse symbols would seem to argue for either interpretation). Regardless, the film stands as a chilling exploration of the lingering effects of sexual and emotional abuse. There's even a nice economic subtext here too, with out two attractive newlyweds holding down shitty jobs (a truck driver and a janitor), having no health insurance, and maxing out their credit cards (yay, America!). 

Before I forget to mention it, Lovely Molly is also ridiculously scary. Gretchen Lodge's performance has an unnerving, brooding intensity in its own right, but couple that with a lip devouring, ghost rape, and a deer carcass birthing from a basement ceiling, and this is one grungy, horrifying flick. Of additional note are the wonderful sound design and the work by the band Tortoise on the terrific score, crackling with deafening white noise and feedback. At its conclusion, the film also contains one of the most horrifying movie moments of all time. I exaggerate not. You will know it when you see it. (One of the only complaints I'd lodge against the film would be that it fails to end immediately after this shot. We're given a brief coda that while logically consistent, also scatters some of the previous scene's visceral effect).

A film that Lovely Molly reminded me of during my viewing is another film from this year, Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact. Both films have strong-willed female leads, haunted family homes, troubled family histories, characters with drug problems, and a focus on shaky sisterly bonds. They both even share the same grimy yellow hues, drenched over every scene. But The Pact is such a dull, uninspiring movie. (So dull and uninspiring that I neglected to cover it here on the blog. What was the point?). It possesses no sense of subtlety when its material clearly begged for some. The Pact tries hard to freak you with screechy jump scares and by stabbing Casper Van Dien in the neck, all to no avail; Lovely Molly, working like the charmed film that it is, knows that the scariest thing on earth can be a hug.

Meltdown 03: Lost & Found (Part V)

Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County (1998) dir. Dean Alioto

One of the few pre-Blair Witch FF films, Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County is an expanded, slightly higher-budgeted remake of the director's own UFO Abduction a.k.a. The McPherson Tape (1989), a hoax tape that was passed around the UFO community for years on home-recorded bootlegs as some of the most compelling evidence of alien contact. Of course to our eyes now it looks rather quaint, but if you can transport your mind back to 1989 it's easy to imagine the film's effect. Coming so early in the initial FF movement, Alien Abduction doesn't have much prior material to rip off, and so manages to stake out its own ground, unlike those of the current decade who seem all too aware of their predecessors' tricks. The film's desire to be mistaken for genuine found footage is its greatest asset-- events unfold in real-time, the situation escalates as one would expect it to (rendering the camera's constant presence more natural), and characters act believably (the C.O., soon after his first alien encounter, wets himself; he then spends the next few minutes running upstairs to change his pants). Moreover, the film's premise is spectacularly eerie: the large McPherson family gathers on the old, remote homestead for Thanksgiving dinner as an alien spacecraft lands nearby, knocking out the electricity and forcing the family to hole up in the house to defend themselves. As the house is transformed into a creepy, candlelit rural haven from the slowly encroaching alien presence outside, the film builds so well to its climax that when it arrives it cannot help but be a disappointment (it is). The film's low quality home video resolution is also a benefit in that it makes the few brief shots of the aliens all the more convincing, allowing us in one extreme close-up to see the peach fuzz coating the scalp of one of the aliens. The found footage is inter-cut with brief, non-distracting interview segments with various "authorities" (on UFO abductions, video manipulation, and the like) around commercial breaks (Alien Abduction originally ran as a TV special on UPN). The best of these is an interview with the film's director, Dean Alioto, who claims that he believes the footage is real, but if it is a hoax then he "should have directed it." Wink!

In Memorium (2005) dir. Amanda Gusack

In Memorium [sic] is a film notable for misspelling its own title. Someone involved in the production, or maybe one of its fans (?), has taken to smugly claiming that it's "Paranormal Activity before Paranormal Activity," which is utter horseshit because there's almost nothing shared between the two. While in Oren Peli's film the lunkhead Micah plants his camera around the house in order to capture the supernatural shenanigans afoot, In Memorium features its lunkhead protagonist setting up cameras around the house he is renting because he has cancer and wishes to record his body wasting away in its final month of life (because, what else is he to do?). This lunkhead only just so happens to capture some ghostly goings-on because, as it so happens, his illness has supernatural origins (Gasp! This aspect is actually kind of neat, in a deranged way. The premise is that a shitty dead mom is returning from the grave to enact revenge against her embarrassed sons. Whoops, *SPOILERS*). It's a bad movie-- one proudly displaying melodramatic acting, a shaving cream bikini, and a recurring joke about stale crackers-- but I'm probably being more hostile towards it than it deserves because its use of the FF conceit is a total joke. The dying lunkhead has installed security cameras covering every inch of his rented house, but instead of the footage looking like actual security cam footage (see: Paranormal Activity 2, Apartment 143) it's more akin to a series of cinematic medium shots that you would forget were meant to be coming from consumer cameras if not for the fact that every once in awhile you catch a glimpse of one strapped to a wall. The film also edits its scenes between different camera angles, allowing for cinematic perspectives but obliterating any semblance of FF verisimilitude. I do, however, thank In Memorium for one brief line of dialogue that shall stick with me for some time to come: the dying lunkhead, when describing how he met his girlfriend on the set of an independent film, relates that "the film cost nothing, but she looked like a million bucks." One of those things is true.

The Devil Inside (2012) dir. William Brent Bell

A complete and unrepentant waste of everyone's time, The Devil Inside has approximately one novel idea: the notion that there is a group of rogue, unsanctioned priests performing exorcisms all around Italy. The rest, as they say, is garbage. Most of the notes I took during my viewing of this film became incredulous questions rather than  observations: "is this a movie? are these even characters? am I supposed to buy this as High Definition footage from 1988? is that what's called "development"? are these supposed to be set pieces? what does this ending offer to the story? what story? who are they trying to fool here?" After fourteen films in a row, it's only The Devil Inside that has managed to make me angry. It's neither frightening, interesting, original, nor enthusiastic (jeepers, even Blackwood Evil has it beat on that last count). For a film about the salvation of souls, it sure could use one of its own. Sniff that irony. It's a cash-grab with a well-edited trailer that somehow managed to net over $100 million, despite its R-rating. A FF film has never given me motion sickness, but I'm feeling queasy now. Is this the genre's death knell? It certainly feels like the death of something or other. My innocence? The FF genre is in a weird spot halfway through 2012-- yeah, we had Chronicle, but we also had Project X. Today, a new Asylum FF flick (which they have the gall to label under the genre "Reality") is being released, to the cheers of no one. Where do we go from here? Can this genre, battered and bruised as it may be, be rescued? Where are the innovators and the storytellers? Innocence lost, but they can't steal my optimism: those champions will arrive, and soon. But they won't be the minds behind The Devil Inside. Of this I can assure you.