30 Days of Fright - 07: The Fourth Kind

Documentaries are not boring. Many of them involve killing and lately loads of them are about big scary aliens!

The Fourth Kind (2009) presents itself as a documentary that has certain scenes dramatised for the purposes of telling the story of events that occurred in Nome, in northern Alaska in the year 2000. The Film begins with Mila Jovovich addressing the audience directly and outlining what they are about to see.

Jovovich plays the part of Dr. Abigail Tyler, a psychologist who, while treating a group of patients in Nome, herself got mixed up the events that took place there. She explains that all of the events in the film are backed up with documented proof in the forms of video and audio recordings and interviews with those involved, particularly Dr. Tyler herself. The director of the film, Olatunde Osunsanmi, interviews the real Dr. Tyler who tells the story of what happened to her and her family and patients in Alaska.

In 2000, Dr. Tyler and her husband were practicing psychologists who were involved in research in Alaska. Abigail’s husband Will is murdered one night while they both slept in bed and Tyler and her family were grieving his loss, with the Tyler children badly affected by the trauma. Two months after the murder, Dr. Tyler is working with a group of patients who all begin reporting the exact same problem. They all wake up in the middle of the night, every night, and notice a large white owl outside their window staring at them that won’t go away no matter what. One of the patients agrees to a form of hypnotherapy and while under reveals that the owl is in his bedroom standing over him and that it’s not an owl at all. The patient gets violent, obviously terrified, so Tyler wakes up from the hypnotic state and he goes home.

That night, Dr. Tyler is called to the patient’s house which is surrounded by cops as the man has pulled a gun on his family and is screaming for Dr. Tyler’s help. She gets there and talks to the man briefly before he shoots and kills his wife and children before quickly turning the gun on himself. Disturbed by this turn of events some of Tyler’s other patients go under hypnosis and reveal similar disturbing details of their nocturnal visitors that leads Tyler to the inevitable conclusion that the people of Nome are the victims of a series of on-going alien abductions. Tyler herself seems to be troubled by something visiting her as she accidentally leaves her dictaphone on one night in her bedroom and it records sounds of her screaming and an unusual voice speaking a strange language...

 ....and then I'm gonna show her my 'O' face... giggity!

The Fourth Kind is normally classified as a pure Sci Fi film, though some reviewers like to call it “spooky” or “creepy”. The reason I included it on the list of 30 Days of Fright movies is because the first time I saw it, it really gave me the creeps. Actually, that’s not true, it scared the piss out of me! Trust me Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a horror film!

The concept behind The Fourth Kind is that of the faux documentary. In order to have the audience accept that what they’re seeing is real, the entire film is dressed up in the way those re-enactment documentaries are that you see on the Discovery channel or the National Geographic channel, only this time they managed to get a known actress involved to play the lead. There’s a strong reliance on video footage allegedly recorded by Tyler and by the Nome police department as well as excerpts from taped recordings of Tyler’s sessions with her patients. The interview itself is really only used to hold the narrative together and to keep things progressing in the order they should. Of course, the whole thing is bullshit, every bit of the story is fiction and everyone is an actor, but that’s to be expected otherwise you’d have heard about all this years ago.

The way the film is presented is very clever. The way the screen splits to show how the actors are acting out the real footage is an exceptionally smart device, especially as the acted scenes aren’t perfect copies and allow for small amounts of artistic license. When characters are introduced the name of the actor playing them is flashed up on screen and the character name is either real or marked as an alias in order to protect the real person. All these tricks get you into a place where you do start to believe what you’re seeing, but it’s the supposedly real footage that packs the biggest punch and is also the biggest let down.

There are only a handful of scenes that Dr. Tyler recorded that are shown to the audience, and there are two or three recoded by the police. Tyler’s material focuses on her patients and herself going through hypnotherapy and show, albeit in a heavily distorted fashion, what happens in those sessions. The one scene where the dude in the bed freaks out is by far the best scene in the whole film and rightly put the shits up me the first time I viewed it. The two cop recordings, taken from dashboard cameras in their cars, which stick in my head are the weakest parts of the film as they are the most unbelievable, with one showing the murder/suicide and the other meant to be showing an alien spacecraft.

The first time I watched The Fourth Kind I wasn’t sure about it. Yes it was scary as a horror film should be but was it any good? The second time (last night) was a less frightening experience but I enjoyed the film more. There are some really smart bits in it – I really liked the hints that the Tyler’s were in Nome looking for aliens or whatever was causing the towns high missing persons rate, and there are other details that are just excellent (I won’t divulge them as they’d be spoilers). However, I’m not sure how well the film would work on an urban audience. If you live in a rural area then you can relate to the isolation that permeates the film and that’s needed to build the fear of being snatched away without anyone noticing.

The Fourth Kind has its weaknesses (like Jovovich rehashing her performance from Joan of Arc) but it also its strengths, and it’s scary enough to deserve its place on my list.

Two Thumbs Up for The Fourth Kind

A Guide to Internet Links:
The First Kind: Links to email
The Second Kind: Links to news sites
The Third Kind: Porn, of course!
The Fourth Kind: Links to details of last nights film

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1220198/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Kind

30 Days of Fright - 06: The Broken

High-concept horror is a rare thing. Most horror films focus on building dread over time and then reaching a scary and/or action packed ending, or they go for the jump out of your seat type of fright where things happen suddenly giving the audience a shock; those types of film are more like roller coasters despite whatever artistic content they may contain. There are a few thinking man’s horror films out there but the majority of studios, film-makers, and audiences find that intelligence and horror don’t tend to make good bedfellows. Of course, there are clever horror films but rarely does the genre go beyond that, perhaps because if the story deals with horrific situations then it can be better dealt with in a more traditional drama, or if the story is going for a supernatural slant then too much has to be accepted on faith for any highbrow thought to be able to accept what’s going on.

The Broken (2008) follows Gina McVey (played by Lena Headey; Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones), a radiologist working in central London as she goes about her business in her seemingly perfect life. She’s beautiful, well-dressed, has a boyfriend who’s a successful architect, she's doing well enough at work to be able to afford a nice flat in London, her father works for the American ambassador (so I guess she has dual-citizenship lurking in a drawer somewhere, though with a name like McVey (regardless of the spelling) I’m not sure how welcome the family are back in the good old US of A), she has a brother who’s an artist who is living with a girl he loves, and all is right with the world. The only tragedy that seems to have befallen McVey is the death of her mother when Gina was about thirteen.

Gina’s Dad comes home one night to his empty house, as is his custom, and he attacks the decanter of whiskey as it’s his birthday and he’s all alone. Except he’s not. There’s someone else in the house prowling about, but it turns out to be his family setting him up for a scare as part of a surprise party they’re throwing for him. This little fright turns into a happy dinner spent with Daddy McVey’s kids and their partners, happy that is until a mirror that had been hit against during the “SURPRISE!” bit finally falls off the wall and shatters all over the gaff.

The next day, Gina gets a funny feeling at work, a feeling that is heighted when a colleague swears he just saw her leave the building for the night. Heading out herself to use a payphone outside the hospital, Gina gets the shock of her life when she sees herself drive by in her own car. Following the car into an underground car park she pursues the driver into an apartment where she finds a picture of herself and her Dad.

Gina drives away from the apartment in her Jeep after something apparently traumatic happened. She’s distracted, looking around her and in the rear view mirror to the point of distraction, right up to the moment when she has a head-on collision with a taxi. McVey is rushed to hospital but none of her injuries are serious, just bumps and bruises; the only thing worrying her doctors are the gaps in her memory right before the accident – from the time she encountered the look-alike up to going to the hospital. She remembers bits but nothing makes sense.

Once discharged from the hospital Gina goes to stay with her boyfriend but he seems like a changed man, radically different from the man she loved before her accident. He’s cold, distant, and slightly threatening to her and she confides this to a counsellor she’s seeing for her memory problems. He diagnoses a deeper trauma in her brain and recommends more tests. Unsure if what’s occurring is in her head or not, Gina’s fears grow as she investigates some strange occurrences around her boyfriend’s apartment and in the wider world. Finally she begins to remember what happened in her doppelgangers apartment, and so remembers the terrifying truth that's threatening her whole family...

It'll never heal if you don't stop picking at it!

The Broken is an attempt at really serious horror. The concept behind the film is way out there and not something that you see too often outside of leftfield episodes of Star Trek. On top of this, The Broken also tries to be a clever movie, and there are times when this works but not enough to save the film from itself.

Gina McVey is the most neutral horror film character out there. Not once did I give a shit what was happening to her. In The Exorcist when the little girl Regan is going through the medical tests you feel sorry for her as it all seems to frighten her. On the other hand, in The Broken McVey gets her melon scanned and she’s told it’s possible that she’s got some rare brain disorder and I was all like “Good! Serves the snooty cow right!” Out of all the characters in the film, her Dad is the only sympathetic one on screen as he’s obviously still grieving the death of his wife after all these years and he loves his kids, so he’s OK. McVey’s brother and his girlfriend seem OK too, but they’re underdeveloped so it’s hard to give too much of shit about them.

As the “horror” unfolds the attempts at building dread don’t work as they nearly always go nowhere and are accompanied by repeating images and rehashes of scenes that have already been and gone more than once. When what’s happening is revealed to the audience the whole jig is up and there’s little point watching all the way to the end as what happened in the apartment before the crash is so obvious it’s funny. The biggest flaw with The Broken is not in trying to tell its little horror story but in trying to put in a twist as well.  In fact, the film opens with a big Edgar Allan Poe quote on screen and from then on I jokingly threw out a raft of possible twists that were going to feature in the film (much like the scene in The IT Crowd where Douglas Reynholm tries to guess the twist at the end of a DVD he’s watching), sadly one of my guesses was bang on the mark – and this was ninety minutes before it was revealed.

Two Thumbs Down for The Broken.

:sknil detaler eivom fo noitcelloc lausu eht era ereH

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broken_%28film%29

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0906734/

30 Days of Fright - 05: After.Life

It may seem obvious but it needs saying: In a movie so much rests on the actors. Bad acting can ruin a great story, and while nothing can really salvage a poor story good acting can at least numb the pain of the viewing. In horror you do tend to see some decent actors occassionally strutting their stuff. I’m not sure why but they all take a crack at it, maybe they’re looking for a challenge, or maybe they’re slumming it for the sake of a rounded CV, or more likely for a rounded paycheque.

After.Life (2009) stars Liam Neeson as Eliot Deacon a funeral director with a big funeral home in a small town somewhere in America. He seems to take extraordinary care of the deceased and knows just what would be appropriate for their service often putting out the favourite flowers of those who’d passed away without having to be told.

In the same town, Christina Ricci is elementary school teacher Anna Taylor who is going out with local lawyer Paul played by some pleb. Like most teachers Anna is slightly unstable (I’m joking (or am I?)) and at dinner one night a row breaks out between her and the boyfriend just before he was going to propose. Anna rushes out into the dark and stormy night, sitting into her car and tearing off before he can stop her.

Anna then wakes up on the slab at the funeral home where she meets Deacon who’s getting ready to prepare her body for her funeral, scheduled in three days time. Anna points out that she’s not dead, what with the waking up and breathing and talking and all, but Deacon points out that every dead person that hits his table says the same thing and that she’s very dead after she crashed her car. Deacon goes on to explain that he has the rather unfortunate gift of being able to communicate with the recently deceased and so he tries to help them with the transition onto the next life. It turns out that most people, like Anna, cling to life and have to get some help otherwise they’ll never be ready and the transition will be extremely hard on them while those they leave behind will suffer too until the dead are laid to rest.

Anna calls bullshit on this line and comes to the conclusion that Deacon is a creepy murderer with a taste for burying people alive. Deacon spends the next three days trying to convince Anna to accept her fate as she’s most definitely a corpse and therefore bugger all can be done for her at this point. Meanwhile, her boyfriend Paul is badly upset by her untimely passing and all he wants to do is say his goodbyes to her privately. However, seeing as how he hadn’t got around to the actual proposal before Anna supposedly kicked the bucket he’s not technically family and so Deacon won’t let him have a private audience with her. Paul grows increasingly suspicious of Deacon and tries to get the help of the local police who are convinced he’s nothing more than a grieving boyfriend.

Following her "death", one of Anna’s students, an eleven year old boy called Jack (haven’t a clue who played him, no-one famous anyway) begins to hang out at funerals, becoming fascinated with them as only a small boy can. Deacon befriends Jack and tells him about his gift for communicating with the dead, a gift he thinks Jack also possesses as Jack claims to have seen Anna stood at a window of the funeral home. Jack tells Paul of what he’s seen and this only further convinces Paul that Anna is still alive so, torn between his belief in her up-and-aboutedness and the progress of his grieving, he attempts to determine the truth just as the time comes for Anna’s funeral...

Playing Hide & Seek with Wednesday Addams was always going to end badly

After.Life is something of a horror and something of a thriller but it’s hard to figure out which it is and that’s the whole point of the film. After.Life is deliberately ambiguous as the audience are supposed to decide for themselves just what exactly the fuck is going on. The choices boil down to this: either Anna is dead and Deacon has a terrible gift that he tries to do his best with, or Anna is alive and Deacon is a serial killer burying people alive when he thinks they haven’t lived as full a life as they should have. After watching the film the choice is very much yours as there’s plenty of evidence both ways while logic (not something often present in Hollywood) gets in the way just to muddy the waters further.

If Anna is dead then did Deacon really give her drugs as part of the process of readying a body for burial? And how did that work – if you’re dead then there’s no circulation so how did intravenous drugs do anything without some sort of a pump? Why did he keep turning the temperature down in the mortuary? And why did Jack give his little clue (I won’t reveal what it was) as to what Deacon was up to?

If Anna is alive then how did she get to Deacon’s table? Was it really just a series of mistakes made by paramedics, doctors, and so on? If so, it must happen all the time and funeral directors everywhere must be encountering people (professionally) who aren’t dead all the time. If this is isolated to the town where Deacon operates then he must have a series of accomplices who provide victims or the local medical and law enforcement establishment must all be massively incompetent and Deacon is merely leveraging this for his twisted purposes. Also, if Anna is alive, why was she never hungry or thirsty, and while bodily functions are mentioned all the time, why does she never nip to the toilet?

I suspect that you’re not really meant to question Afer.Life too deeply as neither option really stands up to scrutiny and that’s what writer and director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo probably intended. The ambiguity present in After.Life is the main source of the enjoyment of the flick and in that regard it works well. The film is well paced and directed and there’s little to fault in its execution. The only real problem I saw with it was the casting.

Liam Neeson is a great actor. There’s nothing more to say about that so he’s free to go. The plebs who played the lawyer and the kid are off the hook too as they turned up and did what they were supposed to. However, Ms. Ricci...

When Christina Ricci burst onto the scene as Wednesday in The Addams Family she set the bar very high for herself at quite a young age. In that film she was perfectly cast as the sinister psychopathic child out to kill her brother with a series of deadly childhood games including the brilliantly titled “Is There a God?” featuring an electric chair. However, something bothered me about Ricci even back then and it was her looks, especially the poor girl’s forehead. What a vast amount of real estate she has between her eyes and her hairline. I thought she’d grow out of it or at least employ the aid of some sort of specialist barber who’d be able to cover the dreadful expanse with a wig or something.

Ricci is not a terribly bad looking woman, as can be seen in Sleepy Hollow where she tidied herself up a bit (probably because Johnny Depp is enough weird for one movie by himself without Ricci adding to things) but in After.Life she looked like death warmed up from the start of the film well before the dead or alive part begins. This helps the idea at the core of the film but her appearance is just too off-putting, made all the worse by the fact that she spends about a third of the film utterly naked. This isn’t me just being mean for the sake of it, Ricci’s look is heightened by the style of makeup used for After.Life and it just makes her look like the weird kid who over did the costume for Halloween as opposed to a young woman desperately trying to discover what plain of existence she’s currently on. I am forced to wonder what this film would have been like with someone else in the role of Anna. Considering the amount of nudity, preferably someone hot!

One Thumb Up and One Thumb Down for After.Life

Yes, there are links after death, here they are:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After.Life
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0838247/

30 Days of Fright - 04: [REC]2

I read an article recently about Kevin Smith, the bloke behind such films as Dogma, Clerks, Mallrats, and Jersey Girl. In the article it stated that Smith was pulling away from making movies within the studio system, the inference being that he’d go back to the small-scale indie style that made him such as success in the first place. Smith said he liked doing things that way as kids who see those movies are encouraged to try making their own films with their friends as it all feels like something anyone could do and be successful at. Once you add in some big name actors or other expensive element it makes movie-making feel like the domain of only those with the money to pay for it. I wonder then if, in addition to the perceived “realism”, there’s something to be said for the first-person, shot on a video camera and recovered later, style of film made famous by the likes of Blair Witch that might actually redeem that shitty style of film? With the exception of Cloverfield and one or two others, this style produces films that anyone could take a crack at themselves.

It would be nice if there was an upside to this type of movie as it’s a shit excuse for getting material on screen.

 This type of movie makes me as angry as this dude
(and I don't care if the picture has copyright, I nicked it, and I'd do it again!)

Picking up the action from the closing moments of the first movie, the action in [REC]2 switches from inside the apartment building in Barcelona where the zombie outbreak is taking place to the emergency services responding to the crisis, in particular a SWAT team en route to kick some ass or whatever it is SWAT teams do nowadays. The boys are tooled up for some serious trouble and are packing assault weapons, a battering ram, and the ever-popular pump action shotgun. Each of the SWAT team are sporting the latest in miniature video cameras attached to their helmets and one of the crew has a broadcast quality video camera with spotlight as they’ve been ordered to document their activities in the apartments.

Upon arrival the SWAT team are met by a bloke from the Ministry of Health called Owen who is to go in with them and is in charge. Due to the nature of the health risks associated with what’s going on inside, the building has been sealed in plastic and there’s an air-lock type entrance rigged up, everyone going in has to wear gas-masks, and only Owen can get them back out as he has a radio with voice recognition which is needed to get the doors open again.

Once inside Owen tells the lads that the masks were purely for show as the infection isn’t airborne. He goes on to explain that his mission is to get to the cause of the outbreak and gather a sample of some description. As the SWAT team move up through the building they encounter signs of a bloodbath everywhere but very little activity until they near the penthouse apartment and meet their first zombies. Once in the penthouse all hell breaks loose and SWAT team members are lost in an increasingly desperate fight against rampaging zombies. At this point Owen is forced to reveal that he’s not actually from the Ministry of Health but is in fact a Catholic Priest... and the zombies crawling all over the gaff aren’t suffering from some terrible disease at all, but are actually victims of something far more sinister...

 A la tuhuelpa legria macarena, Que tuhuelce paralla legria cosabuena, 

A la tuhuelpa legria macarena, Eeeh, macarena!

I enjoyed the first [REC], the quirky little indie horror film from Spain, so I was keen to see the follow-up if for no other reason than to find out how they justified another ninety minutes of raw-footage type film-making. The methods used to get away with this in [REC]2 show a depth not normally seen in a little sequel like this but more often feature in the types of movies where you’ve seen them all  before. The SWAT team with the helmet cams are a direct rip from Aliens, but thankfully this is acknowledged by the team leader having a dodgy camera (like Drake did in Aliens) and by one of the team keeping his shotgun close (like Hicks who kept his handy “for close encounters”). Making them bring a big-ass video camera around with them so they could document what goes down is a bit of stretch though especially as Owen flat out states that he and his lot would never let the truth of the outbreak get out.

What’s nice is that this excuse for footage only covers the first third or so of the film when suddenly it flips over to the recording from a video camera belonging to some teenagers who were in the middle of orchestrating a prank on the roof of the building opposite and who, thanks to their pesky curiosity, get mixed up in the zombie goings-on across the street. Their video only covers the next third where it again changes to the other video camera in the building... the one from the first film. Throughout these switches the timeline is preserved with only brief overlaps in the action to help the audience keep their bearings. For me, the first-person filming style is getting really old at this point and unfortunately [REC]2 really overcooks certain pieces, like where the helmet cams record gunplay which looks so much like a video game that I’m forced to wonder if there’s a game tie-in somewhere out there. Other scenes then look so much like regular movie style action that it jars you out of the immersive experience the footage was meant to induce.

It is important to point out at this point that the way the movie is filmed is the only failing it has. [REC]2 is excellent! When faced with the challenge of making a sequel to the first [REC] the two lads who returned to the Directors chairs from the first movie decided to dial everything up as far as they could and it worked a charm. The SWAT team angle, the nature of the outbreak, the truth behind the zombies, and the twists near the end are flat out genius. There are scenes where you want the action to take a sinister turn – and it does!!! Adults kill children, children kill adults, and zombies kill everyone regardless of age. There’s blood everywhere, a decent religious angle, guns, mayhem, and videotape.

The issues around subtitles in a fast paced film persist from the original but that just can’t be helped as anything is better than dubbing, except maybe a tiny little person in the corner of the screen doing sign-language; everyone hates that shit, even the deaf.

Two Thumbs Up for [REC]2

Aquí hay algunos enlaces de Internet para usted!:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REC_2
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1245112/

30 Days of Fright - 03: Deathwatch

The horror of war is a cliché that like most clichés, catchphrases, and stereotypes, has some basis in truth no matter how small. In the case of warfare there is no doubting just how horrific the experience is even for those who luckily have no direct exposure to such violence. Considering how awful the concept of war is it’s no surprise that there are so few actual horror films with a wartime setting. There’s no real need for them. Just make a regular war film and you have all the elements necessary – oftentimes including a supernatural disregard for life on behalf of most involved.

Deathwatch (2002) is set in the final part of World War 1 and tells of a squad of British soldiers getting ready to go “over the top” one night. The squad is under the direct command of a snooty officer and contains all the other usual suspects for a bunch of soldiers; there’s the gritty world-weary sergeant, the religious one, the smooth one, the psychotic one, and the young innocent one who happens to be the main character, and a few others to fill out the numbers. The young innocent one, Shakespeare (Jamie Bell from Billy Elliot), is only 16 and like so many eejits of his generation lied about his age so he could sign up with the notion of fighting for King and Country (whereas King and Country had the notion of slaughtering as many 16 – 30 year olds they could get their hands on). On the night in question young Shakespeare loses what little nerve he had and turns coward, unable to climb up the ladder into almost certain death (what a wuss) until his good old sarge promises to stick with him.

Once up and over the squad face into heavy fire from machine guns, motor explosions, and then the dreaded gas. Sometime later and after much confusion the squad find themselves roaming around in no-man’s land in a cloud of gas that mercifully turns out to only be fog. Wandering around aimlessly for a while they come across a German trench occupied by a handful of soldiers all apparently more afraid of something in the trench then they are of the British. Easily capturing the trench after murdering the surrendering soldiers the squad settle in to await rescue.

The lads quickly discover that all is not right in the trench, from the large number of dead bodies, to the radio that occasionally mistakenly reports the squads’ death and the strange feelings of rage and paranoia that grip the men. A surviving German soldier is discovered and he reveals that similar trouble befell his men too and that eventually the squad will all turn on themselves to the point of killing each other to prevent anyone ever leaving the trench...

World War One came to an end once both sides realised it was quicker to just shoot 50,000 of their own men every day*

Like I said, I think the reason no one bothers with a horror film set during a war is that war is so bad already there’s no way you can really make it any more horrific then it already is. Deathwatch tries and falls flat. Not only is the film cursed with all the difficulties of making a horror but it also had to contend with trying to make a war movie at the same time, and as any military strategist will tell you, you should never try to fight on two fronts at the same time unless you’re very, very sure of what you’re doing.

Firstly the war film problems: Anytime you make a film about a bunch of men fighting together on the same side you run into severe character development problems because when you want to use an ensemble cast in a film you need to find ways for the audience to easily tell people apart and then to relate to those people. Deathwatch cracks out all the old tricks to try to accomplish this, using the opening scene to show each man displaying his particular character trait - the smooth one combing his hair as bombs drop, the religious one having a good old pray, the innocent one being scared, and the psycho one being a psycho (what else could he do?). Each of these lads are all in the same basic uniform but each has added his own little twist like the tartan on the Scottish lad to the weird barbarian style waistcoat the nutter prefers. But, once the action kicks off, you’ll be lucky to keep track of one or two out of the whole bunch. When things get quiet again you can pick them apart but you’re so busy doing that that you miss what’s going on.

The issues with ensemble casts in uniform are so great and dealt with in such an unsophisticated manner in Deathwatch that you see the inevitable end coming a mile away as those you had trouble following (and really didn’t give a shit about) are killed off one by one.

As for the horror problems there are two biggies worth mentioning and they’re among the worst failings of horror films. Firstly, it’s very hard to determine what the hell is meant to be happening. The lads are in a creepy trench. It’s weird in the trench and there are scary noises. The boys turn on each other. Um, the end! What the fuck? What was the point? That’s worse than an episode of Lost! Deathwatch fails the fundamental test of any film, it’s impossible to retell the whole story as I just don’t know what happened. I guess that the film-makers wanted to leave as much up to the audience as possible but by the end of the film all you’ve seen is some soldiers killed with little in the line of reason behind it. As a metaphor for war it’s not bad but as a horror film it’s shite.

The second horror failing however is the unforgivable sin of not making the film scary. Deathwatch is eerie which is not something you see too often but it’s not frightening at all. At points it’s cool and at other times gross (there’s one brilliant effect where an injured man has been attacked by rats) but there are too many times where it’s confusing or silly. It’s never scary and you never fear for anyone in the film, most of the time you’re glad when someone gets killed, which makes you no better than every other warmonger out there.

Two Thumbs Down for Deathwatch

*I nicked that joke from Blackadder - someone who knew a truckload about World War One

Sir, Links, Sir:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathwatch
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286306/

30 Days of Fright - 02: Halloween II (2009)

Horror is a funny old business. Setting out to make a career in this particular genre requires a certain mindset. No matter the media, be it books, comics, music, TV, or cinema, when you decide that horror is for you then you just have to accept a few fundamental truths. You will wear a lot of black. You will start talking in an overly dramtic fashion and say the word "Greetings" instead of "Hello". You will get funny looks from people in the street, especially small children and elderly women. You might get a tattoo. Of a bat.

There are some obvious and famous folk who have made successful careers from Horror. Stephen King, Ozzy Ozbourne, Garth Marenghi, Dani Flith, and the musician and director of last nights film, Rob Zombie - a man so dedicated to horror that he changed his name to Zombie, for crying out loud.

Picking up the story immediately after the events of the 2007 film, Halloween II opens with the sheriff of Haddonfield finding young Laurie Strode walking along in the rain, clutching a gun, drenched in blood, badly injured and severely traumatised. The action moves along as expected, following the police response to Michael Myers murdering rampage including the collection of the bodies and Laurie’s emergency treatment at the hospital where she undergoes surgery for her wounds. As she sleeps off the anaesthetic a rather improbable accident befalls the van transporting Myers body and it’s revealed that he’s not as dead as was thought.

One year later we discover that Lauire isn’t doing very well. She’s living with the sheriff and his daughter (who had also been badly hurt by Myers) and is somewhat off the rails and undergoing therapy to help her deal with the previous October, especially the deaths of her parents. Meanwhile, Loomis the doctor who had been working the Michael Myers case, is on tour for his latest book about Myers and his family and is coming to Haddonfield for Halloween in order to help the promotion of the book, regardless of the objections of the families involved.

Despite everything Laurie had been through she remained blissfully ignorant of the fact that she’s Myers sister until Loomis’ book spills the beans further traumatising her, just as a large stranger bearing a striking resemblance to her dear brother approaches Haddonfield just in time for the 31^st.

I gave you blood, blood, gallons of the stuff, I gave you all that you could drink and it has never been enough...

Sequels to remakes can work as was seen with the follow-up to the reworked Texas Chainsaw Massacre; in the case of Halloween II the film doesn’t quite click as a sequel even though it does everything a sequel should, it continues the story and answers the questions concerning what happened after the events of the first film. Where Halloween II slips in this regard is that even though Rob Zombie directed both films there is a marked difference in style between the two outings.

In the first Zombie Halloween (now there’s a great name for a film!) Rob managed to contain his usual stylistic leanings and made a really good but understated film. In Halloween II he let rip and seems to have approached the making of the movie in the same way as he makes albums or tours, where every woman on screen is covered in tattoos, there’s a grungy graffiti look to every building and the cutting edge of fashion is what punks were wearing in 1975. This works really well in only one scene in the film, the Halloween party, where it all fits and feels OK. The rest of the time it only serves to make the people you should be cheering for incredibly unlikeable.

Zombie’s style is the root of the major problems with Halloween II. Laurie’s character has gone through an awful lot and it’s easy to see how she’d stray from the path she was on at the start of the first film, but in changing her from the sweet kid she was to the hard-rocking messed up chick she is in the follow-up makes her hard to like as a person. The same goes for her friends too as they’re all cut from roughly the same cloth; all except one girl who appears to have been done up to resemble Laurie from the first film and is therefore the only one the audience can appreciate.

In dealing with the character of Myers himself, Zombie’s first film delved into the background of the character and the motivations for and slide into proper psychopathy. This made Myers a more interesting and believable character then he perhaps deserves and it also set the bar very high for his further development and story. In this film a more supernatural side to Michael has been introduced, starting off with what appear to be visions of his mother and his own younger self that eventually graduate up to the level of ghosts that haunt him and encourage his pursuit of mayhem.

The visions only serve to get in the way and don’t add much at all. As a slasher flick no motivations are needed beyond “he’s a nutter” and having a supernatural slant only makes the whole thing unbelievable and therefore much less scary. If Myers is just a fruitloop who works out a lot then what he gets up to could happen anywhere, even where you live. But if his is a ghost story then we’re safe if we don’t believe in such things.

On the up side, Weird Al makes a cameo appearance as himself and asks the question everybody asks of the Halloween movies, that is, are we talking about the Austin Powers Mike Myers here? (I made that joke back in 2009 too – so Weird Al is a thieving gypsy!).

I came away from Halloween II planning to give it a low score, but I just can't bring myself to do that. As bad and all as this film is, it's strangely haunting. All day today the visuals, particularly the visions Myers experiences and the off-kilter night club scene,  have been stuck in my head and there's something to be said for that. Rob Zombie has managed to really muck up the Halloween franchise with this film but it firmly stands as a triumph of style. Shame there wasn't more substance.

One Thumb Up and One Thumb Down for Halloween II (2009)


Has your big brother flipped out and tried to kill you and all your friends? Click the links for help!
IMDB: http://hackerscoven.blogspot.com/2009/10/30-days-of-fright-01-halloween-1978.html
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_II_%282009_film%29

30 Days of Fright - 01: Candyman

Once upon a time I was a city dweller. I grew up in a major metropolis that can sometimes be beautiful and sometimes brutal. In the modern urban jungle man has adapted his ways to suit his environment, but man is a creature of habit and one of those long established habits is the use of stories to pass along history and to teach acceptable behaviours, hence the urban myth.

Candyman (1992) stars Virgina Madsen as Helen Lyle, a researcher at a university in Chicago who is writing a thesis on urban myths with her friend Bernadette. During the course of her research she encounters the myth of Candyman to whom some local murders have been attributed. The Candyman story is concentrated on a parcel of land that had been developed into a housing project. In the late 1800's, while the area was still farms and plantations, a young black man had been brutally murdered after knocking up a local white chick. Now, according to the myth, it's possible to summon the vengeful spirit of Candyman by saying his name five times into a mirror.

Helen digs into the story when she discovers that, unlike the usual urban myths that all seem to be removed from the person who tells them (in a "it happened to a friend of my sisters room-mates cousins barber" type way) this legend has some verifiable facts as do the murders that have been blamed on it. Venturing into the gang-controlled projects Helen meets with the neighbour of a murder-victim who firmly believes that Candyman is the killer.

Things turn sour for Helen when she runs afoul of a local gang-banger who's been using the name Candyman to instil fear in the locals. Thinking that that was all there was to the story Helen gets the shock of her life when she is stalked by a tall man with a distinctive voice and a hook for a hand who demands that Helen believe in him and who sets about destroying her life by framing her for a series of crimes and getting her locked away in the local asylum. Helen slowly realises that perhaps she shouldn't have said Candyman five times when in front of her mirror, not even for a joke...

A vicious murderer with a distinctive voice - Candyman!

Bitch, what?!?

Candyman is a flick I hadn't seen in years, and as distanced as I was from the film it was easy to get hung up on the saying his name in the mirror idea which is just a re-work of the Bloody Mary myth. However, imagine my surprise when I watched Candyman last night and it dawned on me that this is a brilliant movie!

This is a film where everything works as it should. The music by Philip Glass sets each scene perfectly, the casting choices were inspired, the setting was ideally modern and creepy, and the story by Clive Barker is solid. Virginia Madsen is great as Helen and she carries her scenes well, but she is utterly upstaged by Tony Todd who plays Candyman himself. Todd is a very tall man and is able therefore to be imposing and scary, but add in the amazing deep voice he carries around with him and you're onto a total winner with him as a baddie from beyond the grave. Cut off his arm and stick a hook into the stump and you're in Oscar territory!

The gore and horror that's present in the film are understated considering that Candyman is very firmly a slasher movie though more time is given over to the urban myth aspect then the cutting people up with hooks aspect. The urban myth hadn't really been tapped for too many films when Candyman hit the theatres so it was a refreshing way of conjuring up a villain to go an a killing spree in the windy city, it also meant that more thought went into the film-making as they didn't want to screw up the opportunity of making a mark with urban legends. There are some very clever touches in Candyman, especially the racial and social commentary that's present in every discussion of housing projects, though also in the little touches like the baby licking Candayman's finger (it would have tasted of honey as he'd been covered in the stuff as he was tortured to death).

Sadly though the familiarity of the method for getting Candyman to appear, that is to say his name into the mirror five times, is a direct lift from Bloody Mary and it's a legend that is too familiar to be overwritten by an unknown like Candyman, every time someone says "Candyman" into a mirror a voice in your head corrects them to "Bloody Mary". This is really the films only failing but mercifully it doesn't get in the way too much and never robs from the enjoyment. So when you get a chance, find yourself a decent sized mirror, dim the lights, and stick on a Christina Aguilera CD and let the dozy cow say his name five times!

Two Thumbs Firmly Up for Candyman.


He's a one stop shop, makes my panties drop, He's a sweet talkin' sugar coated Candyman.... wait, what? Here are some links:

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candyman_%28film%29
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103919/