30 Days of Fright - 14: Final Destination 2

Death, as most people know, awaits us all (with nasty big pointy teeth) and on a long enough time line everyone's likelihood of survival drops to zero. This does not mean that we should just accept our inevitable fate, oh no, our very nature forces us to put off the end for as long as we can. Death is pretty scary. But like most things that frighten us we can diminish the fear of dying with a good old laugh, preferably at someone else's expense, and what could be funnier then a bunch of people straight from Hollywood's central casting department terrified out of their wits by the quickening approach of death, trying to put off their sticky ends?

One year after the events in Final Destination, in which Flight 180 exploded on take off killing all its passengers except those associated with a young man who had a powerful vision of the aircraft's destruction and got off the plane, Final Destination 2 (2003) introduces young Kimberly and her friends heading off for a road trip and some good times. As they drive along, a series of unusual hints offered up by songs on the radio and the behaviour of other motorists on the highway indicate that some form of doom may be impending. Sure enough, a truck hauling large tree trunks looses its load that leads to a massive pile-up killing loads of people in a variety of painful and gory ways, including the unlucky Kimberly...

...who then snaps out of the vision she was experiencing and finds herself still behind the wheel of her car with her friends and all still very much alive. Deciding that her vision is too much to ignore, Kimberly blocks the road and prevents anyone from getting onto the highway just as the massive pile-up gets underway, thus saving a whole bunch of people who would otherwise have been splattered all over the place. Except her annoying friends that is, they get killed when Kimberly steps out of the car before it gets sideswiped by a big truck.

Now faced with the realisation that she's going through the same issues as those who'd escaped Flight 180 the year before, Kimberly and those who'd survived the pile-up but weren't supposed to struggle to deal with the fact that death is stalking them. Looking to get some help, Kimberly goes to see Clear Rivers, now the only remaining survivor of Flight 180 (as the other dude Alex was killed by a falling brick sometime between the end of the first film and the start of this one... a falling brick! Honestly). Clear has checked herself into an asylum and is living in a nice safe padded room, totally isolated from the world and its potential dangers, convinced that death hasn't given up on her.

Kimberly manages to convince Clear to help her and the others and they set about figuring out how to wriggle free of death's plans. Looking for further clarification on the whole thing, they go to visit the mortician who told Alex and Clear all about death in the first movie. The mortician (wonderfully played by Tony Todd of Candyman fame) informs them that only new life can disrupt death and Clear and Kimberly realise that their only hope may lie with one of the other survivors from the highway who's heavily pregnant... now all they have to do is get to the woman before death does...

Walk it off... it's only a flesh wound!

Final Destination managed to kick start a very successful franchise by focusing on something that should be present in more horror films but isn't, and that's fun. As odd as that might sound, when you consider that a trip to the cinema to watch a scary film is supposed to be an enjoyable event, fun is something often strangely lacking. The Final Destinations, with their "Mousetrap" set-ups of events that finally kill people, and the gory, splattery ways characters kick the bucket, are highly entertaining, and because of the baseline established in the first film coupled with a lighter touch from director David R. Ellis, the sequel is in many ways better than the original.

What makes the second film in the series so enjoyable is how everyone involved ran with the notion that the film was supposed to be good craic and therefore did not take any of it too seriously. Everyone (and I mean everyone) on screen hammed it up to the last, though it actually took a little while to figure out that's what they were doing; it hit me around about the time Clear comes into the film, though looking back the hints were there from the scene on the highway. Even the scriptwriter and definitely the director were taking the piss out of the very film they were crafting. But this is brilliant, as it allows the deaths to be interesting and outlandish which is exactly as you'd want.

The acting was functional enough with Ali Larter once again turning in the best performance, though it was her over the top bit in the psychiatric hospital that went just a little too far that tipped me off to the self parody present in the film. The others are there for the sole purpose of dying except for A.J. Cook as Kimberly. She bothered me a lot in Final Destination 2 and it wasn't until near the end when I finally copped on as to why; she seems to be channelling Juliette Lewis throughout her performance and I can't fucking abide Juliette Lewis!

 This woman, I cannot fucking abide!

The star of the show is undoubtedly death and once again the Grim Reaper puts on a fantastic show, bumping off adults and children alike in increasingly imaginative and bloody ways. In FD2 there's an added twist to some of the deaths in that the elaborate traps and set ups don't often pay off the way you'd expect, and there are a couple of nice little twists to keep you interested. On top of all that, the final scene is brilliantly funny, despite (or maybe because of) the death of a young lad involved!

Two Thumbs Up for Final Destination 2.

Links:
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0309593/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Destination_2

30 Days of Fright - 13: Sorority Row

The horror genre depends on female characters of all types more than most other types of films. In your average supernatural killer type horror the women that feature usually fall into two main categories, screaming victims and screaming heroines. What is perhaps disturbing is that so many films use these two character types so frequently thus perpetuating the idea that it's unusual for strong women to win out in the end.

Sorority Row (2009) is set in the frankly baffling world of Sororities, the girly version of the equally weird Fraternity system that operates in colleges in America. One of these Sororities, Theta Pi, is home to the usual bunch of attractive Tommy Hilfiger/Abercrombie & Fitch type women who one particular night are throwing a party and and the same time playing a prank on one of their sorority sisters boyfriends. They plan to have their friend fake her death as the apparent result of the drugs that the boyfriend has given her - drugs the girls have swapped for harmless fakes. The prank goes well and the girls manage to convince the poor sucker, who happens to be the brother of one of the girls, that he's bumped off his missus.

The joke steps up a notch when, rather then going to the authorities, they manage to convince him to cover up the whole thing and hide the (not dead) body in a lake. Deciding that bodies need to be weighed down due to the air in the lungs, the girls make a show of looking for rocks and such to cut up the (not dead) body and weigh it down. The poor eejit who's the butt of the joke, who's not exactly the brains of the outfit and somewhat hysterical at this point, gets a tyre iron and, in a feat of some strength, drives it through the chest of the (not dead yet) girl in order to get the air out of the lungs. Now faced with actually having committed a murder, the girls talk themselves into dumping the (dead now) body and covering up the whole thing.

Nearly a year later, the girls are getting on with things as best as they can. Some are handling their nasty little secret quite well while others are struggling with it. As the end of the college year, and the girls graduation, approaches they get down to the serious business of throwing another massive party and then getting on with their lives. On the last day of term though, things take a turn when someone who seems to know an awful lot about what the girls did turns up looking for deadly revenge...

Yes, the girl on the left isn't wearing any trousers!

Yes, we've seen this stuff before, certainly Sorority Row won't win any awards for originality but it is, for the most part, an entertaining little film that doesn't disappoint in the same way that other similar movies have done in the past. That's not to say that there aren't some big problems with the film.

The premise of the story is so completely fucking stupid that it's just about believable, but that doesn't stop it being so completely fucking stupid. The women were playing a prank on a bloke by trying to convince him that he'd killed his girlfriend. And it works! The thought of checking for a heartbeat never crossed his fucking mind, or ringing for an ambulance. Once the gang get to the location where they were to dump the body they all (bar one girl who seems to have a bit of a brain and some modicum of a conscience though not much) go along with the plan without much thought. The fact that one of them isn't keen on the whole plan gives the game away from the very start (if you're thinking that maybe she's the hero of the piece and the fact that she doesn't play along is what saves her, then you're not wrong).

The early part of the film, upto when they dump the (dead now) body goes quite quickly, as if the director Stewart Hendler really wanted to get that bit over as it's only an excuse for the main bit of the story to happen, that is the bit where the young women and a dude or two get murdered. Once in to the main action, things do pick up a bit, mainly because the pace of the film slows down just a little.

The action definitely improves once the killings start but there's an odd problem with Sorority Row. The murders do manage to grab your attention but they can't really hold it. I imagine that the audience are meant to spend their time when watching the film guessing who the killer is, but as most of the characters in the film are vapid sorority girls I certainly didn't give a shit. The big mystery I struggled with during Sorority Row was why weren't there more people trying to kill these bitches?

There is another puzzler in this film, and that's why was Carrie Fisher in it? Don't get me wrong, she was probably the best thing in it, once she produced the shotgun that is. All told, Sorority Row is a deeply unoriginal film, with poor character development, directed with little regard to telling a complete story. That said, I found it entertaining; I liked the film. It had boobs in it.

Two Thumbs Up for Sorority Row.


Lambda Iota Nu Kappa Sigma:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorority_Row
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1232783/

30 Days of Fright - 12: Let Me In

Despite getting very familiar with the workings of the movie business over the past few years and how it operates with respect to horror, it still shocked me when I heard that there was an American remake of Let the Right One In, the Swedish vampire movie that has such a cult following regardless of its shortcomings. Upon reflection though it only made sense as the original does have such a following that any remake was going to attract an audience of existing fans and possible a few more as well, financially a remake was going to be a nice little earner and not that costly to make either. All that remained to be seen was how much of a beating the original material was going to take in the process.

Set in a surprisingly chilly New Mexico in 1983, Let Me In (2010) starts with an ambulance transporting a badly injured man to hospital. The man is in big trouble medically as he has been doused in a strong acid and is covered in severe chemical burns as a result. At the hospital a detective attempts to question him but is called away by a nurse, giving the injured man just enough time to disconnect the medical gear he's hooked up to and to then peg himself out of the window to his death on the ground far below.

The action then switches to a young boy named Owen, two weeks before the incident of the bloke off his face on acid (literally) and the hospital window. Own is a strange young lad, distant in the extreme and sadly the victim of a broken home and a group of bullies at school. Owen lives with his mother, who has a very strong religious faith but is pretty much neglecting her son.Left to fend for himself Owen is picked on routinely and is friendless until he meets his new neighbour Abby who has just moved in to the apartment next door with her Dad.

Abby is a strange fish, happily roaming the apartment complex in her bare feet despite the fact that there's snow on the ground, but she's not as odd as her old man who goes out at night and murders people willy-nilly, draining their blood and keeping it for something. The murders continue until one night when Abby's father makes a balls of it and ends up trapped in a crashed car with his chosen victim. Reluctant to get caught for his killings, the murderer decides to throw acid over himself which disfigures him badly and gets the action up to the point where the film started.

In the hospital, the reason for his header out the window is explained as Abby is revealed to be a vampire and her Dad is going out every night getting blood to keep her fed. Now he's out of the picture, Abby has to fend for herself and at the same time her friendship with young Owen is developing into something more than the average twelve year old experiences.

Whatever else you do, don't look now, but I think there's something behind you!

I found the original Let The Right One In to be a confusing movie largely due to the cultural barriers naturally imposed with foreign films (that’s foreign from my perspective – if you’re from Sweden then Star Wars is a foreign film and Let The Right One In is a triumph of the domestic film industry).

Let Me In is an alarmingly slavish remake, with the majority of scenes an almost direct lift from the original movie simply reenacted in English. This leads to the film suffering from the same pacing issues that plagued the first film in that it's more than a little slow going. While I was kind of expecting that to be the case what surprised me during the viewing of Let Me In was, despite obvious efforts to streamline this version of the story, it was still painfully slow going with bugger all actually happening.

There are some big improvements that deserved to be acknowledged. The sexual element between the two pre-teen lead characters has been removed which makes watching the film a far more comfortable experience. The fact that the film is in a language I understand was a big help too as it made it much easier to follow what was happening.

The special effects in Let Me In are both a highlight and a low point as they're a bit patchy to say the least. The CGI of the little girl vampire attacking someone is a fucking joke and should never have made it into the finished movie. However, is direct contrast, the effects used for the scene in the swimming pool are fucking awesome!

The acting was also hit and miss. Kodi Smit-McPhee (I shit you not, that's his name) as Owen was OK but I just didn't like him, though this was through absolutely no fault of his, it's just that Chloë Grace Moretz as Abby utterly outshone him. Moretz's star turn as the wee vampire should come as no surprise to anyone who saw her amazing performance as Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass, though in Let Me In she doesn't have the same foul mouth (which is a shame).

As Let Me In is so faithful to it's predecessor it was doomed to suffer from the same problems and destined to always be compared to it. Let Me In is not as "beautiful" as Let The Right One In but it's slightly pacier and definitely easier to follow. The one thing that really struck me was that after seeing the remake, I finally understood the point of the film, now the story makes sense, so that's worth something.

One Thumb Up and One Thumb Down for Let Me In.

Want some links that've had the life sucked out of them? Here you go:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_Me_In_%28film%29
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1228987/

30 Days of Fright - 11: Saw II

The events in a story need a reason to be happening. The characters need to have had a reason to find themselves in whatever situation they’re faced with, even if that reason appears to be “wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time” there has to be a reason for them to deal with the situation the way they do. When not enough thought is given to the motivations for the behaviours of characters in films, those films can feel off, like something important is missing but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what. In these cases motivation has most likely been replaced by mere excuses. Some might say that in movies focused on entertainment as opposed to trying to have any depth the loss of character development isn’t that important really. To those who say that I wish to respond with a simple “shut up!” Not giving a toss about people in films is what’s landed us in the awful mess that last night’s movie is an example of.

In an attempt to add some more depth to the idea behind the Saw series of movies the second sordid outing Saw II (2005), properly introduces the villain of the piece John Kramer, the man behind the murderous little clown from his videos, and who became associated with the name Jigsaw. The movie opens with a police informant (as in rat or grass – someone who runs and tells tales to the old bill) called Michael into who’s eye Kramer has semi-surgically inserted a key, a key that unlocks a nasty spring loaded mask Michael's wearing (much like a portable iron maiden) that’s on a timer and is about to snap shut and drive a series of spikes into his skull. All the hapless victim has to do in order to save his life is gouge out his right eye and retrieve the key, the “logic” behind this being that he has to sacrifice something he’s quite attached to in order to prove he’s worthy of life.

After this round of old bollocks sets the moral compass for the film, Saw II introduces a teenage boy called Daniel Matthews and his policeman father Eric Matthews (played by Donnie Wahlberg). Things aren’t great between father and son as Daniel is going through a rebellious phase and Eric is going through a “I got caught beating up suspects, framing people, and generally perverting the course of justice” phase.

Det. Matthews is called in to work the case of the man in the iron mask and when visiting the crime scene he is shown a message written on the ceiling addressed to him. The cops figure this to be the work of Jigsaw and set about locating him, which they do. They discover Jigsaw to be a sick bloke in mind and in body too as he’s suffering from terminal cancer. As he goes about explaining his nonsense little philosophy and therefore his justifications for torturing people to death, John Law uncovers a set of monitors displaying a series of camera feeds from an unknown house where several people have been locked up, including young Daniel.

The house where everyone is trapped is slowly filling with poisonous gas and those inside have a couple of hours to either escape or figure out the clues that will provide an antidote to the gas. Of course, the house is rigged with an assortment of traps and evil puzzles that're designed to reduce the number of possible survivors as time passes while teaching some sort of lessons based on Jigsaw's twisted world view.

Hi, I'm John Kramer. Scientology changed my life, now it can change yours!

Considering the success of the first Saw film it was understandable that there'd be more. What is constantly surprising is how much audiences like this stuff and therefore how much of a runaway success the franchise was.

Looking at Saw II from a purely technical standpoint there are a couple of decent aspects to the film. Wahlberg made more out of the script then was asked of him or was even necessary. The dude playing the cops son is OK, and the ex-junkie who’d been through Jigsaw’s games before is functional enough. The rest are pure torture-fodder but in that they may have been playing their roles perfectly as there’s none of them you’d feel sorry for as they go through the process of getting themselves killed. The only real turn up for the books , aside from Wahlberg, was Dina Meyer as the other cop (you may remember her from such films as The Devil’s Advocate and Starship Troopers) as she did a decent turn and would have made an excellent cop on some TV show or other.

Sadly, Tobin Bell as Jigsaw was just boring, though this was the fault of the character not the actor. Jigsaw makes for a very poor baddie really, his motivations are juvenile in the extreme (it would be great to see an episode of Criminal Minds where they profiled this lad) and his background beyond the cancer diagnosis is a mystery; where did he get the skills and more importantly the money to be able to do this stuff? And is this all really another case of someone not having a decent support network to help keep them grounded, in other words, where’s Mrs. Jigsaw? Are there little Jigsaws out there somewhere, really embarrassed by who and what their Dad is? Maybe Jigsaw wouldn't be so pissed off at the world if he just got laid once in a while!

 There isn't a whole lot to say in terms of the direction or production of Saw II as it's a classic example of sequel film-making; just, here’s the script, point, shoot, edit, done. Nothing special and nothing more than the material deserved or the audience expected. The big trick with a film like this is to avoid the directors instinct to set things up in advance in order to get a pay-off later in the movie, and for the most part the director Darren Lynn Bousman, achieved this though there are a couple of hints earlier on as to what kind of nasty fate was waiting for some of the victims.

The production quality of Saw II is mediocre. The effects aren’t that great, blood and so on, nothing to get excited about, and surprisingly little gore, except one or two scenes that aren’t all THAT bad. The sets are all the same drab depressing shade of grey/green and everything looks dirty and perhaps splattered with bodily fluids, which sums up the feel of the entire film. Saw II is another drab, torturous outing with little to redeem it which is shocking as so much time goes into trying to convince the audience that redemption was the moral of the story.

Two Thumbs Down for Saw II


Follow these links or I'll come up with some bullshit excuse to chop your arms off!
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saw_2
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0432348/

 

30 Days of Fright - 10: Fright Night (1985)

Before he tried acting and ended up ruining his career, Dane Cook was a stand-up comedian in the same vein as Denis Leary (that is, he stole his material from others and presented it slightly differently) and one of “his” routines was about everyone having a friend who’s a gobshite. The trick is to look at your friends and identify the one who’s the gobshite; if you can’t it’s because it’s you! This idea almost certainly extends to other character traits both positive and negative and works regardless of the size of your social circle. Consider the handful of people you know well. One of them should be the cool one – if you can’t figure out which it is then congratulations, it’s probably you. Now consider that one of your group is probably deranged...

Fright Night (1985) is set in middle America slap bang in the middle of the 1980’s and features all the delightful trappings of that most wonderful and awful of decades. Charlie (William Ragsdale) is a teenager living with his mother and is going out with girl-next-door type Amy (Amanda Bearse, who played one of the neighbours in Married With Children). Charlie’s favourite TV show is the late night horror movie theatre “Fright Night” presented by self-proclaimed vampire killer Peter Vincent (a nod to both Peter Cushing and Vincent Price played by Roddy McDowall). When Charlie notices one night that his new neighbours are prowling about in the garden moving what appears to be a coffin into the basement, Amy assumes that Charlie has been watching too much TV and isn’t paying her enough attention.

Charlie’s suspicions grow as a spate of murders take place in the area and one of the victims Charlie had seen going into the house next door the day before she turned up dead. Keeping a close eye on the neighbours Charlie spies one of them with a girl one night and notices the fangs, long fingers and nails, and general vampire-ish aspect of the dude before coming to the completely rational conclusion that the lad next door is a creature of the night. The vampire spots Charlie and it quickly becomes clear that Charlie’s life is now in real danger.

Charlie calls on his friend “Evil Ed” (who is properly deranged) for help and some guidance on how best to ward off the vampire next door. Armed with Crucifixes and garlic Charlie prepares to do battle but decides to call in his hero Peter Vincent for some professional help, without realising that just because you play a vampire killer on TV doesn’t really qualify you for doing battle with real nosferatu...

The teenage vampire - arch-enemy of the orthodontist

Fright Night is billed as a comedy-horror and it is to an extent  though the comedy in the film is at times subtle enough not to be noticeable so it rather feels like it’s just another silly vampire movie where a young lad fights a Dracula style baddie. While that analysis is certainly reasonable it doesn’t do the film justice. What Fright Night is at its heart is a fun homage to the Hammer Horror Dracula movies and all those monster-killer films and TV shows of the late seventies. This hits home when you see the effect of one of the vampires in the film rising straight up out of a coffin which is direct from Nosferatu but was perfected in loads of Dracula films. That’s when it occurred to me how Fright Night really saluted the films that inspired it.

The key strength of Fright Night and the thing that separates it so dramatically from more recent vampire films is that it’s so loyal to the vampire myth. All the best bits of vampire lore are present and feature as plot points in the film; you have no power over a vampire if you invite them in to your house and they won’t come in unless invited, vampires sleep in coffins, they can transform into creatures like bats and occasionally wolves and while in bat form they can fly, Crucifixes ward them off as long as the operator has faith themselves, Holy Water is bad news regardless of the religious orientation of the person doing the sprinkling, wooden stakes through the heart will kill them, they have fangs and must drink blood to survive, and most importantly in sunlight they don’t fucking sparkle – they die!

When you see this list of vampire necessities it’s easy to recognise a good list of vampire terms and conditions, but what you’re actually seeing is the interpretation of the vampire myth that was codified by all those Hammer Horror films and their ilk. The idea of a vampire with all the trappings, like the Holy water and the coffins is no more traditional than the notion of a daywalking vamp (though the spakling thing is plain old bullshit).

Fright Night makes its rediculous setup work well by leaning on younger actors who seemed to have a good time making the film and perhaps because of this the quality of the acting was raised to a standard slightly higher than necessary. Don't get me wrong, everyone in this picture is hamming it up as much as they can, but that's the point and it works well. McDowall as the vampire hunter and Chris Sarandan as Jerry the vampire knock the most craic out of  their roles as they have by far the most interesting characters, with the possible exception of Evil Ed played by Stephen Geoffreys. Evil Ed (or just Evil to his friends) is brilliant, a rare character in a film as he’s actually a bit of a character and one who is nicely mental. In an odd twist, Geoffreys went on to have a successful career in hardcore gay porn (I know this from IMDB.com, not from experience!) so he's either living the dream (his own personal dream that is) or he's living the cliche.

The special effects used in Fright Night are pretty good and along with the treatment of the source material are a highlight of the film as at the time the option of CGI wasn’t available and animation effects had backfired too often to be really usable leaving only physical models as the best option for creature effects, and they're used really well. The creatures like the bat-like monster near the end and the vampire skeleton are excellent but some of the make-up effects don't stand up to scrutiny (or High Definition) as well as they might.

Fright Night has all the silly elements of a film of its day but it also has all the best elements as well. The vampires are what you expect, the characters are likeable, and in the end it all boils down to a good old fashioned fight between good and evil, so you know who to cheer for. Fright Night is a great slice of 80’s Americana; it’s easy to see why there’s a remake.

Two Thumbs Up for Fright Night.

Links to a film about "Trad Vamps" (which would be a cool name for a Ceili band)

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

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089175/

30 Days of Fright - 09: Heartless

When horror moves away from the simple morality of the slasher film, questions about the nature of hope inevitably arise. Situational as well as supernatural horrors present characters with massive challenges that take away hope for the future or for their happiness, and it’s the job of those characters to overcome those challenges. Rarely though does the triumph of the human soul win out in the end despite whatever takes place before the final credits roll. More often, no matter how it’s dressed up, what actually happens is that selfishness and self-preservation get’s the protagonist though things.

Shy photographer Jamie (Jim Sturgess) is out and about one night, prowling the gritty streets of inner city London in the opening scenes of Heartless (2009) looking for cool snaps to take. As he goes about his business he spots an unusual stranger who he follows to some waste ground by an abandoned house. There he hears someone screaming and upon further investigation sees that the stranger and their friends are actually a group of hoodie-wearing monsters who are in the process of brutally killing someone. Jamie gets away after being spotted by one of the creatures and tries to not to let what he’s seen get to him.

Peek-a-fuckin-boo!

He’s massively unsuccessful in this endeavour as the news is filled with terrible details of brutal crimes and the world seems like a nasty hopeless place, even the local corner shop owner offers Jamie guns for sale if he ever wants some extra protection. Family life for Jamie doesn’t help as, loving and all as his mum and brother are, they are all grieving the loss of Jamie’s Dad and all their moments of happiness are tinged with sadness. On top of this Jamie’s nephew is at a difficult age and seems to be mixed up in something bad which adds an extra stress to life. Jamie’s mum is worried for him as he’s had a difficult time growing up and there appears to have been an attempt at suicide in his past. Jamie has a large series of birthmarks covering his face, neck, and one arm and he’s very self-conscious about it, often wearing hoodies to help cover that side of his face.

One night, Jamie and his mother are attacked by the gang of monsters who give Jamie a hiding but murder his mum by throwing a petrol bomb at her and letting her burn to death. After getting out of hospital Jamie swears revenge and picks up a gun for himself at the shop. As well as the shooter, Jamie gets a new neighbour, a young man who’d been a gang-banger himself but is now turning his life around and getting an education. They become friends and Jamie gets some insights into the gangs and the way their territories work.

Of course, as the world is conspiring against Jamie, the neighbour gets murdered too. While dealing with the shock of another loss Jamie starts playing with the gun and gets close to using it on himself until he gets a text message on his neighbours mobile phone that he’d left behind him in Jamie’s place. Surprised at this, Jamie follows the instructions on the phone and goes to visit a mysterious man called Papa B, who offers Jamie a deal. Papa B is a demon who claims to be working to advance mankind by creating enough chaos in the world to force people to develop themselves (much like the neighbour who was improving himself). Papa B offers to remove Jamie’s birthmark in exchange for occasional acts of graffiti and Jamie accepts, but as everyone knows, when you make a deal with the Devil, the Devil lies...

I'm looking at you... from under my big hood!

The making of Heartless was very firmly focused on the photographer character of Jamie (pun very much intended) and in this it paid off. Not often in a horror film do you encounter a character that’s as well developed (pun intended again) as Jamie – his relatively limited life experience has surprising depth that enables him to be a good photographer, he has recognisable personality traits, and he has hopes for the future that he believes are unattainable – like the house and the wife and the kids version of the future he thinks has already been denied to him because of his skin condition. Like all tragic figures he is the architect of his own misery and downfall. Jamie’s shy because he’s so self-conscious so in a very human way it’s his own behaviour that’s denying him the things he wants. When he and the audience are shown what really happened to him after making his deal his tragedy is only compounded by the realisation that the destiny he wanted was his to have if only he changed his point of view.

...but it's my strong hand, child!

 Jamie’s gain in terms of character development is everyone else’s loss. The other characters are totally undeveloped and merely there to fill the empty spaces with people that sound like they might belong there; generic characters like “Mum” and “Brother” and “neighbour” and “Bloke who runs the shop” – speaking of which, he was brutal and his dialogue was a fucking embarrassment. Papa B wasn’t bad, just going through the motions of being a demon in a shitty flat, the little girl was OK too but I admit I expected more from her character as the movie progressed. The best character after Jamie was definitely the “Weapons Man” who was sent by Papa B to assist Jamie fulfil his side of the bargain.  Madly over the top and completely foul-mouthed, I liked him. If there’s ever a sequel to Heartless I hope it features the Weapons Man in the lead role, maybe just following him as he goes about his business being vaguely threatening in that East London way.

The special effects in Heartless are reasonable. The CGI demons that feature are the kind of thing to be expected in a film of this vintage and are about as believable as any CGI effect can be (that is utterly unbelievable). I can’t decide if I liked the costume effect of the man who’d been burned with a Molotov cocktail as I’m not sure if it was realistic or not as I’ve thankfully never encountered anybody with third degree burns over 100% of their body so I’ve no frame of reference – from a distance it looked very good. The other burning effects were hit and miss, swinging between very realistic and not. The violent and gory scenes were well handled with one of the murders very well presented (just to be clear I’m talking about effects here and not the quality of a good murder – I have different blog for that!)

On the whole Heartless isn’t a bad story, just not a great one. The twisting nature of the final act of the film especially left something to be desired as it took a little while to determine what was actually going on in two or three threads of the story as they all got tied up. The bit about the girlfriend was a head scratcher but necessary in order to fill in the blanks left when Jamie realises what really happened to him, the piece about the gangster suffered from the exact same problem and when he turned up near the end I had to work to remember when he’d been introduced and just what the hell was he doing there.

A dark movie, Heartless is filled with tragedy and tells of removing hope from the already hopeless. In the telling of this story it succeeds but, if for no other reason than the nature of the content I would be reluctant to sit through it again. Even the closing scene, supposed to offer some hint at potential redemption is just to heavy handed and saccharine and totally at odds with the ninety minutes that preceded it that it felt like something tacked on to the end as the result of what some test audience said.

Horror can be a thrill ride, or a morality play, or horror can be truly horrific by simply showing the often brutal face of the world to us as it is. Whether Heartless really needed to add in a bunch of demons and a Faustian deal in order to drag this idea out of the realm of drama is open to some debate.

One Thumb Up and One Thumb Down for Heartless

Here are some heartless feckin links for ya:

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartless_%282009_film%29

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1220214/

30 Days of Fright - 08: New Moon

Imagine you were a vampire, with all the advantages of immortality and the intrinsic beauty that comes with being a nasty little goblin of the underworld. With all that power at your disposal, would you spend your days being a miserable bastard in some shitty small town in chilly northern America with a girl who looks like a horse hanging out of you the whole time? Of course not, it wasn't believable in one film so I was curious as to how you'd get another go at the cinema out of this bullshit...

As her eighteenth birthday approaches, New Moon opens with Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) struggling to deal with one of the practicalities of loving a vampire. She dreams of her dear old Granny meeting Edward (Robert Pattinson) in a field one day but she realises that it’s not her Gran but actually herself as an old woman having aged naturally while Eddie stayed his youthful immortal self. With this on her mind, Bella tries to go about the normal business of girls her age which basically consists of going to school and looking moody.

Edward’s family, the Cullen’s (a group of adopted vampire kids looked after by Dr. And Mrs. Cullen) throw a little party for Bella’s birthday at their house and during the giving of the presents Bella gets a paper cut which sets off one of the vampires who isn’t fully house trained. This gets Edward thinking about just how wise it is keeping a human about the place when he and his kind have such murderous instincts. About this time Carlisle Cullen decides that he has to move on as he looks a lot younger than he’s supposed to be and people around him are starting to notice. Edward decides that he’s going to go as well and put some distance between him and Bella as he feels she should have a normal life and not have to worry about the technicalities of going out with a disgusting bloodsucker like himself. Eddie has also been thinking about their situation and he’s come to the conclusion that the only way it could work is to make Bella a vampire and that’s something he can’t do as it would damn her soul.

With Edward out of the picture, Bella gets down to doing some serious moping about and manages to sit in the same chair looking out the window for about four months without ever changing her clothes. When she's not busy being a moody drink of piss, she's flat out screaming her head off in her sleep as she's haunted with terrible nightmares of her lost love. Her days at school are filled with avoiding her friends which only serves to demonstrate just how useless a bunch they are when things get tough. She finally manages to get a grip on herself and slowly tries to deal with her plight by hanging out with Jacob, a local native American boy she knows from when she was much younger. She picks up  two wrecked motorbikes and gets Jacob to restore them while she sits and watches for a few weeks in an example of exploitation of the red man not seen in America since some Europeans purchased the continent for a handful of beads and a dose of smallpox.
 
Bella begins to experience hallucinations of Edward whenever she might be in danger, like going down the wrong street in a bad part of town or riding a restored motorbike without a crash helmet. Bella puts herself in increasingly dangerous situations in an effort to see more of Edward instead of doing the rational thing of seeing a psychiatrist or other mental health professional to help her with the fact that she's seeing things and hearing voices. Her friend Jacob also turns out to be in need of some medical help as he develops a bad fever one night and disappears for a while, though Bella thinks that Jacob is in fact just avoiding her as she rejected his romantic advances. Bella goes to find Jacob down on the reservation (apparently the only reservation in the US without a casino) and finds that he's a changed man, with his hair cut short, sporting a tattoo, and running with the wrong sort of people all the while not wearing much clothes. After a bit of back and forth it turns out that Jacob is a werewolf and so are his mates and that they've been hunting some vampires (left over from the first film) who've been knocking about with plans to kill Bella.
 
Off in exile Edward has gotten wind of Bella's daredevil antics and believes that one of her little vision-inducing activities has actually killed her and so he decides to top himself as immortality isn't worth enduring if the girl he dumped, who was probably going to snuff it sometime in the next seventy or eighty years anyway, has died - as long as no-one stops him in the nick of time...
 

A cinema-goer reacts to the news that they made a few more of these fucking Twilight films!

I shall cut to the inevitable chase; New Moon is an overly long and deeply unoriginal piece of shit film.It's two desperately boring hours of a mopey bitch pining for a creepy girly boy who you know will turn up again before the film is over and very little else. Edward just pisses off as soon as he could at the start of the wretched movie, in fact he ran away so fast I half expected him to have knocked Bella up or something. Edward's departure is too much of a convenience and is only offered up so that Jacob could be properly introduced as a character. Jacob is actually not that bad a character but he seems to unfortunately suffer from the same problem as everyone else in the small town of Forks - he seems to think Bella is the only woman in the entire world worth a damn and that is frankly too unbelievable even for a movie where vampires sparkle and werewolves prowl around whether there's a full moon or not.

Kristen Stewart's Bella is too unattractive and uninteresting a person for it to be realistic that everyone in town to is chasing after her. The Cullen's are fawning over her from the start (though to be fair one of them openly wants to eat her), the kids in school are obsessed with her, and now the werewolves are all into Bella-mania. Love triangles are the staple of manys a fine story but the apex of this one is a droopy faced misery - the lads in Forks must have been really hard up.

Speaking of the love aspect leads me to the real horror of New Moon. The film rips off one major source and that's Mr. William Shakespeare and his tragic play Romeo and Juliet.What makes this crime so heinous is that New Moon flaunts the fact from early on that it's lifting it's central theme from that play, the only twist being that Edward's already dead. What I want to know is,seeing as Romeo and Juliet is a short play, why did it take two long fucking hours to re-tell that story? And why even pretend that the poor teen wolf Jacob was ever in with a chance with a go on Bella?

Just like the fist Twilight film there is very little to redeem New Moon. Sadly, the decent music from the first movie is absent, replaced with a succession of radio-friendly but easily forgotten tunes that no doubt sold well on iTunes, easily forgotten except for the song "Meet Me on the Equinox" by Death Cab For Cutie - I really like that song and it's a shame it only featured on the end credits. The film is slightly better made than its predecessor, the lighting is better, the effects have been given some thought, and the locations are well used. The big redemption for me however was the fact that the Cullen's began to address the whole damnation of the soul thing that bothered me so much about the first Twilight. New Moon doesn't really resolve this problem but it at least admits that it's there.

Doesn't stop New Moon from being shit though.

Two Thumbs Down for New Moon.


Click the links for more info about Vampires and Werewolves that are afraid of the dark:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twilight_Saga:_New_Moon
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1259571/