30 Days of Fright - 21: The Descent Part 2

There are roughly three types of film that end up getting reviewed as part of this little series. There are those movies that are excellent, those that are woeful rubbish, and those in the middle. The good ones are easy to review becuae they're so good I just want to bang on about them in a gushing fanboy way. The bad films are also easy to write about as it's entertaining to tear a poor movie asunder. The hardest films to talk about are the ones in the middle, one's that are so dull there's just nothing much to say about them.

Continuing the events from the first film, TheDescent Part 2 shows Sarah emerging from the cave system and meeting a passingmotorist. At the same time as she’s being rescued, a team of people frommountain rescue are searching for her and the other missing girls who went intothe caves with her. However, Juno, the organiser of their trip, filed the wrong“flight plan” so the rescue team are looking in the wrong place.

When word gets out that Sarah has beenfound and taken to hospital, the local Sheriff goes to see her immediately, asit turns out that Juno is related to a Senator making the Sheriff highlymotivated to find her. Sarah is badly traumatised by the events in the cave andhas developed a form of short-term memory loss as a psychological protection.Unable to tell the Sheriff anything about the whereabouts of the others, heinsists that Sarah leads them into the caves to find the others.

Sarah is haunted by images of the creaturesthat she and the others encountered in the caves but she can’t remember enoughto be able to object and so she goes with the Sheriff, his deputy, and three ofthe mountain rescue team back into the caves. Once inside, Sarah is easilyspooked and her nervousness puts everyone on edge. This gets worse as theyprogress deeper into the cave system and finally discover the mutilated corpseof one of the missing girls. Suspicion quickly falls on Sarah, even though theextreme wounds on the body don’t look like something she’d be capable of.Moving on, Sarah begins to remember what happened and she attacks the Sheriffand the others in order to get away from them. Forced to split up, the group goafter Sarah and encounter all sorts of things they weren’t expecting to finddown in the caves...

Bloody woman, alway screaming all the time...

The original Descent was a bit of anunderground hit (if you’ll pardon the pun) due largely to some of theboundaries it was prepared to push relating to gore and girls, as well as thequite high production values present throughout. The second outing is reallyjust a cashing in exercise, making it a classic horror film sequel, and aboutas shite as that label indicates.

The big problem facing a follow-up to thefirst Descent movie would be how to escalate things above what happened in theoriginal. Rather than even trying to do this, the makers of the sequel insteadopted to try and convince the audience that the whole story was really splitinto two parts and that the second film is in fact just the second half of thesame tale. If that’s the case, then The Decent Saga is a woefully boringmisadventure with far too many coincidences and conveniences.

Once again, the film makers decided toallow fate to do their explaining for them, principally in giving the maincharacter Sarah a dose of amnesia in order to explain why the hell she’d goback into the caves. It’s this type of thing that puts the entire film on theback foot as the dependence on tricks to get characters into play makes youcall bullshit every time something happens. And the only reason some of the people even feature in the film is to bekilled off and while that’s true of loads of films it’s really apparent in TheDescent Part 2.

The production level is roughly the same as the first though for some reason some of the caves seem a little more fake than they did in the first movie. I don't think the fist set of caves were all that realistic, it's just that this time the film is so boring that you tend to pay closer attention to things like sets as there's fuck all else to do. All is not lost in Part 2, the outside cinematography is great and the soundtrack is excellent, with just the right sort of music kicking in at the right time. But music alone is not enough to save this wreck of a film, a film so dull it deserves this low score:


Two Thumbs Firmly Down for The Descent Part 2

Links:

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Descent_Part_2

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1073105/

30 Days of Fright - 20: Devil

This is the image I sometimes use as an avatar on websites and such, it's a copy of an engraving done by Gustav Dore for an early edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost and it shows Satan wigging the fuck out.

Where do bad folks go when they die? They don't go to Heaven where the angels fly...

Over the years El Diablo has appeared in many guises and in many places, but none as weird as where the bugger popped up in last nights movie.

With a disorientating set of opening credits, Devil (2010) brings us to Philadelphia where we meet a police detective Bowden meeting with his AA sponsor who’s advising him to believe in something bigger than himself and to try to change his anger over the recent hit-and-run death of his family into something more positive. Not happy with this advice Bowden heads off to his day at work.

Which begins with the body of a suicide victim that jumped from a skyscraper window that then landed on a truck which rolled down the street. While Bowden is investigates this, fate conspires to put five people together on an elevator heading up the skyscraper. The five, a mattress salesman, an older woman, a man, a woman, and one of the buildings security guards, are heading to different floors on different business. As the lift climbs it suddenly gets stuck somewhere above the twentieth floor and the occupants start hitting buttons to try to get help.

Two security guards are monitoring the towers CCTV system and spot the elevator that’s stuck and send the maintenance man to check it out. In the close proximity of the elevator the five passengers quickly begin to get on each other’s nerves. The salesman is a bit too chatty, the security guard appears to be claustrophobic, the old woman is scared and loud, the man is a bit edgy, and the woman has all the hallmarks of being a bitch. While the maintenance man struggles to find anything wrong with the lift an assault apparently takes place inside the lift with the woman getting a bloody wound on her back that gets blames on the salesman.

The security guards watching on the monitors call in the police and Bowden responds as he’s right outside. Playing back the video shows that the girl seemed to get the wound out of nowhere. It also shows the image of a demonic face when paused at just the right spot, which one of the more religious guards puts down as being the face of the Devil himself. Setting this notion aside Bowden watches with horror as, when the lights in the lift go out as they sometimes do as maintenance struggle to get to those trapped inside, the salesman is murdered. This causes the rescue effort to escalate and the fire department get involved. But as the rescue proceeds someone else in the lift is killed and everyone, those inside and those watching, realise that no-one is safe as all the key players are somehow linked...

While attending a Coldplay concert these fans encounter the Devil... obviously

I first became aware of this film as I roamed the isles of a local DVD Rental shop and spotted it for rent. I didn’t hire it but I made a mental note to keep an eye out for it when it appeared on TV, as it did this week, so I was looking forward to giving Devil a viewing. As a horror film Devil succeeds in terrifying the audience right from the opening credits as a name appeared there that strikes fear into the heart of any rational movie audience member: M. Night Shyamalan. I saw that name and I blessed myself, for I instantly knew in my now fearful heart that this film was going to be shite and have a silly twist at the end.

I was half right. Well, more like quarter right.

Thankfully, M. Night didn’t direct Devil, so there was a small glimmer of hope from that. Secondly, he didn’t write the screenplay, so things were really starting to look up though he did write the original story, so the chances of a twisty ending were strong.

The story told in Devil is an interesting one and more than hints at a religious subtext. The second security guard who’s watching the monitors serves as narrator for the film but also, seeing as he’s Hispanic and therefore (in the wonderful world of cinema stereotypes) raised in a religious family, he provides a level of expertise and advice as to what might actually be happening with those trapped in the elevator. Though his narration and nuggets of advice we learn that a suicide can prompt the Devil to walk the earth and torment some of the dammed before they get to Hell, which will be soon as he’ll torment them to death. This is not a bad plot device and like so many horrors it will appeal to those with at least a passing understanding of all things Christian, but the suicide part bothers me for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, Devil perpetuates a rather old fashioned notion of how certain western religions handle the subject of suicide and the flippant way in which it’s stated that a suicide will invite Satan to Earth is playing just a little too fast and loose with a difficult subject. The really big problem with it though is that the suicide is pretty quickly forgotten once the main event kicks off even though there’s at least one big hint that it was related to what’s taking place in the elevator. The story never comes back to the person who jumped out of the window once the suicide note is read out, even though that note references all things unholy and the victim was clutching Rosary beads when they took the plunge.

Cowabunga!

That aside the rest of the tale is intriguing enough despite every cliche in the horror-film handbook getting a look in. The way in which the rescue unfolds is believable and grounds the film nicely as supernatural events occur. As those events take place in the elevator, it’s a little hard for the sense of tension to be portrayed in a way that the audience can appreciate as you’re in on what’s really happening while those on the inside think they’re just in the presence of a murderer. The lack of palpable tension is a shame and betrays the more run of the mill approach taken when Devil was being made.

That approach does result in a slick looking film that plays out well. The character of Bowden is one of the few with any sort of explained background and he’s ably played by Chris Messina. We’re supposed to see much of the action in the film through his eyes and for the most part we do, though the audience has a slightly better notion of what’s going on before he does.

M. Night Shyama-lama-ding-dong-ding may have written the original story but once it was out of his hands Devil was turned into a more mainstream and highly entertaining film, and while not all that frightening, a little disrespectful to religion, and ever so slightly racist, it is shockingly entertaining. Devil is movie that tries to make Satan the baddie but in doing so highlights how absurd any ultimate evil would have to be considering what people are capable of doing themselves. This poke in the eye for Old Nick makes Devil more of a film then it probably wanted to be. It also makes it good.

Two Thumbs Firmly Up for Devil


Links:
Official Site: http://www.thenightchronicles.com/devil/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_(film)
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1314655/

30 Days of Fright - 19: Wake Wood

The absence of Irish horror is something that concerns me greatly. There are loads of reasons why an Irish horror should be good but equally there are far too many reasons why no-one in Ireland should attempt it. But anyway, it's been a while since the last disappointment on the Irish horror scene so another crack at it was long overdue....

Don't fuck this up now, Donnelly!

Wake Wood (2011) opens somewhere in urban Ireland where Patrick Daly (good Irish name (played by Aidan Gillen)), is a veterinarian with a happy home life with wife Louise (Eva Birthistle) and daughter Alice (some kid). On Alice’s birthday, the day the film starts, life is great for all three of them. Sadly that is ruined when, as she leaves the house for school, Alice stops to say hello to one of the dogs her father is looking after which then attacks and severely mauls her. Alice sadly dies from her wounds despite the best efforts of her parents.

Nearly a year later Pat and Louise have moved to a small town called Wake Wood somewhere in rural Ireland (that looks a lot like Donegal). Louise has a small pharmacy and Paddy is working with a local vet Arthur (Timothy Spall) who is stepping back from the practice and letting Patsy get on with things. Life is far from good as Louise is openly mourning Alice’s death, a process made all the worse by Louise not being able to have any more children due to complications with Alice’s birth. Pádraig is also not in a happy place, but he seems to be working through them, focusing on the new type of veterinary medicine he’s practicing with larger farm animals as well as trying to keep his marriage together as Louise just wants to run off and be alone with her grief.

Louise manages to talk Patrick into taking her to the train station so she can just go away but en route their car breaks down. Luckily they’re near Paddy’s bosses place so they cut across the fields to get there to look for help. At Arthur’s house, Louise witnesses a group of people, with Arthur at their head, performing a strange ritual at the end of which a person emerges from a cocoon in something that looks like a birth. Shocked by all this Louise and Podge run home, where they find Arthur, who’d let himself in, asking if everything is alright.

Shortly after this and after an accident on a local farm kills a man while Patrick was looking after a bull and Louise was assisting, they tell Arthur that they’re leaving Wake Wood as it’s not working out for them. Arthur seems to understand their underlying pain relating to Alice’s death and he explains to them why they should stay. He tells them how the Wake Wood community maintain a strange set of pagan beliefs around the dead and the ritual Louise saw is one to bring a dead person back to life for three days in order for the family to have a little more time with them and to say their goodbyes properly.

This is of great interest to the distraught Louise and Patsy spots his chance at a little happiness and maybe some closure. They readily agree to have the ritual performed but Arthur warns that there are some very strict rules that, if not obeyed completely, can have some dire consequences; the dead person can’t be in the ground for more than one year and one risen they can’t go outside the town boundaries. Paddy and Louise proceed with the ritual even though they’re lying to Arthur about something to do with Alice...

As the contestants on The X Factor get younger, the sob stories get more extreme

Wake Wood is a proper Irish horror film and one that’s long overdue. Irish actors make up the bulk of the cast (with the exception of Timothy Spall), the locations are in Ireland and the details are largely correct, like the registration plates on the cars and such. The only detail missing is that the town signs are all only in English but I guess this was done so that the film could travel outside Ireland without too much effort.

The movie is one of those Irish Film Board/RTE/Other EU country film board collaborations that seem to be the only way to get a non-Hollywood film made in Ireland these days and it was distributed by the newly re-activated Hammer Films (the original company being bahind the Hammer Horror films) which gives this little indy movie from Ireland an unexpected pedigree without much effort. As it's a low budget film the use of cheaper, modern film making techniques permiates the production giving Wake Wood a made for TV feel, though some of the cinematography is also to blame for this.

Aiden Gillen (you may know him as little finger from Game of Thrones) as Patrick is excellent, nicely understated as a man who's suffered a loss and really doesn't want to suffer much more. Eva Birthistle was good as Louise too but hers was perhaps an easier character to play. Timpthy Spall as the older vet Arthur was flat out brilliatn as he did his Englishman in Ireland/Seigfried Farnam style older vet performance. (For those among you who don't know who Seigfried Farnam is might I recommend a read of the early James Herriott novels about his time as a vet, or a viewing of the TV series All Creatures Great and Small)

The script left a little to be desired as, like the road signs, I suspect it was cleaned up in order for the film to travel. There aren't as many slang terms or colloquialisms as you'd expect to hear in the Irish countryside and the accents have been toned down as well. Unfortunately this lets a certain amount of blandness and stuffiness to creep in, particularly in scenes featuring the Daly’s at home or work. This has the effect of dragging out parts of the film and the transitions between parts that move the story along feel longer then they should. You’re also left guessing about the secret Patrick and Louise are keeping, perhaps for a little too long as you’re left to wonder why the resurrected Alice is behaving the way she is and where the story is going, though in fact it actually goes to a decent horror ending.

The story is where the real strength lies in Wake Wood as the primary subject matter is so horrific that it features in the genre quite a lot, but is rarely handled so well. The loss of a child is enough of a horror, but only for those directly involved, namely the parents and other close relatives. The things Patrick and Louise go through show how much they’ve lost but it seems beyond imagining that they’d actually go through the steps required of the resurrection ritual as on a human level you expect something in the backs of their minds to have stopped them. Perhaps trying to understand this allows the audience to glimpse the horror and the motivations driving the main characters in the film.

There are some very strong parallels between Wake Wood and The Wicker Man; the isolated community, the pagan beliefs, the strong community leader with all the knowledge, the distrust of outsiders, and the issues around the death of a child all mirror the events in The Wicker Man. Wake Wood manages to stand on its own however as the rituals and other aspects of the towns beliefs are toned down and instead of playing on the fears of the outsiders the film works on their deepest desires instead, however human they may be.

Regardless of the problems in the film, the cast and crew of Wake Wood deserve credit for taking the risks they did with the story, and for making an enjoyable Irish horror film to be proud of.

Two Thumbs Up for Wake Wood

Links:
Official Site: http://www.wakewoodmovie.com/
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1296899/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Wood

30 Days of Fright - 18: Shelter

I used to love chatting when I was in school, and by that I mean talking in class. I spent several years talking about TV programmes, films, and other bullshit when I should have been paying attention to the teacher. This resulted in my taking home many a report card that informed my parents that I had plenty of potential (like every kid I suppose) but that I wasn't living up to it as I was unable to shut my gob. Now, years later, I lament that wasted potential, especially early in the morning when I'm getting up to drag my arse to work, like a pleb...

 Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus: Two Plebs

Julianne Moore takes the lead in Shelter (2010) as Cara Harding, a psychiatrist who, at the start of the film, is offering some last minute testimony to a review panel of sorts before a man is executed. As part of her testimony she lets it be known that modern psychiatry, herself included, no longer believes in the idea of true multiple personality disorder and thus undermines the last hope for the prisoner on death row. Once the bad man has been shuffled off, Cara returns to work, stopping only briefly to get herself drunk so as to put the events of the execution behind her.

Psychiatry runs in Cara’s family and she followed her Dad into the family business. He’s come across an interesting case and he asks his daughter to have a look. The patient in question, David, is a young man in a wheelchair who appears to come from a sheltered background in the mountains where life is simple and quite religious. Stepping out of the room to ask her Dad what’s up with the dude, she is stunned to find that a simple phone call made by her father to the man in the other room can trigger the emergence of another completely different personality. Wanting to call bullshit on this Cara investigates the case and comes to a rather nasty conclusion.

The second personality, Adam, actually appears to be the man’s true self and David is really the personality of a murder victim. Dr. Harding decides that Adam, traumatised as a child, heard the story of David’s rather gruesome murder and is actually impersonating him as part of a psychotic episode and isn’t really suffering from multiple personalities, as that’s all hogwash! With this theory in the bag, Cara makes the bold announcement that she’s going to cure Adam. She kicks off the treatment by roping David’s grieving mother into a visit. David’s dear old mum is a strange woman, coming from a very remote mountain community, she’s deeply religious and not keen on the whole science thing at all. When she visit’s Adam/David she’s initially shocked by the things David seems to know but then she walks out on the whole thing, declaring it to be an evil trick.

Dr. Harding then takes Adam back to the scene of David’s murder to see if her recognises the place. This sets off a nasty turn in Adam who manifests a new personality, one that Harding’s father was aware of but said nothing about.Copping onto the fact that her old man has been manipulating her into pursuing the case, Cara confronts him and is forced to look at the case in a radically different way then she's used to, a non-scientific approach that entertains the idea that maybe Adam isn't suffering from multiple personalities at all but something more akin to possession.

 After too long in Hollywood, Julianne Moore makes a balls of hanging out the washing

Shelter is one of those little known movies that has a couple of reasonable actors in that you occasionally encounter late at night on some obscure TV channel that is surprising because it's so much better than you expect. The film starts off quietly enough, building the idea of Cara Harding being a doctor with a very strong set of beliefs, whose very good at her job. Things move on into the story of Adam and his potential issues. Once he's introduced a couple of obvious plot points are thrown in your face a little, like the multiple personalities and it does take a little while to get past that and into the juicer supernatural elements. Once things get a little more sinister Shelter develops into a nice little horror movie.

Julianne Moore is perfectly believable in the lead as the straitlaced psychiatrist who has gotten into a professional rut of sorts by being good at what she does by conforming with the accepted ideas in her field. A chunk of the film is given over to how Cara Harding is good, but not brilliant, and her character serves as a metaphor for the entire film as it is surprisingly better than you'd think, but still had room to be more.

Jonathan Rhys Myers puts in a performance that's far better than you'd expect from him, but that's only because he's usually so shit in films (as anyone who saw him in Mission Impossible 3 can tell you). His efforts do wobble when he has to put on accents and mannerisms he's not totally comfortable with and I can only imagine that directors around the world must hate his natural accent as they always seem to prefer to hear him putting on a dodgy American one, even though he's brutal at it. Once you get used to the noise emanating from him in Shelter however he's not that bad.

The pacing of the first half of the film is a little slow but this is made up for the second bit, where witches and strange mountain folk are introduced properly. The supernatural elements are handled well, and the only really big disappointment is the scene where everything is explained using a film allegedly made in the later part of the nineteenth century that just looks too damn modern to be that old.

Shelter is a surprising film, but sadly it left a big chunk of its potential unfulfilled.

One Thumb Up and One Thumb Down for Shelter


Multiple Linkinalities:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelter_%282010_film%29
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1179069/

30 Days of Fright - 17: The Thing

When you take a set against something it can be very hard to see past that and to give something, or someone, a second chance.Once bitten, twice shy as they occasionally say. Which is why, when I saw The Thing come up on the Sky TV guide, I thought to myself "look Murt, he was the worst character in the first Fantastic Four film and no better in the second, does he really deserve a movie of his own?"

The Thing... Not Great

The Thing (1982) is actually John Carpenter’s cold-weather creature feature horror movie and stars Kurt Russell as MacReady, a bad-ass, boozing helicopter pilot assigned to an American research station near the South Pole along with an eclectic bunch of researchers and weirdos. One day, their icy peace is shattered when a Norwegian helicopter appears with its two occupants chasing a dog across the ice and taking pot-shots at anyone and anything as they try to get to the poor pooch.

Not happy with this the American lads start shooting back once the chopper has landed and in the resultant firefight the two invaders are killed and their whirlybird destroyed. Puzzled by this unusual event, the American’s dispatch a few of the boys to the Norwegian research station a few miles away to find out just what the fuck is going on. When they get there, MacReady and Dr. Copper discover the place in ruins, with charred corpses and signs of general mayhem all over the place.

The boys return to base with two of the corpses, chosen because the bodies are fused together in a very twisted fashion. While still concerned by what had happened the lads settle down for the winter, safe in the knowledge that they can’t leave until spring even if they wanted to. The dog that the Norwegian’s were trying to kill is put in with the other sled-dogs the station keeps but almost straight away something isn’t right. The dog's presence in the kennel causes a ruckus and shortly after he's put in there he begins to twist and transform into a rotten looking creature that attacks the other dogs.

Alerted by the racket the poodles are making, the lads pile down to the kennels, tooled up with guns and flamethrowers which they use to kill off anything that moves. After inspecting the remains of the creature, they figure out that they're not alone, as whatever the dog really was it definitely wasn't originally from Earth. As they chew over this notion, it slowly dawns on the boys at the research station that the creature had the ability to transform itself into any living creature and that not all of the men might be men at all...

Honestly, who gave this lad dynamite?

I sat down to watch The Thing will a little trepidation it must be admitted, not because I thought it would be super-scary or anything, but because it's a John Carpenter film, and he and I haven't really got along since Halloween. It turns out that Mr. Carpenter was able to redeem himself as The Thing is not a bit like Halloween, in that it's good.

Carpenter and Russell had a bit of a bromance going on for a while and that paid off nicely as Russell is pretty good in The Thing, but then almost everything about the film is top class. I really like scary films set in cold weather as the contrasts offered up tend to work well for horror. Clean white snow always shows up blood really well, far better then the dirty walls of a dungeon ever could, and there's always an added element of danger when being stalked by something when the mere act of going outside without the right coat on could kill you. Knowing what to do with such a setting is the trick to getting a film like The Thing right and thankfully this time Carpenter knew what he was at.

The vast empty expanses of Antarctica allow for pretty much anything to be dwelling there and it makes for an ideal location to crash an alien spaceship. The remoteness means that no-one is coming to help, even if you could raise them on the radio which you can't due to the bad weather. I reckon that for those with an active imagination a real-life posting to a research station like that featured in the film must be quite an ordeal as the darkness sets in and the wind howls. Add in the chance that there's a metamorphosing alien creature out there hell-bent on murder and you're pretty much buggered!

The Thing features an ensemble cast of people you will recognise from various films and TV programs, but I challenge you to name the actors without the aid of Google. They all turn in decent performances and play their individual traits well. Russell is the main man in the film but he's seriously overshadowed by the special effects.

One of these people may not be human... can you spot which one?

Various gory, twisted, nightmare creatures find their way into The Thing and while constrained by the effects technology of the time they still manage to make for disturbing viewing. The effects department let their imaginations run away with themselves and the results make for some seriously fucked up creatures, like the human head that sprouts spider legs and scuttles off. One excellent side effect of these creatures are the funny comments that the cast make upon encountering them.

Sadly though, as most of the film is made up of a bunch of lads running around the place wondering which one is a monster in a bloody good disguise while the audience wonders which one will die next, there isn't a whole lot really going on and therefore The Thing relies just a little too heavily on the creature effects to hold your attention.That aside, The Thing is an enjoyable, if gross in spots, creature feature.

Two Thumbs Up for The Thing

Linky Thingys:

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(1982_film)

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084787/

30 Days of Fright - 16: Hellraiser

Reviewing a film is all about perspective; one man’s pleasure is another man’s poison and all that, and horror can be really divisive. I’m aware of this and I hope I understand it too. When watching a film I try to go in with as neutral a point of view as possible, unless of course the film features people who are on my shit list, like Michael Rooker or Juliette Lewis, but even then their films might not be total disasters. Knowing that an opinion can be skewed before you’ve even watched a film is an important consideration and one that I was hyper aware of when it came time to watch last night’s film, as I was really looking forward to it.

Hellraiser (1987) kicks off with something akin to a scene from Gremlins where an idiot buys something mysterious from an oriental gentleman that gets him into a shed load of trouble. In this case the purchase is of a small puzzle box (as opposed to a miniature monkey-creature) that the man was very keen to get his hands on dropping quite a bit of cash for the little box. Getting it home, the man in question seemed to know what he was at as he setup a little ritual for playing with the box. One the puzzle has been completed a bunch of hooks shoot into the man’s skin and promptly tear him apart into itsy bitsy pieces that some strange creature in some parallel world has a bit of a play with.

Sometime later and back in the real world (well, what passes for real in the UK anyway) a man and woman, Larry and Julia are looking around the house where the ritual took place. The place apparently belongs to Larry’s family and he’s arrived back from New York with his second wife to take possession of the gaff as his brother Frank has done another of his regular disappearing acts. Looking around the place it becomes clear that the house needs some work as does Larry and Julia’s marriage. Jumping into a flashback, we see that Julia had cheated on Larry with his dear brother Frank not long after they’d gotten married, and that she's is really in love with Frank.

Larry gets down to sorting out the house while Julia mopes about and Larry’s daughter from his first marriage, Kirsty, arrives to check the place out. While moving a bed upstairs Larry cuts his hand quite badly on a nail and reveals his weakness for the sight of blood, alternating wildly between wanting to faint or throw up as he bleeds all over the floor. As Larry is taken to the hospital for stitches, the blood he dripped on the floor reacts with something that had stained the floorboards and up from the stain rises a foul creature that slowly takes shape into something almost human.

Julia discovers the creature in the spare room that reveals itself to be Frank, returned from God knows where by the drops of blood on the floor. Frank is, to put it mildly, in rough shape. He’s basically a skeleton with a little bit of flesh and gore on it that is able to see, hear, and talk and kinda shuffle around the floor. Frank demands that Julia helps him by getting more blood to complete the healing process. Julia then sets about picking up men in bars during the day (quite eagerly it must be said) to bring home for Frank to consume. As Frank returns to his old self he mentions that he escaped from some demons that had shown him all sorts of fun times on both ends of the experiences spectrum from amazing delights to terrible pain. Now Frank’s worried that the demons are after him, but they’re not the only ones concerned with what’s in the same room...

I have this wicked stabbing pain, like, all over my head!

I was really looking forward to Hellraiser. I didn’t know that much about the movie before I saw it, only that it was written by Clive Barker and featured a baddie called Pinhead (due to the large number of pins driven into his, well, head obviously). Clive Barker has such a reputation in horror circles that I was sure that Hellraiser was going to be brilliant. I was completely, entirely, utterly, fucking wrong.

Hellraiser, and I don't care who or what you are, is shite. And that's hard for me to say as some people whose work I really do like are heavily inspired by Hellraiser.

Clive Barker’s writing talents are a little dubious. Candyman was great but Hellraiser is a bullshit story about a bloke wants to experience all sorts of nice and nasty things so he pays over the odds for a little box that enables him to meet demons who fulfil his wishes, that he then “escapes” from by hiding in the spare room, and then tries to avoid contact with people while at the same time needs to kill a bunch of people in order to heal. Not exactly the horror classic I was expecting but the basis for something more than what ended up vomited onto celluloid and fucked at a screen to be watched.

The characters barely deserve to the called that as they are so one dimensional you can hardly see them. I've seen planets feature on Star Trek that only have one geographic feature (like desert or water or whatever) that are more developed and had more imagination put into them then the people who appear in Hellraiser. Larry is a wimp; Julia is a bitch (and a bit of a whore); Frank is a nutter; and Kirsty is the innocent teen destined to win through in the end. These simple character designs lead to all sorts of plot problems. Frank is radically different to Larry which is fair enough, and Julia is such a bitch that it's easy to see how she'd be attracted to him, but then how the hell did she hook up with Larry in the first place never mind marry and then move country with him?

Whatever about the writing there’s no doubt about Clive Barker’s directing talents as displayed in Hellraiser, he doesn’t have any, the direction was awful! The shitty direction coupled with the piss-poor characters went on to bring out the worst in the actors who feature with nearly all of them putting in substandard performances, which goes some way to explain why Pinhead gets more credit than his screen time would suggest he deserves. Frank is really supposed to be the villain as Pinhead and his bunch of demons are hardly in the movie enough to warrant everyone banging on about them so much, though there is the inescapable fact that Pinhead is the best thing in the film by far!

Pinhead's brilliance is down to Doug Bradley, the man behind all the pins. Bradley knew Clive Barker which is how he ended up in the movie but regardless of how he got there he's absolutely rocks as Pinhead and then went on to star in a bunch of Cradle of Filth songs and their videos, often providing the narration or other spoken word bits, like the intro for the classic Her Ghost in the Fog, which features a part of quote from the film: "Oh, no tears please" (it's a waste of good suffering!)

"The Moon she hangs like a cruel portrait..." Pinhead gets all beardy

The second biggest mystery surrounding Hellraiser is where exactly is the fucking film set? It seemed to be England but there’s loads of American actors in it, which would be fine for Larry’s family, but why were so many passersby in the streets also U.S ex-pats? Also, how come Larry was American, Julia was English, but Frank (Larry’s brother) was also English. But only sometimes. Some other times he seemed to be American. Maybe it's because he was played by two different actors, one pre-gore and one all gory and horrific.I suspect that a lot of Hellraiser was cobbled together out of whatever Clive Barker managed to get his hands on, much like a dodgy Halloween costume. To be fair, what really appears to have happened is that Hellraiser is actually a British film that got Americanised during production, which has to be one of the reasons for the pieced together feel.

The biggest mystery surrounding Hellraiser is how come this piece of shit is so popular that it spawned EIGHT sequels and has a remake on the way? Was Britain, home of the Hammer Horror and so many ghost and folk tales, that hard up for a fright?

Two Thumbs Down  for Hellraiser


These Links will tear your soul apart, but only if you ask nicely:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellraiser
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093177/

30 Days of Fright - 15: The Ring

Technology can be delightfully scary. I say delightfully because, as someone with the bare bones of an eduction in science coupled with several years of pretending to work while actually acting the goat with computers, I don't find technology at all frightening. I tend to find it a bit of a dodge actually; I'm the man who doesn't really do anything because I got a nice shiny computer to do the work for me! There are people who are terrified of computers and other gadgets and we as a species have a long history of being afraid of things like that, particularly cameras and their weird ability to steal your soul, which is something that must have crossed the minds of the makers of last night's movie.

The Ring (2002) stars Naomi Watts as Rachel Keller, a journalist in Seattle whose teenage niece dies in mysterious circumstances. Rachel's sister asks her to look into the causes of her daughters death and as she investigates Rachel comes across an urban legend that may have had something to do with her niece popping her cloggs. The legend, that some of the dead girls friends put some stock in, states that a mysterious video tape exists that shows a series of creepy images and that immediately after watching the tape the viewer will receive a phone call and the voice on the other end of the line will simply state that in seven days time the poor sap who watched the video will die.

Rachel is a little bit skeptical of this story and instead pokes into the girls life in a more conventional manner, including snooping in her room and picking up some photographs she was having developed before she went to meet her maker. Most of the pictures, of the girl and her friends staying in a log cabin, are just your regular run of the mill teenage snaps, but a few of them from the end of the roll of film have a weird distortion over the faces of those in the pictures. Rachel visits the cabin in the pictures and there she finds a mysterious video tape.

Of course, the dozy cow watches the video (which puts the shits up her) and then promptly receives a phone call that tells her she's got seven days. Returning to the city she shows the video to an ex of hers (and the father of her little boy Aidan) who happens to be a bit of a whizz at photography and videos and such. He's not as bothered by the whole thing but Rachel gets more and more worried as the days pass and she begins to experience a series of mighty strange occurrences, including having her own face distort in photographs. Deciding that she has to act as there's a distinct chance that something will kill her within the week, Rachel begins to investigate the images on the tape and pieces together a tragic tale of one families suffering, a terrible secret, and the supernatural events surrounding the tape. While all this is going on, the days quickly pass and more people close to Rachel end up watching the video...

At last, a decent 3D TV!

The Ring ushered in brief period in the early to mid 2000's when Hollywood fell in love with Japanese horror films... which it raped for ideas and then left for dead when it was all finished. The Ring was based on a Japanese movie Ringu, which was based on a book, which was based on an old Japanese story (so everyone nicked the idea from someone else). What made The Ring so exceptional and therefore such a trailblazer, is that it's really good.

From the opening scene with the two girls discussing the tape which was filmed with a green filter to make the whole thing look like it belongs on TV, through to the subtle special effects, the creepy images on the cursed video, and the decidedly modern setting, everything about The Ring screams quality. This is a film I thoroughly enjoyed in 2002 when I caught it at the cinema and, despite the aging technology the story depends on, thoroughly enjoyed again on TV in 2011.

Directed by Gore Verbinski (of Pirates of the Caribbean directing fame) The Ring works from the very start to build dread, initially depending on a quick shock to make the audience uneasy then turning down the volume a little so as to make the next hour a properly creepy experience. The centrepiece of this is the video tape that was supposed to hold a recorded football game but instead  picked up a collection of images that look like something an arty film student would throw together but still manages to be a little disturbing even though there's nothing actually scary on it. The tape serves as a micro version of the entire film as, like the best horror does, The Ring convinces you that something frightening is always just about to happen, though it rarely does. This nervous anticipation is brilliant, and Gore (great name for a horror director) deserves a lot of credit for getting the film to work in this way.

The cast work well too, with Naomi Watts doing a decent turn in a nice little reversal of the traditional horror heroine. Usually in a film like this the female lead starts off all soft and girly (into flower arranging and dress-making and the like) and by the end of the film is a real tough nut (into army boots and guns and the like). In The Ring, Watt's character Rachel starts off as a hard-boiled journo, always ready to give her boss the finger while she digs out the facts behind a story (ala April O'Neill or Lois Lane), but as the film progresses she gets the shits put right up her by that video tape and the truth it leads her to. Another one to watch out for in The Ring is Pauley Perrette (Abby from NCIS) as Rachel's ex's new girlfriend of sorts.The only disappointing person in the film is the young lad Aidan as the character doesn't make a whole pile of sense. He seems to have a bit of a supernatural side to him as he's able to understand the motivations behind what's going on and is definitely better informed than his mum is but that doesn't really go anywhere except to help fill in a bit of a blank near the end.

Overall, The Ring is excellent. Perfectly creepy, nicely paced and featuring a good cast and great direction, with only the inevitable move away from video tapes and the technology and quirk's associated with them holding this film back from the level of praise it deserves.

Two Thumbs Up for The Ring.


Before you die, you see The Links:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_%282002_film%29
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298130/