So–as the month proceeds, I’m committed to seeing some horror films. The following three sort of fit the generic bill, but alas while most clearly intra-genre two of the films also failed to bring the noise.
1408 is well-shot and lovingly attuned to genre tradition. It’s also about as much fun as staying in a hotel room. A jaded hack writer kicking out quasi-travelogues of the supernatural (John Cusack, using his sad and grim faces mostly, instead of his other two options–the blank or the smiley) goes into one “evil fucking room” and haunting ensues. In the story by Stephen King, it’s pretty stripped down; I don’t recall a backstory which gives a rationale (sort of) for the writer’s jadedness (this is NOT a spoiler–the requisite dead kid) which did give the film its small bit of emotional juice but also drained out what remained of my pleasure in the film. Why didn’t this work? Again, I liked the turn to the traditional–no torture scenes, just ghosts and evil spaces. But I was never spooked in the least, and mostly I was bored. I kind of blame Cusack… and maybe it’s unfair, but damn he seemed more impassive than jaded. Everything seemed tamped down, controlled.
Black Sheep wants to be uncontrolled, the opposite of tamped down–revved up, Peter-Jackson-crazed with gore and the slapstick potential of extreme horror. But the film suffers from a very similar ailment as the above: while utterly loony in its premise (genetic sheep turned killer, also somehow able to transfer sheep-ness into humans bitten so that we get a few transformations), and in love with endless shots of sheep munching happily on piles of innards or grabbing and stretching bits of rubbery flesh farther than you ever thought biologically possible, the film was also boring. It was so utterly conventional in its enactment of its strange premise that the helium seeped out and instead we get a pretty tedious straightforward horror film, saved only slightly by a relative competence in its execution, a lack of pretension, and some decent enough acting. I enjoyed the trailer more than the film, though.
Black Book probably deserves another thread. I thought about sticking it under our thread on Soderbergh’s Good German, because this film seems a far more effective embodiment of classic war-time Hollywood narrative married to a bleaker, more cynical critique of those films’ romanticism. I watched, and quite enjoyed–Paul Verhoeven updates this WWII melodrama, infusing it with a vicious sense of human nature (and occasional flashes of ironic situational humor) and an intriguing willingness to play the horrors of that war (somewhat explicitly addressed) as fodder for thrilling suspense. I was very taken by the lead Carice van Houten, who is fearless and enthralling in her performance–capturing exactly that sense of the ’40s heroine in her semi-hardboiled yet earnest attitude. Sebastian Koch (from Lives of Others) is also quite good. I guess what drew me in, besides the strong acting and excellent pacing and suspenseful story, is that I kept thinking that it seemed a rather glib way to tell the story, and the film seemed self-conscious of its own glib repression or exploitation. . . and yet it’s not ironic or winking in form (which we might say of Soderbergh’s film). Not really horror, but occasionally horrifying, and–like many reviewers I cautiously toss this word out–entertaining.