Halloween. Yup: time to sift through the seasonal flurry of straight-to-dvd horror, flip through some old favorites, fire up the scary, cue the gore, put on the mask. Yeah.
I gather Takashi Miike’s utterly, grimly compelling Audition has a sweet new two-disc release. And Raimi’s praised Drag Me To Hell will show up in a week or two, and demands some love. (I did indeed love it–a great deal of fun.) But on to the unfamiliar.
I’ve been hearing about Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘r Treat on fansites (from various horror cons & festivals) since last year. And it’s in line with the aforementioned Raimi: less scary, ‘though it has a number of fine creepy bits and the occasional jump, more revved-up goofy thrills. The film mashes up, with an intense affection, a number of semi-familiar Halloween-film tropes: a cranky old sleazeball who hates kids and the holiday, a bunch of teens looking for lust, some much younger sorts playing a prank, a family man with a dark side, a creepy little reject Halloween-freak-kid running about in the background. I’m frankly astonished at how *well* all this syncs up: Dougherty’s second greatest skill is the confident and highly-effective structuring, which turns some potential cliche-bait into a streamlined, sort-of-jigsawed puzzle box. The film’s formal organization amplifies its underlying ‘theme’ of a Halloween mythos–takes all this fodder from so many cheesy ’70s and ’80s films and spins ’em into a love letter to the idea of the Halloween horror film.
Dougherty’s greatest skill is in the gorgeous art design and cinematography — the rich red cape worn by Anna Paquin, the white haze hanging in the air, the dark black-green of vegetation all around, the orange glimmer from jack-o-lanterns lining the path… the film’s credits play out like a good ol’ Tales from the Crypt horror comic (and the film owes more than a small debt to King/Romero’s Creepshow, as much as to those comics), and you can see that same loving sense of composition and frame, the lurid glow of rich blood colors and the complexity of all the shadows and light. It looks quite lovely.
So, sounds like I loved it, right? Well, reader, I liked it. I appreciated it from frame one ’til final flashcut screams and fade to black. But I was never fully engrossed, never all that scared nor too surprised nor that amused. If I was 13, again, or 16–like when I saw Creepshow… I think I’d be half in love. Now, it’s mostly affection. You folks who don’t really like the scary–this might be a good way in to seasonal spirits. (Oh, sure, lots of kids die. But it’s all vaguely innocent, like campfire tales. One review I read said it was a horror-movie Goonies, which seems about right.) But for sheer pleasure, the Raimi film has this one beat by some margin. Still… it’s fun.
Eduardo Sanchez’s Altered is an alien-abduction movie with an intriguing pitch, catching up with a group of guys who’d been abducted some many years later (and diving right into the action, letting us figure out what’s going on). There’s an intriguing plot here, some riffs on the urban legends of abduction (including the implantation of strange Cronenbergian transmitters, nefarious and astonishingly persistent plots to harass abductees for no discernible purpose, and so on). Sanchez was one of the guys behind Blair Witch, and like that film this one has that smart reframing of old-school scares and a confident, technically-savvy way to structure and film.
And like that film actors start in histrionics then take it up 30 or 40 notches as the movie progresses. And like that film, it’s often as much annoying as frightening. It’s full of ham-handed “scares” (and, quite literally, intestine-grabbing gore so amateurish that it makes the acting look naturalistic).
Yet I enjoyed it. It’s silly, not terribly scary, aggravating… but I thought the concept was interesting enough to carry me through a lot, and Sanchez does have an eye–it’s quite passable Halloween goodness.
Drag Me to Hell . . . uh, meh! It certainly has style and plenty of bodily fluids but as someone who thinks Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn to be one of the great comic horror films of all time, this left me wanting more–much, much more. Did you write about this elsewhere, Mike? I’m really curious why you thought it was so fantastic (or at least worthy of love). It struck me as more of a genre exercise; a palate cleanser; a gift to Raimi’s legion of fans (who didn’t exactly turn up at the cinemas in droves). Or maybe Raimi’s brother needed the work. Personally, 2000’s The Gift made me squirm a hell of lot more than this. That all being said, I did enjoy the albino goat. Best performance in the entire film.
Fantastic…overstating–but I did enjoy it, less for scares (minimal) than its goofy and grotesque vigor. (For the record, I hated The Gift–it just bored me to tears–but you’re right that this is not up to Evil standards. But it is fun, and after all the other ‘big’ adult summer films, it’s the only one I think I’d return to, or even recommend.)
As part of my halloween feast, I ordered up The Killing Room, which went straight to dvd and appeared in write-ups to be a Saw rehash. I wasn’t so keen–rehashing Saw is kind of like an Air Supply tribute band–but it had Timothy Hutton and got some interesting affirmations, and–yeah. It’s pretty good, ‘though not at all horror (but I’ll still sneak it in here). The set-up is actually four people brought on false pretences into a locked room; they think they’re in for a consumer focus group, but turns out it’s a revitalized secret-ops MK-ULTRA program testing out methods for coercing human behavior. D’oh! The film is smartly given a patina of clinical detachment–we actually engage with a researcher (the strangely-cast Chloe Sevigny) interviewing for a position with, it turns out, one of this program’s head psychologists (the always-strange Peter Stormare). We watch her watch; we see and hear various technicians around the edges. Inside the room, on the tape, the actions of the four hapless schmoes creates tension but is not your typical sadist-fest — and gains more bite as a result of making the deaths relatively quick and callously efficient. Hutton and Nick Cannon are very good; the film had real suspense and a good twist or two; it also slipped into, without mawkishly or hamhandedly tripping over, some explicit post-9/11 social critique. Worth a look. (But the best film I saw yesterday … needs its own post.)
The other Blair Witch guy does movies, too. Daniel Myrick’s The Objective, with script co-written by son of presidential contender Wesley Clark, has a helluva premise: just after 9/11, the war against the Taliban recently opened, a CIA op drops into deep rural territory with a group of soldiers and a vague objective circling around satellite photos indicating an unfamiliar radiation source. The movie’s a fairly archetypal mash-up of “soldiers on a mission” and “what-the-hell-is-happening” horror, and it’s reasonably entertaining, if never that surprising. The acting’s a lot less shrill than the above-mentioned Altered, and (again) I found the central story pretty engaging if never terribly creepy or disruptive. A reasonably good Halloween flick. Low gore quotient, too, for you wusses.
Antti-Jussi Annila’s Sauna is a pretty effective vengeful-haunts tale set in 1595 far-north hinterlands during a border survey with still-combative reps from Russia and Finland. In a deep, unmapped swamp they come upon an unexpected settlement, with this crazy spooky-doorway boxy Sauna just out of town in knee-high fetid water.
The film cribs from some Japanese horror traditions, teases out the hint of specific cultural and historical references for the Finns, but boil it down to basic plot and it’s a bit too conventional. Still, who needs narrative innovation–ghosts is ghosts, even with scary black-goo faces, and the film is rather marvelous at amplifying mood with lovely bleak peat-swamp compositions, teasing out the tension of each potential scare, fracturing the storyline just enough to keep us a bit out of sorts.
Completely harmless in terms of gore, but scarier than most of you will want.