October Horror 2013: 14 - The Howling

This is a short recap of movies watched during a weekend trip in which I wasn't able to write more full reactions in a timely fashion:

The Howling is a 1981 Werewolf movie directed by Joe Dante and based off a 1977 book of the same name by Gary Brandner.

The movie was, seemingly, an attempt to modernize the werewolf movie as by the 80's the Universal monster movies had taken a back seat for some time and the Slasher was just beginning to rise as a popular force in horror.  I assume it succeeded due to its place on this list of ultimate horror movies.  The movie I thought was alright for the most part, not great...a little silly at times though the many nods to classic werewolf movies were fun more than obvious.  Probably the strongest thing, conceptually, was the very end during the news report that Karen gives when returning from The Colony.  Werewolves tend to make better supporting characters than stars, though I really did enjoy An American Werewolf In London (Though I'd argue that the ghosts and the human form of the lead were more main characters than the werewolf form).  I wouldn't say it's a bad movie, just a bit dull and missing the man-vs-man's animal nature character battle that really should be a part of the werewolf genre.  Incidentally, this is played really well by Sam Huntington in the US Being Human (not to snub the UK's Russell Tovey in the werewolf part, I just think Sam does a better job at the more extreme ends of the emotional range).

The remake/re-imagining The Howling: Reborn is a bit more fun, and the effects are better...but it is quite silly.

October Horror 2013: More Haunted houses: Screamer's Hollow & Fright Nights at the Fair

Screamer's Hollow
Screamer's Hollow is an outdoor park-style attraction with a loose "Village of the Damned" theme that is staged on the grounds of the Sterling Renaissance Festival.  Though most of the festival grounds are roped off.  They've got a maze, a walk-through, and a hayride through the nearby apple orchard in addition to the base "Village of the Damned", with the walk-through being the weakest thing and the hayride being surprisingly fun.  The maze was very intense and though sparsely populated, very effective at being scary.  I think one of the standout parts was the Village itself.  During the night, they use the stages around the grounds to set cute little Halloween themed plays and tell ghost stories around campfires.  I wish they did a little more with haunting the festival grounds, and had a few more actors wandering around the Village part to make it feel a bit more village-y...fog machines wouldn't go amiss either.  But all in all, very good.

I originally wanted to go to Halloweekends at Sylvan Beach, but due to my inability to read both Screamer's Hollow and this were only available Saturday night.  So as consolation on Sunday we went to:

Fright Nights at the Fair
This is a small haunted park in the New York State Fair fairgrounds, specifically a small building near the farm expo portion by the parking lot.  It was pretty cheap looking and had the traditional midway food trucks. They had 5 walk-throughs of various themes and a 3D hayride.  All the walk-throughs were actually surprisingly scary, making tremendously effective use of non-shouty actors and strobes of differing frequencies to keep things scary and tense and only startling at a few times.  The hayride, however, was crap.  It was a short, well-lit, ride in a tractor-pulled trailer where the seats were all facing inward around a few of the extra buildings with panels with those diffraction 3D neon painted panels.  At random points small groups of masked actors would board the trailer and shout at someone, stand around awkwardly, then jump off.  I think they could've made it work even with limited actors and the well-lit setting if they had made actual sets there instead of panels, worked in a good story, and rehearsed their actors a bit better.  As it stood, it was pretty lame and I actually entertained the notion of jumping off the trailer and wandering back to the main building so the ride would be over quicker.

October Horror 2013: 13 - The Frighteners

This is a short recap of movies watched during a weekend trip in which I wasn't able to write more full reactions in a timely fashion:

The Frighteners is another early Peter Jackson horror film, though with much better production and less "Weird" than Dead Alive/Braindead.  Our lead character, played by Michael J. Fox, is a former architect-turned psychic investigator in a small town.  Except he's a sham.  He can really see and communicate with ghosts, that's not the sham bit.  The sham is that ghosts aren't actually haunting his clients, well no...that's not true.  They are.  But the sham is that he's friends with the ghosts, they haunt houses because he asks them to so that he can charge people to "exorcise" their houses.  See, his wife died in a car accident years ago before he was able to finish building their dream home, and he's been grief stricken and financially devastated.  He's living in the half-finished house while saving the money he gets from his semi-cons (there are ghosts there, and he does make them leave...) to someday finish the house.

Really the plot isn't that important, and to be honest it's a bit silly.  However, the movie looks really good and is really funny.  It's got a lot of good slapstick and some nice "ghost" humor.  The pacing is lively, though it does get mired down attempting to work in a muder-mystery sort of thing.  The ghost look is particularly standout, though a lot of the later "creepy" sets wind up feeling more haunted house than horror movie.  The only real tough bit is that Michael J. Fox has been diagnosed with Parkinson's, but has not yet officially revealed it so some of his expressions and mannerisms look awkward as he's trying to hide it.

p.s. Jake Busey has huge teeth.

October Horror 2013: 12 - Scream

This is a short recap of movies watched during a weekend trip in which I wasn't able to write more full reactions in a timely fashion:


Scream is one of those classic horror revival flicks that tend to be hated on quite a bit, having done some good but far outstayed their welcome.  Horror in the 90's was often regarded as a bit of a dead and niche genre with the majority of releases being straight-to-video or sequels to existing franchises like the once incredibly popular Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm St.  Theatrical releases often having much lower budget than their predecessors.  Scream came out in 1996, directed by Wes Craven, who previously created the Nightmare on Elm St franchise.  Ironic, considering the film often lampoons horror movie "rules" than Nightmare had a hand in establishing.

Having seen Scream ~17 years too late, it probably didn't have as much of an effect on me as it would've had on the original audiences, but as a horror fan I really enjoyed it.  I feel like its self-aware nodding to horror tropes and formula is something that has allowed movies like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, Cabin in the Woods, and even Grave Encounters to exist.  I did enjoy it, but it might feel a little cheap in relation to more modern movies.  Still well written and worth watching for the legacy, but don't expect to be amazed and blown away.  Amusingly, for being regarded as saving horror from the glut of long running franchises with endless sequels Scream spawned 3 of its own.

October Horror 2013: 11 - Jacob's Ladder

This is a short recap of movies watched during a weekend trip in which I wasn't able to write more full reactions in a timely fashion:



I have not seen Jacob's Ladder but the little woman has.  Apparently it makes much more sense the 2nd time through.  Jacob's Ladder is very twisty 1990 movie concerning Jacob Singer, a Vietnam veteran living in NYC in the early 1970's.  It does a striking job making everything look like it was really set in the 70s, so much that I had to double check the release date a few times.  Also, Tim Robbins would've been somewhere in his teens in the 1970s and Macaulay wasn't born yet so it has to have been released in 1990.  I mention this because it makes some of the nightmarish imagery look surprisingly real.  It couldn't have been a special effect because that type of effect/technology didn't exist in the 70s...when this movie was clearly made.  The plot is confusing as all get-out, but not so hard to follow you're can't figure out what's going on.  I'd imagine just a few of the finer points or revealing references wouldn't jump out until you knew how things would play out.  The movie prefers to play with general discomfort or longer scenes with creepy setups and strange action to simple jump scares, which is quite nice.  It's a very well done mind-bender.

October Horror 2013: 10 - The Serpent and the Rainbow

The Serpent and the Rainbow is a 1988 Wes Craven movie based on a book of the same name by ethnobotanist Wade Davis regarding the case of Clairvius Narcisse, a Haitian man who was declared dead, then stumbled into his home village 18 years later with stories of a Bokor (dark voodoo shaman) who drugged him with Tetrodotoxin (puffer fish) to make him appear dead, then dug him up and forced him to work on a sugar cane plantation.  The Bokor kept Clairvius subservient and confused using constant doses of Datura.  He is presented as the first real-life Zombie.

The movie concerns anthropoligist Dennis Allen, played by Bill Pullman, who is employed by a pharmaceutical corporation to got to Haiti and procure a sample of this supposed "Zombie" powder.  His contact in Haiti is a local psychologist who's been treating a few former Zombies who've managed to escape and make it back to town.  From there he winds up being pulled into a power struggle not only for Haiti's government but the souls of its population.

Between Craven and dealing with Voodoo we're pretty much guaranteed some cheese, but it's actually surprisingly well integrated.  Especially towards the end there are little bits of humor which are nice.  There are some attempts earlier, but I feel like they fell flat and seemed weird or forced.  However, the exploration of Voodoo is done in a much more interesting way than in other movies I've seen where it comes off as "and this is a voodoo thing THAT IS SPOOOOOOOOooOooOKY!", while here it's given a certain real-world weight while still having the quality of myth.  This works especially because of the rational behavior of Dennis, who is clearly a scientist the whole time just a bit over his head in a world of legends and magic.

The pacing is good and I like the ramp up as Dennis initially ignores then believes his hallucinations and comes to terms with a world with voodoo magic.  There's some minor faltering here and there but nothing egregious, and there are several nice bits with very good creepy imagery like the scene with the flaming boat they drew on for the cover.  The last half of the movie is the one with most of the good stuff but I don't think it would stand up without a passing familiarity with the first half.

It wasn't really scary in any major ways, but hit a lot of good notes.

We're traveling this weekend so updates will be hard to come by, so the next few movies may be rolled up into a multi-movie update with short paragraphs just so I can catch up more easily.  Not sure yet.  Stay tuned.

--PXA

October Horror 2013: 9 - Ju-On (2002)

Ju-On is the original Japanese horror movie that inspired 2004's The Grudge.  The film itself is a sequel to 2 direct-to-video j-horror movies.  I remember The Grudge and The Ring being pretty big back in the day, though I never really felt a major need to watch the originals until I started getting really into horror and then figured that comparing the source material to the native interpretations would be a nice exercise.

For the most part the story is the same, although as is often the case for adaptations of j-horror many elements are trimmed to make for a tighter narrative.  But the core story of a husband killing his wife, son, and pet cat before killing himself, causing their house to become cursed place of sadness and rage.  Anyone exposed to the house becomes a bearer of the curse until it kills them, and they can also bring anyone they care for into the curse.

The flow of time in this is somewhat difficult to lock down.  The film opens on the murder, but the scene is quite obfuscated with heavy effects, close shots, and many cuts.  After that we go through a series of almost short segments, like an anthology, following each person affected by the curse.  I think the first segment happens before the first, though I'm at a loss to explain the need for a social worker in the first segment if the wife is at home as in the second.  It could be a weekend/weekday thing, but then why would the husband put on a suit and go to work?  But then again, if they're backwards and the first happened afterwards, why would the old woman continue living in the house?  I had similar issue with The Grudge, since these two sequences were almost exactly alike apart from the nationalities of the characters.

From there it's mostly straight forward until one sequence in which a man has a vision of something happening in his future, that sets up what happened prior to the next segment which takes place years later.  After that it's possible some of the last few bits happen in parallel.

It was a good movie, I was confused a bit because of the time lapses, which may or may not have been helped by the subtitles.  What was particularly difficult was that apart from the opening scroll and the title cards before each segment with people's names, very little on-screen text was subtitled.  As is often my issue with foreign films I had some trouble following along and had to discuss the movie while it was happening to keep everything straight.  Also, I have a hell of a time keeping peoples' names straight in Japanese movies because their names are so dissimilar from Western names that I have no basis on which to associate the name with the person.  In a Western film if Brad, Frank, and Jenn are in a room together...it's easy to figure out which one is Jenn, but in a Japenese movie and Takashi, Katsuya, and Kayako are in a room...I got nothing.

Anyway, it still pulled off some great creepy bits and really did unnerve me in a few parts.  Some of the scenes where the ghost manifests as a black cloud look really bad, effects wise, but the acting and the sounds the ghost makes when showing as a full person are profoundly creepy.  It's also got more to it, so the variety in haunting is nice.  I do like the increased production values in the remake, and there are a few places where this one looks cheap or much older than it should be, but it's still very solid and I liked seeing where a lot of the elements of The Grudge originated.

Next up was supposed to be Don't Look Back, but Netflix apparently expired it off streaming so we're going to have to substitute something else.

--PXA

October Horror 2013: 8 - The Mummy (1932)

Similar to last year's Call of Cthulhu, I find myself somewhat ill-equipped to react appropriately to a movie like this.  Now, while it at least has sound, it's still black & white and comes from an era far removed from modern horror cinema.  Camera placement back in the day was a very different animal than it is now.

That said, 1932 was in a pre-steadicam era and as such the camera was generally placed on a tripod and operated mechanically in the few instances they required panning.  There were some shots where the frame shook violently, and I'd believe those to be where the camera was handheld for close shots or some more complex movement.  One particularly impressive movement was of a camera from behind two characters in an arc before stopping suspended over a pool of fog, which then became a sort of flashback/film-within-a-film.  I'd assume it was thought of as impressive back in the day when all effects were done with optical compositing, and this would even be the early days of compositing.

The Mummy's plot concerns an archeological expedition to Egypt which unearths the tomb of Imhotep.  Against the advice of their occult consultant the expedition leads decided to bring up the mummy and also read aloud a found scroll which inadvertently brings Imhotep back to life and he wanders off.  10 years later the original archeologist's son is leading a somewhat fruitless expedition in Egypt when he's interrupted by a man named Ardath Bey who shows him where to uncover the tomb of princess Ankh-es-en-amon, claiming that Egyptian natives aren't allowed to dig up their dead and he must tell a foreign archeologist where he found an artifact.

As to reactions I thought the shots and camera action were surprisingly lively feeling.  It didn't feel that far removed from a more modern movie most of the time, but the lack of dynamism was noticed as a whole.  The plot included an oddly stilted feeling romance sub-plot that almost felt obligatory so they could have a female lead pursued by two suitors, which is a pretty common trope.  These early Universal horrors tended to have that Damsel in Distress, and this feels quite formulaic.

That said, I definitely enjoyed it as an artifact.  It wasn't too tough to watch, though a bit slow sometimes.  One or two of the early creepy scenes were quite effective, and like a lot of great modern movies worked on the strength of the actor's performance.

I believe we're including one "old" movie and one subtitled movie in this week's "Ultimate Movie List" subset, so this is the old and tomorrow is the sub'd: Ju-on

--PXA