October Horror 2013: 7 - Misery

Closing out Shit We Missed week is the Rob Reiner directed Misery starring James Caan and Kathy Bates, based on a story by Stephen King.  Misery is considered by many to be a classic, and I think it deserves that distinction but I am never watching this movie again.

Author Paul Sheldon (Caan) has published a series of successful romance novels centering around a woman named Misery Chastain.  He wanted to focus on more serious work so he retired to his traditional writing cabin to put together a manuscript.  Upon finishing it, he began driving down the hill in the middle of a blizzard.  Unfortunately he can't hack the weather and drives off the road, where he's rescued from the wreck of his car by Anne Wilkes (Bates), a local nurse who takes him to her home.  When he wakes up she claims to be his #1 fan, however her devotion makes Paul pretty uncomfortable.  I'm going to leave it there because this actually a very good movie and although the elements aren't really twists and are pretty easy to see coming, it's worth it to let the movie reveal things at its own pace.  One thing I will say is that when I saw the movie I thought Paul's new manuscript was the final part of the Misery series that incites the conflict, and not the recently published Misery book.  In checking wikipedia's summary, I discovered I was wrong.

Anyway, the movie really succeeds on the strength of the performance.  Specifically the stark contrast between Caan's mostly passive smile-and-nod Paul and Bates' completely manic-depressive Anne.  Woman plays a good psycho.  Most of the camera work is very good and tension building but some of it when Anne flies off the handle is a little cheesy at first.  Though it plays a major part in producing that uncomfortable feeling you get when you're stuck in a room with someone who's taking something way too far and reacting way too strongly and you don't want to contribute to the situation, but you can't leave and don't know how to make it stop.  Uncomfortable is the word of the day here because it's very hard to watch this movie.  Very worth it, though.

One more important caveat is this, like Secret Window, is very difficult to play the Stephen King drinking game to.

Week 2 begins with the first of mega-ultimate-super-classics: The Mummy.

--PXA

October Horror 2013: 6 - Campfire Tales

Campfire Tales is not a spectacular movie, but I do enjoy it.  It was originally slated as part of our Anthologies week.  This was the one from 1997, not the 1991 movie of the same name starring Gunnar Hansen.

Campfire Tales is interesting in the sense that out of the rest of the Anthologies this one is only retellings of classic scary folk stories and urban legends instead of original stories.  The framing story, as far as I know, is mostly original but relies heavily on a darker version of a very common TV and early film trope.  I like it because it's fun, not because it's particularly good.

Eschewing the Anthology format I've been using thus far, I will talk about the framing story then mention the classic stories included.  These are classics so I won't be spoiler tagging them.

After an opening classic tale from the 50s, our intrepid heroes are driving wrecklessly along a country road, probably drunk, before crashing their car.  They setup road flares and light a fire in the woods then wait for rescue.  To pass the time, they tell each other scary stories.  I understand the need to set the lead up as the irresponsible one in order for the reveal to drive home the appropriate moral epiphany on the repercussions of your actions, but it was just a bit trite.  Oddly, despite the obvious moral I never felt the movie was terribly preachy, which was pretty welcome.  The framing story otherwise is the least entertaining but most interesting segment in the movie.

The other classic stories are:
"The Hook": Set in the 50s, two teens are at makeout point in a car when the radio announces an inmate from the local prison has escaped.  He has a hook for a hand that he's used to kill people.  The girl claims she hears a noise and forces the boy to take her home, but instead he takes her to the local burger/shake/diner at which point he steps out of the car and is horrified to see a bloody hook embedded in the side of the car.

"The Honeymoon":  A newlywed couple is driving in an RV to Las Vegas for/as their honeymoon.  Eventually they stop to rest for the night but are confronted by a nervous man with a shotgun telling them the area isn't safe because "they" (heavily implied to be werewolves) come out at night.  The couple leaves, but runs out of gas shortly and the husband decides to walk to the nearest gas station.  During the night the RV is attacked, but the wife manages to lock herself in and defend against the attackers.  When she wakes in the morning a police officer has arrived and attempts to escort her away from the RV without her looking at it, however she turns around and sees her dead husband hanging from a branch over the camper...his wedding ring scraping the roof.

"People Can Lick Too": A young girl lives with her older sister, parents, and dog.  The dog will often sit under her bed and lick her hand if it drops over the edge of the bed.  One night her parents leave her alone at home, which she mentions to another young girl she's chatting with online.  This girl turns out to be a creepy older stalker who breaks into her house that night.  When she drops her hand over the bed, she assumes it's the dog licking it but then sees "People can lick too" written in blood on the window and sees the reflection of a man under her bed.  She flips out and runs away.  When her sister returns and checks the scene, she finds the dog's corpse under the bed.

"The Locket": A younger guy decides to go on a cross-country motorcycle ride in search of adventure.  He runs into engine trouble outside of a country home and seeks help.  A pretty girl answers the door, but she is mute.  They seem to connect and she allows him to stay the night while her father is away driving cattle.  A brutal fight, and possibly a murder/suicide are played out by ghostly figures and voices throughout the night, until the guy runs away with the girl.  They wake up under a tree in a field and he removes a locket she wears around her neck.  Opening it, he reveals a picture of both of them, dressed in obviously 1800s clothes.  The girl wakes, asks what's happening, and then her head falls off.  A cut forms where the locket was originally tied.

It's kindof lame and camp, but for some reason I've enjoyed watching it.  You can see some actors before their famous roles and they're decent adaptations of classic urban legends.

Tomorrow Shit We Missed concludes with Misery from Stephen King week.

October Horror 2013: 5 - The Shining

I really do enjoy Kubrick's The Shining.  I haven't read Stephen King's original story and I am aware of his dislike of this version.  I do have the King-approved version on my watch list but I haven't gotten around to it yet.  For now, I really like the unsettling atmosphere of this movie.  There's not a lot I can say about it since it is such a classic.  This was part of Stephen King week, as though I had watched it entirely my partner in crime hadn't watched the entire thing in one focused sitting.

The movie itself is legendary already, spawning other documentaries and countless homages and references.  Kubrick built sets using impossible geometry and drove his actors to their breaking points to create amazingly "off" performances.  Except Danny Lloyd.  I always thought his performance in the movie was strange, especially in the face of the often cited report that Kubrick made him think he was acting in a drama film and he didn't realize it was a horror movie until years later.  With the shots of him shaking in bed and frothing at the mouth, the various close up "horrified" faces he had to make, and all the Tony/"Redrum!!!" stuff, how could you hide the nature of the film?  Either way, maybe that's why his performance has always seemed not-entirely fitting.

Child actors tend to be a mixed bag and I feel like this one was a slight ding against the movie, and I really wish I knew what was up with the fursuit blowjob bit right near the end.  Freaky shit.

Anyway, it's up there as one of the few horror movies that is regarded as an amazing work of film in its own right and well worth checking out.  Also, the documentary "Room 237" is currently on Netflix, I haven't seen it yet but theories and observations for The Shining are generally pretty interesting.  There's a lot going on in most of Kubrick's movies, but this one seems especially dense.

October Horror 2013: 4 - The Others

This one was really good, not going to dance around that one at all and try to play the somewhat non-committal "Yeah, it was ok.  Nothing spectacular and nothing horrid" tone my writeups have been tending to take.  We got to the movie really late after getting home from Barrett's Haunted Mansion and a semi-interactive adventure called Zombie Apocalypse which was right down the street.  So we started the movie pretty low-volume hoping to not be too loud for anyone, which caused a problem because of just about everyone in the movie whispering almost the entire time.  The only major complaints I have are that everyone was whispering and that both Nicole Kidman's character and her daughter were kindof a bit of a bitch.  The daughter more often I think because she was pretty mean to her brother a lot of the time.

So the movie is set in England in the 1940's sometime after World War 2 and stars Nicole Kidman as Grace, a woman with 2 children alone in their large manor.  Grace's husband, Charles (Christopher Eccleston), had gone off to fight in the war on the side of England but has likely been killed.  A few weeks prior to the beginning of the story the house servants had suddenly left without informing Grace or collecting their final wages, leaving Grace alone in the house with her children Nicolas and Anne.

We open with the arrival of 3 people, led by a Bertha Mills (Fionnula Flanagan) who claim to be responding to a request for new house keepers to assist Grace in taking care of her children who suffer from extreme photosensitivity and require special treatment.  This treatment consists of a bizarrely ritualistic way of life in which all doors in the house are closed and locked before another door is opened, and all curtains must be closed in a room before allowing the children in.  Most of the light sources in the shots are implied to be leak from around the curtains (which is explained as the children being tolerant of a low level of light) and hand-held oil lanterns.  Grace claims that during the war the electrical power was continually being knocked out so the family just decided to leave it off and rely on natural fuel sources for light and heat.  I would add that, probably for practical reasons, a lot of the movie felt much brighter than it should have been for a house that is being deliberately darkened.  It's not bad and I stopped noticing quickly but it seems strange that this movie is better lit than Sinister, which took place in a house with electricity.

It's all a very interesting setup that lends a very oppressive and uncomfortable atmosphere.  I was initially taken aback by the adversarial posture that Grace takes a lot of them time but it really fit her character when I think about it.  She's effectively cut off from the nearby town by an oppressive fog, and the spooky happenings during the movie are spurring a belief in ghosts in her children that is clashing with her strong Roman Catholic faith.  The children, Anne particularly, feel like they're being treated unfairly (which they are, being punished for telling the truth of things but then being told to tell the truth) and begin to draw away from Grace and gravitating towards Mrs. Mills.  Grace then sees the new servant as a competitor for her daughter's affections and possibly even an active force driving a wedge between her and Anne, so she lashes out at the new servants.  It's all drama which I normally wouldn't care for since I did sign up for a horror movie but it's really well done as a backdrop to the things that go bump in the night.

There aren't actually a tremendous amount of explicit scare scenes in the film, they mostly just serve to ramp up the tension as Grace unravels and the servants are revealed to have their own agenda.  The character drama and the implication of things happening plays amazingly on the imagination and even though you're not really imagining ghouls and etc, there's a certain amount of feeling things are not quite right needed for the ending to work, which to me it did.  While the ending was not exactly something completely groundbreaking and new, it brought the movie together really tightly and paid off the excellent atmosphere building that had been going on.  Very spooky and focused.  I'm glad we finally got to this one.

Next up is The Shining from Stephen King week.

October Horror 2013: 3 - Secret Window

Secret Window (2004), written and directed by David Koepp and starring pre-Burton/Disney Johnny Depp and always-great John Turturro is possibly the tightest adaptation of a Stephen King story I have ever seen.  Though it is a bit dry to play the Stephen King Drinking Game to.

The premise here is that a writer {DING!  Take a drink!}, Mort Rainey (Depp), catches his wife cheating {DING!} on him at a motel and has a mental break.  After initiating divorce and moving out, he retreats to a small lake town in Upstate New York {Aww} to work on a book.  However, he has horrible writer's block and can't think of anything so he spends his days napping and talking to his dog.  Until one day he's woken up by John Shooter (Turturro) at his door, claiming in a ridiculous southern drawl that Rainey had stolen, word for word, a story he had written several years ago but is mad that Rainey botched the ending.

Rainey spends the rest of the story attempting to prove he wrote the story first, by producing a magazine in which it was published which predates when Shooter claims he wrote his, while avoiding finalizing the divorce with his wife and being tormented by Shooter who continually asserts Rainey cannot prove he wrote the story.

As his life spirals out of control, Mort...really doesn't do much.  It's an entertaining movie with a solidly built twist reveal and well delivered climax but it's odd thinking about it that Mort barely deviates from his busy schedule of napping in a ratty robe and running out the door without a shower.  I suppose I can see how it would fit, but it's striking how not-proactive he is.  Also it's pretty refreshing for a Stephen King story that alcohol is only given a brief mention.

There are a lot of signature quirky Johnny Depp behaviors in his portrayal of Rainey, and while it was amusing in the beginning with cigarettes a lot of it seemed out of place later.  In fact, more of the movie seems to be occupied by Depp's mannerisms that King's signature tropes.  Except for the very end of the movie following the climax, which is pure Stephen King.  And really the falling action and resolution taking so long is a very literal thing, most movies ends much more abruptly after the climax without nearly as much epilogue.  It's definitely one of King's hallmarks to resolve things like that in a way that might feel awkward, but it makes sense since it's a horror story and wants to get under your skin and make you uncomfortable.

If we're making distinctions I'd say this is more of a thriller because the majority of the movie is a study of Rainey's unraveling mental stability.  It was really pretty good and there is a lot of the performance that Depp gives that shines wonderfully but almost as much is weird and awkward.  Turturro's take on John Shooter is incredibly entertaining to watch and the kind of giddy psychopath that is absolutely perfect in this sort of movie.
P.S. You're gonna want to watch through the credits for the stinger. It's freaking hilarious.

Moving on to The Others.

--PXA

October Horror 2013: 2 - The Uninvited

The Uninvited was originally from our Ghost Stories week.  I wasn't aware of it at the time but it's also an English language remake of the Korean ghost movie A Tale of Two Sisters, however it has several differences from that story and neither movie is particularly faithful to the folk story on which they're both based.

Anyway, The Uninvited is about Anna (played by Emily Browning) returning home after being institutionalized following an explosion at her home that killed her infirm mother.  Once there she has to contend with her rebellious sister and a strained relationship with her new step mother, who was previously her mom's home nurse.  It's an awkward situation, only made worse by her father's lack of engagement and the reappearance of the boy she used to mack it with.  Oh, and hallucinations.  She begins hallucinating at night, first an incredibly creepy version of her dead mother that slide and crawls stiffly along the floor and a pale red-haired girl who keeps jumping out and telling her she's next.

There's a lot of great surreal imagery like a falling glass of milk that turns into blood when it hits the floor.  It's got a pretty good creepy atmosphere but eventually it loses it to procedural mystery work, which was a bit disappointing.  I will say that I found it much less mind-bending that the Korean version, which I think at one point had 2 levels of hallucinations.  However the Korean movie had a much more darkly oppressive atmosphere while The Uninvited is set in absolutely beautiful places, which lend it a nice contrast when things go bump in the night.

The story is nicely coherent while still being interesting, though I think most audiences will figure out at least one of the twists way before the movie decides to reveal it.  It's definitely worth it for the hallucinations in the first half.  There was only one thing I really didn't like and a few minor disappointments.

Tomorrow's film is Secret Window, originally from Stephen King week.

--PXA

October Horror 2013: 1 - The House that Dripped Blood

The House that Dripped Blood, not to be confused with The House that Drips Blood On Alex, is a 1970 anthology film directed by Peter Duffell, who would become the 2nd unit director on Richard Donner's Superman, and written by Robert Bloch.  Bloch was probably most famous prior for penning Psycho and numerous other collaborations with Hitchcock, as well as Lovecraftian short stories.  The movie stars several well known actors including Denholm Elliot, John Pertwee, Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing.

Framing Story:
Film star Paul Henderson (played by Pertwee in the 4th segment) has disappeared and a detective from Scotland Yard has arrived to investigate.  While interviewing the local police for background, Inspector Holloway is told repeatedly that there's something evil and wrong with the house.  He then interviews the landlord who owns the property and is told more stories about the horrible things that have happened there.

Method for Murder:
The first story concerns a horror novel writer (Denholm Elliot) who moves in to the house to focus and finish a novel concerning a strangler named Dominic.  He imagines his character coming to life and tormenting him and threatening his wife. Except he's not hallucinating, Dominic is real and strangles the author's psychologist after the wife suggests that he was strangling her when he saw Dominic doing it.  Except Dominic isn't Dominic, he's a failed actor the wife is having an affair with.  They planned to make the writer think he was insane and that his killed the psychologist, except Dominic has really gone mad and killed both of them, then strangles the wife.  It's pretty fun as a story and though I liked the idea of Dominic, he looked retarded.  The story worked really well in short format, while a longer movie would need to have a lot more superfluous elements to distract us from that the base story is a bit simplistic.

Waxworks:
An older gentleman played by Peter Cushing moves into the house next and spends his days listening to music and reading.  At one point he goes for a walk into town to find out if anything cool is there and discovers a wax museum.  He becomes transfixed by the wax sculpture of the museum curator's wife, who he's told is a murderer who was hanged.  A friend comes to visit and he also becomes transfixed by the figure.  It turns out the curator was the murderer and he kills the friend for coveting his wife, then when Peter's character comes to investigate what happened to his friend he finds the severed head on the platter the wife sculpture holds.  The curator then attacks him and we cut forward to someone else being transfixed by the wife sculpture that now holds a wax version of the head of Peter Cushing's character.  I thought this was the weakest, the killing took place outside of the house and the person who went mad had nothing to do with the house at all.  While the idea is nicely twisted the execution was lacking.

Sweets to the Sweet:
I wonder if the tagline to Candyman was a reference to this, or if it's just an older phrase?  Anyway, this segment concerns a widdower named John played by Christopher Lee who moves into the house with his awkward and withdrawn daughter.  Forbidding the daughter from entering local school, John hires a nanny/homeschool teacher for her.  The teacher and the daughter connect while John spends significant amounts of time being a complete bastard, at one point throwing a doll the teacher had bought for the girl into the fire.  The twist here is that both John's wife and daughter were powerful witches and he was fearful of them.  He restricted access to dolls and noneducational reading because he feared his daughter would construct a voodoo doll of him and use it to kill him.  Which she does using books on witchcraft from their private library and some candles.  This one was interesting initially because I was watching it just to understand why John was being such an asshole to his daughter, and then when the reveal happened it was over quickly enough and all the odd references earlier in the segment got nicely tied up that was a fun a tidy little segment.

The Cloak:
Famous actor Paul Henderson moves into the house where he will stay while filming a Hammer-style horror movie in which he plays a vampire.  He's a bit of a snobbish prick and after deciding that the cloak provided him by the wardrobe department won't do, he finds a business card for a local costume shop and then decides to check it out.  While there he buys a cloak the owner repeatedly tells him is "authentic" for his role as a vampire.  When puts on the cloak it legitimately turns him into a vampire, he no longer has reflection and despite being freaked out goes on to do the scene with his costar.  He bites her and she gets pissed at him.  As a way of making amends, he invites her over for dinner the next night and confesses he believes the cloak really turns you into a vampire.  He puts it on but it doesn't work, then it's revealed she's slipped him the prop cloak and already believes in the real one.  She puts it on, becomes a vampire, and attacks him.  This was probably the most fun to watch, although the premise was quite silly.  The acting is pretty tight, especially in the film-within-the-film where they're playing bad actors acting.  But the faces Pertwee makes are so freaking stupid looking they're hilarious.

Framing story wrap-up:
Deciding he's heard enough, Inspector Holloway enters the house to investigate, against everyone's advice.  He enters the basement and discovers a coffin containing a vampiric Paul Henderson, who turns into a bat and attacks him.  The landlord appears to give a "Spooooooky" sales pitch about the house needing a tenant, perhaps it could be you? Roll credits.

While not bad, this movie feels very shlockey and not particularly creepy, I don't know if the original reaction was to take it more seriously but I don't feel like it aged well.  Admittedly my modern sensibilities skew me into thinking that saying AN AXE MURDER HAPPENS does not do much to shock me, so for an audience not so well conditioned it may have been more visceral.  However I will give it that the stories were well constructed, if not having aged well and the camera work was good as far as I can tell.  The title is ironic because there's actually no blood in the movie, though it may just be "Dripping blood" in the sense that it has a very death-filled history.

And that's our first movie of the season.  Tomorrow we cover more tales from lists past with The Uninvited.

--PXA