October Horror 2011 - Post-season - Greatest hits 2009

I didn't originally write anything about the first October Horror Viewing season in 2009, but we watched some really good movies that year.  So the first entry in the post season is this writeup of the entirety of the 2009 season.

That year we had simple categories since we were just starting:  Zombies, Slashers, Hauntings & Exorcisms, and Scifi Horror.

Zombies week:  Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Quarantine, Dead Snow, Braindead.

All these movies were pretty solid.  Shaun and Zombieland are zombie/comedy classics and are very funny.  Dead Snow was really fun to watch because of the novelty of the concept of Nazi Zombies and the balls to film zombies in bright daylight in the snow.  Definitely a highlight and something I enjoy watching again from time to time.  Although we originally watched the sub'd version I have a dub now which is much more fulfilling.  28 Days Later is a modern classic for being one of the first movies of the current zombie cultural resurgence, and also for the unapologetic fast zombies.  Quarantine deserves special distinction since it was so unsettling it took me 3 tries to watch to the end.  Braindead is an early Peter Jackson movie and is just weird.  I don't know what to say about it, it's beyond messed up.  I think my favorite of the week, horror wise, was Quarantine.  In general I liked Shaun of the Dead the best since it is REALLY funny.

Slashers: Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Cut, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2004), Saw, Prom Night (2004)

Prom Night was also on this year's list, partially because we either never watched it in 2009 or just didn't remember watching it in 2009.  Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street are all huge classics.  I probably liked Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street the best.  Friday the 13th has pretty excellent kills and the twist killer reveal absolutely floored me the first time I saw it.  Nightmare of course put Robert Englund's Freddy on the map, and I really like him as a character because of how bizarre and manic he is while still being half a second away from killing you dead.  I think Cut deserves special mention for being quite fun to watch with a pretty novel concept.  It's a little silly, but hey...Molly Ringwald in a horror movie.

Hauntings & Exorcisms: The Unborn, Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, 1408, A Haunting in Connecticut, The Amityville Horror, 13 Ghosts.

Exorcism movies are some of my favorites.  The Exorcism of Emily Rose is probably #1 on my list of scariest movies ever.  I watched it at 2 in the afternoon, with all the lights on, in a dorm room, with the door open, on a green tinted 15" CRT monitor and it still scared the crap out of it.  Personally the least solid movie in this week was Rosemary's Baby.  I just didn't think it aged well and it was kindof weird and boring.  The Amityville (remake) was decent, although a little visual at the expense of personality.  The Omen (remake) was also fun, but a bit silly.  It was just a bit too easy to mock.  13 Ghosts is one of my favorite movies, but not particularly scary.  It's a very original concept and the execution is wonderfully stylish.  The Unborn is also very stylish, with some excellent jump scares and a few genuinely creepy moments.  1408 is also very creepy, but feels a little rushed and frantic.  They probably didn't want to run out of things to do since the movie was set in a single room.  A Haunting in Connecticut is probably my favorite horror movie out of the week.  Pretty much everything it does is perfect.

Scifi Horror: Pulse, The Mist, Dreamcatcher, The Thing, Doom, Event Horizon, Aliens.

Aliens was a poor choice, as it much more action focused than Alien.  Doom as well, I honestly don't know why we put it there.  I guess it had some horror moments in the middle.  Dreamcatcher is another great movie that has a lot of fun moments, it's just a bit more disturbing than creepy.  Still well worth watching.  The Mist was a great tense movie, but the ending is very polarizing.  You either really love it or you hate the death out of it.  It gets a major thing right that a lot of monster movies just forget: The monsters are scarier the less you see of them.  Pulse is a guilty pleasure for me.  It never seems to get a lot of respect and the sequel was horrible.  It's got a lot of plot holes but I just love the concept and the execution is competent enough to make it interesting.  Event Horizon is a modern horror classic, as far as I'm concerned.  It's scary, it's gross, it's bizarre.  The concept is innovative and the execution is horrifyingly tense.  It's also one of my favorite scary movies and does pretty much nothing wrong.

--PXA

October Horror 2011: Day 28 - The Last Winter

The Last Winter, released in 2006 was directed by Larry Fessenden.  It stars Ron Perlman and Connie Britton.

As the final movie of the official horror viewing season this year I was really expecting something fun, especially with Ron Perlman in the lead role.  Unfortunately the movie ruined itself in the last act deciding to be preachy instead of just presenting a cool story with the message they wanted.  I'm aware it's a bit of a hot-button issue, but they could've taken the high road and just presented things without the soap box.

The basics here are that an American oil company is trying to build an ice road to a remote spot in the arctic circle so they can open a well.  The oil reserve they're trying to tap is apparently large enough to secure U.S. energy independence for quite some time.  The project leader, played by Ron Perlman immediately begins butting heads with the environmentalist who's been assigned to the base to report to the government with environmental impact assessments.  Effectively, the government sold the land to the company under the condition that they operate an environmentally sound operation on it.  The environmentalist won't let Ron Perlman build the ice road because it's not cold enough for the road to be safely built, but Perlman's character just doesn't care and is going to find a way to get this oil.

The movie itself is actually really good for the most part.  The characters are pretty genuine, if a bit difficult to distinguish.  Ron Perlman's character is a bit one note and inappropriately angry, which plays into the obvious preachiness because he represents the company and we're supposed to hate him.  Everyone else seems like real people just trying to do their jobs in a stressful environment.  What they really do well here is that the tension is mostly accomplished through the behavior of the characters: They act strange, they don't quite behave normally or as they used to.  It's very unnerving.  This is amplified by how isolated the cast is to begin with, and then by how much time each of them spends alone.  You hear things happening off camera, the characters see things that the camera doesn't show and since no one else is around to verify you just don't know if it really happened or if it was in their head.  The tension is supremely built for the first 80% or so of the movie.

Then in the middle of the 3rd act they start showing us far too much.  Instead of leaving it nebulous, they make it obviously clear what's happening, and what's happening is just stupid.  If you can forgive Larry for hopping on the soapbox right at the end there it's actually a pretty good supernatural suspense movie.  If you can't, it's still a good movie that got ruined at the end by obnoxious moralizing.

With this, Horror Viewing Season 2011 is over.  We only planned 28 movies instead of 31 since it's easier to divide into 4 categories and also for a bit of buffer.  I may fill the remaining 3 days by adding some additional movies I liked or really good movies from 2009's crop.

--PXA

October Horror 2011: Day 27 - Cry_Wolf

Cry_Wolf is a 2005 American movie directed by Katie Couric's nephew and stars Not-Thora Birch, Jared Padalecki, and Jon Bon Jovi.

It's a pretty interesting premise:  Owen is the new guy at a preparatory high school in Australia and falls in with a group of students who break out of their dorms at night and gather in the school's chapel to play a game they call Cry Wolf.  The game is a sociology game where one member of the group is designated a Wolf, and nobody in the game knows who.  Each "night" the Wolf "murders" someone.  This is followed by a round of accusations and the townsfolk eventually "lynch" whoever they think is the Wolf.

After a girl is murdered in the nearby woods the students invent a serial killer called The Wolf and write an email to the student body describing the kills he makes as he works through a school.  They design the kills after members of their own group.  As mass hysteria grows they revel in how they're causing it all, until Bon Jovi discovers the fraud and threatens to expel Owen.  I don't remember exactly why they let him stay.

Owen begins receiving threatening IMs and messages from the Wolf, as if he was suddenly a real person.  Paranoia among the group builds and Owen is attacked by someone dressed exactly as the Wolf they made up.  There's a double and triple twist, which aren't actually horrible.

It's a pretty decent mystery/thriller sort of movie, with a fairly inventive story.  It fails to hold attention at points and it's sometimes difficult to follow who the female characters are.  I don't think I would watch it again, but it was actually pretty fun the first time around.  It felt a bit like a late 90's teen slasher movie, just a bit more intelligent.

Horror Season 2011 concludes tomorrow with: The Last Winter, set in the Arctic.

October Horror 2011: Day 26 - Shutter

Released in 2008 Shutter is an American remake of a Thai film of the same name from 2004.  The remake stars Joshua Jackson in the lead role.

The story is that an American photographer who previous lived in Japan has moved back to the states for a period of time.  He eventually gets married and accepts a job offer to move back to Japan.  From the honeymoon onward it seems some spirit is stalking the newlyweds mostly manifesting as distortions in photographs.  As the haunting intensifies the spirit manifest as hallucinations and then is able to manifest in the physical world just enough to kill some people until they die.  The nature of the haunting is revealed, then re-revealed.  The film closes with Josh Jackson in a mental hospital in a catatonic state with burns on his neck and face.

The movie is well developed, although not very creepy.  It is fairly suspenseful.  What drags it down a bit is the characters.  Namely, I want to punch most of them.  Josh himself isn't bad, but a bit dismissive and and makes some dumb moves.  In the end it turns out he's a big huge asshole, but it just doesn't make sense.  His wife has an unfortunate tendency to go wife-rage jealousy on every single woman who wanders within 4 feet of her husband.  The other characters are mostly superfluous.

The end is actually pretty damned creepy, with the final photo taking being just really messed up.  The film is a bit lackluster as a whole, but everything in it is pretty good.  It's worth watching because it is suspenseful and creepy at points, but probably not worth rewatching.

With the larger continents done, we move to Australia for: Cry_Wolf.

October Horror 2011: Day 25 - Dominion

Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist was released in 2005 on the coattails of Exorcist: The Beginning.  It could almost be classified as a remake.

Basically in 2004 Paul Schrader was hired to film a prequel to 1973's The Exorcist with a story written by Caleb Carr and William Wisher, jr.  Schrader had essentially finished his movie when the studio decided it wasn't to its liking and hired Renny Harlin to refilm the movie.  The resulting movie, Exorcist: The Beginning, was released in 2004 to poor reception on the part of audience and critics alike.  Since the version the studio liked was doing poorly they decided to give the version they didn't like a chance and threw Schrader a few thousand dollars to finish his movie, which they released in 2005 with the name Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist.

It's really interesting to compare both of those movies since they have the same story and effectively the same plot, with different direction, and slightly different screenplays and cast.  The movies are so vastly different that the author of the original Exorcist story describes The Beginning as his most humiliating professional experience while saying that Dominion is "Handsome, classy, and elegant".

Both movies tell of Father Lankester Merrin's first encounter with the demon Pazuzu prior to the events of The Exorcist.  The events depicted vary quite wildly from the flashback sequences of those events from Exorcist II: The Heretic.  The basic premise is that after suffering a crisis of faith during World War II, Father Merrin takes a leave of absence and joins an archeological expedition to East Africa which uncovers an early Christian Church that was built on the ruins of an older pagan temple dedicated to Pazuzu.  The demon possesses a local pariah and does spiritual battle with Merrin.  The encounter reaffirms his faith and Merrin dedicates himself to the exorcism of demons and eternal battle with Pazuzu.

Dominion is a profoundly subtle and uncomfortable film, favoring atmosphere building and story to creep out the audience over grotesque visuals.  It's a movie that's difficult to look away from.  When it's not showing something designed for obvious shock, it's building an atmosphere saturated with cultural tension between African natives and British military forces.  The story evolves slowly, as Merrin is forced to confront the demon with the aid of God.  Even though the final transition involves Merrin regaining his faith and using it to save the woman who he can no longer be with because of that faith, the movie doesn't harp on a religious message.  It's a personal struggle of Lankester Merrin to believe in God despite the overwhelming presence of evil and wider mentions of religion are only really used to establish a context or contribute to the tension.

The demon and the evil events in Dominion are much creepier, while The Beginning winds up being far more typical of supernatural horror, and as such far less creepy.

Both movies are worth checking out to compare with each other, but if you were to only watch one of them Dominion would be it.  It's a much creepier movie across the board with better developed characters and thick layers of tension.  It's subtle without being tied to the idea that subtle means that nothing happens, and has great lulls between tense moments.  Comparatively, The Beginning bashes the audience over the head with important points because it doesn't trust them not to miss those points, and panders to an "EVIL MUST BE SICK" mentality to the point where it does the story a disservice.  Dominion, as Ebert put it, takes evil seriously.

Next up, Asia with the Shutter remake.

October Horror 2011: Day 24 - The Shrine

The Shrine is a 2010 Canadian horror movie directed by Jon Knautz and starring Aaron Ashmore.

The film opens with an unknown man dressed in a gown strapped to a cross-shaped table as a cloaked cult chants odd prayers in Polish, then hammer a grotesque mask into his face.  Cue credits.

Flash forward and we meet Carmen, a reporter who's in a failing relationship with Marcus, a photographer.  Carmen is in the professional doghouse for writing a controversial article.  In a misguided attempt to salvage both her career and relationship she suggests Marcus accompany her on a "vacation" to the Polish village of Alvania, and while he's their he can help her do a story on the original man's death.  The original man was a reporter for the same paper, incidentally.  They take along an intern named Sara.

When arriving they do a few uncomfortable "ha ha look at how weird and backwards these rural Polish hicks are" scenes before finally seeing an unnatural grey cloud above the forest, which was mentioned in the original reporter's notes.  They go to investigate and after being initially warned away from the forest, they sneak past the villagers and discover the cloud reaches the ground and forms a dense and visible wall.  Sara and Carmen enter the fog and are lost for a time.  When they come out, they find a little girl who speaks passable English to lead them to a barn containing several corpses, all wearing masks like the reporter in the beginning of the movie.

The group is captured by the cult, and separated.  I'm going to stop here since I don't want to give away anything interesting.  If you want the full synopsis, head to wikipedia, or go ahead and watch the movie.

The opening bit where the leads first enter the village are pretty uncomfortable, but not in a good way.  They're poorly handled and a little silly, even though it's obvious they're trying to be tense.  The scenes inside the fog itself are a pretty good warm up, and although a bit unsurprising are well executed.  After the discovery of the corpse barn the movie takes a very sharp turn into more grotesque and interesting territory.  There are very bizarre monster effects that function both as jump scares but also to blur the lines between what's happening and what might be happening.  Are they hallucinations, or some sort of "true" vision revealing real monsters?  This sort of thing only escalates until the movie more or less answers the question in a pretty novel way.  I wasn't surprised by it because they made it make sense that it was happening, but not so much that I saw it coming halfway through the movie.  I also really like the twist that the angry, scowling, knife-wielding Pollack isn't actually a bad guy.

One thing I didn't like was that a significant portion of the movie was in Polish, and had no subtitles.  It was still relatively easy to follow the action and the depth of what happened at the end really didn't need spoken words to appreciate, however I think it could've benefited from subtitling or just using English for at least a bit more of the dialog during the cult's scenes.  It could have added a lot of depth to the mythology and also made the movie more accessible to a wider audience.

The makeup effects are also very good, but you can tell they're really low budget which is a bit distracting, they could have benefited greatly from just a tiny bit more money in the makeup department.

All in all, it's very good and well worth checking out.  It is tense, creepy, and interesting.  Sometimes even downright jumpy scary, but it's not relying on that to freak you out, which is where it wins.

Onward! To Africa!  Tomorrow is Dominion: The Prequel to The Exorcist.

October Horror 2011: Day 23 - And Soon the darkness

And Soon the Darkness, released in 2010 is a remake of a 1970 British film also called And Soon the Darkness.  It is set in Argentina and features Karl Urban, Odette Yustman, and Amber Heard.

Amber Heard is one of the current crop of scream queens making some fair decent movies.  All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is actually one of my favorite under-appreciated slasher movies.

Odette Yustman is also pretty strong in both horror and mainstream.  She's even got a recurring role in the current season of House.  It doesn't hurt that she looks like Meghan Fox if Meghan Fox had acting talent.

And Soon the Darkness is the story of two American girls who are on vacation together in Argentina.  They separate from a bike tour and tool around the country.  We join them on their last night in the country where they stay in a hotel but go out and get shithoused at a bar.  Odette's character, Ellie, spends a lot of it making out with a guy while Amber's Stephanie obviously doesn't approve.  The guy ends up following them back to their hotel and being creepy, they're saved by Karl Urban.  They're so drunk they don't get up early enough and miss their bus back to the airport.  Instead of trying to make other travel arrangements they decide to tour the country some more and visit some waterfalls.  They have a fight and get separated, Ellie gets kidnapped.  Steph and Karl Urban try to rescue her, there's death, some twists, more death, angsty, etc.  Eventually Stephanie gets free and is rescued by Argentinian military.

I glossed over a lot of details in the name of avoiding spoiling anything, and also because I just don't want to go into it.

The movie is unfortunately dull, despite its best attempts at action sequences and throwing around twists so as not be accused of being formula.  The earlier action sequences suffer from none of the characters acting intelligently, and the twists are predictable...which kindof defeats the point of twists.

The characters don't really help since our protagonist, Steph, is really a one note that waffles around most of the first act before being defined completely by her attachment to Ellie.  Ellie is a stereotype of the annoying party-girl with a deep friendship with a more innocent girl, and that just really made me dislike her.  The entire character just grated on me and I spent a lot of the movie lamenting her time on screen.  Steph isn't much more interesting, but she is at least not annoying.  She suffers from being too afraid to act appropriately.  Even when she starts to go final-girl, she only survives by pure luck and not any sort of transformative badassery.

Karl Urban is actually the best to watch because even though he's also a one-note, the performance manages to tone down that aspect enough to give the impression he might be a fully realized person.

The movie does one kindof interesting, artsy thing.  While starting off in full color, as the movie goes along they desaturate the colors and increase the contrast.  It's a cool little thing to read some subtext into, but the rest of the movie is just dull.  The plot was very similar to other kidnap/revenge stories like Hostel or Taken, with only very few variations from formula.

Not really worth the effort.

With The Americas complete, we venture to Europe with: The Shrine