Horror Off-Season: Oculus

At this point, there's no denying that I love Mike Flanagan (See exhibits A, and 2).  However, I was a bit anxious of what he'd do when partnered with a studio and given a budget.  Would the studio stomp on his Flanagan-ness?  Would he go crazy with the money and throw in a bunch of pointless effects?  Would telling an old story again make him just give up and get boring?

Well, he didn't.  Let's get that out of the way.  Oculus the feature is the same as Oculus the short, except it's totally different.  What we get here is a really logical expansion of the original story.  The backstory, which previously had only small hints and references, gets completely fleshed out in a way that makes total sense with the original story and fits in the context of the feature without seeming like a stretch.  All the new characters work and the twists are nice.  I liked just about everything about this movie.  It was just as scary, familiar but fresh and not predictable...just...really well done.

Being based on the original short, Oculus is about an attempt to objectively prove that a demonic mirror named the Lasser Glass is responsible for a string a murder/suicides going back over 100 years finally culminating in the deaths of the parents of the lead character(s).  However, being feature length enables the movie to spend a lot more time with everything and elaborate on the background of its extended cast.  The two biggest changes are the location and the lead character.  In the short it was only Tim Russel, but in the feature the lead character is actually Tim's sister, Kaylie.  Also, instead of the experiment taking place on what is  assumed to be neutral ground (the white room), the mirror is taken back to the Russel's house and placed back on the office wall where it previously hung.

The film itself takes place in the days following Tim's release from the mental hospital he's been undergoing treatment in since the incident with his parents.  Kaylie managed to avoid institutionalization and has been working for an auction house where she's tracked the mirror.  Tim's release happens to coincide with the auction sale of the mirror, and Kaylie seizes the opportunity to experiment on the mirror during the few days it will be allowed away from the auction house before being delivered to the next owner.  She convinces Tim, who is reluctant because of his therapy, to stay with her during the experiment.  They then repeat the setup of the short almost verbatim.

Intercut with the present day experimental footage is flashback footage of the family originally moving into the house and slowly deconstructing due to the mirror's influence.  What's interesting is that the present day sequences have much more of a subtle, vaguely uncomfortable, supernatural feel like Flanagan's previous work, while the flashbacks have a more visceral feel with gore and disgusting things.  The balance is great, especially because the creepier and more character driven present day scenes provide a great contrast for the bloody dementedness that eventually happens and makes that have a real impact.  I actually need to buy this on Blu-Ray when it comes out if for no other reason than there are bits I straight up did not see because it was so uncomfortable I had to look away.  Loved Ones, Asylum Blackout, and Martyrs all couldn't pull that off. 

Katee Sackhoff does an excellent turn as mother Marie Russel, though I would've liked to see her turn to a paranoid jealous wife a bit slower.  Rory Cochrane as Alan unfortunately never seems to sell the caring father portion either, his delivery through most of the movie is fairly deadpan.  Brenton Thwaites was a pleasant surprise as Tim.  Guy is so damned pretty I wasn't sure how well he'd be able to pull off a horror movie and emotional sibling drama but he actually did really well.  Karen Gillan performed admirably well as Kaylie.  Unfortunately, I feel like neither sibling really shined and the present day scenes really felt less interesting somehow than what was going on in the past, until the end.  They were good and they carried it well, but their scenes didn't pull me in as much as the scenes with their child actor counterparts.  I don't know if it was just Flanagan really getting into the opportunity to flesh out the world of Oculus or if the kids were just really good, but those scenes were really enjoyable.

The effects they use on the mirror ghosts as well are particularly nice and something I don't think I've seen much before.  Very creepy touch.  And I thought the direction at the end was just really compelling and totally sucked me in.  In fact, the only thing I think I was disappointed in was the big line in the original short ("I've met my demons and they are many, I've seen the Devil and he is me.") wasn't nearly as scary in the way it was delivered here.  That, and the lack of the gorgeously deranged "Finger LICKIN' GOOD!!!" line from the answering machine in the original.

To a minor spoiler:  I still dislike how quickly the experiment fell apart.  In the original it made sense despite being ultimately disappointing.  Being alone in a room with an evil demonic looking glass can be a somewhat taxing experience.  It kindof makes sense that Tim would fall asleep.  But in the feature no one falls asleep.  They just watch video of weird things, hallucinate, and then watch plants die without doing much of anything about it.  And finally, in the feature the glass suffers minor damage due to Tim shooting his insane father in front of the mirror and the glass cracking a piece off when Alan's body hits it.  The glass normally deflects attempts made to harm it fairly dramatically but it couldn't do anything about the body hitting it.  In the finale of the movie Tim activates the dead man's switch, not realizing Kaylie was standing in the way due to the mirror making him see things.  This causes a boat anchor to swing from the ceiling and hit Kaylie, killing her and smashing her into the mirror.  Given the force of a swinging boat anchor, especially one with additional weight on it, how did this not break the mirror further?  Kaylie demonstrates the pointy anchor going almost all the way into the wall behind the mirror.  It's not a light touch.  I would've loved to have seen the mirror effectively suicide itself.

--PXA

Horror Off-Season: The Quiet Ones

The Quiet Ones is a new horror release from the resurrected Hammer Film studio.  It's director John Pogue's 2nd feature as director.  John also served as a writer on the 2nd draft of the script, originally by Tom de Ville (who served as writer on episodes of Urban Gothic and Lexx), alongside Craig Rosenburg (The Uninvited) and Oren Moverman (Rampart).  It is sometimes worrying when a script has this many hands involved.  A single writer or a pair with solid history seem more likely to produce a horror film with common vision, while multiple writers tend to work by committee which results in a film that ultimately relies more heavily on well-worn tropes in order to keep everyone in agreement.  At least in my experience.

Set sometime in the early 1970s the story is told through an interesting combination of Found Footage-style and traditional omniscient camera.  It centers around an Oxford professor played by Jared Harris, 2 student researchers, and a student cameraman recruited through his class on the paranormal.  Dr. Coupland believes there is no supernatural and the paranormal is just science we've yet to understand.  He believes there is no such thing has haunting or possession and that these are just deep psychological conditions that can be cured through extreme therapy. Initially describing a failed attempt to cure a young child referred to as "David Q.", he then tells the class about his current experiments on a young amnesiac foster child named Jane Harper (Olvia Cooke), who claims to be possessed by an entity she calls "Evey"

In some strange combination of The Philip Experiment and Psychoplasmics from The Brood he hopes to deprive Jane of sleep and subject her to hypnotism sessions and isolation in order to expose Evey as some sort of secondary personality or hallucination and allow Jane to confront and get rid of her.  After being evicted from their original location near the university and having the experiment's funding cut by Oxford, Coupland takes his students and Jane to a house in the country where they'll be able to continue their work.  This is where the bulk of the action takes place.

I do want to go over the end and some, but that will be a spoiler tag so I'll just give my impressions.

This movie is pretty good.  I'm not as impressed by it as I was other Hammer Revival flicks like Woman in Black, but I consider this solid and I'm glad that Hammer is back.  That said, I have some criticism:  Despite having a cast of only 5 characters, there are some who are so poorly developed I feel like the movie could have done completely without them.  The non-camera students, Harry and Krissi, seem incredibly superfluous.  They deliver lines, yeah, and things happen to them, but I don't think a single thing they do is integral to the main plot.  They reveal no information and only seem to serve a b-plot that contributes nothing to the main one.  Also Coupland's character is just confusing.  We get some reveals during the ending sprint that do help to explain some of his motivations, but there's a lot he does that makes no sense.  And his continued insistence on following the preordained path of the experiment despite mounting evidence of occult involvement makes him a crappy scientist.  And I know it's petty, but the bit of dialog where they name-drop the title of the movie makes about as much sense as nipples on a duck.

I feel like the movie could've also added some psychological weight to its action to up the creep factor, and favor slow-burn lead ins more.  In the hypnotism/seance scenes, it would've been incredibly unnerving to have long, slow shots of unbroken dialog with creepy shadows and unexplained noises instead of short lead-ins to jump scares.  A final weird point is the use of a train-chugging sound effect.  It had a few points where it was effective at tension-building, but it wasn't related to anything...it just happened to be a tense and driving sound effect.

I know it sounds like a lot but everything I just talked about I felt would have made the movie better, not were needed to make it good.  It doesn't do anything egregiously wrong in my book and does a fair amount right, it just missed some opportunities to do some things really right.

That out of the way, on to the ending:

I feel like I "got" the majority of the ending, but there are a few sticking bits.  The way I took the story of the movie, as revealed by the final act, was that it's not really the Philip Experiment at all despite the face-value similarity and that lots of other reviewers mention it.  The key to the Philip Experiment is that the spirit they conjured through seances didn't exist at all, he was a complete fabrication.  However, in The Quiet Ones, the experimenters don't invent Evey, they basically prod Jane until she invents Evey.  Also, there is evidence that Brian finds of Evey actually existing when he researches the occult symbol that burns into Jane meaning that unless the power of belief retcons the spirit into existing, Evey can't be a fabrication.  After the final act reveal I think it's very clear that what actually happens is that Evey Dwyer was a real little girl who is in some way a conduit for a cult's deity/demon.  This is a bit of theory, but I think the original attempt to manifest the demon fails due to some part of Evey that was not willing to be sacrificed.  This persona becomes Jane, the amnesiac.  However, the experimenters torture and break down Jane until she loses the strength to control Evey and Evey re-asserts by re-branding Jane.

When the experimenters move out to the country and Jane reveals the name Evey, she's gathered 4 other people in a single house who believe in Evey and want her to become manifest.  She's effectively recreated the original cult, this is further evidenced by the cult mark being burned into all the experimenters during the final act.  Then Dr. Coupland kills Jane, and Brian resurrects her causing Evey to be fully reborn.  Evey, rid of Jane's persona, self-immolates which gives birth to the demon.

What I don't fully understand is why the demon/fire deity now requires possess of Brian at the very end of the movie to begin the Apocalypse.  If the demon simply needs a body, why not use Jane/Evey's?  Maybe it needs to destroy the original body to be manifested but then needs another body to work?  That just seems counterproductive.  Frankly, I feel like the whole thing is derailed by the stinger at the end that shows Brian being interrogated for the murder of Jane and the rest.  If that wasn't there the movie would've ended with the demon breaking out of J'Evey at the camera, presumably to kill Brian and wreak its havoc.  So maybe one of the several writers felt like they needed the stinger, and wanted to have the cool similarity of using the clap gesture Brian used as the camera man to begin the movie to call the end of the movie, but then never answered the questions it raised?
--PXA

Post PAX Impressions

So I got to check out some interesting things at PAX East 2014, in addition to just enjoying basking in the geekery.  Without further ado here are some highlights:

The Evil Within
Bethesda brought a gameplay demo of the new Shinji Mikami game, The Evil Within, to the expo hall.  I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't a playable demo, but just consisted of sitting in a darkened theater area while an employee played 2 short levels of the game.  The whole thing lasted about 20 minutes.

The first demo was of a bright outdoor area of a crumbling city populated with zombies of some sort that the protagonist had to fight and light on fire using a quick command.  The terrain actively shifts up and down, buildings move in on the player to create alleys and threaten to crush the character.  I'm going to operate under the assumption that this is some sort of nightmare dreamscape rather than a city being wracked by violent and highly specific earthquakes.  It was pretty odd given how brightly lit it was, but maybe in context the variety is welcome or this is some sort of lead-in before the atmosphere shifts to something darker and more claustrophobic.  Unfortunately, there was no indication given of when in the game either level was.

The second level was a more traditional survival horror environment, which actually felt very similar to the environments in Silent Hill 2 and 3.  It was some sort of dank sewer or industrial area with lots of pipes and valves.   Oddly, lots of fences and caged areas.  But most strikingly was an epic, constantly regenerating, enemy.  According to some reading, this guy is called "The Keeper", but we just called him "Safe-head guy". See, his head is inside of a locked safe wrapped in barbed wire.  This guy is relatively easy to put down, but he has a tendency to regenerate himself.  In one cutscene he rips his own head off in order to regenerate on the other side of a fence.  He looks a lot like Silent Hill 2's Pyramid Head with the apron, strange headpiece, and oversized weapon.  Safe-head Guy could represent the same things as Pyramid Head did for James, but I don't know enough about Sebastien to make a good guess.  There's also symbolism in that the head is trapped inside of a safe, so if we're to take the levels as nightmares then it could be something Sebastien is trying to protect from himself.  But again...it's conjecture.

The demos leave me wanting to see more of the game, so that I can put the shown levels into context.  While nothing in the demos suggests the resource starvation that made early Resident Evil famous, it could still end up that way.  The game itself appears to be based on The Last of Us's engine, just more streamlined towards combat, which could go either way.  I hurt for resources a lot in Last of Us which made it very tense, but the streamlining of it may indicate a more combat focused game than the stealthy takedowns that made Last of Us so much fun.  The obvious use of nightmare sequences and unreality definitely makes me excited that we could get something really good, but without more of the game there's no context and in horror context can be everything.  There's plenty of opportunity for them to Dead Space the game and place too much focus on combat and action, removing any tense lulls. Or constantly putting that unkillable enemy up your butt, reducing the game to a frustrated sprint trying to get to whatever checkpoint makes the monster go away.  But I hope they don't.

The Evil Within releases in US on August 26th for PC, Xbox One/360, and PS 3/4.

Murdered: Soul Suspect
This is a new game developed by Dark Void and Quantum Conundrum developer Airtight and published by Square Enix, hereafter referred to as Squenix.  This was a playable demo of the first major mission of the game and also all the opening exposition cutscenes.  The main fault was how heavily it relied on cutscenes to convey really simple things that probably could've been done via gameplay.  I thought the main opening which described the life of the protagonist through his tattoos was great, but when it descended into cutscenes after that I felt like the message could've been put out in a more interactive way.  Though there were times when the opening was interactive that felt way too pointless and should've been breezed through in a second or two of cutscene.

The basics here are that you play as a Detective with a crime family past in Salem who's just been killed by a local mysterious serial killer.  Depressed by the death of your wife (?), you decide to check out a lead without backup like a dumb and the killer kicks you out a window then shoots you in the middle of the street with your own gun.  The gameplay here was really interesting, as there was a brief moment between cutscenes where you got to play as your disembodied spirit that didn't realize it was no longer in your body.  After officially dieing you go to limbo where your wife's soul tells you that you can't cross over unless you return to earth and resolve your life's unfinished business.  It's a decently executed setup, though a bit stock.

The setting is a bit jumbled.  First, the Salem Witch Trials actually took place in nearby Danvers (originally called Salem Village), but I won't dock them points for going for the Salem reputation.  Then your character is an Irish cop named Ronan O'Connor, but could just as easily be Jame Generic-Accent.  They go through the trouble of implying Ronan comes up through the Irish mob before going straight and becoming a police officer, but don't give him a lick of characterization in the voice.  But then the other cops have Boston accents, so the whole setting becomes this sort of amalgam of Eastern Massachusetts stereotypes and references.  Nothing terrible bad or distracting, but I did find it a bit amusing.

Gameplay here is really slick and quite fun, though sometimes jiggering the camera to just the right angle where you can interact with certain people is annoyingly tricky.  The tutorial has one or two clunky moments where the game just has to say "Do this now, because.", but for the most part is nicely interactive.  In game you can possess other characters to make use of their eyes and ears, influence them by bringing up memories, or read their minds.  It's a bit LA Noire-like collecting testimony and other clues from the area, but there are no interrogations and failure if you use the wrong memory to influence a character isn't as spectacular as Cole going off the handle.  In addition to investigating clues to solve mysteries, usually revolving around your death or the death of some other trapped spirit, there are demons which roam the ethereal plane looking to eat you.  Dealing with the demons is stealth or bust.  You can sneak up behind them and perform a takedown, but if they see you all you can do is hide by running away or vanishing into some sort of floating soul remnants which you can travel between à la Batman on Arkham Asylum's gargoyles.

All indications here are that this will be a pretty decent game, but probably won't make any headlines as some phenomenon that people talk about.

Murdered: Soul Suspect releases in the US on May 3rd for PC, Xbox One/360, and PS 3/4.

Others
Race The Sun is a gorgeous looking game in which you race a solar powered vehicle against the sunset on a daily randomly generated and minimalistically rendered course until the sun either sets or you crash into something.  It responds fluidly and is really fun to play.  The game sports Oculus Rift support.

There Came an Echo is an isometric real time quad strategy with a well known voice cast.  The game is notable for using voice commands to control the squad.  And it's actually pretty good at it, even in the noisy expo hall I was able to issue commands with accuracy.  The mouse controls also exist but are definitely lacking and my first attempts to play before I realized how to use the voice controls met with a lot of frustration.  The game is clearly almost done but definitely needs some usability spit and polish before release, which should be in mid-2014.  Should be fairly fun for a while at least.  I was amused that the voice commands basically preclude making a Let's Play of the game...

I would add finally that I was a bit disappointed that there was no really good showing in indie horror, like Outlast at last year's PAX East.  The enthusiasm for horror tailed perfectly into the release of Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs.  This year the only real horror game around at all was The Evil Within, and that demo left me nowhere near as excited as I was for Outlast.

--PXA

The Beerening: Beer 101

I had originally begun writing a much different article to follow up my last beer op-ed about the problematic aspects of exposing non-beer people directly into the previously insulated internal conversation of the beer geek community.  As a quick summary, I felt that as nerds in love with the flavors of beer we tended to gravitate the conversation towards extreme styles with the current trend being extreme degrees of hop aromas and flavors.  This, coupled with the popular myth that hoppy == bitter, can lead people dipping a toe into the ocean of craft beer we're producing now getting a really skewed impression of what good beer is.

I once saw someone refer to Heady Topper as ho-hum because it's just another West-Coast-Style Double IPA, like any produced by a dozen other local breweries on that side of the country and the only reason it was being paid attention was because it was produced in Vermont instead of San Diego.  My own feelings about the beer aside, we have to admit that Double IPA is an extreme style and there are people complaining that this beer is not extreme enough to stand out in its category and warrant as much praise as it gets.  I can't even begin to imagine how I would have reacted to something with that much raw hop power 6 years ago, but now I'll gladly sip a can of it and pick it apart and feel like I know what I'm talking about.

So anyway, I began writing a follow up, setting out to educate the non-initiated about the whats and hows of beer.  Thinking it would be a great idea to try to talk in a clear and easy way about how what goes into a beer affects what it tastes like, that knowing about these things would help people nail down some flavors they liked and find other beers with similar builds.  After all, everyone knows that wine is made of grapes and no one thinks twice about ordering a wine while out for dinner: "I like red wine and robust seems like a good word, please give me this red wine".  But after reworking that about 3 times I felt like I was at an impasse.  And I think that's because I forgot to answer something very important: Why beer?


Because beer is cool, and I like it.

Alright so that's a cop out, but the fact that beer exists at all is pretty amazing, given the process.  Especially when you consider that people have been making beer intentionally or not for some 7000-9000 years and the act predates the written word.  There is a lot of cool history that follows the making of beer.  But really drinking it is what makes it fun.  Beer is a phenomenal confluence of so many little details that produce an incredibly tasty beverage, and there's so much variety in beer that I really think there's something for everyone.  Nothing tastes like beer and one beer can not resemble any other beer at all.

Beer is a simple thing that becomes greater than the sum of its parts.  Beer is so simple that in the late 1400s the Germans were able to decree that only 3 ingredients were to be used in the brewing of beer:  Water, Hops, and Malted Barley.  Yeast hadn't been discovered yet, we just knew that beer fermented.  But that's it, and for the most part these ingredients still make up the majority of any beer brewed in the world.

And that's the beauty of it to me...that I can decide on any given day that I would like to drink a beer that tastes like sweet orange zest and go to the store and buy a Belgian Witbier. The next day, maybe I want a beer that tastes like caramel and toffee and get a Scotch Ale, or maybe I've decided that I'm an adult so if I want to, I can have an entire wedge of brie for dinner so I go out and buy a bottle of a Rauchbier (a German style known for using heavily smoked malts, giving the beer a profoundly smokey and meaty flavor) which pairs great with creamy cheeses.

That variety is why I think beer and the associated community is such a great thing to be part of, but also what makes me a little sad when people get turned off to beer because they're not aware what they're drinking is actually an extreme representation of one facet of beer.  There's so much else going on that I feel like so much focus on the one style does beer a disservice.  And that's why I wanted to do a Beer 101 post/series, to talk simply about the "how" of all the different kinds of beer and hopefully give people an idea of beer beyond simple styles.

So that's why.  See you in another 12 re-writes.

--PXA

Horror Off-Season: Haunt

Haunt is another 2013 movie that hit VOD in early 2014.  It's also another debut, this time of director Mac Carter who's previous directorial work had been on a documentary.

Haunt as a film is a good old fashioned ghost story.  Something you'd expect to hear around a campfire or from some old lady at midnight at the local social lodge (Those are things, right?).  I enjoyed it, it wasn't bad, but I feel like it missed in a few ways.

First, the story (which I liked plenty), is about a house.  A haunted house.  In the mid-80's a couple, both successful doctors, moved their family into a large house.  In 1984 almost the entire family died tragically:  The son died in a car accident at 16, then the youngest daughter drowned, followed by the eldest daughter committing suicide, and finally the father in a mysterious incident at the house.  Fast forward a few decades and a new family, the Ashers, is just moving into the house.  The teen son of that family, while out for a walk, befriends a local girl named Sam and the two become involved quite quickly.  While their relationship blossoms, increasingly odd things happen around the house, culminating in the two of them delving into supernatural investigation.  Since it is a fairly straight and folksy ghost story I do want to try to stay away from spoilers so that's about all the detail I'll go into.

On to the odd: During the film the behavior of the Asher parents struck me as strange.  They seemed to be the most accepting and trusting parents ever portrayed.  As an example, one of the first few nights the Asher's son, Evan, meets Sam she follows him home.  Not wanting to go back to her house she sleeps the night in his bed.  In the morning he just brings her down to the family who had no idea she was there and they were completely unperturbed by it.  Everyone's cool with strange girls following their son/brother home and sleeping in his room.  Not this is really a bad thing that detracts from the story, but it just seemed so odd.

There are two more aspects I feel like they also missed with, and they're both part of the visual aesthetic of the film.  First off, a lot of lower budget supernatural horror movies seem to feel like they have to compensate for being a slower creepshow by nature and find ways to up their pace.  So when things that should be low-key and creepy happen, these movies try to amp them up and make them more intense.  Specifically what I'm talking about are shots where, because there's a ghost around, the movie will drop frames, random frames will be zoomed in and grainy or with weird color effects.  Basically this technique where they decide to make their movie resemble a mid-90's alternative rock music video.  I dislike this.  I feel like it cheapens the effect of supernatural elements.  The House at the End of the Street did this a lot, and it didn't even have any supernatural elements to its story, it was just being weird.

Second, I think ghost effects in movies tend to follow whatever precedent was set by the last really successful ghost movie regardless of their own aesthetic or what would actually look good.  The Ring ensured that every ghost story would have frame-skipped jerky moving ghosts for years.  I think Haunt is taking its cues from Mama, which featured a fast moving but very smooth ghost with lots of floating whispy strands of hair and clothing.  And while I adore Mama, I don't like this in Haunt.  The design of the ghost is very sensible.  It relates to the backstory, it looks creepy...it's a totally competent ghost...but then in post they made it all floaty and it has those whispy bits around it which makes absolutely no sense.  Considering the ghost isn't actually on screen in full view very much, this is a really minor gripe...but it really just rubbed me the wrong way.

That aside, it's got some fairly chilling implications and I really did enjoy the story teller narration that bookends the film.  It's not really great by any stretch but I would definitely call it good enough and nothing about it is particularly objectionable so Haunt gets a "well done".

--PXA

Horror Off-Season: Devil's Due

Devil's Due was released in early 2014, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett who did one of the more fun shorts in V/H/S, it's writer Lindsay Devlin's debut film.

It's a found-footage movie focusing on newlyweds Zach and Samantha McCall, who become pregnant after their honeymoon.  The initial camera is a small handheld bought by Zach so he can document their new life together, but is then upgraded to a multi-camera setup hidden throughout the couple's house.

Before I dive in, I should say that this should probably be read with a spoiler warning in effect.  I don't know how much of this movie was intended to remain a mystery since the trailer was pretty front-and-center, but I don't want anyone mad I spoiled this so...be warned.

What goes on in this movie is basically: While on honeymoon in the Dominican Republic, the aforementioned newlywed couple wind up in an underground party where they're taken and some ceremony is performed on the wife.  Waking up with severe hangovers they assume they partied too hard and hurry to make their plane home.  A few weeks later Samantha discovers she's pregnant.  Strange things begin to go on and she has a lot of issues somewhere between "rough pregnancy" and "insane demonic possession things are not alright why am I carving symbols on the floor and beating up my cousins?".  As things progress, a cult inhabits the abandoned house at the end of the street and places multiple hidden cameras in the McCall's house to monitor Samantha as they wait for her to bring the anti-christ to term.


In a lot of ways I feel like Devil's Due is like a modernized, really crappy take on the Rosemary's Baby-type story.  The found-footage aesthetic being one of the things most responsible for bringing down the movie.  All the individual pieces feel like they could have come together into a decent story.  The Rosemary's Baby story is a really good place to start from for a horror movie because it is an alien and scary thing.  You'd need to trust people who've done this before, but what if you feel like they're not on the level?  Devil's Due does get points for a minor plot element where the original OB/GYN is replaced after the first appointment.  While it's cheese stuffing added to the cult plot, it definitely ramps up the wife's paranoia and it's nice to have a reason for the woman's increasing paranoia in a horror movie.  Some of the character and relationship beats are a bit over the top, but it doesn't stick with me nearly as much as the execution.

All the elements present are pretty stock and glossy, but it feels like the movie was never planned to be a found-footage movie, or at very least whoever decided to do it that way didn't really feel committed to it.  The problem is that found-footage movies, when they work, work by bringing the audience into the small world of the characters.  You stay set in a smaller location...a room, a single house, maybe the town.. When it feels natural that this could be someone's home movies happening to catch something going horribly wrong, found-footage works.  This is why Cannibal Holocaust worked, this is why Paranormal Activity worked, why Europa Report worked, etc.

When found-footage doesn't work, more often than not, it's because something's broken immersion.  This tends to be the "Why is he filming that?" or "How is he still holding the camera up?" moment where you tend to wonder why any rational person would film certain really uninteresting or awkward things, or you're amazed at this person's dedication to holding a camera up at eye level and facing forward while running for dear life.  Also, found-footage movies almost always have some pretext under which the footage was actually found.  However, in Devil's Due the footage comes from wherever it needs to come from without rationalization.  The footage sources in this movie are:

• Husband's camera
• "Adventure Camera" mounted to husband's chest
• Hidden cameras placed in the house by the cult
• Security camera in a grocery store
• Interrogation camera in a police department
• Some random kids' camera
• Another vacationing couple's camera

And there might even be another I'm forgetting.  So how did we, the audience, get to see these?  Who found them?  Did the cult collect it all?  If they did, how did they get the police department footage?  Do they have agents there, well that doesn't make sense since the cult is implied to move around following whoever their target couple is.  And at that, even though I gave them points for it if the cult just follows couples around...how did they manage to plant a doctor in a hospital so quickly?  What about the grocery store security footage?  The cult is really crappy about spying inconspicuously so how would they even have known something weird happened at the grocery store?  At one point in the movie they stole all the husband's camera's footage up to that point, but what about everything he recorded afterwards, or on the adventure cam?

All the questions just make it feel like they were lazy and wanted to do it as found-footage because it's cool and not because of any of the advantages the style gets you.

Makes me sad.

Horror Off-Season: Oculus: Chapter 3

Ok, so the Oculus short hit my radar a few years ago when I first saw Absentia.  Director Mike Flanagan had mostly focused on character dramas until that point, though he had dabbled in horror before.  First as DP on 2004's amazing cult cheesefest Chainsaw Sally, and then again as writer/director in 2006 with his own short film Oculus: Chapter 3 - The Man With the Plan.

Originally planned as a 9 part short film anthology focused on the film's Lasser Glass mirror, only Part 3 was made due to budgetary constraints.  Following the success of Absentia, Flanagan was able to direct a feature length adaptation of the story.  That version premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in Sept of 2013 and Relativity Media secured distribution rights for an April 2014 US release.  Unfortunately, that deal seems to have included pulling sales of the original short, which I feel is a tremendous missed marketing opportunity but rumor mill has it that the short will be included as bonus material on the DVD/BD release of Oculus.

Filmed for about $2,000 over the course of 4 days as primarily a monologue and clocking in at roughly 32 minutes Oculus: Chapter 3 is an amazing example of a less-is-more horror ideology.  And beyond that, it's goddamned scary.

The film is set entirely in a single, white room with a small table and a battery of cameras on tripods at one end and an easel at the other with the very imposing mirror on it.  The single character, Tim Russel (played by Scott Graham), wears jeans and a grey baseball collar t-shirt.  To say sparse would be an understatement.  Tim is here because his father was one of the previous owners of the Lasser Glass and also its most recent victim.  Tim believes the mirror is haunted/possessed/evil and somehow compelled his father to kill his mother and himself.  He's set up an experiment to prove the mirror has supernatural powers in order to clear his father's name.

During the run of the movie Tim explains the nature of the experiment he's running as well as external controls and checks.  A system he feels will protect him from falling victim to the mirror as well.  He also recounts the mirror's bloody history and the tragedy that fell on each previous owner.  These are simple stories, but quite eerie.  As the experiment goes on Tim becomes increasingly erratic, losing time, yelling at his friend on the phone, rambling, etc.  The cameras in the room are all hooked to monitors on a table, and the perspective jumps between them and an omniscient camera leading to great creepy shots where Tim is in frame and a monitor doing something different.  It throws into question assumptions of truth...which image is real?

Flanagan relies fairly heavily on his tight depth of field and editing to obscure elements making what really should be dumb instead very scary due to context and execution.  Both tricks he would also use in Absentia to make the not-very intimidating Daniel Riley freaking frightful as the gape-mouthed ghoul.  The final sprint is an absolute bedlam of amazing that begs me to never look at alarm clocks the same way, and the repeating line from the trailer ("I've met my demons and they are many, I've seen the Devil and he is me...") is really disturbing when it finally appears.

It's not a great looking movie, which isn't surprising given its budget and time.  But it looks good for what it is, and the execution is stellar for a scary movie.  The compressed insanity at the end left me actually speechless for a bit after the short ended, it was kindof a drive-by.  Though it is very tight, I feel like bits could have been shaved off earlier in the movie to make Tim's decent a little less breakneck, but it still works very well as is.

That said, there's very little wrong with the movie and I'd highly recommend it.

--PXA