Deep and Hard

...to watch.

FILM:

On the one hand, I haven't posted in a while.  On the other hand, I've been writing small pieces of stupidly oversized articles, which was stupid.  So here are a couple lowish-budget horror movies with mixed results.

Deep Dark - 2015
Written & Directed by Michael Medaglia

It's best to think of Deep Dark as a fable.  A bleak, bitter fable with a taste for the freaky stuff.

Now on the one hand; I have a taste for the archetypal tales, and Deep Dark knowingly composes itself within classical motifs.  On the other hand, however -- and primarily in the interest of even-handedness -- it is at times so classically grounded that one could construe it as predictable.  It added up to a mostly satisfying fable about desperation and deception, jealousy, betrayal and the cost of success.

Deep Dark also wears its film-making influences openly and proudly.  Moments recall Cronenberg, Lynch, the Coens and others.  First-feature writer/director Michael Medaglia isn't there yet, but he's making the right choices.  The film feels both fresh and timeless.

If it sounds like I'm avoiding discussing the plot, it's because I am.  In brief; Hermann, a failed (terrible as well as unsuccessful) artist (specializing in mobiles made of garbage) desperately turns to his uncle or help when reaches the end of his rope.  The uncle (an equally untalented but commercially successful hack) offers to rent him the apartment where he first "found his inspiration."  The dank, dismal apartment does indeed provide the key to his financial success but at a price Hermann may not be willing to pay.  Faustian type bidness.

In the time since watching Deep Dark, I find I've come to like it more than I did when it first ended.  The experience of watching it was perhaps diluted at the time by my reservations about the lead character, which is a pretty big deal considering he's in pretty much every scene.  Looking back at the film, however, I tend to reflect more on the story and the presentation than my minor annoyances with his persistent dysfunction.  Hermann is consistently unpleasant and self-pitying.  Even when a goldmine falls into his lap, he doesn't pause a beat to acknowledge (much less appreciate) it before he goes to work self-sabotaging.  I feel like I would have had a more powerful connection to the story if I'd had more reason to care about him.

Lesbian Vampire Killers - 2009

I don't want to say that Lesbian Vampire Killers is bad, but when something so completely dodges every opportunity to be good, I don't know what else to call it.  It's meant to be a kitschy, fun vamp on low-budget exploitation films of a bygone time, but where it's should be kitschy; it's bland, where it should be fun; it's self-satisfied, and where it should be exploitative; there's a spout of flour paste.  Wait, what?  Yeah, the many lesbian vampires killed simply explode into some gloppy white goo -- and yet NO ONE in this "comedy" thinks to make a joke about ejaculate.  I mean, come on.

Anyway, add this to the stack of vampire films that deserve cheesy headlines about "lacking bite."

I, For One, Welcome Our New Robot Overlords

FILM:

Robot Overlords - 2014
Written by Mark Stay & Jon Wright
Directed by Jon Wright
With Callan McAuliffe, Gillian Anderson & Ben Kingsley


I'm kind of geeking out right now.

Thirteen months ago, I wrote an article about Grabbers; an entertaining horror-comedy film by Jon Wright that, I felt, evoked the adventurous sense of fun represented by classic 80s cinema.  So while I'm certainly geeking out that Robot Overlords is an entertaining sci fi-adventure-comedy, the only thing that geeks love more than finding something new to geek about is, well, something new to bitch about -- but the only thing they love more than that is being proven right.  Doubleplus thanks, Jon Wright!

Once again, the British Isles face an inhuman threat from outer space.  This time, it's mechanical.

Now, let me just say how nice is was to see robots as a menace again.  It's been zombies and supervillains for a while, and unabashedly campy giant robots from outer space came as a breath of fresh air.  I realize that Transformers exist, but they're abashed in their campiness.  There's no wink, no sharing of the joke.  Think real Star Wars versus prequels.

It's funny, when I wrote about Grabbers, I specifically noted how Grabbers seemed to have tapped into that 80s film vibe, while at the same time making a complete end-run around the gang of foul-mouthed kids save the day bit of business.  Here, Jon Wright has come right back with a big fat "Oh YEAH? Well just you watch THIS!"

Eleven years after the robots invaded, humanity is still on house arrest.  The film opens with one man's unceremonious dispatch for "breaking curfew" -- being out of doors without permission -- right in front of his son, Connor.  It's tragic, but with a glint of black comedy.  The local human representative (read: collaborator) of the robot order, Robin Smythe (Ben Kingsley) is able to intervene at the last possible second, to save the son from the same fate, and allow the boy to relocate to the home of Kate (Gillian Anderson), a neighbor who has already taken in a brother and sister pair along with her own son.  Ladies and Gentlemen, meets your rowdy kids.

The robots have only one rule; stay indoors.  They promise that they will leave the Earth in peace once they have completed their research, humanity is assured via regular broadcasts from the Mediator, a super-creepy robot clearly meant to look like a child.  The rest of the robots are function-driven, lacking any sort of personality, not that the Mediator is remotely personable.  He's just human-appearing enough to get his dictates across -- you know, like the automated Ken & Barbies on Fox News.  Filling in for the machines in the menace department, we instead have Ben Kingsley with the vindictiveness and passionately issued threats.  It's a wise distribution of villain duties.

While the mediator represents the robots' best effort to bridge the gap between robots and humans, they've also attempted to bridge humans to robots by implanting each person with a tracking node at the base of their skulls.  This allows the robots to know in an instant if anyone has strayed out of doors.  One night, while dabbling with a little home electronic repair, the kids discover that they can disable their trackers with a little incautious self-electrocution.  Naturally, this is key to evading and resisting the robots, setting them on a course to discover the fate a lost father.  Of course this kind of resistance can't help but to bring them into direct conflict with the entire robot hierarchy.

One thing that really struck me as I was watching Robot Overlords was the story structure.  This is a refreshing change of pace from the standard 21st century action-adventure story formula.  The story has a natural way of unfolding, necessitating the progression from Point A to B because that's the next thing they have to do.  It avoids many of the modern contrivances such as the first big loss followed by a restatement of purpose, and training sequence and ultimate thumping victory.  Our heroes have become too strong in the post-9/11 no-way-can-I-appear-weak era and our hero formula requires an equally overpowered thumping just to check off the "remember folks, he's really human" box.  The kids don't need that.  We know they're no match for the robots, and it's a step-by-step fight for survival for them, with each one getting the opportunity to lend their unique abilities to save the rest at one point or another -- not unlike the Goonies.  Refreshingly, these kids are much less obnoxious than the Goonies.

The story is going to have lots of recognizable pieces, but arranged in its own way.  Tweaked one way or another it might have gone the direction of parody or slavish tribute, but the wit and energy with which Wright pulls it all together manage to evoke many of those sensations of 80s action-adventure-comedy in a welcome, fresh way.  Actually, we never had to call those things "comedy" in the 80s.  It was simply understood that things could be funny as well as being everything else that they were.  Things were just funnier.  Jokes didn't have to be translated into international box office numbers.

Jon Wright is a magnificently skilled director.  He knows what he's doing and he delivers taut and energetic cinematic experiences.  Give this guy a real budget and creative control, and suddenly JJ Abrams will be looking like the overrated story-agnostic hack that he is.  Wright can do more with less, and still have a story that makes sense.  I may come to regret this if he ever DOES get a budget, and becomes beholden to the corporate interests that come with it.  By not designing his film as a collection of action set-pieces and by using not-totally-cutting-edge computer graphics, Wright is still capable of telling a story well without having to make those kind of lowest-common-denominator capitulations.

The performances were all good if not better.  Kingsley brought a restrained complexity to the character we knew was going to be "bad," but didn't have to be one-dimensionally so.  Smythe was allowed to be tragic and flawed, but still undeniably a bad guy worthy of comeuppance.  Gillan Anderson was perfectly fine in an essentially thankless "mom" role.  The kids all ended up being much better than expected.  There were a lot of surprisingly likable characters in this film, and that really makes the difference when separating the one-watchers from the repeated-viewers.

There's been a suggestion that one of the robot machines bears some resemblance to the squiddy aliens from Grabbers, and I like the idea that they may be parts of a bigger story.  They certainly share a feeling, and have firmly established Jon Wright as a director with his priorities in the right place... even if that place is 1983.

The Taming of the Kung-Shrew

OR When East Meets Easter

FILM:
Heroes of the East - 1978
AKA Shaolin Challenges Ninja
Written by Kuang Ni
Directed by Chia-Liang Liu
With Chia-Hui "Gordon" Liu, Yuka Mizono & Yasuaki Kurata


Despite its thoroughly generic title, the Shaw Brothers' Heroes of the East has a unique charm all its own.  The high-concept pitch is a brilliant one -- take the first half of The Taming of the Shrew and the second half of any "fight X-number of enemies defined by their fighting styles" kung-fu bang-up, and that's it, that's all you need.  Well, almost.

Central to everything in the film is martial arts legend Gordon Liu (36th Chamber of Shaolin, Kill Bill Vols. 1&2) as Ah To (Ho Tao in some versions), the archetypical star pupil in a historied Chinese martial arts academy.  Wasting little time with anything more than introductions, the news is sprung upon both Ah To and the audience that he is soon to wed in a long-arranged marriage to Yumiko, the daughter of his father's business partner; a Japanese girl he has not seen since her chubby youth.  He complains only until he discovers that she's hottened up in the intervening years, and the wedding commences almost immediately.

This is where the film's core theme is introduced.  While the story does end up feeling like two incomplete stories stapled together, the two parts are unified by the running theme of cultural difference, and that theme gets played out on all the levels -- comedy, drama, martial arts and marital arts -- that make up the film's structure.  It's an unexpected piece of thematic cohesion in a genre that rarely gets involved in that sort of thing.

At their wedding, cultural differences come into immediate conflict.  Yumiko is fiercely Japanese, and arrives seemingly never having considered that she might have anything but a Japanese wedding, or at least that she might be anything but a classic Japanese bride.  As such, her different wedding dress and eschewal of certain customs (kneeling at a given time, etc) sets off a stir among the Chinese mean girls.  Ah To is undisturbed by the differences, but does less than Yumiko (and this viewer) reckoned he ought to do in her defense against the sniping.

After a bit of schtick where the community becomes convinced that Ah To is beating Yumiko based on sounds heard over the wall, it's revealed that Yumiko is an avid devotee of the Japanese martial arts and the sounds overheard had been her rigorous training sessions.  While Ah To doesn't mind that Yumiko trains in the martial arts, he does advocate that Yumiko should switch to more "modest" Chinese martial arts for girls.  Yumiko is polarized by this rejection of her style, therefore her culture and her foundational identity.  There's a very interesting side-by-side comparison of Japanese martial arts and the Chinese styles from which most of them came.  The final bone of contention between Ah To and Yumiko is Ninjitsu; the style and craft of the ninja.  Ah To rejects Ninjitsu outright as immoral and dishonorable.  To use such sneaky Japanese techniques was nothing less than murder, in his estimation.  Yumiko takes extreme offense at this, and flees home to Japan.

In an effort to yank Yumiko's chain and goad her into coming back where he could win her over, Ah To sends a letter to her, challenging her to a husband-vs-wife, Chinese-vs-Japanese head-to-head style-for-style throw-down.  The letter gets intercepted by her Ninjitsu teacher -- who also happened to be the boy she left behind -- Takeno (Professional Handsome Man, Yasuaki Kurata).  He gets his mawashi all in a bunch and soon gathers together a group of seven (because it's always seven) Japanese masters to go teach Ah To some respect.

It's at this point that the Taming of the Shrew part of the movie is all-but-entirely over.  There's really very little resolution to the Ah To/Yumiko relationship other than that they just sort of end up back together along the way.  She feels guilty for dragging all these people into this mess over what was largely a matter of her pride.  Now that I think of it, that's actually a better "taming" than ol' Shakesbeard came up with.

From this point on, the film is essentially Ah To fighting his way through all seven Japanese masters, countering with Chinese techniques the Japanese arts of Karate, Judo, Kendo, Nunchaku, Ikebana, Sai and... Ninjitsu!  One of those might be wrong.  But hey, that's all we're askin' for!  Each fight has its own character and style.  In order to confront a more rigid Japanese karate master, Ah To's friends pick a fight with the local drunken master so Ah To can shadow and learn his more wily and flexible style.  He counters the samurai sword in kendo with the more fluid Chinese sword stance.  While spears are largely the same, we learn that the fuzzy red pom-pom on the Chinese spear isn't just ceremonial.  One by one, Ah To shows them the error of Japanese thought and culture.  As you'd expect, his final showdown in with Takeno's mad ninja skills, and that battle goes through 3 major phases before Ah To... wins or loses -- I'd hate to spoil the mystery for you.

I love the overall concept for the film, using a culture clashing romantic relationship as the basis for a really top-notch collection of high-concept beat-downs.  I was a little disappointed on the narrative end that their story wasn't better resolved, but it's a little like ordering pie, getting free ice cream, and then grousing that the ice cream could have been a little better.  We just don't get many interesting romances in martial arts cinema, and I got all cookied up when we got half of one here.  In that way, the film doesn't quite live up to what it offers.

However, in other ways, it does far more.  The side-by-side comparison of Chinese and Japanese techniques is cool.  The X-number of enemies provide an outstanding assortment of conceptual battles, which is of course the paramount issue when approaching a kung fu movie.  The culture clashes are both funny and insightful, especially if you remain aware of the inherent cultural bias behind it.  Kung fu cinema is very much about national/cultural pride, and Heroes of the East is all up in that.

Totally, totally entertaining (and surprisingly thought-provoking) old-school fu, even for someone who tends to be biased in favor of the Chinese New Wave and after. 

Leftover Candy

I managed to watch and write about AT LEAST one horror movie or TV show every day for the month of October, but would you believe there are still some others that I didn't get around to writing about?  Well here they are, like your day-after tummy ache.

FILM:


The Babadook - 2014
Written & Directed by Jennifer Kent

Oh BABY!  What an excellent find for my actual Halloween night movie.

Amelia is a widowed mother trying to raise a smart, creative, albeit undeniably weird son who has not yet learned to manage his fear and anger.  Her son, Robbie is deeply concerned with threats to home and family, likely due to the fact that his father died in a car accident while driving his mother to the hospital to deliver him.  This makes him unnervingly clingy with Amelia, and also compels him to create and build oddball weapons like a catapult backpack (thus breaking a window).  Amelia feels like she's at her wits' end.  Robbie's weirdness has begun to isolate her from the friends she'd ordinarily rely upon for support.

One evening at bedtime, Robbie pulls a book off the shelf that Amelia has never seen before, a strange and seemingly handmade pop-up book called Mister Babadook.  The book tells the story of a monster who comes into your home and will not leave, ultimately bringing death.  Robbie is both fascinated and terrified by it, and Amelia cannot get it away from him fast enough.  First she hides it, but he finds it.  Then she tears it to bits and throws it away, but it comes back, pieced back together.  Robbie becomes increasingly freaked out about the Babadook coming to kill them, and his anxiety transfers to her and the lack of sleep spreads her even thinner.

Not since The Shining have I seen a movie that so successfully treads the path between psychological and supernatural horror, and this might even do a better job of blurring the two.  The question of whether the Babadook is a real thing or simply the product of Amelia's beleaguered and exhausted mind remains fully alive all the way until the end, and even now I still wonder.  The fear of what Amelia fears and what she might do are authentically terrifying.  In the meantime, the world actually behaves much as the world actually does, with social workers showing up to check on Robbie, thus introducing another threat to home and family.  I think a LOT of parents will be able to relate to the horror of Amelia's desire to protect her son crossed with the uncertain feelings that come when your kid JUST WON'T STOP even when you feel you've got nothing left.

This is a GREAT and genuinely chilling horror movie.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown - 2014
Written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
based on the 1976 film by Earl E Smith
Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

This is a slasher, but it's a slasher with some of the self-awareness and cleverness of Scream minus much of the wit and humor.  It's a more earnest mystery in which the town of Texarkana is subjected to a series of slasher-style murders that parallel a case from the 40s and a film about the case from the 70s.  Too much of the story is dependent on us believing that Addison Timlin's character is an outcast in town (evidently because she reads), but at least there IS a story rather than just a bunch of running around getting stabbed.  It really makes an effort at illustrating the way fear can grip a community and even tries to give the protagonist a character that extends beyond being afraid and screaming all the time.  And the gore still manages to be gory!  It is, after all, still a slasher, but I found it to be an entirely tolerable entry in a field predominantly occupied with ugly, mindless garbage.

Summer Of Blood - 2014
Written & Directed by Onur Turkel

If you can make it past the first half an hour or so of the lead character Erik's unrelentingly awful personality, you might find this a mildly rewarding vampire tale, but that's a REALLY BIG "IF."  I stopped the movie twice, he was so freaking unbearable.  I almost couldn't go on.  He's an emotionally crippled 40 year old who uses unfunny humor to deflect E-VER-Y-THING away from himself while simultaneously making everything ABOUT himself.  When his girlfriend of three years (which frankly, strains all belief) proposes over dinner, he can't even treat her with the dignity of addressing the subject head-on.  When he finds a man on the street with his throat torn open, he can't stop babbling to the guy about bullshit long enough to call 9-1-1.  He's a hollow, self-centered hipster douchebag asshole.  Naturally it's set in Brooklyn.  Maybe if you're the kind of person who can tolerate the uncomfortable humor of The Office you'll be better equipped to tolerate Erik, but it was psychologically agonizing for me.

Until he meets a vampire who tells him to shut up for a minute.  The vampire takes him to the core of his self-loathing, then releases him from this life of suffering.  ...Into a whole new undeath of suffering!  The second half of the film plays with the concept of vampirism in some interesting ways, and it's both satisfying to watch Erik suffer as well as seeing him become more human in his post-human condition.  There IS something here, but the buy-in may be too much for some viewers to handle.

Mercy - 2014
Written by Matt Greenburg
from a Story by Stephen King
Directed by Peter Cornwell

At the intersection of late life dementia and the corrupting influence of witchcraft, there is grandma Mercy.  Throughout the movie, her grandson tries to help her, suffering as she is in her drug-induced haze, uncovering family secrets and local legends about witches, only to discover too late that they are one in the same.  There's an idea here, but the execution is so lackluster and unengaging, the climax so lacking in character, that it's really irrelevant what the idea was.  It's been squandered to the point of nonrecognition, just like grandma Mercy.

Hour of the Wolf - 1968
Written & Directed by Ingmar Bergen

Just in case you were wondering, no, this is not a werewolf movie.  I know I was thrown by that.  But it does qualify as horror in a creeping dread, losing one's mind, Ingmar Bergman kind of way.  An artist (Max von Sydow) and his wife (Liv Ullmann) move to a remote island where they can be alone so the taciturn artist can paint.  Despite their apparent isolation, the nearby town seems to be haunted with elements of his past centering around a lost and scandalous love which is perhaps more likely what he's really fleeing.  It's VERY slow and observes no obligation to explain itself, but it builds a deep sensation of "WTF" until its disturbingly bizarre climax.  At least ONE person here is insane, and it might be you.

TELEVISION:


American Horror Story
Season Three: Coven - 2013
Created by Brad Falchuk & Ryan Murphy

I liked Season One a lot, despite some structural flaws.  I LOVED Season Two which avoided those flaws and excelled in its structure and characterizations.  I knew that a lot of people had really been daffy for Coven so I was looking forward to it.  But it mostly left me flat.

Coven centers around a school for witches in New Orleans as they enter into a time of transition where one Supreme witch will fall and another will rise.  And that's really about it.  Structurally, it's much more soap operatic than either season prior.  The characters aren't as well developed, thus their personal stories have much less driving motive, and are poorly differentiated.  Basically it's a big ol' back-stabathon with literal back-stabbing and the characters are frequently resurrected from their stabbed backs.

Jessica Lange is back to playing a bitchy Southern belle, which is how a lot of people like her but I find terribly tedious.  I was never clear on whether the school for witches was an actual school of if that was just their cover for a place to hang out because not once did any teaching ever occur until everyone had to get up to speed for the big showdown.  There were exactly TWO plot threads that I found to be worthwhile.  One, concerned Kathy Bates as Marie Laveau, a thoroughly evil witch from before the Civil War, cursed with immortality and newly exhumed into a world where a black man is president (in other words, your standard Tea Party voter) and her relationship with Gabourey Sidibe as Queenie, more-or-less well-meaning (but not above her own back-stabbery) young black witch from Detroit.  They had a great dynamic and an interesting story between them that was largely separate from other goings-on.  The other was the relationship between Lange's Fiona Goode and the newly reconstituted ghost of the Axeman of New Orleans, whose spirit has lingered in the coven's house since they stopped his murder spree in 1919.  The whole affair is creepy and unseemly and leads to a sweet piece of cosmic justice in the end.  Danny Huston, as the Axeman, really makes this subplot worthwhile.  Again, it's largely isolated from the rest of the story and allows for some authentic moments of character.  I also liked the character of Misty Day, but she really got shorted on the story side of things.  The actress, Lily Rabe really deserves a more complete story arc in one of these seasons.

By and large, it ends up being a big soap opera where survival of the bitchiest wins the day.  If I wanted to watch that, I'd watch... I don't know because I don't want to watch that.  Is there something that combines Dynasty with Designing Women?  Real Housewitches of New Orleans?  Feh.

Halloween Classics: Generations

It's Halloween, kids!  The day we've all been waiting for!  In culmination of this writing project (whew!), it's time to stop messing around with Dum-Dums and get into some Milky Ways -- 3 classics from 3 generations, each viewed in a different context.

FILM:


Poltergeist - 1982
Written by Steven Spielberg  Michael Grais & Mark Victor
Directed by Tobe Hooper

I don't think I'd seen Poltergeist since I was a kid, but it's pretty ubiquitous when it comes to lists of best haunting & ghost stories, so I thought it was time to take a look at it again.

In brief; "typical" white American suburban family complete with 2.5 kids and dog is living the dream of the 80s in a homogenous Southern California housing development.  Actually, it's the same homogenous Southern California housing development used for Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (filmed concurrently), which I think makes an interesting statement about homogenous American suburbs in itself.  One suburb is all suburbs and all suburbs are the same.  It's even more telling that these are desirable places from which to escape difference.  Scary.

So much for "in brief," but as I was saying, white-bread family in indistinct house (the film even points this out, so I don't think I'm totally off-base here) starts to experience strange and unusual occurrences, largely centered around youngest daughter Carol Anne.  First she's talking to the TV (more on this later), then chairs are moving around the kitchen, then -- BAM! -- the creepy tree is devouring son Robbie, seemingly as a distraction for sucking Carol Anne into a closet vortex.  It really seemed to escalate rather quickly then settle into a much slower arc of investigation and exposition before unleashing even bigger spooky effects.

Now, even as a kid, I remember being a little skeptical about the effects.  There are a few big ones that just don't make sense to me from a haunting perspective, and don't hold up from a technical standpoint.  For example, I don't see the point of a big, giant zombie head popping out of the closet, and it just looks like a big ol' model to me.  There's a spectral door guardian late in the movie about which I feel much the same only more so, and it uses a film layering technique that I never found convincing.  that being said, there are still a lot of practical effects that hold up better than the optical effects, and there's even one particular optical effect that I still find particularly chilling.

While I may see the effects as uneven and outdated in places, I was really surprised by how well the story itself holds up, outside of certain pacing issues.  Like I said, it seems to escalate rather quickly, then drag in the middle before jamming on the gas again toward the end.  I think it would be much creepier building slowly, going as far as to suggest that the para-psychologist and crew might be brought in BEFORE Carol Anne's disappearance and shuffling a couple of the other spooky set-pieces.  There are times after her disappearance where the family seems to forget to be as upset as they should be.  Nevertheless, it's a very solid haunting tale that plays strongly on parental fears and concerns about the kinds of worries about home and hearth that drive people to the suburbs in the first place.

Indeed, subtext was what I found most fascinating as an adult viewer with little chance of being surprised by a familiar story.  Where director Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre could be seen as a metaphor for America's culture wars, Poltergeist very strongly depicts an environment in which the counter-culture has surrendered to raise them up a passel o' young'uns.  Mom still likes a toke before bed, but Dad can't be bothered to roll a joint anymore, he's so engrossed in TV and a Reagan biography.  This is the same Dad who discovers that he's been selling a community built on top of a field of graves.

Consumerism is a strong, but passively expressed theme.  The product is all.  The dead of the past and the children of the future are both subject to consumption.  Pave over the dead, and bury children in commercialism.  Son Robbie is surrounded by Star Wars merchandise and the commercial ephemera of other pop cultural media.  Carol Anne is consumed by the pre-fab house, her voice trapped inside the television.  The final image in the film is not merely funny, but telling, as Dad pushes the television out of the hotel room.  It's not merely ironic, but symbolic of the control from which he's freeing himself and his family.

Poltergeist didn't work for me in all the same ways that it did when I was a kid, but much to my surprise, it worked for me in some brand new ways.  I understand that they're remaking it next year (heedless consumption of the past again), and it's my default setting to be skeptical of such things, but there's definitely a core there that could certainly be relevant again, and depending on the creative choices made, potentially better executed.  With a little reining in and refocusing, it could be a crisp and haunting tale.

Rosemary's Baby - 1968
Written & Directed by Roman Polanski
from the Novel by Ira Levin

This was my first time watching what many consider one of the scariest movies ever.  I guess it makes a difference when you see it.  Yeah, this is one that's going to get me banned from the clubhouse.

In brief (I promise this time), Rosemary & Guy, a young couple (Mia Farrow & John Cassavetes) move into a new apartment in New York.  The building has long been connected with brutal and scandalous rumors.  Shortly after moving in, they hear spooky chanting from the apartment next door.  The first neighbor they meet is a young woman recovering from drug addiction with the help of the elderly couple next door.  She's soon dead of an apparent suicide, but Rosemary's not so sure.  After that, Minnie & Roman (Ruth Gordon & Sidney Blackmer) the friendly-to-the-point-of-overbearing neighbor couple begins to ingratiate and insinuate themselves into Rosemary & Guy's lives.  Guy, an actor, gets a plum role when the man cast suddenly goes blind.  Rosemary gets pregnant and Minnie takes over her life, sending her to her doctor friend and feeding her drinks with homegrown herbs.  The pregnancy progresses with difficulty, and Rosemary's fear and paranoia grows.  When her friend Hutch falls suddenly ill, eventually dying and leaving her a book about witchcraft, her fears find a name.

The thing that struck me most upon watching the film was seeing where so many other films had come from, like The Exorcist or The Bible.  Like those, its pace drags, it's poorly aged in the context of later works and you kind of have to ignore a lot to be all that scared by it.  Also like The Bible, its gender attitudes should offend the modern viewer.

It doesn't help that the characters are unbearable.  Most of them have an excuse for it what with the Satan worship and all, but even our protagonist, Rosemary, is weak and pathetic even when she's fighting for her life (or rather, her baby's life, and there's the rub).  Maybe it's just the helpless paranoia, maybe it's the era's ideas of women, or maybe it's just that Mia Farrow whines so consistently that intergalactically notorious cry-baby Luke Skywalker starts to look like Dirty Harry.  Nah, it's not just that.  The end felt like a tremendous letdown after all her previous efforts and while I absolutely wanted to go open the jugulars of every one of the Satanists, they were about as menacing as canasta night down at the senior center.

And that's my biggest issue here.  I just didn't find it that scary, or really that engaging.  There's the structure of a tense thriller, but the tedious pace allows the tension to dissolve before our very eyes.  Like I mentioned up front, I think it depends on when in one's life one first sees the movie.  By this stage in my life I've simply seen too many movies.  I've learned how they're built from film makers who learned from Polanski.  I've seen the ways that subsequent movies have developed and expanded upon its elements.  Maybe it's similar to the way that hard bop makes it hard for me to appreciate the more predictable structures of ragtime.

Whatever it is, the time for Rosemary's Baby has passed for me, in more ways than one.

The Descent - 2005
Written & Directed by Neil Marshall

British film, The Descent is hands-down one of the best horror movies of the modern era.  To a certain extent, it's almost two great horror movies.  The full measure of its greatness, however, is subject to which version of the film you see, and whether you prefer an earned outcome or an obligatory horror twist.  More about THAT at the end.

The Descent distinguishes itself among horror films in a number of ways.  First of all, the core cast is entirely women, and not any candy-ass prom queen women either.  These six women are adventure sports enthusiasts and know how how adrenaline feels.  The first scene shows several of them on a white water rafting expedition, with central figure Sarah's (Shauna McDonald) husband and daughter meeting them at the end.  These girls rule.

Moments later, Sarah and her family are in a terrible accident on the road with Sarah the only survivor.

A year later, she's still recovering from the loss, but determined to forge ahead so they get the band back together (with a new addition) and the six women head off for a bit of spelunking in the Appalachians. Unbeknownst to the rest of the group, their self-involved limit-pushing friend Juno (the one who previously shared meaningful glances/averted gazes with Sarah's late husband) has led them not to the well-known intermediate cave to which they believed they were going, but to a completely uncharted cave.

The first half of the film is like its own movie.  Once the women descend into the cave, the only way out is through.  The exploration and natural dangers of their situation are remarkably tense, with the question of what will happen when the rest of the group realizes Juno's selfish folly weighing foremost in our minds.  Claustrophobia reigns as they crawl through narrow passages.  We feel the weight of the earth threatening to crush them.  Once the gain a fuller grasp of their situation, the tension ratchets higher.  A deep crevasse must be traversed.  Even as we feel their sinews stretched and muscles strained, we're captured by the mystery of "If this cave is undiscovered, where did that funky old piton come from?"  I could have totally watched an entire movie about them just struggling to survive this dangerous cave amid growing character tension.

Then it gets worse... so much worse.  They discover a chamber filled with ancient paintings a la Lascaux, depicting wild beasts and a mountain with two exits, so there's hope... until the creatures attack.

The second half of the movie turns the survival horror up to eleven.  Like many things in The Descent, it skips the exposition and allows us to figure out what's really going on, and evidently what is going on is that an evolutionary spur of subhumans have developed in this cavern; savage, sightless creatures.  Panic splinters the team and each individual or cluster is responsible for their own survival.

This part of the movie is deeply frightening and highly brutal.  There is gore, but not for gore's sake.  At all bloody junctures, my thought was "Well yeah, of course that's how it would be."  The sensation of fear is so electric that, when one of the most shocking deaths I've ever seen in a horror movie occurs, it makes perfect sense.  In fact, all of the deaths are completely reasonable in the context of the story, not merely a variety of ways that the creators thought up to devastate a human body for the amusement of blood-thirsty viewers.

Throughout this, Sarah demonstrates a thoughtful and powerful commitment to survival.  I mention this because it's highly relevant to the meaning of the alternate endings.

The Descent is original, well acted, cleverly written and freakin' beautifully shot.  Marshall has packed it with iconic frames, which, as others have pointed out, are cribbed from other imagery in such way as to indicate that he has learned his lesson and knows what he's doing.  The element of fear here is virtually unparalleled.  It's like a "Best of" compilation of different sense of primal fear, all assembled into one magnificent package.  It's tense, mistrustful, creepy, startling, shocking, horrific, gruesome, thrilling, terrifying and more.  It's damn near perfect.

...unless you see the wrong ending.

There are two versions of The Descent, and as far as I'm aware the only difference is the end.  One is the American Theatrical Release (AKA the R-rated version) and the other is alternately referenced as the British, Director's Cut or Unrated version.  I personally believe that the Theatrical version is "correct" and rescued the film from a foolish impulse on Marshall's part which completely undermines the story and betrays its entire meaning.  I will discuss this in greater detail below, but I don't recommend that discussion for people who haven't seen the movie.  I already feel badly enough for how much I've already said.  In his (rave) review of The Descent, Roger Ebert implored viewers not to let anyone talk to them about the movie until they'd seen it for themselves.  Bear in mind, it was the Theatrical release he was reviewing.

SPOILY-SPOILY-OHH-SO-SPOILY-SPOILER ALERT!!!

Seriously, don't read this unless you've seen the movie.  No, not even if you can't help your compulsive little self.  Just walk away.  You have been warned.  You're only ruining it for yourself.

Last warning.  Do not enter.

Okay...

In the American Theatrical Release, Sarah escapes from the cave, makes her way to the trucks and races away from there like a bat out of a fairly literal Hell.  Fade to black.  Credits.

In the British Release, she races away from there like a bat out of a fairly literal Hell, then pulls over to cry, gets startled by a passing semi truck, vomits... and suddenly sees Juno next to her in the truck.  Screaming, she awakens back in the cave and imagines her daughter there with a birthday cake as the creatures close in on her from all sides.  This is some bullshit.

First of all, the American version is very clearly edited in a slap-dash way and loses some nice moments.  Where she pulls over to cry and vomit; those are earned moments.  The first time I saw The Descent, I saw the Unrated or Director's Cut, and I was bawling.  When she vomited, I spoke back to the television in sympathy.  But once Juno appears and she wakes up in the cave -- again, some bullshit.

And here's why.

Sarah EARNED that escape.  We see how hard she fights every step of the way.  There is NO indication that she has any "lay down and die" in her.  Yes, once or twice she does imagine her daughter prior to the bullshit ending, but those visions occur at times when she needs to be spurred on, when she needs that little extra help to bring her focus back to moving forward and surviving.  It's COMPLETELY contradictory for her to fight as hard as she did only to up and decide to be a crazy quitter in the end.  Moreover, and perhaps most significantly, if her true desire was to lay down and die to rejoin her daughter, I don't believe that it's literarily or psychologically realistic that she would dream/hallucinate such a thorough escape.  She survived the loss, she survived the cave, she was reborn from the earth as a force unto herself.

The other ending simply doesn't add up.  It has the stink of obligatory "gotcha" all over it.  There's a common attitude among horror fans and evidently among directors that "happy" endings are inherently invalid, that they somehow diminish the film's commitment to horror if you don't walk away from it feeling completely hopeless.  Now, I'm certainly someone who likes a happy ending, but what I like most is an earned and appropriate ending that faithfully concludes the narrative arc with a sense of closure that is consistent with story and character.  The daughter-with-a-birthday-cake ending doesn't do that.  The Cake is a Lie.

It's been suggested by some individuals (clearly desperate to validate this cheap, bullshit ending) that Sarah was hallucinating a lot sooner, and that she may have even been the one who killed her friends and imagined the creatures.  Yeah; no.  The film just doesn't make the case for that, even if the director is willing to allow for it.  You don't just get to pull "It was all in her head" out of your ass without supporting it.  By that logic, you could slap 30 seconds onto the end of ANY movie to change its meaning.  SHRIEK!  And then Leia wakes up and she's still in that cell on the Death Star and she's really just a prostitute.  SHRIEK!  And then Rose has a flash of consciousness as she sinks beneath the waves and realizes that she steered the ship into the iceberg and Jack was just a passenger who pushed her into the water in the name of justice.  SHRIEK!  And then Anne Frank wakes up at home in Canton, Ohio and realizes there wasn't a war, she's not even Jewish, and Hitler is just the name of the neighbor's mean old Rottweiler.

Sarah lives.  The End.