If Blood and Love Taste So Sweet

FILM:


Excision - 2012
Written & Directed by Richard Bates Jr.

Holy crap!

Excuse me, before I get going on the other aspects of the movie, I need to recognize one thing in particular.  Excision is a masterpiece of casting achievement.  Just brilliant.  We have former teenage porn star Traci Lords playing the prudish and religious controlling mother.  Ray Wise, perhaps best known as Laura Palmer's father (and killer) from Twin Peaks plays the high school principal disinterested in hearing about psychological excuses for behavior.  Malcolm McDowell, who came to prominence as the extreme teenage delinquent in A Clockwork Orange plays a teacher who doesn't suffer troublemakers.  The one that will really grab your attention is John Waters of... being John Waters ...as a pastor, but I think the one I love the most is Marlee Matlin as a school counselor... who can't hear.  Yeah, that's how dark the humor is here.  Now where was I?  Oh yes...

Holy crap!  What did I just see!?

Excision is a restrained examination of one girl's journey from "disturbed" to "Disturbed."  I'm sure it won't fulfill all viewers' expectations of what constitutes a "horror movie," but it's undeniably horrific, while at the same time imbued with a sense of humor so black and morbid that The Joker would stand up and applaud at the end.

Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord) is not your normal high school student.  That much is evident from the very first scene, in which she dreams of two selves; one erupting in blood and agony, and the other writhing in erotic delight over the sight.  Clearly not right.  She's an acne-and-cold-sore-pocked outcast at school, where her socially inept behavior and emotional detachment mark her as strange; as other.  It's natural that we empathize with her, although she continually reminds us that her reasoning is not well-adjusted.

At home, she fights with mother, more-or-less correctly assessing her as a bitch.  Mom has two daughters, and the younger, prettier, disease stricken one is "her heart," while Pauline is constantly reminded of what a frustration and disappointment she is.  Pauline is intelligent and full of wit, but a disinterested student.  She wants, more than anything, to become a surgeon, and her dreams of blood feature her in increasingly glamorous roles, where she has control and finds a satisfaction crosses into the sexual.

The early incident that establishes her character is her decision to lose her virginity to one of the popular boys -- or more specifically, the boyfriend of the popular girl whom Pauline despises.  She matter-of-factly tells him what she wants and gives him number.  Later, she inappropriately tells her sister of her intentions, and that she wants to be on her period when it happens.  Boys being stupid and incapable of turning down free nookie, he accepts.  Pauline directs the event with clinical detachment.  She has timed it correctly and experiences visions of blood and passion far more glamorous than the reality.  When she directs him downtown, he discovers just what's up and is appalled.  Dropping her off at home, he can't get away fast enough.  Later, rather than feeling shame, Pauline uses the event to humiliate both the popular boy and his popular girlfriend

Pauline's conflicts with others intensify, and most of the time, these appear, well, not necessarily reasonable, but understandable as teen behavior and film behavior.  She fights with her mother about church, school, the cotillion into which she's been forced, and really pretty much everything.  This doesn't seem SO strange to us until it is, perhaps, too late.  When the popular girls vandalize her house, Pauline attacks her nemesis, laying her out and bloodying her nose.  We want to take the side of the underdog, so we're much less offended by this counterstrike than her parents and the principal who expels her.  Maybe we shouldn't be so hasty.

After having been stuck with the-price-is-right counseling from her pastor for the last few years, Pauline pleads to see a legitimate psychiatrist, having diagnosed herself with borderline personality disorder and her parents finally relent. ...but will it be soon enough to avert disaster?

Excision is one of the more chilling and, I feel, credible cinematic examinations of the loss of sanity that I've ever seen.  It happens slowly, and it doesn't seem particularly crazy until it crosses the line in an irretrievable way.  Pauline is incredibly insightful and strikes as as the only one who really gets it in her world, and while the delusional dreams are startling, their influence on her reality is filtered through restraint.  Even when she "loses it," she does a very wrong thing for a very right reason, but that doesn't make it a sanely arrive-upon conclusion.

It's a slow burn that suddenly slips into a living nightmare, only it's less sudden than it seems.  Like a frog in boiling water, the doom is ever present but easily overlooked.  It seems purposeful that so many of the actors were cast against type.  More than merely being hilarious stunt castings, they reflect the conflict and inherent madness of the world that both ushers Pauline into her own world of madness, and fails to recognize it for what it is.  The message here is not to treat the mentally ill as weirdos, though that's how they might present to us, or pariahs, but to get the real professional help.

I expected something in the ballpark of American Mary and/or May from Excision, but what I found was something entirely itself, and in many ways much more honest.  A true nightmare.

A Very Scary Pairing

FILM:
Insidious - 2010 and Insidious Chapter 2 - 2013
Directed by James Wan
Written by Leigh Whannell

The party starts here.

Ever since director James Wan shook up the horror genre with Saw in 2004, he's been the "It" director of horror films.  Rather than continuing to churn out Saw sequels, as he surely had an opportunity to do, he's brought even spookier tales to the screen in films like The Conjuring and Insidious 1 & 2.  It would not be unfair to call Wan this generation's John Carpenter.  His next film will be the seventh Fast & Furious, which seems like a good fit, given Wan's intense and unsubtle approach to direction.  While Wan never shies away from clubbing the viewer over the head with his story beats on film, it's his partnership with writer/actor Leigh Whannell (the guy who is not Cary Elwes in Saw) that truly stands out as an example of thoughtful and clever storycraft.

"You have something on your shoulder..."

Nowhere is that more evident than in Insidious and Insidious Chapter 2 -- the latter in particular.  I'm discussing them together because they are the rare case in horror movies where the sequel was clearly planned from the beginning rather than invented as a way to separate teens from more of their allowance.

Insidious is a modern take on the fairly rote themes of the possession story.  A family starts to experience an increasingly unnerving series of haunting events.  Mom picks up a creepy voice on the baby monitor.  Floor boards creak.  Locked doors are blown open.  Visions of the dead begin to creep in.  All that good stuff.

Wan takes a pretty heavy hand with the presentation of these things.  Many scares are telegraphed from miles away and the viewer can frequently point to the split second when a spook will suddenly appear.  It's hard to say whether we're simply so conditioned by movies that we respond so strongly to the rote pacing of a scare, or whether the alchemy of film has so refined the process of scaring us based on our natural tendencies.  I suspect it's a little of both.  The music, in particular, seems designed to not-just-suggest how we should be feeling, but to scream it in our faces like an archetypical drill sergeant.  "YOU are FEELing TENSION right now, you damned panty-waist!  That TENsion is BUILDing to a POINT.  Right NOOOW, I want you're skin to be CRAWLING, soldier, and what I want is LAW, DO YOU HEAR ME, maggot?  THAT was the moment of relief before (SKREE-SKREE-SKREE) a FRIGHT that will cause your BOWELS to release like MONteZUma's REvenge!  Now STRAIGHTEN UP, you wussy little pukes!"  It's... a bit much, at times.  And yet, it often works.  I genuinely had to question the wisdom of watching the sequel on quite so chilly a December evening.

"Dear God, no... not cosplayers!"

The series of scares builds up to an increasing threat toward the children of the family, until the older son falls into an unexplainable coma.  When all scientific approaches have been exhausted, his grandmother brings in a psychic/paranormal investigator.  She believes that the boy has been astrally projecting got lost in the limbo between the world of the living and the great beyond.  The greater threat is that his spiritually vacated body is to ghosts what a boarded up row house is to London squatters.  If he can't find his way back to his body soon, something else will.

As it turns out, the father encountered the same danger as a child and had his memories suppressed for his own safety.  Tapping into a talent for astral travel, he's able to cross over and seek out his son's wandering soul.  It's here that things cross the line from a build up of scares to openly explicit boogeyman territory.  The spirit world is all darkness and fog with moaning people in gray makeup.  It was just... too much ...in my opinion.  It was tense, but it wasn't scary anymore.

Insidious ends with a death and a mystery, which leads directly into Insidious Chapter 2.

"What was that?"

The sequel takes a much more fluid approach to time, opening with a flashback to the father's childhood and the events that would (literally) come back to haunt them all.  It then rejoins the story a few hours after the end of the first film.  The family has gone to stay with grandma in the father's childhood home while the police conduct their investigation into the death at their house.  It quickly becomes clear that the "insidious" spirits are not done with them yet, and the chilling process of building up fear begins again.  The filmmakers hit us pretty hard with their escalation of terror.  While things get worse at home, grandma is out with the paranormal investigators tracking down the origins of their ghosts, find that this rabbit hole leads directly into a Hell of human making.

We are returned to the land of darkness and fog, and while it's all still very sound-stagey, the established mythos makes it more effective the second time around.  We're not looking for naturalism anymore, but accepting it as a conceit of the series.  It takes on a number of twists of its own, now that we know what to expect from it.  It's still not as scary as the real world scares; the anticipated, the startling and the unknown, but it contains its own tension and drama.  This time, rather than wholly containing the climax within this world, there is paralleling tension and drama in the material world, creating a much more effective anxiety.

"Watch it with the spoilers!"

I'm of the opinion that it ends with something of a joke.  As the camera moves in on one character's face, it's like a game of chicken for well-trained horror fans.  We KNOW it can't end with a pure sigh of relief... or can it?  Wan & Whannell allow themselves to have it both ways, both wrapping up the story while still leaving room for the inevitable sequel rooted in the the first two.

It's really in the crafting of the narrative that they shine.  I've kind of made a point of both sides of Wan as a director.  He knows all the notes and hits them hard, but it's often too hard, with too much... flair.  Kind of like a female pop vocalist in the post-Whitney Houston era.  Ease up on the friggin' melisma, you know?

In the script, however, Whannell weaves together a variety of scares in a tightly-paced fashion, and story elements that actually add up, rather than merely existing to make the viewer jump.  It's in Chapter 2 that the cleverness is truly revealed, as mere haunts from the first movie turn into pivotal story beats in the second.  It's one thing to unspool a mystery, but it's even more thrilling when you discover that the mystery is bigger and more complex than you suspected.  Taken as a whole, I felt that Insidious 1 & 2 delivered both bigger and deeper than Saw.  Forget your M. Night Shyamalan (which you really should have done by now anyway); Leigh Whannell is your guy for twisty stories.  I really hope that he's able to break out on his own.  His narrative skill would be amazing in a TV series.

And now, just for shiggles; another Wan/Whannel afterlife joint... Doggie Heaven.

Ghoul, Interrupted

or One Slew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

FILM:
The Ward (2010)
Written by Michael & Shawn Rasmussen, Directed by: John Carpenter



My recent interest in horror movies has inevitably led my path to cross with that of John Carpenter.  Now, I was pretty familiar with his more action-oriented work product, but as he's arguably neck-and-neck with Wes Craven in terms of influence on the horror genre, it was inevitable that I'd end up watching his classic work from the 70s and 80s.  Carpenter kind of fell out of favor after that, which is a shame, because I found The Ward to be one of the most satisfying horror movies I've ever seen.

The movie doesn't exactly throw you into the action as much as wake you up to find that you're already hurtling through a plate glass window.  The classic horror opening -- a teen girl in terror meets an unfortunate end -- is so abbreviated that it leaves one struggling to catch up from "go."  This is immediately followed by another teen girl in terror.  She sets fire to a farm house and is gathered up by the police in short order.


Before she -- or we -- know it, she's the newest resident of the North Bend Mental Hospital of North Bend, Oregon... and it's 1966.  At this point, I must admit, I was feeling highly skeptical.  A lot was going on and none of it was making a hell of a lot of sense.  As it turns out, this is all as it should be.

As the girl, Kristen, explores the secrets of the ward, and the mysteries about herself, we discover the answers along with her.  She shares the ward with four other girls, a frequently absent or inconveniently present staff, and a very vengeful ghost. The other girls each have specifically individuated personalities (or personality archetypes anyway), which is more than can be said for a lot of genre movies.  The staff is menacing and controlling, except for the times when they appear to be gone altogether.  I had to mutter an "Oh come ON..." when the action led Kristen through a kitchenette with an unsecured meat slicer on the counter (mercifully NOT an implement of death here).  As the story progresses, the staff appear to be covering up the ghost's deadly deeds, building upon the mystery of just what is going on.

Act 1 works on blending familiar ghost story and mental patient tropes.  Act 2 becomes a somewhat standard one-by-one reduction of cast members with asylum-themed gore.  More questions are raised; not the least of which is, "Is anyone RUNNING this place?"

It's in Act 3 that The Ward reveals all its been holding back.  As the ghost story unfolded, I became more and more skeptical.  It seemed fairly rote.  The part that keeps it interesting is the ongoing question of what others know, and when they seem to know it.  Everyone is holding information back from Kristen, and the way that information is revealed constitutes the backbone of the narrative, rather than a mere arbitrary series of deaths (as in Carpenter's Halloween).  In Act 3 there was a major confrontation with the ghost and... something that should not happen in a ghost story.  This had me rolling my eyes and ready to write the whole thing off.  Then came the big reveal.  Now, I often pick up on third act reveals in the first five minutes of a movie (sometimes just from the poster), but I didn't see this one coming until maybe 5 minutes beforehand because Carpenter knows the song so well and wasted so few notes in the introduction.

There was, of course, a SUPER obvious horror movie final minute, but as a horror movie, it was obligated to offer nothing less.  So often, the last minute of a horror movie sneaks in one last "Gotcha!" just for the sake of making you jump, which can betray the narrative arc.  This one makes sense...ish in the context of the story.

The performances were above average for the genre and did a lot to sell the story, although I was never quite able to accept Amber Heard (Kristen) as a citizen of the 60s.  The crimping iron was overplayed in the effort to make her look raggedy.  I was also left wanting more screen time for Jared Harris as the resident shrink.  He has a remarkable ability to be likeable and unsettling all at once, which keeps one guessing about his motives, even as one wants to trust him.

I don't know that I was ever scared by The Ward, but I remained intrigued from start to finish, and I felt that my patience as a viewer was rewarded in a way that so many movies simply do not deliver these days.