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.

Gimme Those Funky Horns

FILM:


Horns - 2014
Written by Keith Bunin
from the Book by Joe Hill
Directed by Alexandre Aja

Horns is bound to anger the internet rage-nerds (but then what isn't?) with its resistance to simple classification and expectation-defying insistence on being completely itself.  The core structure is that of a murder mystery, but in its greater context it's also a love story and a dark parable that steps outside naturalistic conventions.  While I had some doubts about whether its primary conceit was strictly "horror," the final scene convinced me that, while it was certainly horror, why should it need to be strict about it?

The rage-nerds love to throw out the debate between Siskel & Ebert over Full Metal Jacket and Benji the Hunted as an attempt to discredit Roger Ebert, but it really only demonstrates that the rage-nerds don't understand art.  Ebert gave thumbs down to FMJ and up to Benji in the same episode, and Siskel tried to shame him with the specious suggestion that he was saying Benji was better than FMJ.  What's often omitted from this example, however, is that Roger called Gene out for his false equivalency, explaining (as Siskel damned well should have known) that the rating of a single movie is not inherently a comparison to all other movies, but an indication of how successfully that movie achieves its own purpose.  Art is not a sport, and the pathetic need to score it for so many emotionally and intellectually undeveloped males per their demands and expectations is deeply unhealthy for the art form.  In Ebert's opinion, FMJ was not entirely successful as a war movie, or an anti-war war movie, or a Kubrick movie, and I can see his point without necessarily having strong feelings about it one way or another.  Separately, he saw Benji the Hunted as a very successfully executed Benji movie.  While having no personal interest IN a Benji movie, I can see how one might be well made per its own intentions.  While you and/or I may feel that he misjudged FMJ, Benji had absolutely nothing to do with it.  In other words, they're not in competition with each other -- not one human soul went to the theater in 1987 and said, "Hm, do I feel like seeing a bleak vision of the Vietnam War, or a cute children's story about a fluffy dog?!" -- they're in competition with themselves.  I bring this up because A) I consider Ebert to have been pretty much as good as it gets when it comes to film review, and 2) the absolute failure of the majority of internet loudmouths to grasp this concept has become toxic to the media arts.

Approaching Horns as a film that is what it means to be, it's a complete success.  Approaching it as a film with tho obligation of meeting the expectations of angry young boy-men, it's a magnet for scorn.  And the moral of this story (like so many stories) is "Don't read Comments on the Internet."

But I digress...

Horns stars Daniel Radcliffe in what I believe is his best performance to date.  Radcliffe plays Ig Perrish, a young radio DJ from near Seattle who is accused of murder.  The murder of which he is accused is of the love of his life, Merrin (the ethereal Juno Temple), his girlfriend since childhood.  The whole town hates Ig and wants him to burn.  Even his parents' phrasings betray their own doubts about his innocence.  Universally despised, but legally bound not to leave, Ig is in a living Hell.

So maybe it shouldn't be entirely surprising when he starts to sprout horns from his forehead.  Devil's horns.  People react very differently to Ig's new appearance.  Some see it as representative of what they already think he is.  Others don't see them as anything terribly unusual, and some don't see them at all.  This becomes part of the mystery.  Along with the new fashion statement, Ig's other statements take on a new gravity as well.  People immediately start sharing their shameful secrets, asking him whether they should go ahead and act on them.  We all have our hidden impulses, but we like having the Devil around to blame.

Initially horrified, Ig comes to embrace these changes almost like super powers, enabling him to uncover layers of the mysteries surrounding him.

Well, I just enjoyed the hell out of this film.  What was more-or-less a mystery gained all kinds of richness through its characters and their secrets, and through the utterly surreal story device of Ig's horns and abilities.  It's filled with genuine humor, never resorting to cheap jokes, and darkness that never resorts to bleakness.  The way the story reveals personal histories creates characters worth caring about and hoping for  Even when a plot point came up that hinted pretty strongly at the mystery's solution, I was still fascinated to find out how it all fit together.  This is just plain good storytelling, in the true spirit of fable craft.


OPENS TOMORROW

TELEVISION:


Constantine: Pilot Episode - 2014
based on the Hellblazer comics by first written by Jamie Delano,
based on the John Constantine character originally created by Alan Moore

I don't know if John Constantine has actually become "wildly popular" over the years since I walked away from comics, or if that's merely the hyperbole of the lazy and triflin' entertainment press.  The movie with Keanu Reeves was... okay ...but felt wrong, primarily because the character known to readers is a smart-mouthed demon fighter from the north of England and Keanu Reeves is, well, Keanu Reeves.  It was with extreme skepticism that I approached the new NBC series.  It just didn't (and I'm still skeptical about this) seem possible that a network TV show could have the brutal darkness and grit of the comic books I knew.  It was announced that Constantine wouldn't be shown smoking, which is not only a defining character affectation but a MAJOR plot point.  And the actor, Matt Ryan, still doesn't look quite right -- his clothes look too fresh and his dye job or wig still strikes me as costumey.

So it came as a significant surprise to me that I was intrigued and entertained for the entire pilot episode.

The story was instantly familiar to a reader of the original series like me, even if it's been transposed from England to the United States.  At least Constantine is English, as he always should have been.  The character was created by Alan Moore during his run on the Swamp Thing, and always had the quality of bringing that gloomy, rainy, Jack-the-Rippery steak-and-kidney flavor of the macabre to DC Comics' supernatural world.  Alan would probably get his ire up for me saying this (then again Alan hardly needs an excuse anymore), but I always took John Constantine to be the character most like Alan himself (prior to Promethea anyway), albeit wrapped in Sting's body.  Constantine is something of a paranormal investigator, magician (the real stuff) and "Master of the Dark Arts" towing doom in his wake.

The series opens with him in a mental hospital (per his choosing) trying to leave behind the idea that demons and ghosts and whatnot are real.  This is a man with a past of which he wishes to be unburdened, and it's not going to be as simple as disbelieving it away.

The first episode was actually a lot more fun than I remembered the comics to be, but it's hard to complain about that when you're having fun.  The episode did a fantastic job of establishing the series as well as completing a single-episode story.  It was overflowing with tone and texture, hinting at things to come without being overburdened by them, and sneaking in one hell of a tease without dwelling on all the "Guess who THIS is! Guess who THAT is!" that we got from Gotham.

You can seldom know for sure what you're going to get in the long run based on a pilot episode, but in terms of promise, Constantine's got it in spades.  Let's just hope he doesn't let us down like all those dead people he used to know.

The House Has Hot and Cold Running Ghosts

What would horror be without the occasional surprise now and then?  I'm changing things up a little today by discussing a TV show rather than a film, but then this TV show is at least as good as most horror movies, and quite a bit better than the majority.

TELEVISION:

American Horror Story
Season 1: Murder House - 2011
Created by Brad Falchuk & Ryan Murphy

I'm coming to this one a little late, but then I freely admit that I have gotten to a place in my media life where I can barely stand to watch shows on a weekly basis.  Binge viewing is really the only way to watch the serial narrative anymore.  Obviously it satisfies the "what happens next?" impulse that networks rely upon to emotionally hold viewers hostage, but I find that I simply get more out of the narrative when I'm able to follow it more consistently and deliberately.  American Horror Story has really built up its viewership (and laurels) over the past three seasons, and I finally reached the point where I was ready to invest in a new series.  Each season is an independent narrative, so I am approaching them independently in my consideration.

Season One tells the story of Murder House, an LA mansion built in the 20s and site of more murders than any one person realizes (well, maybe one person).  The story pays homage to the entire haunted house genre, without ever being overly similar to any one story.  Per the conventions of the genre, the story begins with a family moving into the house.  In this case, they are the Harmons; Tom (Dylan McDermott), Vivien (Connie Britton) and Violet (Taissa Farmiga), who bring plenty of their own emotional ghosts with them.  While they had been informed in advance that the previous owners had died in an apparent murder/suicide, and we as viewers were aware from the opening scene that a couple of redheaded brats died there in the 70s, numerous other restless spirits make themselves known -- or not-so-known -- in short order.

Also making themselves known are Constance (Jessica Lange), an omnipresent and socially inappropriate neighbor and her daughter Adelaide, whom we saw as a child in the opening scene, warning the twins of their impending doom.  Constance and Adelaide let themselves into the house so often and so casually that it took a few episodes before I was sure that they weren't ghosts themselves.  Constance clearly knows more than she's telling anyone, and several of the ghosts clearly know Constance.

The first five-or-so episodes hit the viewer pretty hard with a rapid-fire onslaught of supernatural shenanigans.  By the third episode, I couldn't fathom how the family could possibly survive all the way to the end of the series at the pace things were going, and I was partly right about that.  The pace slows down significantly once the initial rush of fear dies down.  The story bogs down somewhat as tensions between characters play out, and the character roster deepens with the revelation of more of the house's history.  By the time the Black Dahlia joins the gang, she feels entirely unnecessary (hot ghost-on-ghost action notwithstanding).  There are so many dynamics between so many characters, both living and dead, that few of them seem to be allowed to play out in fulfilling ways -- especially when so many of them hate Constance, who the producers clearly adore..

There's another pacing issue that surrounds Connie Britton's character, Vivien.  She serves as one of the primary conduits for the narrative.  She's the one with the most logical arc of disbelief to gradual understanding of her situation.  It's Vivien who actually investigates the house's history and recognizes an earlier visitor in an old photo.  She's also just the most likeable.  Violet, their sullen teen daughter is a close second, but her unwillingness to share information of react quite believably when presented with the facts weakens her position.  So Vivien is, by default, not to mention by degree of victimization, our best defined protagonist.  Then she all-but-disappears for a few episodes and it really chokes the narrative.  I get the distinct feeling that Britton may have had a scheduling conflict, because the change in structure just doesn't make sense from a narrative standpoint.

Things do pick up pace as we get closer to the end, and Violet does carry a lot more of the load, but only after a draggy spot where the structure seems to have crumbled a bit.  In fact, the pace accelerates toward the end with more and more revelations and death, but then it comes to an almost screeching halt as the final episode slowly unspools its post-climax denouement.  In this more leisurely paced aftermath, there is a lot of room for questions to come up about inconsistency and illogic.  The show's self-established rules for ghosts don't always apply the same way to all characters, or even to single characters over the span of the season.  At one point, one of the ghosts is motivated to have the house sold so that her body can be dug up from the back yard, thus freeing her, and yet most of the ghosts are not buried on the grounds and are just as trapped.  While they enjoy varying degrees of ability to manifest themselves and interact directly with the living, not one of them ever burns the house down, which seemed the logical conclusion.  In one scene, a ghost stops a loved one from committing suicide, yet is nowhere to be found in the very next scene when others ghosts decide to go ahead and kill off the very same living person.

These inconsistencies are clearly cases of the details taking a backseat to the intended story, and I get that.  I just wish that the writers had been afforded a little extra time to smooth these things out ahead of time.  Murder House clearly emphasizes character and overall narrative arc over things like obedience to their own rules and the momentum of the individual episode.  I'm actually okay with that.  The level of fear that one expects from a two hour horror movie simply would not work across a 12-episode season, and it becomes necessary to vary it a lot more.  After the initial rush, Murder House becomes much more dependent on interpersonal tension and creepiness than instant scares or growing dread.  They do, in fact, do "creepy" really damned well, and there is a greater sense of sadness in loss than almost any horror movie I can think of.  It plays to the strengths of the television format rather than simply trying to make a really long movie, and that's bound to take some rethinking and repurposing of the conventions we've been so trained to expect from the genre.

Horror needed American Horror Story.

What About BOB?

TV:
Twin Peaks - 1990-1991
Created by David Lynch



I hadn't seen Twin Peaks since it aired, over 20 years ago, before my recent foray back into the series.  The foremost question on my mind in returning to it was also voiced by others when I told them I was watching it again; "Does it hold up?"

The answer, I found, was "Yes, but..."

YES, it holds up.  Lynch's retro-iconic predilections give the show a look that doesn't age in the same way something more au currant from 1990 would look now.  Moments of big hair effectively keep it grounded in small town America, but Audrey Horne in saddle shoes, a pencil skirt and pearls will be a thing of beauty forever.  Characters are costumed, not simply dressed according to marketing arrangement.  As evolving tastes in drama go, Peaks sets itself apart again, employing a stylized form of melodrama.  Over-the-top performances remain internally consistent to the tenor of the show.

I'd venture to say that Twin Peaks was massively influential on the kind of televised dramas that would come after it.  It viewed its story in the long term, and was aware that it had a place to go.  This wasn't a case of thinking one episode at a time with cliffhangers for the sake of cliffhangers.  It built to each reveal.  I believe that Twin Peaks made shows like X-Files, Lost and even Desperate Housewives possible.  If it were made today, it would run 7 seasons on cable.

BUT it still suffers from the same ailments that troubled it the first time around.  I had hoped that the rough spots I remembered would be buffed out by my contracted viewing schedule.  While it did strengthen the narrative continuity, it still breaks down exactly where one expects it to.  The pleasant surprise is that it recovers, albeit too late to save it from cancellation.


Season One ran a mere seven episodes and created a sensation.  Director David Lynch brought his obsession with the unsavory underbelly of small town America to television, combining a supernatural mystery with a darkly satire of a soap opera filled with mood, coated in idiosyncrasy and dunked in a hot cup of the surreal.

It opens on the riverside discovery of a dead body; the local prom queen, Laura Palmer.  This is the event that brings the secret lives of the small northwestern logging town of Twin Peaks into the cold light of day.  It also brings FBI agent Dale Cooper to town.  His eccentricities fit into the town's peculiarities like a six-fingered hand in a six-fingered glove -- not just snugly, but with great unlikelihood.

The threads of the murder extend throughout the tapestry of the town, and each thread tugged upon creates new distortions in the image they have woven for themselves.  The threads pass through the high school (which no one seems to attend after the first 3 episodes), the Double-R Cafe, the Great Northern Hotel, the Packard Saw Mill, Horne's Department Store, One-Eyed Jack's (the brothel across the border), and assorted lives in between, including the local drug trade and the town's own police department.  Everyone has secrets, most of them are having affairs, and not one relationship will come through unaffected.

Now, it's not my intention to tell you the story nor to catalogue its characters.  If you've seen it, that would be redundant, and if you haven't, I'd be robbing you of the opportunity to discover them for yourself.

The first season builds up to some major cliffhanging.  Some of those mysteries aren't resolved until late in the next season.  The murder of Laura Palmer is solved -- sort of -- about a third of the way into the second season, and that's where things break down for a while.  If Laura Palmer's death was the cluster of threads tied to so many other lives, the closing of the case is like a cigarette hole burned into the tapestry. 

To build a grand mystery, the show had wrapped itself in a large and dense cast of characters.  Absent a central story, the characters were adrift.  The show gets caught up in subplots for several episodes; few of them compelling, and some downright annoying.  Out of some of these subplots, however, develop converging elements of a new mystery, itself tied into the lingering unresolved elements of Laura's murder.  Just as this is really kicking into gear, Season Two ends with another round of cliffhangers ...and the show wasn't renewed.

Which leads us to...

FILM:
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me - 1992
Written by David Lynch & Robert Engels
Directed by David Lynch



This prequel to the television series answers absolutely nothing.  It illuminates, but as it deals with events leading up to the discovery of Laura Palmer's plastic-wrapped body, it makes only the slightest nod to the mysteries of the series' end.

It backtracks to a murder only mentioned in the series; that of Theresa Banks, a girl looking much like Laura, from another Washington small town much like Twin Peaks, murdered just as Laura will be soon after.  It then shifts to Palmer herself and the situations that send her spiraling toward her own doom, finally culminating in her grisly murder and dumping in the river.  This is no spoiler.  It bleeds right into the beginning of the series, and the details are largely covered therein.

Fire Walk With Me takes advantage of its cinematic format to indulge in peculiarity even more.  It's a couple notches darker than the series and wanders even deeper into the grim and bizarre supernatural mythos of Lynch's world.  I'm not sure this is to its advantage.


I highly recommend the series.  It's rich with stories and characters one won't have seen anywhere else before.  Despite its meandering period and uncertain ending, it's still faithful to its own storytelling and adds up to more than, say (my go-to less-than-the-sum-of-its-parts series), Lost.  It's not just a show; it's an experience.

It's natural that one will want to watch the movie after the series, but one needn't feel obligated.  It repaints familiar scenery with some powerful emotional colors, but it doesn't answer the mysteries that remain, and it over-answers a mystery already solved.