Hack Jobs

After revisiting the Ginger Snaps series, I was inspired to check out a couple of other films with actress Katharine Isabelle who was so great in that series and American Mary.  This, despite the fact that both of these sub-genres -- home invasion and straight-up slasher -- are not my particular "bag."  Oh, the things a man will put himself through for a pretty face...

"Who's the leader of the gang that's made for you and me?  C-R-E, E-P-Y M-O-U-S-E!"

"What have I done to deserves this... movie?"

FILM:


Torment - 2012
Written by Michael Foster & Thomas Pound
Directed by Jordan Barker

Torment is a fairly unadorned home invasion flick, which is really little more than a slasher with the personalized paranoia of viewer vulnerability.  The threat of home invasion is Bible Truth for a large percentage of Americans.  Unfortunately, it's about as factual as the Bible, and believed by many of the same people.  But hey!  At least it sells more guns!  And shut your commie mouth about guns in the home being a greater statistical threat (BY FAR) than home invasion.

I SURE HOPE THIS DOESN'T BECOME IRONIC LATER!

Where was I?  Oh yeah, Torment.  So a newlywed couple and their son (from the widower father's previous marriage) head out to the house in the woods, because that's how these things happen.  As they're settling in, they discover that "Someone's been sleeping in MY bed!" while the house has been empty.  The sheriff comes out and essentially suggests that these things are bound to happen if you don't take better care.  As it turns out, the someone who's been sleeping in their bed is still there.  So much for checking out the house.

Throughout this first part of the film, the director actually does a halfway decent job of building some menace and tension.  There's the evident threat from the strangers, and there's also a somewhat well handled story about the young son's mistrust of his new stepmother.  Dad actually makes some mature choices, parenting his child and calming his bride's fears.  I actually had some hope at this stage.

Then, that night, the boy disappears, leaving shredded stuffed animals behind.  They assume that he's run off and go to look for him.  Everything after this is pretty much what you'd expect and I'm not going to summarize it.

This guy got off lucky

It turns out there are four kidnappers/killers, each wearing the head of one of young Liam's over-sized stuffed animals.  It's a suitably creepy effect, if overly evocative of the masks in You're Next.  Despite just having decapitated the stuffed animals, they treat the heads as though they have always been their identities, and never ever have any problem seeing through them.  In fact, the murderous "family" of killers are entirely overpowered, on top of outnumbering their victims, and the film paces its deaths poorly.  The horror trope of the bad guy suddenly appearing behind you is beaten more severely than any victim or killer in Torment.  As many bad choices as characters make, it's really irrelevant when some big hurkin' dude can silently circle all the way around you unseen and creep up behind you unheard, defying all logical sensibility.

Torment desperately wants to turn it's "family" of killers into a thing, thus accounting for the way that most if not all of them escape both death and police custody at the end.  Unfortunately, they're based on a stupid premise and reveal no actual personality.

Katharine Isabelle is completely wasted here, as are Act 1 efforts at establishing a story.  Make your own joke about "Torment" and the experience of watching it.

Kane's Back -- GET IT?  I WISH the movie were that clever.

And his front.  Can we go back to the back?

See No Evil 2 - 2014
Written Nathan Brookes & Bobby Lee Darby
Directed by Jen & Sylvia Soska

So you know how I just slagged Torment?  I don't want to take any of it back, but I need a much deeper yardstick to measure the suckage of See No Evil 2. I had low, low expectations going in, but I thought maybe there was a chance that the Soska Sisters could but a twist on it after American Mary.  But no, it was just a slasher with an overinflated impression of its ability to challenge Jason Voorhees in a Jason-Off.  As there is exactly ONE surprise in the film, I see no sense in summarizing, and will instead share a few of the thoughts that occurred to me as I endured this cinematic abortion.

The film is produced by WWE films (yes, that fake wrestling show is diversifying -- but not by much) and ultimately serves as a vehicle for one of their fake wrestlers (given that he kills everyone else).  It's pretty bad when an angry slab of hate-meat can't play an angry piece of hate-meat with conviction.  He pretty much behaves the way I'd expect fake wrestlers to behave at home, based on their sociopathic fake wrestling characters.  Evidently WWE owns the fake wrestlers "Kane" identity, so maybe it's not really big dumb guy who's the terrible actor, but "Kane" the fake wrestling character who's terrible, and big dumb guy who signed his identity away in a contract who plays him as a terrible actor.  And isn't signing your identity away a form of slavery?  Given the Tea Party's support of Linda McMahon's political ambitions, I suppose that tracks.

Whew!  Glass is unbreakable, right guys?  GUYS?

The murder character clearly has an IQ of no more than 80, and I'm just trying to be generous about that.  Whether that's the actor, the character of "Kane" or the killer character than "Kane" plays, I'm not entirely sure.  Perhaps all three of them had to team up to act that stupid.  And yet, despite all this stupidity on display, he's somehow able to predict the movements of others, think 3 steps ahead, and yet still be everywhere that they think of going, but only when they think of going there.  This isn't any freakin' Hannibal Lecter mastermind here.  He's a mental defective raised on even more mentally defective religious psychosis.

And sure, the guy is a burly, seven foot mass of muscle, but none of that makes him a goddamn shadow ninja or part cheetah, yet somehow, after being pumped full of embalming fluid, he manages to sprint 100+ yards faster than a Volvo, and noiselessly go from behind a character to behind him again.  Oh yeah, that embalming fluid.  Just one of the many things that should have killed him but didn't.  You have not earned the surprise when you betray physical reality that way.

You know exactly what happens with the next match

You know how you wanted a GI Joe or a Star Wars figure as a kid and some well-meaning but unaware relative got you Hero Soldier or Space Fighter?  That's what this is to Friday the 13th, except that Friday the 13th was never Star Wars or even GI Joe in the first place.  It was the Hero Soldier to Halloween, which sucked in the first place, making See No Evil the Fight Guy to Hero Soldier.

It's roid rage presented as a character, with all the withered nutsack and delightful personality traits to match.  And that's just "Kane."  The killer character is a couple notches up from that. 

I find it interesting that the first Seen No Evil (which I have not seen and will not see) was directed by Gregory Dark, formerly of the weirdo porn producing team, the Dark Brothers (New Wave Hookers), and See No Evil 2 was directed by the weirdo horror producing team (with edgy sexual themes), the Soska Sisters (Dead Hooker in a Trunk).  Porn would be more honorable than this ugly, stupid, nihilist garbage.

Paging Dr. Buxom

The film starts with the meek morgue worker pining for his hot co-worker, and they end up being the last two alive.  Despite working there, the dead guy knows his way around better than they do.  But while they are the last two alive, they finally share that kiss.  I couldn't help wondering how that might have worked out for them...

"Grandma, tell us again how you met!"

"Well, I was working in the morgue and Grampa worked there with me."

"No, Grandma, not how you met, but how you fell in love!"

"Oh, that old story.  Well, as you know, we were working there one night when the unkillable slab of angry hate-meat was brought in..."

"Yeah...!"

"And then he murdered my brother and all my slutty friends and our co-worker, Wheelchair Guy, and it was just so romantic, I knew we'd be together for the rest of out lives!"

Grandma wasn't far off about that.

In fact, the only surprise in the movie is that Sexy Morgue Doctor gets killed before Meek Morgue Worker.  Now you know so I've spoiled the movie for you, and saved your sanity.

Best "effect" in the movie

Now, because I believe in fairness, I will say this.  Katharine Isabelle is a lot of fun in her scenes as the Perverted Slutty Girl with her boyfriend Greasy Guy.  Times have changed and there's more than one slutty girl in slashers nowadays.  There's also a Sad Slutty Girl who crushes on Overprotective Patriarchal Brother.

I should have just walked away once the dead slab of angry hate-meat arose, because the movie had nothing fun to offer after that point.  The movie picks up immediately after See No Evil, which came out EIGHT years ago, and it's desperately obvious about thinking it deserves to become a series.  It doesn't.  Don't allow that.  You are a bad person if you give this movie your money.

Ugh.  Fuck this shitty movie.  Fuck "Kane" and fuck Vince McMahon.

REDEEM YOURSELVES, SOSKAS.


OPENS TODAY!

What It Feels Like for a Girl (Part Two: The Snappening)

As discussed yesterday, Ginger Snaps attained a certain level of cultish success, at least within horror circles, and relative to cost analyses for mid-to-low budget Canadian horror.  As is the way with horror, the idea of sequels became a consideration, however Ginger Snaps ended with a relatively conclusive story closure.  For one thing, how do you make a sequel to "Ginger Snaps" when Ginger is dead?  Well, the producers found two ways (or found writers who found ways) that differed as greatly from the original as they did from each other, and then released them both in the same calendar year.

FILM:


Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed - 2004
Written by Megan Martin
Directed by Brett Sullivan

Following the events of Ginger Snaps, Brigette is now out on her own, laying low, and struggling to keep her own lycanthropic infection at bay.  The Brigette to whom we're re-introduced is still socially reclusive, but clearly stronger and more self-reliant as a matter of maturation through necessity.  Survival is a full-time occupation for Brigette, and she meticulously charts her physical changes, dosing herself on monkshood to fight her slide toward the wild side.  She's on her own, but not totally alone.  She's haunted (and taunted) by visitations (or delusions) of Ginger, particularly when she knows she's slipping.  When she overdoses on the poison to stave off a flare-up, she awakens to find herself in rehab, cut off from the resources she needs to stay in control of herself.

To a large extent, Unleashed plays like a "Women on the Psych Ward" thriller, or alternately, a "Just Say NO to Lycanthropy" after-school special about the horrors of monkshood addiction.  Brigette has to deal with fellow patients while her grasp on self-control is slipping away, an exploitative orderly with access to her medicine, and Ghost, the strange young girl who suspects Brigette's true nature, and just might know a way out of the hospital.  To make matters much worse, she can smell the male werewolf that stalks her, eager for a mate.  This plays into some distinctly sexual connotations about controlling the beast within.

In ways, this is the most horrific of the three Ginger Snaps films.  The humor of the original really didn't make the jump to the sequels.  There are definitely some ironic beats about rehab, but none of the satirical edge that so invigorated the original.  This is Brigette, the sullen one, alone against herself most of all.  If Emily Perkins had to carry the first film, she's bench pressing this one.  Katharine Isabelle's role amounts to little more than a cameo.  That makes Unleashed much darker with a greater sense of foreboding .  It's a high definition, slow motion train wreck as Brigette fights to avoid certain doom.  The ending feels a little undeserved, but it certainly fits the narrative arc of the film and the character.

Ah, there's one more thing that bears mentioning.  I took some issue with the soggy and hairless werewolf in the first film, but the sequels seem to demonstrate that the transformation is by-and-large a much more gradual process than we're accustomed to in other movies.  The werewolves grow more hair over time, the further they move away from being human.  In fact, they turn out to be some of the wolfiest werewolves (that aren't just wolves) in any of werewolf movie I've watched.

Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning - 2004
Written by Christina Ray & Stephen Massicotte
Directed by Grant Harvey

"Together again... for the very first time!"

Rather than curing and/or resurrecting any characters for another go around, this is a sort-of prequel that inserts Ginger and Brigette into the origins of their curse.  Set in 1815, The Beginning tells the story of a time when the Wendigo's curse from native legends reached a transformative turning point on the Canadian frontier.  Traveling alone in the wilderness, the two girls with secrets behind them arrive at a frontier outpost in the dead of winter to find a dwindling troupe of soldiers and trappers with a few secrets of their own.

On one hand, this entry has the least humor of the bunch.  On the other hand, when Ginger responds to a tense and ominous dinner where simmering rage and racial, sexual & religious bigotry are on full display with "These people are fucked," it's clear that they're not taking themselves TOO seriously.

With a forest full of werewolves, an absent supply shipment and an atmosphere thick with paranoia and superstition, the Fitzgerald girls find themselves walking a precarious path between threats.  The only person who doesn't seem to be completely out of his mind is the native hunter, who just might be able to help them find some answers... if they don't all get killed first.

Ginger Snaps Back plays heavily on the threatening group dynamic.  Every interaction tugs threads of fear, tension and mistrust.  Additionally, it features the most outright carnage, closing things out with a bang.  Less is made of the sexual themes, unless you count the suspicions of the puritanical preacher (the type for whom everything is subtextually sexual) toward the girls.

If The Beginning had actually been the first film released, I doubt that Ginger Snaps would have become the kind of modest phenomenon that it did, but it's a sufficient excuse for getting the band back together one last time, and it's a dark little frontier adventure that metes out tension and a growing sense of fear from start to finish.

What It Feels Like for a Girl (Part 1)

 

So far, most of these movies have followed the Wolf Man tradition and dealt with male werewolves.  Today I'm going to look at a pair of radically different films that place women in the the fore.  The werewolf mythos has made much of the theme of male aggression in the past, but these both recontextualize the tales in uniquely feminine perspectives.

FILM:


In The Company of Wolves - 1984
Written by Neil Jordan & Angela Carter
Directed by Neil Jordan

I have to apologize right off the bat for the inadequacy of my ability to discuss In The Company of Wolves in as thoughtful a manner as it deserves.  I'm going to need to see it at least once more before I really get a grasp on just what the hell is going on here.  The film plays on more than one level and is dense with symbolism.  I can't imagine that that's all meant to be clear before one can approach it with the perspective of having seen the complete story arc, given the revelations involved.

Director Neil Jordan is still most often referenced with The Crying Game, but looking at the body of his work reveals a strong and recurring attraction to the supernatural and the imagination, which, of course, are facets of the same gem.  He's made films about vampires, ghosts, selkies (something of a were-seal in Irish legend) and here, werewolves.  Themes of transformation are also recurrent in his work, whether the mystical or the gender related.  Probably the most frequent element of all in his films is the consideration of sexuality, particularly its role in identity.  In this, Jordan's second film, all of those aspects of his directorial tastes are on full display.

This is also the second of at least nine times that Jordan has used Stephen Rea, who has done at least three werewolf movies in his career.  I don't really have a point here.  I just find it interesting in a trivial way.

The majority of the movie takes place in a young adolescent girl's dream, building up to a distinctly original reinterpretation of Little Red Riding Hood.  Now I, for a long time, have been considering the psychological, symbolic and sexual connotations of the LRRH story, but whatever I'd considered, it's clear to me now that Angela Carter had been there, written a thesis about it, then moved on to even larger considerations and implications.

Within the dream, Rosaleen's sister has been devoured by wolves; an inherent risk for "straying off the path."  Following this event, her grandmother shares with her various tales of the dangers of wolves (often while knitting for her the red shawl that she will come to wear proudly in a world of muted tones).  Over the arc of the narrative, Rosaleen goes from meek child to budding young woman, and the appeal of straying off the path grows, and the lure of wolves becomes more seductive.  Obvious parallels to sexuality are only the beginning.  There's almost certainly something about independence and identity in there too.

None of this is to suggest that you need to watch the film as part of a women's studies curriculum, mind you.  I'm sure it's perfectly possible to enjoy the movie at face value and chalk up recurrent symbols to the fingerprints of cinematic auteurism.  Visually, In the Company of Wolves is lush and beautiful, filled with stimulating imagery that needn't have meaning to be enticing.  A bird's nest filled with eggs that reveal baby figurines inside can simply be strange and surreal without symbolizing fertility, which is merely a guess on my part.

As for the werewolves, Jordan approaches them from both ends of the spectrum.  On the one hand, we have a lot of just plain wolves running around in places, although the wolves are being played by Belgian Shepherds here.  On the other hand, we have some pretty disturbing and explicit werewolf transformations, particularly the one involving Stephen's Rea's character.  The effects aren't quite as high-end as American Werewolf's or even The Howling's, although I found it to be better thought out and even more unnerving than the latter.

It's never really a distinctly scary movie, but Jordan creates such a compellingly surreal atmosphere that conveys an appropriate sensation of dreaming.  There are different kind of dreams, and some of them convey a growing sense of undefined danger and dread as they go through their paces, visiting both seductive and unnerving imagery as they lure us in.  That's the kind of dream that Jordan and Carter craft for us here.  While the overarching narrative isn't necessarily the most compelling story when taken at face value, In the Company of Wolves is a completely unique werewolf movie with more than its share of moments and ideas all wrapped in gorgeousness, which more than earns the repeated viewings it's going to take to really digest it.

Ginger Snaps - 2000
Written by Karen Walton & John Fawcett
Directed by John Fawcett

The makers of Ginger Snaps have some female oriented observations about the werewolf mythos as well, although they approach them much differently.  Key to its development is the observation that both adolescent girl and werewolves are subject to a bloody "monthly curse."

Ginger and Brigette Fitzgerald are morbid pair of Canadian sisters.  At 16 and 15 (respectively) neither one of them have yet gotten their monthly friend, a fact which is of considerable concern to their busybody mother who listens more to parenting manuals than she does to her daughters.  Between their over-engaged mother and their disengaged father, they have made a pact with each other than they will either get the hell out of Nowheresville, Ontario ASAP, or come to a drastic end trying.  In a school filled with hollow mundanity, their escape and identity is rooted in their outsider status.  Ginger is the smart-mouthed and aggressive one who balks at attention from boys.  Brigette is the silently plotting brains of the team who not-so-secretly covet Ginger's strength.  Their roles and relationships to their family, school, classmates and each other are summed up neatly with a class photo project in which they depict themselves in a variety of possible suicide scenarios.

At the precise moment when Ginger first gets her period, one night in the park, she is attacked by some sort of feral beast that drags her into the woods.  Brigette helps her to flee, and the beast is hit by a van driven by the local dope dealer.  Previously inseparable, the changes that these events trigger in Ginger will become a growing wedge between them, in a way not dissimilar to the changes that all adolescents experience.  Except this one goes to eleven.

Suddenly Ginger becomes dramatically hormonal, sprouting hair where she never had it before (never mind that it's coarse and grey, growing from the bite marks on her shoulder) and the attention of boys is more than welcome.  Brigette, meanwhile, is desperate to both save her sister from the condition about which she has growing suspicions, and to keep Ginger from leaving her behind.

Getting right to the point; Ginger Snaps is my favorite werewolf movie, period (no pun intended).  Ginger and Brigette are strongly developed characters that would be enjoyable to watch no matter what the story vehicle.  I would watch them in any variation on the high school movie, whether or not there was a monster involved.  This is due not merely to the writing, but to the powerful performances from the film's two lead actresses; Katharine Isabelle (Ginger) and Emily Perkins (Brigette).

The first time I saw Ginger Snaps, I declared (to an empty room, but still out loud), "Oh THAT girl's gonna be a star" in reference to Isabelle.  Nevermind that she's beautiful.  She exudes the same kind of magnetic "cool to hang out with" appeal that has worked so successfully for Jennifer Lawrence.  Months after watching the Ginger Snaps films (more on that later), I was watching a movie called American Mary, and without realizing that I was watching the same actress, I declared to the empty room, "Oh SHE needs to get famous," only to realize once I jumped online that it was Katharine Isabelle again.  Purely in the interest of science, let me be clear, I had not made this declaration at any point in between, and I don't run around making it about every pretty face I see.  Isabelle plays Ginger with enthusiasm, making her antisocial behavior all the more appealing.  The humor and personality with which she fills Ginger overflows in such way that you realize it's bigger than the role.  She's certainly a working actress, but Hollywood hasn't yet given her the vehicle that would really put her into orbit.

Absolutely none of this raving is intended to take anything away from Emily Perkins.  It's certainly Ginger that steals the show, but it's Brigette that carries it.  While Isabelle is tasked with the slow-motion explosion of an adolescent girl coming unhinged as she turns into a werewolf, Perkins is the one that has to hold it all together while Brigette feels her world falling apart.  She really becomes the lone protagonist and draws us close to see how she has to become her own person in the face of this cataclysm.  The role calls for range, and Perkins delivers it.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is Mimi Rogers as the girls' mother.  Several of the most laugh-out-loud hilarious moments come from her highly satirized portrayal of suburban parenting.  When the girls end up with too much blood on their hands (literally), Mom steps up with a plan to rescue them.  She's just a mom that cares, you guys!

The third act is a high tension race against tragedy, and it's here that Perkins is most clearly called upon to carry the film.  Once Ginger fully transforms, it's Brigette that we connect with and root for.  This does, however, bring up one of the less satisfying aspect of the film.  The final werewolf isn't all that we might have hoped for.  I'm not faulting the director for choosing to go the practical effects route, but the final wolf form looks kind of diseased and mutanty with wispy hair and wet, soggy flesh like a drowned and bloated molerat.  I'd be more concerned about it touching me than biting me.  Fortunately, the film isn't reliant on giving the werewolf a lot of screen time.

My only other complaint is a selfish one.  The funny parts are so funny and the sisters so personally appealing that I wanted more.  The blessing there is that Ginger Snaps attained enough cultish success to inspire a duet of sequels.  For more about those, come back tomorrow!

The Unusual Suspects

OR Axe and Ye Shall Receive

FILM

For the longest time, it was the psycho-killer, axe-murderer movies that kept me away from horror movies in general, specifically, it was the popular franchises of my high school years; Friday the 13th and Halloween.  I hadn't really seen them, or had only seen parts, but there was just no appeal there.  While I find serial killers to be disturbing enough, I find it even more disturbing that people are fans of them and want to watch murders committed in lurid detail.  Add to the realistic side of this some highly UNrealistic film treatment, and it's just a recipe for ugly stupidity.  I actually did enjoy the first 2 or 3 of the deconstructionist Scream series, primarily because it injected cleverness into the whole formula.

That said, in the interest of fairness, I did finally watch a few of the [ahem] "classics" which I was assured were better than the rest, as well as a number of fresher takes on the "slasher" sub-genre of horror.  Here is a round-up of some of the stabby-stabby murder movies I've seen in the last six months or so.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - 1974
Written by Kim Henkel & Tobe Hooper
Directed by Tobe Hooper

Discounting Psycho, this is really where it all began, and I'm not sure it's fair to hang the legacy of slasher movies on Psycho.  It's a pretty bare bones affair ( no pun intended) with the prototypical five young people on a doomed trip to the country.  The pick up and get rid of a dangerously unbalanced hitchhiker, receive warning about their isolated-house-near-the-lake plans by a creepy old-timer and stick their noses where they don't belong.  In fact, when the first 3 of the 5 youngsters technically trespass in someone else's home, it's kind of hard to feel bad for people who simply refused to pay attention to the fact that they were in Texas and reap the consequences.  In fact, they're all so unlikeable that you really have a hard time caring what happens to them.  It's really not until the third act that the film gets particularly interesting, once we're down to our last survivor.  This is where director Tobe Hooper really starts to direct hard toward the sense of fear.  It's also where the bigger picture comes together and we understand who and what Leatherface's family are.  Up until that point, my interest in the film was mostly academic.  After that point, I decided I was willing to give TCM2 a chance.

Weapon of Choice: axe, meat hook, chainsaw (natch), hammer

Halloween - 1978
Written by John Carpenter & Debra Hill
Directed by  John Carpenter

Crazy kid goes to mental hospital, becomes crazy adult, breaks out and stabs a bunch of people while wearing a creepy mask.  What Texas Chainsaw Massacre introduced, Halloween codified.  Unlike TCM, however, there's no personality in this one.  No creative kills.  It's like Old McDonald on a killing spree, with a stab-stab here and a stab-stab there.  There was ONE thing that impressed me about it, and that was a shot before the killing got started.  Before everyone knows who Michael Myers is and what he's up to, he stalks Jamie Lee Curtis, and in one shot, stands on the sidewalk in broad daylight.  THAT was the scariest thing in the movie.  A nightmare out in the open, fully lit, right in front of you.  It was a welcome diversion from all the stabs in the dark that have been the bread and butter of the slasher genre.

Weapon of Choice: butcher's knife

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 - 1986
Written by L.M. Kit Carson
Directed y Tobe Hooper

This is one weird-ass movie.  Not in the "oh so surreal" sense, but as an odd sum to its combined parts.  After the original TCM, I found myself primarily interested in learning more about psychotic family of cannibalistic white trash, who really didn't get their due until Act 3.  It was only then that TCM took on a comic element, albeit a dark, perverse sort of comedy.  The sequel certainly gives the Sawyer family more screen time, and more of that blood-caked comedy, particularly the "how the hell is he alive" crazed hitchhiker brother now known as "Chop-Top."  While he capers about like Gollum on a fish bender, family troll Leatherface gets his own subplot where we learn that he's really just a sensitive simpleton behind that face mask made of faces.  There are two other non-Sawyer primary characters.  The one we get plenty of is Stretch, the radio DJ who records a phone call from a couple yuppie punks who run afoul of Chop-Top & Leatherface on an ill-advised outing.  She becomes the object of Leatherface's perverse affections.  The other is Dennis Hopper as Lefty, a former police detective whose obsession with tracking down the chainsaw killers who murdered his nephew and drove his niece insane made him a laughingstock in law enforcement.  We don't get enough of him and his quest for vengeance, but his role in the film's climax certainly helps to make up for this.  There's an odd balance of factors at work here.  The humor & satire, the gore (much more explicit than the original), the parts that go on too long and those that don't go on long enough, the places where it's totally self-aware and the places where it's totally UN self-aware, the quotable lines; it all adds up to strong "cult fave" material.  There's also the fact that it's a Golan & Globus Cannon Film; of which I was frequently reminded though numerous little low-rent 1980s touches.  Like an abdomen ripped open with a chainsaw, there's a lot going on in here... but much of it isn't pretty.

Weapon of Choice: chainsaws, hammer, hand grenade

Session 9 - 2001
Written by Brad Anderson & Stephen Gevedon
Directed by Brad Anderson

Session 9 has been included on a few "Best Ghost Story" lists online, but they are liars.  There are no ghosts.  There, I just ruined it for you, but no more than the "shaggy ghost story" format with a lame twist ruined it for me.  An asbestos clean-up crew is called in to clean up an old, abandoned mental asylum on a tight schedule.  There are all kinds of rumors about the place, and they eventually discover some very creepy tape recordings from old therapy sessions.  The stress of their schedule, their own personal problems and the spooky tapes have them all on edge when one of the crew members disappears.  It's all ghost story build-up, filled with tedious hazmat banter and a mental break payoff.  I get that it was supposed to be a shocking twist, but it felt completely unearned.  All the creepy narrative was irrelevant and the boring filler turned out to be the real "story."  Yes, as a matter of fact I am irritated about getting jacked around.  Sure, it does a clever job of misdirection, but it just adds up to a big fat "meh" as a story when it turns out not to be what it totally swore that it was, you guys.

Weapon of Choice: orbitoclast

May - 2002
Written & Directed by Lucky McKee

May is an awkward girl.  This is framed in a flashback to her as a cross-eyed child made to wear an eye patch, which isolated her from other kids from Day One of kindergarten.  That explains some of her loneliness, but upon reflection, her oddity may have had more to do with her high-strung mother, who gives May a semi-creepy handmade doll to be her best friend, but won't let her take it out of its glass case.  So as a sweet and gentle but very poorly socialized adult, May's attempts to reach out to people become more off-putting as her desperation to connect increases.  Every time she thinks she's made a human friend, they pull the rug out from under her, and something is bound to get broken.  This is one of the most heartbreaking horror movies I've ever seen (stay tuned for another), and when May's psyche breaks as well, it's almost hard to blame her.

Weapon of Choice: scalpel

Freddy vs. Jason - 2003
Written by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift
Directed by Ronny Yu

The thing I liked about Freddy vs. Jason is that, if I was going to watch a Jason movie, at least this one had Freddy to lend some personality to it.  If I cared more about either franchise (or at all, about Friday the 13th) then I'm sure I would have gotten more out of the fan service here.  What remains is vastly stupid and deeply misogynistic (particularly the horrors visited upon the excellent-in-other-things Katharine Isabelle's character).  I have sometimes enjoyed the Elm Street films, but Freddy just seems particularly rapey this time.  Sure, if I were a not-terribly-bright teenager hopped up on purple drank, I might see the appeal of the ultraviolence, but I'm not, and there are just certain sacrifices of logic and taste that I am no longer able to make.  Well-made crap, for what it's worth.

Weapon of Choice: machete, bladed glove

High Tension - 2003
Written by Alexandre Aja & Gregory Levasseur
Directed by Alexandre Aja

The French slasher Haute Tension gambles everything on a single twist which I will not reveal here.  The premise is that two college girls, Alex and Marie, head out to Marie's family's house in the country to get some studying done over the weekend, but suddenly an axe-wielding maniac shows up and starts killing off Alex's family.  Alex is captured and it's up to Marie to save her.  This sets up a taut game of cat and mouse as she evades the killer while trying to get close enough to make her move.  This leads to the big twist via a fairly large leap of faith in the narrative.  One's ability to make this leap will determine the extent to which one enjoys the movie.  On the one hand, it IS a pretty stunning reveal and as long as you're letting a movie be a movie, it's all fair.  However, the twist DOES feel unearned and inadequately explained, which adds up to more than your usual nerdy nitpick.  I can see both sides of both sides, so I had a pretty good time, but I'd also hesitate to fully recommend it.

Weapon of Choice: straight razor, cabinet, shotgun, radial saw

Dread - 2009
Written by Anthony DiBlasi
from a Story by Clive Barker
Directed by Anthony DiBlasi

A couple college students team up to do a documentary/thesis study into the subject of fear and things get out of hand.  It turns out that one of them was witness to his parents' axe murdering as a child, and this has left him ridiculously and obviously unbalanced to everyone except the characters in the movie.  Dread wants to be an intelligent movie, but without ever using any actual intelligence.  It boggled my mind how everyone was willing to give trust and enormous amounts of slack to a character which has been pretty overt about his disintegrating psyche.  It tries to end with a shocking finale, but sanity demands that the police, which much surely exist SOMEWHERE in this town, should be following the trail of blood to his door at any moment.

Weapon of Choice: axe, revolver

American Mary - 2012
Written & Directed by Jen & Sylvia Soska

Less than half-way into American Mary, I made a silent pronouncement to myself that its star was destined for big things in Hollywood.  It was only after I finished the movie and checked IMDb (per my compulsive tendency to do so) and realized that said star was Katharine Isabelle that I remembered that I had made the exact same declaration while watching her as a teenage werewolf in Ginger Snaps.  She brings an innate personality and charisma to these roles which I have to assume comes from her, herself, much the way a, say, Jennifer Lawrence does.  They share a similar magnetism.

As Mary, she plays a med student with a promising future and lot of sass.  Desperate circumstances lead her to an involvement in meatball surgery for semi-organized criminals.  This, in turn, puts her in contact with a walking plastic surgery nightmare whose ultimate "after" picture is Betty Boop.  Through her, Mary gets involved in the world of extreme body modifications, and a personal tragedy drives her away from school and deeper into the underworld.  She helps one woman to become more completely the "doll" that she wishes to be, removing the visible lady-bits that Barbie wouldn't have, splits tongues, removes limbs, creates diabolic beasties...  In Nietzschian fashion, Mary's time with monsters has a monstrous effect on her psyche, and it starts to consumer her.

This was a truly horrific horror flick.  The gruesomeness of the body modifications is all the closer because it's something that actually exists, and I don't just mean Joan Rivers.  While initially someone that we want to like, Mary's descent is disturbing on a number of levels, but particularly because so much of it comes about from completely understandable choices.

Weapon of Choice: scalpel

Maniac - 2012
Written by Alexandre Aja & Gregory Levasseur
Directed by Franck Khalfoun

This remake of 1980's Maniac is written by the team behind Haute Tension.  It's a much more straightforward venture and wears its twist up front.  Elijah Wood stars as the titular maniac, the socially awkward owner of a mannequin refurbishment shop.  He's also quite the active serial killer; seeking out, killing and scalping beautiful young women and attaching their scalps to the mannequins with which he's populated his home... and psychotic delusions.  The twist is that virtually the entire film is shot from the first-person perspective of Frank, our killer. Not only does this make the violence particularly lurid, but it makes us complicit in his crimes.  When Frank, mid-murder, screams at the specter of his mother in his head "WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME DO THIS?" he's also screaming at us.  By inhabiting his eyes, we give him life, and our anticipation drives him to kill.  It's a deeply effective conceit.  Where "found footage" films lend a certain reality to their events by placing us within them, putting us inside the killer draws us even closer -- disturbingly close.  It wouldn't work as a sub-genre the way that found footage has (to degrees), but it works here to create a complex experience from a fairly simple story.

Weapon of Choice: knives

The Seasoning House - 2012
Written by Paull Hyett, Conal Palmer & Adrian Rigelsford from an idea by Helen Solomon
Directed by Paul Hyett

I've mentioned truly horrific horror flicks and heartbreaking horror.  This one is both.  Set amid war in the Balkans, a deaf teen girl is stolen from her home as she witnesses her mother's murder by soldiers.  She is taken, with a number of other girls, to a ramshackle house in the country to serve as forced "prostitutes" (in reality, enslaved rape victims).  Seemingly due to the large birthmark on her face, and presumably her deafness, she is singled out from the group by the house's owner and operator.  Rather than serving as a "prostitute," she is made to work as a servant, delivering food in a bucket and worse, forced to give the other girls the heroin injections which keep them docile and dependent.  If it sounds unpleasant, that's because it is.  This is real horror.

Where it becomes more storylike and less of a sad statistic that we casually ignore is when "Angel" (so nicknamed for the necklace she wears) discovers that she can unscrew the air vents and crawl about between the walls and floors.  She uses this technique to visit the one girl in the house who recognizes her deafness and can communicate with her in sign language.  When the same group of soldiers who kidnapped her and killed her mother arrive to use the house's services, Angel witnesses her new friend's brutal death -- an accepted cost of doing business with savage killers.  Giving little thought to her actions, she attacks the soldier with a fileting knife, setting her on a desperate course of survival and revenge.  Despite the intense violence of the second half, it's nowhere near as disturbing as the first.  This is the real nightmare lived, to degrees, by millions of people in the world today.  Some may call it exploitative.  I call it necessary.

My only complaint would be the abuse of unfortunate coincidences that befall her toward the end.  By that point, I had already abandoned any hope of hope as a viewer, so anything less than watching the light go out in her eyes seemed like a victory of sorts.

Weapon of Choice: fileting knife, broken glass



So there you have it.  I learned a lot from these films.  I partly learned that I've been right about slasher horror all along.  Some of it IS abysmally stupid.  I also learned that I'd been wr-- that I'd been wro-- wrrr--  I learned that it didn't have to be that way, and that fascinating stories could be told within the loose confines of stabby death movies, giving us something new and inventive beyond the means of evisceration. 

Isn't that part of what we watch movies for?