Horror Movies Seen As Pithy Life Lessons

• Phantasm: Don't have sex in a cemetery at night.
• The Night of the Living Dead: Frankly, just avoid cemeteries altogether.
• Dracula: Beware of illegal immigrants.
• Frankenstein: Early childhood education is vitally important to the development of a child.
• The Exorcist: Don't become a Roman Catholic priest: Low pay, high mortality rate.
• The Nightmare on Elm Street series: Don't take justice into your own hands, especially if it involves burning an alleged felon to death.
• The Friday the 13th series: Don't have pre-marital sex.
• The Hallowe'en series: Seriously, don't have pre-marital sex.
• Cujo: Have your pet regularly vaccinated for rabies and other diseases.
• The Omen: The Italian health-care system is a mess.
• The Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Home gardening can be a life-changer.
• The Day of the Triffids: Green energy is bad.
• Gremlins: Have your pets spayed or neutered.
• Pet Sematary: If you have young children, don't live close to a road.

Claustrophobia

Wind Chill (2007): written by Joseph Gangemi and Steven Katz; directed by Gregory Jacobs; starring Emily Blunt (Girl), Ashton Holmes (Guy), and Martin Donovan (Highway Patrolman): A car-sharing ride from Pennsylvania to Delaware for Christmas Break goes horribly awry thanks primarily to the fact that the driver is a stalkery loner who has a crush on passenger Emily Blunt. 

However, the movie's more interested in the supernatural than in stalkery, slashy real-world goings-on, and that makes Wind Chill worth watching. The generic title doesn't help matters, especially as wind chill isn't much of a factor -- it's really just cold and snow and a crashed car, within which about 50% of the movie's scenes take place.

The writers go a couple of times too many to the Well of Dreams That Seem To Be Real, but things are otherwise quite, um, chilling. Portions of the story play effectively with various Urban Legend tropes concerning stopped cars and sinister cops, with a nod to the movie's Urban Legend qualities coming in the unnamed status of our two principals, who remain simply 'Guy' and 'Girl' for the movie. Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes do decent work as the 'couple,' and the outdoor scenes manage to be sufficiently chilly and forlorn. Recommended.

JeruZalem  (2015): written and directed by Doron and Yoav Paz; starring Danielle Jadelyn (Sarah Pullman), Yael Grobglas (Rachel Klein), Yon Tumarkin (Kevin Reed), and Tom Graziani (Omar): Loopy found-footage film with an anomalous 'Z' in the title. Yes, the 'Z' is there to cater to World War Z fans. But the monsters in this Israeli production aren't zombies. Jerusalem itself is really the on-location star of this film. 

The two Jewish-American 20-something women who visit Jerusalem on holidays have a good time at first before all Hell breaks loose, though not before the protagonist has taken off her footage-filming iGlasses so that we can get a look at her nekkid. Hoo ha! 

The whole thing ends up being a plea for people of different faiths to get along set against a background of apocalyptic destruction. I enjoyed it, especially its non-zombie components. More nudity might have been nice. Recommended.

Quarantine (2008): adapted by John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle from the movie Rec, written by Jaume Balaguero, Luiso Berdejo, and Paco Plaza; directed by John Erick Dowdle; starring Jennifer Carpenter (Angela), Steve Harris (Scott), Jay Hernandez (Jay), and Johnathon Schaech (George): Effective Americanization of the Spanish horror movie Rec throws out Roman Catholicism in favour of a more bioterroristic explanation for the horrors that await the cops, paramedics, film crew, and residents in an L.A. apartment building within which they're trapped under quarantine. 

It's another found-footage movie, and as such it plays better on a small screen (or at least less vertiginously). Jennifer Carpenter's character gets annoyingly reduced to screaming, Fay-Wray stand-in for the last third of the film. Admittedly, who wouldn't scream while being assailed by blood-thirsty, super-strong plague victims at every moment? The original was superior, though not by as much as horror cognoscenti like to pretend. Recommended.

Problems in the Canadian Backwoods

Solo: written and directed by Isaac Cravit; starring Annie Clark (Gillian), Daniel Kash (Ray), Richard Clarkin (Fred), and Steven Love (Marty) (2013): Surprisingly competent straight-to-video cheapie filmed in the terrifying woodlands of Ontario, Canada. 17-year-old Gillian, nursing some tragedy that one knows will be revealed before the end credits, takes a job as a camp counselor somewhere in Ontario's cottage country. She knows nothing about camping.

Before the kiddies arrive, new counselors have to spend two nights alone on a small island to prove their camping ability. As all the counselors seem to be at the camp when this Solo occurs, I guess that either the camp never hires more than one new counselor a year, or the experienced counselors have a lot of down time before the kiddies arrive.

Anyway, 25 years earlier, a girl disappeared on that island, never to be seen again. Now, it has a reputation as being haunted. Man, this is the best summer job ever! So Gillian goes camping, and various things happen.

Annie Clark does a solid job as Gillian, and the rest of the acting is fine. The plot creaks a bit at times -- there's nothing really new here, but writer-director Isaac Cravit shows talent throughout. And at about 80 minutes, the movie certainly doesn't overstay its welcome. Lightly recommended.


The Name of the Game: written and illustrated by Will Eisner (2001): One of the American comic book's seminal giants, Eisner's career went from the late 1930's to the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. He's an unavoidable figure in comics.

This late-career graphic novel is a fine example of Eisner's strengths and weaknesses. It traces the fortunes of several Jewish-American families from the middle of the 19th century to the 1970's. The 'Game' of the title is marriage, arranged and otherwise, through which families rise and fall.

For most readers, The Name of the Game will be a historical primer on the Jewish experience in the United States, centred on the various nationalaties of the immigrants, and on the hierarchies within the overall Jewish community. How and why these hierarchies occur and then mutate slowly over time is one of the book's most fascinating and illuminating strengths.

Its other great strength is Eisner's consummate skill at propulsive story-telling. The art and the dialogue carry one through the story effortlessly. It's a testament to Eisner's control of the graphic medium and to his facility with simple, unadorned prose that a book with so much historical information nonetheless zips by. I read it in one sitting, and really wanted more when it was over.

The problem? As with pretty much all of Eisner's non-genre work, there's an essentially superficial, glib, and melodramatic approach that surfaces again and again. A couple of sequences cross so far into bathos that they become inadvertantly comic, making the death of one major character feel like the punchline to a really bad joke.

The bathetic elements don't detract from the fact that Eisner was a master of comics form and structure. He wasn't a deep thinker -- but he was a consummate model of storytelling and entertainment. Recommended.

Minotaur

The Cabin in the Woods: written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard; directed by Drew Goddard; starring Kristen Connolly (Dana), Chris Hemsworth (Curt), Anna Hutchison (Jules), Fran Kranz (Marty), Jesse Williams (Holden), Richard Jenkins (Sitterson), Bradley Whitford (Hadley), and Sigourney Weaver (The Director) (2011): In a perfect world, The Cabin in the Woods would, at the very least, get a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination for 2012. But it's a horror movie and it's a comedy, so it won't. Nonetheless, it is a humdinger.

Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, who worked together on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, conjure up something special here: a postmodern, metafictional slasher movie that also works as a nifty addition to the Cthulhu Mythos and as a commentary on the tastes of both horror audiences and horror-film makers. Light-footed and well-acted, it never becomes leaden and it never punches the audience in the face with its cleverness. It's a Charlie Kaufman film without the underlying pomposity.

Five college students on Spring Break go to a cabin in the woods. And then...well, frankly, you should experience it yourself. The ads and trailers for the movie gave way too much away as it is. Like the Scream movies, The Cabin in the Woods plays with cliches of the modern horror film. Unlike the Scream movies, it never becomes what it parodies. As one character realizes, "We are not who we are."

If nothing else, this may be the first horror movie that could be read as a metaphor for U.S. drone strikes on targets in Pakistan. Or I may be overthinking it. But you'll never look at a bank of elevators the same way again. Or a Japanese horror movie. Highly recommended.

Coma Chameleon

Insidious, written by Leigh Whannell, directed by James Wan, starring Patrick Wilson (Josh Lambert), Rose Byrne (Renai Lambert), Ty Simpkins (Dalton Lambert), Barbara Hershey (Lorraine Lambert), Lin Shaye (Elise Rainier), Leigh Whannell (Specs) and Angus Sampson (Tucker) (2011): Surprisingly 'old-school' ghost story given that the writer and director are best known for their work on the hardcore Saw films. If it weren't for the last twenty minutes and the subsequent, exhausted 'twist' ending, this would be a really solid film.

Young Dalton Lambert goes into a medically inexplicable coma. His family searches for answers. Weird things happen. A psychic is consulted. More weird things happen. That's the movie with the major twists and revelations unrevealed.

Wan and Whannel get a lot of productive mileage out of showing little and suggesting a lot, of quick scares and odd things lurking in the outskirts of the frame. The cosmology introduced by the psychic to explain what's going on makes a certain amount of sense, though it's not developed enough to be all that convincing for long. A visual homage to Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is a bit jarring; that one supernatural entity looks an awful lot like Darth Maul undercuts a certain amount of tension.

Rose Byrne is a stand-out as the worried mother. Byrne's face in repose tends to look sad anyway -- I think it's her eyebrows -- and the look suits the material. Patrick Wilson is fine as the father, who has supernatural secrets of his own, though he appears to lose about 50 IQ points in the last twenty minutes. When the psychic tells you not to draw attention to yourself, don't run around yelling at every supernatural entity you encounter, that's all I've got to say.

The movie also joins the horror sub-sub-sub-genre of 'Monsters who love novelty songs,' as one entity really likes Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe Through the Tulips," which was already terrifying enough on its own. Hell's playlist must be really awful. Recommended.

Docudramamine

Paranormal Activity 3, written by Christopher B. Landon, based on characters and situations created by Oren Peli, starring Chloe Csengery (Katie), Jessica Tyler Brown (Kristi), Lauren Bittner (Julie), and Dustin Ingram (Randy Rosen) (2011): The 'documentary/found footage' subgenre of horror films, so popular right now, harks back to the 19th-century beginnings of what we now recognize as the horror story. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was told in the form of letters and diary entries; Bram Stoker's Dracula added fake newspaper clippings to that mix; Edgar Allan Poe played with fiction and fact within stories that were sometimes published as 'fact.'

H.P. Lovecraft moved the documentary style in a more holistic fictional direction, having his narrators tell ostensibly true tales about fictional events and mythologies and framing everything inside the conceit that the fiction was the real truth about the universe, and recognized fact the fiction.

I have a great fondness for these attempts at documentary horror -- at their best, they're much better than almost every other filmed attempt at horror in the last twenty or thirty years, in part because they move so resolutely away from the grapohic violence of the slasher films that have dominated the horror film genre since the late 1970's. Suggestion and subtlety are what work best in these movies, and Paranormal Activity 3 comes up with some lovely moments of 'found' horror.

The fictional backstory of the three Paranormal films situates the entire narrative within the subtext of long-term child sexual, physical and emotional abuse, abuse that spans generations and is part of the horror. It's a classic example of Stephen King's 'sub-text school' of horror, in which the supernatural stands in for something too mundanely awful to be depicted on film.

Thankfully, one can also say 'pooh!' to sub-text and simply enjoy the movies as a depiction of the pervasive and perhaps unkillable influence of supernatural evil. That the threatened protagonists are spiritually and intellectually unsuited to a confrontation with elemental and generational evil is part of the point of the movies, I think -- no one is coming to save them because they're too dumb, or too conditioned to an unintellectual passivity, to make any real effort to save themselves. They're reactive, not pro-active.

I won't bother with the plot of the movie, or even the characterization. It all makes more sense if you've seen the first two films, though if you haven't you may be a lot more shocked at some of the plot developments. There is clever, killer use of a camera mounted on a rotating fan within the story world, with menace building as we move at a set pace back and forth from foyer to dining room and back again, and things start to appear that shouldn't be there.

There's also one of the smarter, more realistic character reactions to a haunting that I've seen in some time -- a secondary character seems to have seen Eddie Murphy's hilarious bit about The Amityville Horror and reacts accordingly when threatening weirdness occurs. Highly recommended.

Attack of the Scottish Blob

X, The Unknown, written by Jimmy Sangster, directed by Leslie Norman, starring Dean Jagger (Dr. Royston) and Leo McKern (Inspector McGill) (1956): Tight little Hammer science-fiction horror film from the mid-1950's, seemingly consciously constructed to resemble the proto-Doctor-Who Quatermass tv serials and movies (the title recalls the title of the then-recent Hammer Quatermass picture, The Creeping Unknown).

Atomic scientist Royston ultimately becomes the only thing standing between an intelligent radioactive blob and global armageddon. The blob, which apparently lives somewhere in the Earth's molten mantle or core, surfaces in Scotland and starts heading for every available radiation source, which it then slurps up.

This would be fine if it didn't kill any human being in its way. The blob is pretty much a big, radioactive brother to the Horta in the original Star Trek episode "The Devil in the Dark": even its malevolence is in question, as its mere proximity to a human being kills that person due to heat and radioactivity. For all we know, it's just on vacation.

There's an enjoyable ruthlessness to this movie that probably wouldn't exist now, at least if it were a studio picture -- a young boy actually dies of radiation poisoning, foregrounding the menace. The filmmakers wisely keep the blobby thing off-screen as long as possible, and when we do see it, we don't see it much (a scene of the blob destroying power lines shows us just how limited a budget the filmmakers were working with). There's also a shocking level of violence for the time period -- two victims melt pretty convincingly before our eyes.

The science is hooey, delivered quickly and with conviction. The performances by Jagger and McKern are solid and professional, lending verisimilitude to what is, after all, a Shaggy Blob story. The film ends with a tiny lack of closure, in keeping with its overarching story concern with the gaps in human knowledge when it comes to the fundamental atomic forces of the universe. A fun 80 minutes. Recommended.

Target That Explosion And Fire!

It! The Terror from Beyond Space, written by Jerome Bixby, directed by Edward L. Cahn, starring Marshall Thompson (Carruthers), Shirley Patterson (Ann Anderson), Kim Spalding (Van Heusen) and Ray "Crash" Corrigan (It) (1958): I salute the B-movie makers of the 1940's and 1950's for being able to make enjoyable movies that clock in at under 90 minutes. Actually, this one clocks in at less than 70 minutes. And that's with a mostly unnecessary frame-narrative involving expositional press conferences back on Earth.

About 90% of this movie takes place on a rocket ship headed from Mars to Earth. It's just picked up the last survivor of the first Mars manned mission (in 1973, no less!), Colonel Carruthers. He maintains that a mysterious monster killed the other members of his crew. Nobody believes him. Guess who's right? Veteran science-fiction writer Jerome Bixby writes a solid script with some wackiness, while the direction is tense and suggestive rather than literal most of the time. The filmmakers do what they can with a very limited budget, and the suspense remains pretty tight for the entire movie.

Many moments anticipate Alien and Aliens and any number of other monster movies in which a seemingly indestructible creature stalks humans in an enclosed space. Almost every movie ever made along these lines seems to owe a debt to Canadian Golden-Age science fiction writer A.E. Van Vogt's seminal 1940's novellas "Black Destroyer" and "Discord in Scarlet" -- indeed, the makers of Alien paid Van Vogt an out-of-court settlement because of the similarities between their movie and his novellas.

The monster looks about as good as any humanoid monster of the 1950's ever looked -- rubbery and a bit goofy, but fine as long as it remains in the shadows. The spaceship crew is hilariously trigger-happy, firing off wildly inside the spaceship (which ain't that big), setting off grenades, setting off gas bombs, and in general doing things that should pretty much result in their immediate deaths, monster or no monster. One astronaut even fires off rounds from a bazooka during the final battle. Did I mention that the ship consists of four levels, each of them maybe 30 feet in diameter?

Hilarity will also probably ensue when you realize that the all-female medical staff of the ship is also in charge of serving food and beverages. This is what I went to medical school for?

The title is, of course, misleading -- it should really be It! The Terror from Mars. Marshall Thompson, who plays Carruthers, bears an uncanny resemblance to Tim Robbins, who was in the much worse Mission to Mars movie decades later. Recommended.

Amityville Horror All Right!

The Amityville Horror, written by Scott Kosar, based on the screenplay by Sandor Stern, based on the book by Jay Anson, based on material by George and Kathleen Lutz, directed by Andrew Douglas, starring Ryan Reynolds, Melissa George, Chloe Grace Moretz, Jesse James and Philip Baker Hall (2005): The original Amityville Horror (1979) was a financially successful, dramatically awful horror movie whose only greatness may lie in the Eddie Murphy comedy bit it spawned ("GET OUT!" "Too bad I gotta go!").


The "true story" it's based on has since turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by the Lutz family, though the original murders were tragically real. Subsequent residents of the house in question, in Suffolk County, New York, have reported nothing unusual about the house other than the hordes of tourists that stop by to look at it. Hoo ha!


This movie looks a lot better than the original, not much of a feat considering how crappily 70's the cinematography was in that original shitfuck. It's shorter, which pretty much eliminates any building of suspense. And it cuts the one scene I (and Stephen King in Danse Macabre) would cite as the first film's one moment of fully realized suburban terror, an incident in which the House appears to steal much needed money from George Lutz, cash needed to pay for a wedding. That was a good scene. So they don't even try to duplicate it.


So far as I can tell, the screenwriter realized how bad the original material was pretty early on and so decided to remake The Shining instead. I shit you not. So this is basically The Shining as written and directed by moronic hacks and produced by Michael Bay (seriously on that last one). Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George are spectacularly miscast as a young couple in the 1970's -- Reynolds's hairless hard-body alone pretty much erases all suspension of disbelief.


Philip Baker Hall struggles manfully with the underwritten priest part which caused Rod Steiger to devour the scenery in the original, and we don't even get the spectacularly bizarre bit involving Kathy Lutz's nun sister. Or the bit where the demon, its red eyes clearly light bulbs, perches at the window to glare at the Lutzes. Or the crazy part about the doorway to Hell in the basement.


Come to think of it, at least that godawful 1970's movie was sorta fun; this one is just sorta boring. The remake does have a terrific bit of fucked up continuity, though. At the end, Kathy Lutz spends all day at the Amityville library researching the house. When she returns home that night, George has turned into Mr. Cuckoobanana. What seems to be a real-time ten minutes of shenanigans ensues which ends with the family taking off in their motorboat...at which point the sun comes up. Because in Amityville, the nights are about 20 minutes long. Really not recommended.