Grave Encounters (2011)

In every found-footage movie I’ve ever seen, there comes a point when the scriptwriters, “cleverly” anticipating audience objections, have one of the characters demand something to the effect of “Why are you still filming, you freak?”  There has not been a single instance in found-footage-movie history where someone has produced a satisfactory answer to that question.  I would like to suggest that maybe in future films we should just skip that exchange and stipulate that someone will always be That Freak Who Keeps Filming.

I actually wasn’t going to watch Grave Encounters, mostly because of the whole found-footage thing.  I am so done with found footage, Hollywood.  Unless your name is actually Jaume Balagueró, please stop using it.  The odds that you will actually do anything original or clever with it are vanishingly small.

However, both Unkle Lancifer from Kindertrauma and Andre from The Horror Digest reported that Grave Encounters was great fun, and I have a huge weakness for abandoned mental hospitals, so I queued it up on Netflix.

Right out of the starting gate, Grave charmed me with a hilariously spot-on parody of risible network reality-show intros.  The basic plot of the film is that a team of “ghost hunters” – who don’t seem to actually believe in ghosts, but do any of them? – are filming a ghost-hunting reality show in the abandoned Collingwood (ha) mental hospital, the history of which seems to borrow pretty liberally from the “Asylum” episode of Supernatural.  There’s some truly amusing setup in which they interview various people about ghostly goings-on (the gardener steadfastly denies having seen anything weird until he gets a cash payment, and then there are ghosts all over the place).  Then they’re locked into the hospital for the night, which turns out to be a bad move.

The first hints of weird happenings are both relatively subtle and great fun – things move when people’s backs are turned, doors slam unexpectedly, and so forth.  Then the haunting stuff started in earnest, and I was reminded of the second reason I don’t like found-footage movies: they mostly involve running and screaming (the characters) and motion sickness (me).

What I saw of it after that was pretty good.  There were places where the special effects fell down a bit – the ghost photos had more of gravy than of grave about them, and one guy apparently dies when he’s thrown down a hallway at a speed and distance that wouldn’t have seriously injured me, let alone a man half again my size.   But the actual ghosts are fun and creepy, the group’s descent into the freakout zone is well paced, and the show’s host (Sean Rogerson) shows a reserve of spine and determination entirely unexpected from someone who does reality shows for a living.  I think I would really have enjoyed it if the camera work hadn’t made me as sick as a dog.

So what’s the verdict?  Honestly?  It depends on how prone you are to motion sickness.  There were some good scares, some clever shots, a funny send-up of the reality-show industry, and fewer unlikeable characters than one might expect.  On the other hand, it almost made me lose my lunch.  If you get motion sick, I can’t entirely recommend it; at the least, you’ll need to start pacing yourself with the amount of time you actually spend looking at the movie fairly early on.  I’m giving the movie three stars on its own merits, because if you can overlook the nausea it induces it’s a pretty fun movie.  If you’re easily nauseated, though, knock off a star and weigh costs versus benefits carefully.  Or at least take Dramamine first.

The Baby’s Room (2006)

“The Baby’s Room,” one of six films on Spain’s Films to Keep You Awake compilation, is an entertaining and worthwhile (if not entirely satisfying) film from director Álex de la Iglesia.  I mention the director off the bat because the only other movie of his I’ve seen is the incoherent and tedious The Oxford Murders, so now I consider myself compensated for having sat through the latter movie.

In all honesty, the storyline in “The Baby’s Room” is not a model of coherence either.  I’m still not quite sure how exactly everything happened that happened.  (Ghosts?  Demonic possession?  Quantum physics? What?)  Fortunately, though, it’s an entertaining enough journey that I didn’t feel like I enjoyed the movie less for not having had a cast-iron grip on every single plot detail.

Sports writer Juan, his wife Sonia, and their new baby – walking away with a hands-down victory in the Most Adorable Family in the Horror Canon competition – move into a very large, very old house that should be expensive but wasn’t because (a) it needs renovating, and (b) no one lives there for very long.  I keep trying to find a house like this myself but have thus far been unsuccessful, so I guess people in horror movies are better at house-hunting on Craigslist than I am.

Soon, though, things start falling apart.  Juan and Sonia hear voices from the baby’s room over the monitor, but there’s no one there.  Juan buys a video baby monitor, sees a man actually sitting by the crib, and justly freaks out.  He becomes more and more obsessed with burglars, then with the idea that the house might be haunted, until Sonia gives up and packs the baby off to her mother’s.  This leaves Juan at the house with a wall full of baby video monitors – through which, in a wonderfully creepy set piece, he watches a man murder his wife and baby, in real time, while in the world outside the video camera Juan is alone in the house.

(While all this is going on, by the way, Juan is also having to cope with the demands of his day job.  This is a rather wondrous departure from American horror movies, where hauntings seem to be largely a problem afflicting the independently wealthy.)

Half the fun of The Baby’s Room is trying to figure out exactly what’s going on.  Is Juan seeing an old murder enacted by ghosts?  Is it a recording of the murder stored somehow in the house’s very walls?  Is it a portal to a parallel universe where Juan is actually seeing some sort of mirror-Juan with more than a few screws loose?  Is Juan just cracking up and having hallucinations?  You only actually find out the answer to one of those questions, in a Twilight Zone-ish ending that feels more satisfying than it objectively should; but if you resign yourself to going “Enh, sometimes things are ineffable,” it’s a fun ride anyway.

So what’s the verdict?  Three stars.  I think half the reason I enjoyed this as much as I did is that Juan and Sonia are so engaging.  I’d probably have been a lot less forgiving of the film’s few weaknesses if it was framed around the typical, vaguely off-putting WASP couple beloved of most horror-movie directors, living a life of suspect affluence rudely interrupted by ghosts.  (Disclosure: I watched part of 1999′s In Dreams yesterday before Annette Bening and Aidan Quinn so got on my last nerve that I had to turn it off.)  I can deal with the occasional movie where even the people we’re supposed to sympathize with are pretty unpleasant, but not a steady diet of them; so the charming and unpretentious family in “The Baby’s Room” were a welcome breath of fresh air as well as just being enjoyable to watch.

Anyway, rants about unsympathetic main characters aside, “The Baby’s Room” is definitely worth the watch.  I may have to check out the other five movies in the release.

Right to Die (2007)

And the 2007 Ed Gein Award for Least Competent Body Disposal in a Work of Film goes to… Dr. Cliff Addison!

Pity poor Cliff (Martin Donovan).  (Or don’t.  He’s a real dick.)  His wife Abbey (Julia Benson) gets hideously burned in a car accident that happened while he was driving.  He’s very sad about that, but he’s also going to be ten million dollars richer once the lawsuit against the car company goes through – unless his mother-in-law scores it with her media campaign to stop the Do Not Resuscitate order Cliff requested out of what, in fairness, certainly seemed to be a genuine desire to do right by his rather shallow wife.

Of course, that’s before he figures out that every time Abbey’s heart stops she slips the leash and starts killing people.  That realization’s a real game-changer.

“Right to Die” delivers the gory hilarity that “The Washingtonians” aimed for and missed.  Any show that gives me the glorious visual of severed body parts falling off the top of a SmartCar like plywood bits out of a broken IKEA crate pretty much wins that game; not to mention the sheer satisfaction of watching thoroughly unpleasant people die in creative ways.

Actually, I’m only assuming Abbey was an unpleasant person before the events of the movie.  I don’t even care.  I love her.  I want to have a standing Sunday brunch with her and watch her drown the barista in a terrible steamed-milk incident if he accidentally gives her soy instead of 2%.

So what’s the verdict?  Three stars.  Three and a half, let’s say.  I almost gave it four just for the sheer hilarity of the last ten or fifteen minutes.  If you like horror comedy, you’ll want to watch this one.

The Strain (2009)

Reading The Strain is weirdly like reading an alternate-universe version of Blade II, sort of like Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle is an AU of Card Captor Sakura.  So many of the same elements are there that in a way it’s impossible for the book to surprise if you’ve seen the movie:  vampirism as virus; the physical description of the vampires; the stingers on the tongues; the way they congregate underground like rats; even the UV hand grenades and the World Health Organization have cameos.  So it’s fortunate for the book, and for us, that Blade II was, hands-down, the best movie of the series.

The Strain is the first in a trilogy, the basic plot of which is this: a European vampire, one of seven “original” vampires in the vaguely Anne Rice-ean sense, comes to America on a 777, brought over by Douchebag Rich Guy;  Douchebag Rich Guy, of course, wants to live forever and has apparently never seen any of the 1023980983 horror movies on the theme of “Sucking up to powerful supernatural creatures because you want to live forever is only going to end in tears, honest to god.”  The plane lands on the runway at JFK and promptly goes dark, triggering some of the best and most tightly suspenseful scenes in the book as all sorts of government security agencies respond to what initially appears to be some sort of terrorist attack.  It’s like a 20th-century, high-tech re-envisioning of the landing of the Demeter at Whitby.

Enter the main characters: Ephraim Goodweather, CDC; his colorless girlfriend and co-worker Nora, who may be given things to do in subsequent books but is deadweight in this one; his son Zack; and Abraham (no, really; yeah, I know) Setrakian, Holocaust survivor and vampire hunter.  Ephraim is hard to convince on the whole vampire front, but it doesn’t take more than a handful of reanimated corpses trying to eat him and his loved ones before he comes around.

The book has two authors – Guillermo del Toro, director of the aforementioned Blade II, and Chuck Hogan – and it shows.  Del Toro as a filmmaker has a wonderful eye for the visual composition of a scene, a thing rarer among filmmakers than one might expect; Del Toro as a writer has a distinctly cinematic style.  I have no way of knowing who wrote what prose, but the quality is variable.  The first scenes, as mentioned, are stunning – tight-wound and brilliantly visual, superbly blocked and paced.  Unfortunately, the writing falls down in the last few chapters; it becomes clunky and weirdly mannered, as if it were written by someone who has read a lot of skilled writing and a lot of really atrocious writing without really understanding the former or having enough skill himself to avoid picking up bad habits from the latter.  The Strain would have been good for four stars if it had gone on as it started.

And if it had had a better villain, honestly.  The Big Bad here is a shadowy archetype, nowhere near as effective or charismatic as B2‘s Nomak.  He’s more reminiscent of the villain in The Keep, less a personality than a vague embodiment of OMGEVOL. It’s a shame, because of the humans, even the minor characters are immediately engaging and fully fleshed out.

So what’s the verdict? Three stars.  If whoever wrote the first scenes writes the rest of the books, that rating might go up; either way, though, I’m interested enough to continue the series.

The Midnight Meat Train (2008)

My take on this movie was colored a little by my conviction that taking pictures of random people is creepy as shit and should earn you a restraining order, not a place in a photography exhibit.  So figuring out who to get behind in The Midnight Meat Train required some extended negotiations that went something like this:

Leon, the main character: “Oh hai, chick who’s about to be sexually assaulted.  I’m going to stand here taking pictures of you while you’re being threatened with a knife, instead of screaming for a cop or something.  Because I am Edgy.”

Me:  “Wow.  I hope you die in a fire.”

Mahogany (and ouch, if that isn’t the most undignified name for a serial killer since Early Grayce):  *smashes eyeballs*

Me:  “Ew.”

Creepy Conductor Guy:  “Mahogany, that was sloppy.  I AM DISAPPOINT.”

Me:  “Jeez, how mean.  Okay, maybe I’m on Team Freakish Butcher Dude.”

Maya, The Girlfriend:  “I’m doing my best, here, but Leon’s kind of a creep.”

Me:  “Okay, maybe I’ll be on Team Girlfriend -”

Maya:  “Oh wait, I’m going to be That Stupid Horror Movie Chick and get my friend killed.”

Me: “- or maybe not.”

Brooke Shields: “Hey, I’ve aged amazingly well, haven’t I?”

Me:  “And you’re well-dressed!  Team Brooke!”

Still and all, I always enjoy Clive Barker movies, and I enjoyed this one.  Leon (Bradley Cooper) is an aspiring photographer whose avowed mission is to capture the Heart Of The City on film, which he explains to gallery owner Brooke Shields using language of such excruciating triteness  that you have to figure Barker is making fun of someone, or a whole class of someones.  Brooke rightfully sends him away with a flea in his ear, so back Leon goes into the subway to take edgier pictures or die trying.  Soon he realizes that an awful lot of his subjects are going missing, and that the same beefy guy shows up in an awful lot of those pictures – Mahogany (Vinnie Jones), the mute butcher who actually is going around slaughtering people on trains in the night.  Cue Leon’s obsession with the whole thing, a lot of pictures on actual film, and things ending badly for many, many people.

The Midnight Meat Train is probably the most overtly Lovecraftian movie of Barker’s that I’ve seen, which doesn’t thrill me because I don’t love Lovecraft, but it makes for a neat twist ending.  The performances are good, the visuals are nicely bleak, and Mahogany – who could easily have gotten shoehorned into a Generic Guy Killing People – wound up being someone I’d really have liked to know more about.  And Creepy Conductor Dude is creepy, holy shit.

So what’s the verdict? Three stars.  It can’t compete with Hellraiser or Candyman, but it’s solidly in there with Nightbreed.  I might have had trouble figuring out who to root for, but the movie kept me involved and entertained.  I have to say, though, I never understood the hate for CGI blood until now.  Yeah, Hollywood, no.  Please bring back the ketchup or whatever it was you were using before.

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I Sell the Dead (2008)

There’s not much to I Sell the Dead, but it’s an entertaining movie, funny in that very strange British way and moderately awesome.

Dominic Monaghan, who once told me my daughter was cute and therefore can do no wrong in my eyes, plays resurrectionist Arthur Blake, whose partner, Willie Grimes (Larry Fessenden), is guillotined at the beginning of the movie.  Arthur, awaiting the headsman’s block himself, is visited in his cell by Father Duffy, who has come to write down Arthur’s dying words of penitence.

(Duffy is played by Ron Perlman, who according to his imdb page is set to play Elvis in 2011′s Bubba Nosferatu.  I disapprove of this.  Bubba Ho-Tep is flawless and requires no sequel, but if it did have one, Elvis should only be played by Bruce Campbell.  No offense to Perlman, who did an effective turn as Reinhardt in Blade 2; it’s just one of those things.)

At any rate, Arthur and Willie are fairly run-of-the-mill as resurrectionists go, stealing cadavers for a creepy physician who threatens to turn them over to the police if they don’t keep him in a fresh supply.  Downtrodden, they dig up graves, raid wakes, and generally scrape by until – in one of the most hilarious scenes in the movie – they dig up a suicide at the crossroads and take the stake out of her heart.  That proves to be a bad idea, though the enterprising Willie quickly finds the silver lining and sets the zombie on the creepy doctor.

It turns out, conveniently enough, that selling the undead is more lucrative than selling the dead – but Arthur and Willie’s new career pits them against the House of Murphy, a group of homicidal whackjobs determined to control the undead trade in England.  Soon the two of them are trapped between the House of Murphy and Arthur’s grasping whackjob of a girlfriend, and the poor guys, all they want is to sell some zombies and buy a round at the pub.

So what’s the verdict? Three stars.  Fair warning, this isn’t the fastest-moving film in the world, but there are more than enough hilarious moments if you meet it at its own pace and the ending is all sorts of awesome.

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Sauna (2008)

I want to say I have no idea what in the hell just happened, but strictly speaking, that’s not true.  I know what happened; I just don’t know how or why, or whether my confusion is due to the movie or to my own complete lack of knowledge about Finnish bogeyman mythology.  (Wikipedia was unhelpful on the topic of sauna demons.)

In 1595, the end of a 25-year war between Russia and Sweden requires that borders between the two be redrawn.  A border-mapping team consisting of three Russians and two Swedish brothers sets out on a trek to figure out what borders should be where.  As a plot concept, this seems like it should be right up there with trade blockades around the planet Naboo on the “Really?  You’re basing  a movie on that, really?” scale, but it’s as good an excuse as any to send a group of people out into the back of the Blair Witch beyond.

The two Swedes are Eerik (Ville Virtanen) and Knut (Tommi Eronen). Eerik is a soldier, tired of war and yet unable to let it go, who keeps a disturbingly accurate tally of the number of people he’s killed.  Knut has spent the war in the 16th-century equivalent of grad school and hopes to receive a posting as a professor when they return; this appears to be a rare excursion out of the ivory tower for him, and he’s pretty disturbed at the things his brother does.  After a violent and rather traumatic encounter with a peasant family, he starts seeing creepy visions somewhat reminiscent of The Ring.  As if that wasn’t bad enough, the team happens upon a strange village in the middle of a swamp, with a population exactly equal to Eerik’s kill tally.

The people in the village are very, very clean.  (I didn’t actually notice this until one of the characters pointed it out.)  They’re also afraid to give birth or die, because either one will cause them to have to go into the saunas that are lurking in the swamp looking weirdly like concrete bunkers.  Of course, whatever it is that’s lurking in the saunas waiting to wash people clean of their sins whether they like it or not doesn’t really care what they’re afraid of, and with the border team’s arrival things start going to hell very quickly.

Seriously, what is that made of? Is it concrete?  I feel like apes should be dancing around it while Also Sprach Zarathustra plays.

The movie is beautifully filmed, strangely paced, not strictly linear in timeline, full of weirdly surreal moments, horribly sad at the end, and damn creepy.  I suspect it of keeping the viewer off-balance on purpose by skating around the edges of familiar genre cliches without ever falling in.  I don’t know if Eerik’s sins were so great that they spilled out in horrific collateral damage onto everyone around him or what the deal was.  I do know that I thoroughly enjoyed watching whatever it was that was going on.

So what’s the verdict? Three stars.  I can’t decide if I’m really, really glad I was sober while watching this or vaguely sorry.  It’s a slow, cerebral movie that still manages to inexorably ratchet up the dread all the way through, and the relationship between the two brothers is ultimately heartbreaking.

Also, there should be way more period horror films in this world.  I’m sort of hoping for Romans next.  Ooh, or Egyptians.  Or Harappans, I don’t even care, there should just be more of them.

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Red Sands (2009)

Doesn’t that DVD cover look like something you’d roll your eyes at and skip over in the Blockbuster straight-to-DVD ghetto?  Between the cover and the Netflix description I was expecting mild entertainment, maybe something so bad it’s mockable.

Well, surprise – Red Sands is awesome.

Not perfect, to be sure.  It starts out with a screen of explanatory text that is not only redundant with later dialogue but indeed repeated almost verbatim.  The opening almost but not quite gives away the ending, or at least gives away the body count.  (Which, if nothing else, saved me from spending an hour and a half going “NOOOOO DON’T DIE ALDIS HODGE!”)  But from there, it proceeds pretty darn well, with some good scary tension and a couple of moments so clever that I might actually have gone “Ooooh!” at them.

The plot, in Netflix’s defense, is something of a classic.  A group of American soldiers in Afghanistan, in the process of checking out a hilly area, stumble across an ancient statue carved into the rock.  The Geeky Translator (Callum Blue)  fills them all in about the Djinn, how they were created by God out of fire and basically have to be contained in *cough* statues or whatever because they hate all humans and will gleefully rip them apart if let out.

So of course the Company Asshole (Brendan Miller) hauls off and shoots the statue.  Just because.  In a rather surreal moment, the other soldiers rip him a new one for destroying antiquities.

“Courage, men, the Grail is here somewhere!”

The soldiers are then sent to a brick house out in the middle of the desert to keep an eye on a road.  There isn’t a road.  There are a bunch of dead, fried-to-a-cinder bodies, which the soldiers bury out back, blaming their crispy condition on a white phosphorous bomb.

No sooner do they get there than their communications equipment starts malfunctioning and playing weird messages; the translator and the staff sergeant (Leonard Roberts) start having flashbacks to People They Killed By Mistake, Oops; there’s an enormous sandstorm; and an Arab woman (Mercedes Masohn) stumbles into their bunker, not speaking any language the interpreter knows.

See, I would probably have given her some water and politely shown her the door as soon as the storm was over, but the soldiers let her hang around.  No one seems to think this is a good idea, the audience least of all, and sure enough, it isn’t.

This is the start of a wonderfully clever shot.  I’m not going to spoil it for you, because I want you too to watch it and go “Ooh, nifty!”

The cinematography in Red Sands was a thing to behold.  I didn’t love the obligatory shaky-cam shots, but the night shots are lit in green, almost like you’re watching them through a night-vision scope, and that was a nice touch.  The exterior shots really accentuate the feeling of being stuck somewhere unsafe in the middle of nowhere.  The pacing was effective too – once things start going to hell and the body count starts racking up, the action is tight and claustrophobic, and the men are in as much danger from each other as from the Djinn.  The acting is above par, with Final Guy (Shane West, Tom Sawyer from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) turning in a very effective confused-yet-competent performance that’s a nice change from Final Girls who seem to survive by the grace of God and a lazy scriptwriter.

The end has a nice little Twilight Zone twist that I didn’t see coming at all.  I was like “OH I C WHAT YOU DID THAR!” and caused my cats to look at me funny.

So what’s the verdict? Three stars.  I might actually buy this one for the collection if I can find it somewhere cheap.  Good action, light on the gratuitous gore, and you really cannot go wrong with Aldis Hodge, so.

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Madhouse (2004)

Well, that was a fun surprise.

I found Madhouse streaming on FEARNet, so we should probably establish that my expectations for movies that stream free over the internet are about as high as my expectations for the average YouTube video of a teenager singing into her hairbrush along with Mariah Carey.  As long as no one actually utters the words “Run!  Save yourself!” you’re pretty much golden.

This one looked like it might be kind of entertaining, though.  Joshua Leonard (also known as The Least Annoying Blair Witch Kid, Not That That’s Saying Much) plays Clark Stevens, newly arrived at Cunningham Hall Mental Health Facility to do an internship.  He quickly finds out that the staff are as strange as the residents, and in some cases hard to tell apart from them. The head nurse (Dendrie Taylor) is a taser-wielding Nurse Ratched type; the security guard (Christian Leffler) is a violent whackjob; the head doctor (Lance Henriksen, who has been in so many movies I think he must have cloned himself at some point) is clearly keeping Dire Secrets that probably involve Nazi medical experiments; and the Cute Social Worker (Jordan Ladd, otherwise known as Cheryl Ladd’s Daughter My God Where Does the Time Go) is on antipsychotics because she’s schizophrenic but just a little, okay?

Not long after Clark gets there, the head nurse is killed via a sort of do-it-yourself electroshock treatment that causes her to chew off her own tongue.  In the process of questioning the patients on the disturbed ward, Clark discovers a prisoner in an ostensibly empty cell who has a lot of cryptic Hannibal Lecter-like pronouncements to make.  Oh, and Clark starts seeing a kid who may or may not be a ghost.  The more he investigates, the weirder things get (and the higher the body count goes), until he finds himself seriously considering the possibility that the hospital may be haunted.

The introductory scene is one of those strange OMGGHOSTS montages with all sorts of fast cuts, fast motion, and stark lighting.  I love it, I’m not going to lie, but I have no idea what it had to do with the rest of the film.

Madhouse is a fun movie; at 90 minutes there isn’t really a chance for the pace to drag, and it doesn’t.  It’s direct-to-video for a reason, make no mistake.  I can’t even tell you the movies it’s derivative of without giving away the plot twist, but there are so many of them that you could make a drinking game out of spotting them.  (There’s one character billed as “The Tranny” who I think is more of a drag queen, but all I could think of whenever he was on the screen was “He’s not a transsexual.  He thinks he is.  He tries to be.”  Well, that and “Dude, he’s in lockdown in the basement of a mental hospital, where the hell is he getting all that makeup and the eyebrow tweezers?”)  The production values occasionally make it look made-for-TV.  The very end doesn’t actually make any sense.  But the acting is good and it’s entertaining, so my conscience would be clear recommending it for a rainy afternoon when you can’t face playing Silent Hill one more time.

Ghost Kid is pissed because he has to spend eternity in the suit he wore to his cousin’s wedding.  In 1842.

So what’s the verdict? Three stars.  I don’t mind if movies are hugely derivative, usually, as long as they’re entertaining while they do it, and this one is.  If the only Silence of the Lambs you want to watch is the one with Anthony Hopkins in it, though, you’d probably better do that instead.

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