The House of the Devil (2009)

I remember when House of the Devil first came out.  It seemed like every horror blogger in existence went nuts over it.

“Watch it!  You’ll love it!” they said.

“Scariest movie that was ever scary!” they said.

You guys.  I did not love House of the Devil.  Also, I am pretty sure that at some point in my life I have seen scarier Kleenex commercials.

I mean, for about the first ten minutes it has a certain retro charm.  (“OMG, she’s using a phone booth!  How quaint!”)  But even quaint needs a good lead character as a hook to hang from, and Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is just.  Boring.  Wow, is she boring.  I couldn’t even concentrate on her long enough to dislike her.

Even if you can get past that, you run into the second problem: the movie is a tribute to 80s movies, and it’s a little too good at it.  Some people see that as a plus.  I myself do not see it as a plus unless you’re willing to not only suspend disbelief but also pretend that you’ve never seen another horror movie in your entire life.

The problem is that the movie just contains too many elements that it’s impossible to view unironically in a post-Scream world.  The characters are not only dazzlingly stupid, they’re dazzlingly stupid in exactly the ways that have been lampooned so many times and so effectively that now they’re just tedious, like a joke that was funny every time you heard it until you heard someone explain it in excruciating detail.  House of the Devil really requires you to completely suspend your sense of irony for 95 minutes, but it never gives you a reason to other than “Hey, let’s watch an 80s-style horror movie unironically!”  If I wanted to do that, I’d watch an honest to God 80s horror movie.  I’m sure there are some I haven’t seen, and a lot of them are probably even good ones.

And speaking of 95 minutes, Judas priest.  This was the longest 95 minutes I have ever sat through, including my college graduation and that time I gave birth.  Of those 95 minutes, I swear at least 50 are devoted to Samantha wandering aimlessly around the house where she’s supposed to be babysitting (where, of course, there actually is no baby and Strange and Evil Things are going on instead).  No, I’m serious.  I got so bored watching her wander around the house that I got up and started wandering around my own doing chores.

I went in the kitchen, loaded up the dishwasher, started it running, and came back.  She was still wandering around the house.

I shifted a load of clothes from the washer to the dryer, started another load of clothes, and came back.  She was still wandering around the house.  Oh, wait, now there’s going to be a Tom-Cruise-in-Risky-Business montage where she bops around the house to bad 80s music.  Okay, at least I wasn’t bored during the thirty seconds where I was cringing in horrible embarrassment for everyone involved with this movie, but at a terrible price.

I grabbed the clothes from the dryer, folded them, put them away, and came back.  Samantha was still wandering around the house I am not even joking right now.

Now, it’s possible that while I was off doing more entertaining things like laundry, things happened that – had I been present for them – would have contributed to a growing atmosphere of creepiness and dread.  It’s possible.  It’s possible that if you pay very close attention to a wall full of drying paint, every now and then messages from Elvis in the beyond will fade briefly into being and then vanish.  I don’t know; I’ve never met anyone who had the patience to actually watch paint dry.  I can’t believe in my heart of hearts that anyone has ever had the patience to sit and watch House of the Devil all the way through, either.

The end at least has a faster pace, in that there’s a fair amount of blood and a flurry of activity that would probably be more memorable had I actually had even a modicum of interest in anyone involved, and if I hadn’t already been paralyzed from boredom and Downy inhalation.  If I recall correctly, it has one of those ambiguous 80s endings that worked very well in genuinely good movies like Halloween or Friday the 13th, but here just adds to the annoyance.

So what’s the verdict?  One star.  Yes, I gave House of the Devil the same rating as The Haunting of Molly Hartley.  In fact, it should probably have gotten a lower one, because Molly Hartley at least had enough oomph to make me actively want to beat every character in the movie with a claw hammer; but that would have put it at the same rating as Frayed, and no horror movie I have yet borne witness to is as bad as Frayed, or if it is then I’ve repressed the memory.

House of the Devil is an endurance test, the Marathon des Sables of boredom tolerance, surpassing even the tedious Paranormal Activity in the sheer depth of its need to be edited down to a five-minute short like the Pixar lamp cartoon.  If you watch it, which I can’t recommend, be sure you’re stocked up with knitting, good books, and Angry Birds on your phone.

Paranormal Activity (2007)

Paranormal Activity has more in common with The Blair Witch Project than just the found-footage conceit.  Like BWP, PA has exactly one effective moment, right at the very end; the rest of it consists of twelve thousand four hundred and six grinding hours of tedium and motion sickness, so that by the time the effective moment rolled around I was so pathetically glad to see it that the effectiveness of the moment was lost in my appreciation of its effectiveness, if that makes sense. It’s hard to be scared when you’re sitting there going “OH THANK CHRIST AN EFFECTIVE PIECE OF FILM-MAKING AT LAST, HOW DID THAT EVEN ACCIDENTALLY HAPPEN.”

This is an old enough movie that you probably know the plot.  Smug Marrieds – or, in this case, Smug Living-Togethers – Katie and Micah (Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat) take to carrying a camcorder around with them, even under circumstances where it is wildly improbable that any reasoning human being would be carrying a camcorder, in order to record the bumps in the night they’ve been hearing.  The bumps turn out to be a demon who is righteously pissed off by the blatant attempt to turn his existence into an episode of Jersey Shore – as, bless, who wouldn’t be – and disaster ensues.  Sort of.  Eventually.

Well, okay, boredom ensues.  But it’s disastrous boredom.  More like ennui.

Nothing happens for enormous chunks of PA.  I spent a great deal of time going “Yep, there they are sleeping again,” and “I’m not going to have to watch douchebag sex, am I?  I don’t want to watch douchebag sex.”  That’s the first problem with PA, and the most serious (other than the fact that the characters are so utterly unsympathetic that I couldn’t even sustain interest in them long enough to hope they’d die) – it was made by people who don’t understand that suspense is not an end in and of itself.  Suspense has to have a payoff or it dies fast.  An audience in suspense is an audience who expects something noteworthy to happen at any moment; an audience who has been trained by the last half hour of the movie to expect that nothing interesting is going to happen in the near future is an audience in about as much suspense as someone watching laundry tumble in the dryer.

No, the interesting thing about PA, to the extent that anything can be salvaged from the wreck, isn’t the haunted house.  It’s the feminist subtext, almost certainly inadvertent.  It’s not bad enough that Katie has a malevolent supernatural entity out to get her.  On top of that, she’s saddled with a  boyfriend who patronizes her, trivializes both her fears and her boundaries, and dismisses her completely when he’s not whining for her attention like a cranky five-year-old.  Micah does not even make a token attempt to hide the fact that he thinks Katie is a pretty piece of furniture whose function is to dispense sex and adoration on demand.  He constantly refers to the house as his house, even though they both live there; even more disturbing is when he’s ranting, righteously indignant, about things messing with “my house and my girlfriend” without a single change in inflection to indicate that he sees a difference between the two things.  They’re both his property.  The demon’s bad for Katie’s mental health, but I’m not sure it doesn’t take a decided back seat to the utter toxicity of her relationship.

Either way, it’s an interesting commentary on how hard it is, as a woman in a patriarchal stronghold, to reclaim your power if no one will take you seriously long enough to concede that you might have had any power to begin with. The demon thinks it owns Katie.  Micah thinks he owns her.  She’s caught in the middle in a way that would be heart-wrenching if she weren’t so intolerable, and still manages to be icky and faintly disturbing.

So what’s the verdict?  I don’t actually know what the purpose of PA was.  If it’s a feminist allegory, it’s very well done, though it’s one of those movies that only becomes interesting in the abstract after you’re done with the horrific tedium of sitting through it.  If it was a horror movie, it was an epic failure on pretty much every level.  Either way, it only gets two stars, and only the last thirty seconds or so got the rating up even that high.

The Morgue (2008)

See, this is an example of an effective movie poster.  It’s effective because I actually want to see the movie it’s advertising.  Which, strangely enough, does not seem to be the one I just watched.

Despite its title, The Morgue does not actually take place in a morgue.  It takes place in an improbably large and ornate funeral home.  It also does not feature Heather Donahue (The Blair Witch Project) in enough screen time to warrant first billing, which is a matter of not looking gift horses in the mouth because Heather Donahue is an unconvincing actress whose sole talent is for unobjectionable blandness.

The setup is fairly obvious from the beginning, intentionally.  Margo (Lisa Crilley, the sole watchable element in the movie), is a night janitor at the funeral home who suddenly finds herself saddled with an out-of-gas family of three and two random blood-smeared guys.  It’s obvious from the outset that, somehow or other, they’re all dead.

This adds a certain lead-balloon element to the fact that no sooner are they all assembled than Random Old Guy (Michael Raye), who was once a worker at the funeral home until he offed himself in the bathroom for no explicable or relevant reason, starts stalking and killing them one by one.  Well, “killing.”  I mean, honestly, they’re already dead.  Is he making them deader?  (The answer, apparently, is yes.  No, we don’t know why.)

There’s a big “OH NOES WE ARE DEAD” scene rendered marginally effective by Brady Matthews as Margo’s cop ex-boyfriend, who has a minor breakdown over finding her body at the scene of the mass accident that killed the lot of them to begin with.  Mostly, though, the movie is unsuspenseful (They’re ALREADY DEAD), has a thoroughly unscary killer (I have no problem with the geriatric population, honest to god, I just don’t think they make effective slashers), and ends on a moderately clever though somewhat pointless note.

So what’s the verdict? One star.  The performances are just good enough that I’m not judging the moral character of everyone involved, but it’s a bland movie, not anywhere close to good but not full enough of bad-movie energy to be fun.  Don’t pass up something better on your Netflix queue to watch it, and by “better” I mean “up to and including that 80s slasher that appears to star Vanna White, what in the actual fuck.”

 

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Bloody Mary (2006)

I should just stay away from Target.  I ran over to replace my flash drive and came home with:

• - T-shirt that belongs on someone twenty years younger and two cup sizes bigger (1)
• - Doritos (1 bigass bag)
• - DVDs (3)
• - And also, flash drive (1).

I couldn’t help the DVDs.  They were five bucks.  Five bucks for four horror movies, each cheesier than the last.  I got one with a vampire theme and one with a Generic Trashy Horror theme.  (And Stargate.  I’ve had a crush on James Spader since 1986.)   Bloody Mary (2006) was third up on the Generic Trashy Horror compilation, and my expectations were not high.

However, like everyone who has ever been a 12-year-old girl, I have a soft spot for the Bloody Mary legend, so I was prepared to be generous.   And my generosity was rewarded: Bloody Mary is a fun, goofy movie that may not have much in the way of real scares, and doesn’t actually make much sense, but nonetheless is hoisted up into so-bad-it’s-good territory by decent acting and sheer eye-gouging ebullience.

Granted, it doesn’t exactly start out on a high note.  A group of sorority girls psychiatric nurses are gathered around a tunnel shaft to bully one of their members into taking off her clothes (yes, there was gratuitous nudity in the first thirty seconds of the film) and going down through the tunnels into a room that looks like a midlevel puzzle in a Silent Hill knockoff.  The room contains a mirror, which Hapless Naked Chick must stand in front of and say “I believe in Bloody Mary” until gore ensues.  It turns out the head sorority girl (Danni Ravden, the poor woman’s Sara Michelle Gellar) is crazier than a shithouse rat and has appointed herself High Priestess of the Bloody Mary Cult, keeping Mary fed in the time-honored tradition of Renfield and Creepy Conductor Guy from Midnight Meat Train.

Too bad you don’t get the fire ax before this point.  There’s nothing like the fire ax for taking down zombie nurses.

Soon, Hapless Naked Chick’s sister (Kim Tyler, who is the poor woman’s somebody, I just can’t figure out who) comes to town to find her.  She attempts to enlist the aid of Asshole Cop Ex (Matthew Borlenghi), succeeds in enlisting the aid of Strangely Hot Psychiatrist (Jaason Simmons, the poor man’s Liev Schreiber), and wanders around the asylum until it becomes clear that the place could host a yearly conference for serial killers complete with vendor rooms and invited addresses and security is so lax that no one would ever know.

I suppose pointy dragon-lady nails aren’t quite such a fashion don’t if you need them to rip out eyeballs with.

Through various expository speeches, we learn that Bloody Mary was actually a patient at the hospital back in the 70s who was obsessed with her reflection.  Eventually she escaped into the tunnels and starved to death, only to return in vengeful-ghost form and hang out with the random creepy prisoner whose purpose is never actually made clear (Paul Hassett), when she’s not killing people and then meticulously cleaning up after herself so there’s not a drop of blood left. (Usually.  When she kills Guy Randomly Painting Naked [Jason Benson], she leaves behind a big bloody chunk of mirror that Asshole Cop Ex walks right by without even noticing.)

Her Reign of Terror and Eyeball-Gouging is brought to an end when the sister, hauled down into the tunnels by the Head Sorority Chick, smashes her mirror.  Which was already broken.  I don’t know, now it’s the special broken or something.  I would feel bad about giving away the ending, but honestly, it’s not like you didn’t see it coming.

So what’s the verdict? Two stars.  It’s an entertaining watch with better-than-expected performances.  Just don’t expect it to make much sense, or contain any surprises whatsoever, or be scary.  It’s a ridiculous movie about dead mental patients ripping out people’s eyes, and goddamn if it doesn’t fly that flag with pride.

 

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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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The Haunting of Molly Hartley (2008)

I approached The Haunting of Molly Hartley as a sort of challenge – the challenge being whether I could find a way to view the movie that would make it anything other than an eye-sporking waste of nine million hours of my life.

Yeah, I know.  You already know how this is going to come out.  So did I, and yet.

The thing is, The Haunting of Molly Hartley isn’t a real horror movie.  It’s a kids’ movie, a big-screen episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? No functioning adult is going to be scared by this movie unless you live your life in such a hamster-like state of terror that you have to keep smelling salts on hand for when your toast pops up out of the toaster.

Granted, by the time I was the age of this movie’s target audience I’d already cut my horror teeth on films like Halloween and Phantasm.  Middle-school me would have chewed this movie into a quivering red mass, horked it back up, and spit on its grave.  The point is, it’s not a horror movie, and it’s not made for horror fans.  It’s made for girls in their early teens who don’t care what it’s about as long as some hot Mouseketeer flashes his hipbones at the camera, and the soccer moms who have to be persuaded to pay for said teenage girls’ movie tickets.

In short, I went into this movie with really, really low expectations.  All I was hoping for was that it would be as entertainingly awful as its second cousin, The Covenant.  And I wanted to see if it would work as the horror-movie equivalent of a YA novel.

Molly Hartley starts out with a flashback in which an stunningly badly dressed teenager is killed by her father, who goes off the deep end yelling things like “You’re going to be 18 next week!  I won’t let them take you!”  Which, given the eventual context, I don’t really understand, but whatever.  My kid could be the Antichrist and as long as she was well and happy I’d just be like, “Have a good day ruling the world, sweetheart!  If you need me to stab any religious fanatics for you, just call!”

Cut to the present day, where Molly (Haley Bennet, who manages an impressive zero-to-strangleworthy time of thirty screen seconds flat) is starting a new school.  Immediately she attracts the attention of the resident Hipbones Guy, Joseph (Chace Crawford), earning her the ire of Joseph’s girlfriend (AnnaLynne McCord), whose hair must be seen to be believed.  Also, the girl assigned to show her around is the resident Jesus freak, Alexis (Shanna Collins, the only effective part of the movie).  At this point Molly has nearly racked up enough FML points to warrant that perpetual surly pout, but not quite.  She still needs a house to fall on her sister or something.

Well, he doesn’t sparkle.  Be grateful for small favors.

It turns out that hearing the name of the Lord gives Molly migraines.  (This is the point where Dean Winchester should show up with the holy water and dispatch her back to Hell, but sadly he does not.)  Also, her mother tried to stab her to death and is now locked up in an asylum.  And Molly gets nosebleeds and hears voices.  A sinus tumor nearly changes the genre from horror to disease-of-the-week without missing a beat, but sadly, not permanently.

That’s quite a case of buyer’s remorse, there.

In between endless scenes of high school drama featuring Molly’s Difficult Friend Choices and the Epic Love Triangle of Molly, Hipbones Guy, and Mall Hair Chick, we find out that Molly was stillborn or something, and her mother made a deal with the devil such that Molly would live but then become Satan’s at age 18.  Really you ought to adopt if you object to that sort of thing, but people always seem to be selling their kids to Satan and then wishing they hadn’t afterward.  And now, of course, the entire cast is in a vast conspiracy to help Molly fulfill her demonic potential.

So does Molly Hartley work as a Lifetime-style YA movie?  Sadly enough, the answer is probably yes, for a certain type of teenage girl.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie hit the “I am so special and unique and no one understands my paaaaaaiiiin except That One Hot Guy Who Finds Me Irresistible so I am totally justified in being as sullen and intolerable a pain in the ass as I want” message so hard and so relentlessly.  (No, I haven’t seen Twilight.)  That’s probably at least part of why it got such awful reviews – I challenge any adult over legal drinking age to make it through this movie without wanting to beat Molly with a tire iron.

So what’s the verdict? I’m grudgingly giving it one one star, because I think it does a reasonable job of accomplishing what it sets out to do, which is two hours of wish-fulfillment for bitchy teenage girls.  I’m just sorry the writers chose horror as the genre of choice for accomplishing it.

Does that mean it’s not a bad movie?  Hell, no.  It’s an awful movie.  It’s not even as entertainingly awful as The Covenant – it’s just irritating and tedious. For god’s sake, do not see this movie if you’re over fifteen years old.  Do not even let your kids bully you into sitting in the same room with it.

By the way, there are 16  jump scares in this movie, including the ghost-in-the-mirror and killer-coming-back-to-life scares.  I counted.  You’re welcome.

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The Exorcist III (1990)

In 1977, Hollywood, flush with the 1973 success of The Exorcist, filmed a sequel entitled Exorcist II: The Heretic and unleashed it upon an unsuspecting public.

“What in the actual fuck am I watching,” the public said.

“Um,” said Hollywood.  “The latest addition to the wildly successful Exorcist franchise?”

“Is that a locust-cam? Seriously?” said the public.

“Yes, it is a locust-cam.  Our bad,” said Hollywood, slouching sulkily off toward Bethlehem.  The movie flopped with a resounding crash, and there the matter rested for thirteen years.

In 1990, William Peter Blatty wrested his franchise back out of the hands of the people responsible for E2, probably bitch-slapped them with it, and started over, wisely choosing to pretend that E2 had never happened.  And I wish that movie hadn’t left such a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, because The Exorcist III is an underappreciated gem of a movie, creepy and gothic, with at least a couple of moments capable of scarring you for life without a drop of blood being shed onscreen.

Though, don’t get me wrong, there’s blood too.  Creatively.

I thought about capping the scene with the nurse, but then I didn’t.  If you’ve seen the movie, that part probably scarred you for life the first time around.  If you haven’t, I want you to be scarred right along with the rest of us.  I’m generous like that.

For E3, Blatty wisely chose to jettison Regan MacNeil, who was a bit of a one-trick pony anyway, in favor of bringing back Detective Kinderman (George C. Scott) and Father Dyer (Ed Flanders).  Kinderman is facing a rash of religion-themed murders that bear all the hallmarks of having been committed by the fifteen-years-dead Gemini Killer – except that fingerprint evidence indicates the murders were all committed by different people.  His investigations lead him to the disturbed ward of the local hospital; where he finds, among other surprises, that the Gemini killer (in the person of the incomparable Brad Dourif, handling some five solid minutes of bad-guy exposition with such flair that you never want him to stop talking about killing people) is, while indisputably dead, not as gone as one might hope.

Half the joy of this movie is that, like the original, the creepiness builds not just from blood-splashed confessional booths but from such small things.  Kinderman speaks the name of God and the clock stops.   Someone whispers his name as he walks through the disturbed ward.  An empty street in the middle of the night has people running across it every couple of minutes for no apparent reason.  Things that are done and then left alone to be unnerving all by themselves, not overemphasized by music stings or dramatic reactions.  It’s a very different experience from loud and rambunctious slasher movies,  so immersive that it closes over your head like water.

The movie’s not flawless.  (Father Morning, wtf?  I love him, but wtf, where did he even come from?  I’m pretty sure he’s a replicant.  Also, water dripping into a sink is not ominous, it’s just annoying.)  But there are places where it could have been flawed and wasn’t.  Even pinned cruciform against the wall by the power of Satan Or Whoever, for instance, Kinderman stubbornly refuses to have a heartwarming reconciliation with God.  And what the movie gets right, it gets so right that you’re in awe.

Father Morning.  A dream to some… A NIGHTMARE TO OTHERS!

So what’s the verdict? Four stars.  I almost gave it five, putting it up there with the seminal horror movie of my childhood, Halloween; that’s how great this movie is.  It only lost a star for the deus ex machina quality of the ending, which is strangely unsatisfying until the last minute or so of the climactic scene. Watch it, own it, just don’t blame me when you develop a phobia of birdlike little old ladies.

Also, check out the exhaustive and hilarious writeup of Exorcist II on Jabootu.net.  They’re braver than I am, that’s for damn sure.

P.S.:

Kinderman has a dream about Limbo.  I don’t even want to know what he had for dinner that Limbo involves Angel Fabio, but I hope to god I never eat it after six.

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Devour (2005)

When I started surfing horror blogs, one thing I noticed was that while everyone and their dog had a review of Alice, Sweet Alice – a movie that, as a child, I would have sworn I was the only person in the world to have ever seen or heard of – almost no one had a review of Devour.

Then I realized why there are no reviews.  It’s because there is only one reason on God’s green earth to watch Devour: you and your girlfriends are gearing up to eat ice cream and watch every single movie Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki have ever been in, and you’re putting off the evil hour when you’re going to have to suck it up and pop in that Lifetime movie about Thomas Kinkade teaching some hapless town the meaning of Christmas.  (Be told: single-malt doesn’t go well with most ice cream flavors.  For this marathon you’re going to have to break out the tequila.)

So in a way, there’s no sense in doing a review.  You’re either going to watch it because Jensen Ackles is smoking hot or  shun it like the atrocious, nonsensical plague ship of lost careers that it is.   But!  If you shun it, you will miss things like:

• The ugliest macrame shirt in Creation
• The sex scene most likely to make you turn your face to the wall and refuse to go on out of sheer vicarious embarrassment
• Rubber demon costumes stolen in the night from the set of Legend
• Improbable plot twists involving baby-snatching, demonic incest, multi-million-dollar video game empires, and Jensen Ackles: Antichrist, all of which combine to shear away the plot of the first part of the movie from the plot of the second part like the Titanic splitting in half in its death throes and dragging 88 minutes of your life to a watery grave.

And no one wants to miss out on that, right?

Ackles plays Jake Gray, a wastrel with daddy issues who hangs out with Trashy Blonde Chick (Dominique Swain) and Geeky Loser Guy (Teach Grant), who have actual names in the movie but their characters are so shallow and disposable that they might as well not.  On Jake’s birthday, Geeky Loser Guy introduces him to a video game called The Pathway.  It’s an online game; playing it requires you to hand a gaming website every piece of information anyone might ever need to steal your identity, loot your house, and rehome your pets, but for some reason people play it anyway instead of laughing hysterically and hitting the “back” button.  The game is a sort of “throw Momma from the train” deal – someone calls you and tells you what the Pathway is going to do for you, then calls you back, abuses you for a while, and then tells you what to do for the Pathway.

The Pathway wants Trashy Blonde Chick to have embarrassingly brief and poorly-acted chair sex with Jake.  I don’t remember if this was supposed to be a reward or a punishment, or for whom, but it’s pretty punishing for the viewer.

This ends in largely pointless murder-suicides for Trashy Blonde Chick and Geeky Loser Guy.  Jake, however, resists, and  begins trying to track down what’s going on with the game and how it can be Stopped For The Good of Humanity.  In a rather stunning leap of logic, he concludes that the game is actually Satan’s doing.  He also decides that Satan is female, apparently working on the logic that Satan = Evil and Women = Evil so Satan = Woman.  I once saw Richard Jeni use the same logic to prove that God was Ray Charles.

At any rate, Jake – with the unenthusiastic aid of Shannyn Sossamon as Macrame Shirt Chick – delves into the seamy underside of the video game world, where it intersects with Satanism and playing heavy metal records backward.  Talking to some creepy old Satanist (played by Ackles’ father, who is a better actor than he is) leads Jake to the discovery that he’s actually Satan’s son, stolen at birth by his adoptive parents, who were in some sort of militant Christian Antichrist-stealing commando team.  Apparently the video game was developed by the Satanists Union in order to find him because he was the only one who would be able to resist its nefarious pull -

No, there you go trying to use logic.  Stop it.  You’re just going to get all annoyed.

Anyway, the ending is actually not too bad, and by “not too bad” I mean that it actually makes you stop filing your nails and pay attention to the screen for a few minutes.  Satan reveals herself; Jake reaches deep into his soul and manages a couple of minutes of almost human emotion; people are force-fed goblets of blood; Satan gets staked, which mostly just annoys her; and the ending sort of sets up for a sequel that please God will never come.  After all, Ackles is on a hit TV series now, and probably wants to be paid in something other than Twinkies and Bud Light.

Nothing says “Mommy loves you, pumpkin” like force-feeding your kid the blood of his adoptive parents.

Unless it’s letting him wake up on the ground with a brutal gore hangover…

…and then framing him for the deaths of umpteen people.  Thomas Kinkade himself couldn’t come up with a better Hallmark moment!

So what’s the verdict? On a 0 to 5 scale, where 0 means “The people responsible for this owe me money and I’m judging them as human beings” and movies accumulate stars according to either their actual goodness or their so-bad-it’s-good-ness, Devour weighs in at a lackluster 1.  Plenty of so-bad-it’s-good plot elements, but lacking in that essential bad-movie energy; mostly what it leaves you with is a sort of “Dear god, what is wrong with me that I’m sitting here watching this?” sense of existential bewilderment.

Jensen Ackles is hot, though, I’ll give it that.  If he can act then he’s keeping it a well-guarded secret, but he’s nice to look at, and he does “creepy and dysfunctional” pretty well.

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