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.

Pathology (2008)

Usually when there’s a mismatch between a movie and its ending, it’s a fairly decent movie being ruined by an ending that makes a hash of everything that came before it.  (I’m looking at you, Deadline, and don’t think I don’t see M. Night Shyamalan hiding behind you either.)  Much rarer is the situation where the movie itself is fairly unimpressive but the ending fills you with glee.  Pathology is a fine example of the latter.

Dr.  Ted Grey (Milo Ventimiglia, who confused us by looking like Tobey Maguire)  has managed to score both a rich fiancee and a plumb pathology residency.  He gets off to a rocky start with the other residents, especially golden boy Jake Gallo (Tom Weston), but within about twenty minutes they’ve lured him into a game wherein each participant has to commit a murder and the others then have to guess how they did it.

Well, I say “lured.”  It actually goes something like this:

Grey:  “Oh my god, what are you, a serial killer?”

Gallo:  “Okay, you know what, you can’t play.”

Grey:  “NO FAIR!”

Grey, it turns out, is just as much of a misanthropic psychopath as the rest of them, which lends a little interest to the proceedings.  Which is fortunate, because otherwise there’s not much interest to be had.  Aside from Gallo’s skeevy girlfriend (Lauren Lee Smith), whose boobs get a considerable amount of screen time, almost none of the other characters are anything but glorified extras.  (Literally, during one of the final scenes I was like “Hey, who’s that guy?”  My daughter informed me that he’d been a member of the group the whole time.  I’m glad she’s more observant than I am.)

Pathology takes on the immortal question: “Just how far can you push the crack-whore characterization while still having it be even remotely plausible that these people made it through medical school?”  The answer, by the way, is “Not this far.”

Pathology isn’t a bad way to kill time on a slow weekend, but there’s not much to it.  The movie spends way too much time establishing that the main characters are freaky in just about every way and not enough time on how they go about setting up the perfect murder, or indeed even solving the perfect murder, which you would think would be the point of the movie.  How many scenes of budding pathologists smoking crack do we really need?  The answer is a lot, apparently.  Also, a tip for future filmmakers: scenes of kinky S&M sex where the use of acupuncture needles has made one of the participants look like a porcupine are neither hot nor disturbing, but they are good for a laugh.  You do get bonus points for Wallace Stevens, though.

You know what would have been awesome?  Scorching, screen-melting chemistry between the two leads whose conflict is supposed to drive the whole movie.  Or, you know, any sort of chemistry at all.  Anywhere.  Between anyone.  By half an hour in I’d have settled for a vinegar-and-baking-soda volcano.

So what’s the verdict? Two stars.  Ventimiglia really should have been playing this role in a much better and more intelligent movie; he’s better than it deserves, and because of that his performance sits at a weird angle to the rest of the film.  Weston is not better than it deserves, and indeed his gloriously scenery-devouring performance is pitch-perfect for the movie he’s in.  I just would rather have been watching Ventimiglia’s movie instead.

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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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Shutter Island (2010)

Shutter Island is one of those films that demands an immediate second viewing, just so that you can go through and pick out how the filmmakers did what they did.  It’s also brutal and heartbreaking, with one of the finest last lines I’ve heard in I don’t know how long; gorgeously filmed, atrociously scored, not flawless but it shouldn’t be – it’s a movie about beautiful, broken things, after all.

This is the kind of movie that’s difficult to review without giving away too much, because the plot starts its slow twist almost from the beginning.  In one sense, the plot summary is very basic: Character X goes to Place Y, and Things Are Not As They Seem.  In this case, US Federal Marshals Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) are called to Ashecliffe Hospital – a gothic fortress for the criminally insane – to investigate the disappearance of a patient who killed her children. The patient’s disappearance gets resolved rather surprisingly;  but by that time, Teddy, haunted by the liberation of Dachau and the death of his wife, has his own ideas about what’s going on on the island, and he’s not giving up that easily.

It will take you about ten minutes after you leave the theater to start going, “Wait, that setup is sort of outlandish.  I mean, really?”  And it is.  But you won’t even care, because Leonardo DiCaprio will have broken your heart into a million pieces with his grief and his love and his war flashbacks.  He is the heart of this movie and he carries it beautifully.

A word about the twist.  I’ve seen all sorts of people complaining that they saw it coming in advance, as if that were a strike against the film.  I think too many of us have come to define “twist” as the kind of thing M. Night Shyamalan tries to bludgeon us over the head with in every one of his movies.  I’m pretty sure the twist in Shutter Island isn’t supposed to blindside you.  It’s the sort of twist where you’re supposed to start suspecting early on that something’s wrong and then slide right along with the movie to an ending that, while you wouldn’t have seen it coming when you stepped on the slide, seems inevitable by the time you get to the bottom.  That’s tricky, people.  It’s not hard to fool the audience up until the last five minutes of the movie and then say “Ha, psych, we lied to you, it’s really like this instead.” (Though, admittedly, it’s hard to do it well, a thing proved on a yearly basis by Shyamalan’s post-Sixth Sense career.)  It’s a lot harder to bring the audience along with you, every step of the way, and still not lose the magic like you were David Copperfield explaining how he gets those rings to stick together.  Scorcese and DiCaprio between them pull it off beautifully.

Is this Scorsese’s best picture ever?  Well, no.  But it’s a pretty damn good Scorsese, a slow, creepy tribute to film noir in which the political message is as out of date as a vintage issue of True Detective and the message about human frailty will never not be relevant.

So what’s the verdict? Four stars, because I want to beg Scorsese to take it back and have it rescored by someone who’s not deaf and doesn’t hate humanity and freedom.  Countdown to the DVD release starts now.

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