Gateway Cinephiles

Late to the Game: The Wolfman

June 15, 2010 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Libby, Horror 1 Comment

2010 (UK / USA)
Director: Joe Johnston
Viewed: June 14, 2010
Format: DVD – Universal (2010) (Unrated Director’s Cut)

[SPOILERS] I have to give screenwriters Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self a point for hewing to the essential elements for an old-fashioned werewolf feature, particularly the now-slightly-subversive notion that the luckless protagonist must perish by the time the credits roll. Unfortunately, the film tips its hand entirely too early with respect to the progenitor lycanthrope, and as a result the whole enterprise runs out of steam long before the clunky, climactic werewolf-on-werewolf brawl. The Victorian-gothic production design is admittedly luscious, even downright bewitching at times, but this only contributes to The Wolfman’s disjointed tone. When the titular monster is nowhere to be seen, it’s an atmospheric B-movie, stuffed with faux-gravitas and lent a dollop of menace by Anthony Hopkins’ glowering, lip-licking presence. When the werewolf attacks, meanwhile, the film veers off into slasher-flick camp, clashing dreadfully with the chilly tone that dominates elsewhere. The film’s R rating is utterly unnecessary, other than to provide the beast with license to rend limbs, slash bowels, and devour a victim’s liver. The crowning disappointment is that while the film-makers capitalize on the evocative power of the classic Universal feature, they disregard the screamingly obvious role of the werewolf myth as a metaphor for the unrestrained id.

Experimental Treatment

February 22, 2010 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Libby, Dramas, Horror 4 Comments

Shutter Island
2010 (USA)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Viewed: February 21, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

Eternally the Catholic kid from the Garment District, Martin Scorsese has long used his narrative features to explore the relationship between violence and guilt. Granted, the stultifying, deforming influence of societies on the individual frequently figures prominently into his films, with the societies in question ranging from blinkered, hierarchical subcultures to the vast, alienating melting pot of over-stimulated contemporary America. Even Scorsese’s most unambitious feature in the past two decades, his 1991 remake of Cape Fear, took pains to develop the original film’s anemic foundations into a more substantive commentary on the absurdities of the criminal justice system and the allure of masculine mythology. However, cultural settings only seem to hold the director’s attention inasmuch as they relate to searingly personal concerns; at the center of most Scorsese films is a battered man squeezed between others’ rules and his own sins. Given these tendencies, I suppose I should have expected that Shutter Island would prove to be something more elaborate and bruised than the “mere” creepshow thriller that is being presented in the film’s promotion. Not that there’s anything wrong with a creepshow thriller done exceptionally well (q.v., Drag Me to Hell), but Scorsese, despite his profile, isn’t the film-maker that leaps to mind when one hears the phrase “Master of Horror.” Shutter Island feels for all the world like a florid imitation of a Wes Craven delve, and it’s only in the final twenty minutes that the curtain is pulled back to reveal that Scorsese tell, the strand of private Christian torment that stretches all the way back to Mean Streets.

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Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

November 6, 2009 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Chris, Dramas, Horror No Comments

Antichrist
2009 (Denmark)
Director: Lars von Trier
Viewed: November 3, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Antichrist is an aggressively unpleasant film, but that’s not the same thing as a bad film. In fact, the latest effort from Lars von Trier, the noted asshole and self-appointed ambassador of pretentious European film-making, is the most intriguing work from the director I’ve yet seen. I have never understood the contempt his films often arouse, but my prior experience with von Trier has been admittedly underwhelming. Antichrist, however, proves to be audacious and original. The film is suffused with unforgettable images, seemingly plucked out of a bad dream and given a rotten, mythic life on the screen. Von Trier has achieved a fresh alchemy, blending his essential cynicism with intellectually engrossing themes and a new-found instinct for terror. While a bothersome lack of emotional heft prevents it from succeeding as a genuine work of horror, Antichrist is nonetheless harrowing, provocative stuff. It seems ordained to lurk in the cellar of cinema for years to come, it noisome bellows drawing attention to our unexamined assumptions about remorse, sex, and especially gender. You are forewarned: von Trier has summoned forth an ugly, ugly beast, and staring it down is not enjoyable in the least, but there is something nonetheless compelling in its scabrous eyes.

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Things That Go Bump

October 28, 2009 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Roland, Horror 2 Comments

Paranormal Activity
2007 (USA)
Director: Oren Peli
Viewed: October 27, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

Ever since The Blair Witch Project slithered into theaters in 1999 to become the most profitable movie of all time, audiences have been periodically subjected to horror films that attempt to replicate various aspects of its formula, evidently with the hope that this will lead to a similar windfall. The staggering hype and backlash that attended Blair Witch’s somewhat unexpected success—not to mention a subsequent decade of dispiriting decline in horror cinema—seem to have obscured an obvious truth. Namely, that much of the attention surrounding Blair Witch was driven by its astonishingly slick marketing campaign, one that gave viewers the impression that this fictional film was comprised of authentic found footage. The problem, of course, is that the public can theoretically be punked only once, and for this reason alone Blair Witch would seem to be a once-in-a-lifetime sort of phenomenon. Granted, there have been some satisfyingly scary attempts to rebottle the lightning, most notably the Spanish zombie thriller [•REC], but there seems to be little likelihood of a Blair Witch successor emerging when the original so ruthlessly exploited (and demolished) the credulity of contemporary horror film-goers.

Nonetheless, this hasn’t deterred enthusiastic boosters from bestowing that dubious honorific on a little ghost story entitled Paranormal Activity. And I do mean little. Writer-director Oren Peli, shooting the entire film in his own house on a notoriously anemic budget of $15,000, has doubled-down on the notion that a horror movie doesn’t have to be grandiose, polished, or even artful to be frightening (and I mean that in the best possible way). With a video camera, two actors, one location, and a few post-production flourishes, Peli delivers a post-Blair Witch take on the familiar haunted house scenario. With these limitations in mind, I’m inclined to be generous when assessing a film like Paranormal Activity, which is essentially a horror movie at its most elemental, a contraption designed to evoke terror. Only one question truly matters: Is it scary? The honest answer is, “Not really, but…”

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These Rules Are For Your Own Safety, People

October 16, 2009 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Horror, Comedies No Comments

Zombieland
USA (2009)
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Viewed: October 8, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

In the wake of Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, a film that managed to be both achingly funny and rather vicious, it was probably a safe bet that another genuinely imaginative zombie horror-comedy would be a long time coming. Happily, a scant five years later, Ruben Fleischer, in his assured feature film debut, delivers a zombie film that should make any aficionado of the genre stand up and whoop with delight. There’s nothing particularly artful about Zombieland, which is exactly the creature it appears to be, no more, no less: the comical tale of a group of ragtag survivors at the end of world. Is it unambitious? Certainly. It’s also damn funny and even occasionally exhilarating, if only as an example of film-makers uncovering fresh meat in a horror scenario nearly drained of its power by direct-to-DVD mediocrity. Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who wet their beaks in television, don’t go looking for a new wrinkle to add to the zombie film’s now well-establish parameters. Instead, they change the angle of their approach, throwing their sympathy behind the misfits for whom life in undead America isn’t an especially difficult adjustment.

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It Burns, Burns, Burns

June 8, 2009 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Libby, Film Diaries - Roland, Film Diaries - Lara, Film Diaries - Stephanie, Horror 1 Comment

Drag Me to Hell
2009 (USA)
Director: Sam Raimi
Viewed: June 7, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Horror films with a camp sensibility are a dime a dozen, but outright giddy horror is a much more elusive creature. In his much-ballyhooed return to the form after a seventeen-year hiatus (if we disregard 2002’s The Gift), director Sam Raimi delivers the latter species in Drag Me to Hell, a wicked delight so gratifyingly realized that calling it a “genre exercise” seems faint praise. While its title suggests exploitation schlock in the vein of Die Screaming, Marianne and I Spit on Your Grave, the trappings of Raimi’s film are standard occult thriller fare. The tone, however, summons forth the nightmarish, absurdist character that was previously endemic to the Evil Dead films. Also evident is the bleak, even malevolent worldview that emerges from Raimi’s smaller (read: non-Spider-man) films, from Darkman to A Simple Plan. Exhibiting both tremendous confidence and a ravenous appetite for unholy fun, Drag Me to Hell deserves better than a soft-mouthed label like “tribute” or “throwback.” Let’s be clear: It’s a damn fine horror film in every way.

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The Girl Next Door

December 30, 2008 Andrew Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Foreign, Horror 3 Comments

Let the Right One In (Låt Den Rätte Komma In)
2008 (Sweden)
Director: Tomas Alfredson
Viewed: December 28, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Tomas Alfredson’s chilly, provocative vampire tale, Let the Right One In, is not for the faint of heart. It spatters blood and gore with the ugly abandon of a child’s vengeful dream. It dabbles at the edges of sexual norms, and dares to do so with characters on the cusp of adolescence. It plunges into the icy waters of schoolyard memories that cut to the quick: bullying, humiliation, loneliness, and that first crush, so unbelievably sweet and painful. Although it snuffles in the countless musty corners of the vampire myth and revels in camp horror silliness at times, Let the Right One In is no mere horror paint-by-numbers exercise. Rather, director Alfredson and screenwriter John Ajvide Linqvist–who adapted his own novel–take up the genre for its purest purpose, engaging a host of personal and social anxieties with a quiet, distinctly Scandinavian cunning. Serving as a parable, allegory, and hideously gleeful dose of wish fulfillment all rolled into one, this is an astonishingly powerful vampire film, in that leaves a thousand whirling thoughts in its wake, none of them about vampires.

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3-Minute Intro: Cannibal Holocaust

October 22, 2008 Andrew 3-Minute Intros, Foreign, Horror No Comments

Screened: October 17, 2008
Format: DVD - Grindhouse Releasing (2005)
HorrorFest 2008

Depending on who you ask, Italian director Ruggero Deodato’s 1980 exploitation magnum opus, Cannibal Holocaust, is either a masterpiece of ruthless social commentary and over-the-top gore, or unrepentantly amoral, racist, sadistic garbage that could only originate from a supremely sick mind. One of a handful of self-proclaimed “most controversial” horror films of all time, Holocaust has served as a sort of twisted gold standard in fringe movie-making since its release, representing the most depraved excesses of the European film industry.

Director Deodato had previously created numerous exploitation films, including other cannibal features, but Cannibal Holocaust would become his most ambitious and renowned work. Holocaust unabashedly mimics the style of the notorious mondo documentaries, initially produced in Italy, which depict gruesome accidents and deaths, bizarre aboriginal customs, and other sensational subjects. Indeed, Deodato allegedly conceived of the film as a statement on the sensationalism and lack of integrity he observed in Italian journalists, particularly with respect to violence. Critics have railed against Holocaust’s hypocrisy in the respect, pointing to the film’s lurid promotion and treatment of is subject matter.

Cannibal Holocaust seemingly offers something for everyone to loathe: child murder, gang-rape, abortion, torture, beheadings, impalements, shameless racism, the on-screen slaughter of animals, and, yes, cannibalism. Although promoters now boast of Holocaust’s numerous censorings and bannings as badges of honor, the controversy and confusion over its initial release were problematic. At one point, Deodato had to produce his actors alive and well in an Italian court to prove that he had not made a genuine snuff film.

Despite the notoriety of its content, Cannibal Holocaust’s most significant cinematic legacy is likely its structure and technique. Its conceit of the allegedly “found footage” of a documentary film crew and its cunning promotion that tricked audiences into believing they were witnessing nonfiction would inspire later films such as The Last Broadcast and particularly The Blair Witch Project. Deodato’s reliance on location shooting in a rugged, naturalistic style heightened the film’s illusion. This led no less a figure than Sergio Leone to declare that the Deodato had created a “masterpiece of cinematographic realism,” although the legendary Italian director added, “I think you will get in trouble with all the world.”

3-Minute Intro: The Orphanage (El Orfanato)

October 22, 2008 Andrew 3-Minute Intros, Foreign, Horror 2 Comments

Screened: October 17, 2008
Format: Blu-Ray - Picturehouse (2008)
HorrorFest 2008

It’s probably overstatement to suggest that Juan Anontio Bayona’s 2007 directorial debut, The Orphanage, would not have been possible without the box-office and critical triumph of Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006, but the latter film’s success certainly didn’t hurt. Not only did Guillermo del Toro’s fantasy film enhance the receptiveness of audiences to Spanish-language gothic cinema, but the director’s role as a producer for The Orphanage was prominently featured in the film’s promotion. Fortunately for Bayona, his film successfully escapes from del Toro’s shadow, delivering a chilling and harrowing update on reliable horror conventions now mostly absent from American films.

Bayona and screenwriter Sergio Sánchez provide us with a landscape that is familiar, but also realized with efficiency and a pitch-perfect gothic sensibility. The essential elements for a conventional ghost story are all present: a creepy old house, a sensitive little child, buried secrets, a séance, and a protagonist driven to the brink of desperation and madness. What makes The Orphanage an adept piece of horror film-making is Bayona’s assumption that we understand and appreciate the traditions of the genre. He stacks the film with dense layers of mystery, and packs in crucial details that reward viewers willing to pay attention and able to keep up.

The Orphanage was the first feature film for Bayona, who established himself directing music videos for Spanish pop groups. The director’s flair for evoking a classically gothic atmosphere abounds, as does his talent for absorbing and revisiting iconic ghost story devices in a refreshing manner. For the critical leading role of Laura, Bayona turned to Spanish actor Belén Rueda, who won a Goya award for her performance in director Alejandro Amenábar’s 2004 Oscar-winner The Sea Inside. Despite The Orphanage’s admittedly moody and gorgeous trappings, it is undeniably Rueda’s engaging performance as Laura that holds the film together. Rueda’s convoluted portrayal—compassionate, arrogant, fearful, resolute, neurotic—creates an absorbing study of parenting and grief that dwells within a sharply executed haunted house tale for the twenty-first century. In addition to Bayona’s skill in handling a story laden with twists and sleight-of-hand, it is the strength of Rueda’s performance that lends such anguish and horror to The Orphanage’s final revelations.

3-Minute Intro: Sleepaway Camp

October 22, 2008 Andrew 3-Minute Intros, Horror No Comments

Screened: October 16, 2008
Format: DVD - Anchor Bay (2000)
HorrorFest 2008

The tale of first-time director Robert Hiltzik’s 1983 film, Sleepaway Camp, and how it became a beloved cult classic, is one of the lesser-known sagas of the slasher movie’s 1980s heyday. At the time of Sleepaway Camp’s production, the slasher parameters were already well-established by features such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Black Christmas, Halloween, and Friday the 13th, as well as a host of lesser works vying for adolescent eyeballs. Sleepaway Camp had a conceptual drawback in that it utilized the same setting as the Friday the 13th series—a summer camp—but it was savvy enough to subvert the subgenre in cunning ways. Its protagonist, the shy little Angela Baker, doesn’t quite fulfill the archetype feminist film critic Carol J. Clover has termed the Final Girl, the pretty young thing who eventually confronts the killer.

Sleepaway Camp attained a modest success in its theatrical run. Perhaps unexpectedly, a small but loyal fan base gradually developed over the years based on sales and rentals of the VHS videocassette. The film’s murder sequences—especially a notorious scene involving a beehive—and particularly its shocking conclusion lent it a forbidden quality that endeared many teenage horror fans. There were two rogue sequels by another director, but the original film’s cast and crew quickly moved on. Director Hiltzik attended law school and eventually attained partner in a New York City firm. Felissa Rose, who had something of a break portraying Angela at the age of thirteen, went on to an arts education and a career in the theater.

In 2000, horror film buffs from a website devoted to the Sleepaway Camp series contacted Hiltzik about recording an audio commentary track for a new DVD release of the film. The director-turned-attorney was shocked that his seemingly forgettable film had acquired a devoted following over the years. The revival of interest in the film also brought Rose attention as a lost cult figure, and she has appeared in host of low-budget horror films since 2000. The revival has even sparked enthusiasm for a new Sleepaway Camp film that is now in production, with Hiltzik returning to direct and Rose reprising her notorious role.

Gateway Cinephiles

Late to the Game: The Wolfman

Experimental Treatment

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

Things That Go Bump

These Rules Are For Your Own Safety, People

It Burns, Burns, Burns

The Girl Next Door

3-Minute Intro: Cannibal Holocaust

3-Minute Intro: The Orphanage (El Orfanato)

3-Minute Intro: Sleepaway Camp

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