Clunky
Women's Horror
by
Kristin Battestella
This
trio of recent horror releases puts women at the center of the
scares, but the cliches littering the action are what's most
frightening!
You
Make the Call!
All Light Will End – Thunder, rustic cabins, and a scared
little girl in white saying there's a monster in her closet open this
2018 scary before folk songs, creaking doors, and hiding under the
sheets with a flashlight to keep the growls at bay. However, rather
than building on these chills, the story restarts twenty years later
with a fat redneck cop chastising a rookie black cop as they answer a
call about a severed forearm. We're told the little girl is the
sheriff's daughter before restarting again with her big city
rise and shine complete with taking pills while looking in bathroom
mirror, edgy ballads, and posters for her titular bestselling debut.
Multiple driving montages, radio chatter, cliché talk show
interviews, and therapy loose more momentum – arbitrarily going
through the motions while giving everything away in the first fifteen
minutes. Her medication can cause disassociation or a fugue state
mixing dreams with reality, and flashes of previous conversations,
nightmares, and suicides provide guilt, blame, and inner demons.
Alarms, flashing lights, green hues, and eerie tunnels accent the
hospital nightmares, and the best scary moments allow the potential
frights behind each door to play out with darkness and screams.
Unfortunately, these quality night terror vignettes delay our
writer's six hour drive home to face her fears, and it takes more
than half the movie for any forward action to happen. We're at the
wrong point in the story, and viewers who haven't tuned out will
wonder why we're watching now when all the story seems to have
happened then. Bungling cops jar against the severed limbs,
creepy gas stations, suspected abuse, and campfire tales, but the
grieving family moments and women mulling over telling secrets or
keeping them and losing your sanity are better than the try hard pals
with beer. The blurring of dreams versus reality are intercut well
when we finally do get to the cabin, mirroring the mental
disassociation with similar nighttime lighting, mind bending jumps,
distorted voices, blindfolds, and bloody trails. People are missing,
searchers are separated, and woods and whispers blend together. Prior
arguments between mother and daughter are revisited with negative
portrayals, sacrifices about what it takes to be a writer, and doubts
about who wrote what escalating to blackmail and crazed, violent
reactions. Although there are some choice twists as well as a reason
for the disjointed, non-linear telling, the structural flaws make it
tough to enjoy this story. Key points are both obvious thanks to that
front loaded information and muddled with unanswered plot holes and
abrupt resolutions. The possibilities devolve into hammy actions,
unnecessary running at the screen with open mouth screams, and
strolling through the woods in bloody lingerie. With four minutes of
end credits, this really is an eighty minute movie that should have
traded the first half hour for a half hour to resolve everything
properly.
Two
to Skip
Backcountry
– From packing in the parking garage and highway traffic jams to
embarrassing sing a longs and a Cosmo
quiz
for relationship backstory, this 2014
Canadian survival thriller from writer and director Adam MacDonald
(Pyewacket)
has plenty of cliches for this city couple in the woods. Sunlit
smiles, peaceful canoe pretty, and happy hiking montages can't belie
the ominous when the audience enters in with full knowledge of the
impending horror. At the
country rest stop, a ranger warns them of bad weather and closed, out
of season trails, however our big man insists he doesn't need medical
kits or a map. He ignores minor injuries,
mocks his inexperienced girlfriend's preparations, leaves his ax
behind, and lights a fire before leaving it to go skinny dipping. Not
only do these actions completely contradict everything Survivorman
taught
us, but these people also don't know they are in a scary movie. A
sudden stranger at their campsite creates obvious jealousy and
inferiority complexes but weird accents, racist questions, contrived
dialogue, and stereotypical characterizations interfere with the
attempted tension. Fortunately, askew angles on the trail, going off
the path doubts, isolated nature sounds, and lookalike trees invoke
better suspense as the camera blurs and pans with confusion or pain
thanks to disgusting toe nail gore. Up close views inside the
cramped, not so safe tent build fear alongside snapping branches and
bear footprints, but of course this guy doesn't believe the
supposedly overreacting woman who wants to go home when she hears
something amiss. No dumbass, it isn't acorns falling on the outside
of the tent, and you should have never taken her phone and left it in
the car! It takes a half hour for the innate wilderness horrors to
get going, but the suspense is continually interrupted by the
obnoxious behavior – wasting water, blaming her for their situation
when it is clearly his fault, and her apologizing after confessing he
is a loser just trying to impress her. Why couldn't they have gone on
an easier hike when she never wanted to go in the first place?
Proposal excuses aren't enough when you continually ignore dead
carcasses nearby and claim it was just a raccoon that ate your food.
Drinking the mini champagne bottles is not going to help their
situation! Despite well done heartbeats, ringing in the ears, and
tumbling down the ravine camera views, there's simply not enough
character development and story here to sustain the wait for the
superbly bloody, frenetic bear attacks in the finale. Gore, scares,
screams, growls, and maulings fall prey to a just missed 'em
helicopter rescue opportunity as our final girl inexplicably becomes
an expert runner, rock climber, and field medic before pretty deer
and dumb luck save the day. Is this uplifting music and girl power
ending just a dream of what she wishes happens because otherwise it
is ridiculously unlikely. Where Pyewacket
expressly defies the horror tropes checklist, this does nothing but
adhere to it – becoming only worth watching if you want to yell at
the people or fast forward to see them get what they deserve.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The
bear isn't the villain, human superiority is!
The Disappointments Room – Foreign blonde architect Kate
Beckinsale (Underworld)
moves into a haunted country fixer upper after a death in the family,
and there are many more cliches in this long delayed 2016
psychological tale written by Wentworth Miller (Stoker). After
the stormy driving montage complete with a sing a long, an annoying
kid, and promises of a fresh start; unnecessarily ominous moving
boxes abound alongside on the nose mirrors visualizing the parallel
but divided parents looking in opposite directions. Trying to be cool
transitions consisting of dream fake outs, bathroom scares, and
derivative flashbacks begat scary dogs and suspect stray cats as our
Jill of All Trades photographs the damaged greenhouse, overgrown
garden, dirty statues, grimy reflecting pool, and rusty iron gate.
Instead of creepy atmosphere, however, the locked doors and
mysterious attic lights break the point of view – we see a shadowed
hand or eyes peering through the keyhole because they are meant to be
shocks for the audience rather than something experienced by the
protagonists. Likewise, an apparent vision of this tormenting garret
doesn't feel like the characters are experiencing it so much as they
are spliced into the rapid ye olde scary images. The jerky husband
objects to everything his wife says but she conveniently finds the
right skeleton key after freaking out over old pictures. It's all
supposed to be intense because of knives and a kitchen timer yet she
dresses so hip with cool boots and suave hair to renovate a house, as
seen by her marking up some blueprints with a red marker and using
the correct term for a chifforobe. There's a box marked “historical
research” which ultimately has everything they need to know, but
how do rich white people in horror movies buy a renovation property
without never having surveyed the estate in advance? Typical
sleeplessness, mental history, and distorted timing contribute to the
increasingly unrealistic as a man's leather library, luxury bedrooms,
and a fancy architect office are completed while a giant leak in the
roof goes unattended until our Mrs. plays hardball and shares
cigarettes with totally random hunky handyman Lucas Till (X-Men: First Class). Despite the library research montage, coincidental
but not a coincidence death dates, and an old lady explaining the
titular imprisonments, we don't feel any fear because it's never in
doubt that the ghost story meets psychological excuse is suspect.
Late flashbacks to suicide attempts without the injured character
further unravel any kind of mental horror examination, tossing in big
city troubles while wasting the supporting cast, and it's likely
behind the scenes turmoil and cutting room changes were responsible
for the inexplicable. Skeletons, hangings, dinner parties, burning
portraits, and ghostly hallucinations that somehow do incredibly
physical violence go on and on in a finale that becomes one montage
after another. Suspenseful music seemingly builds to something that
never happens, and the ghosts as guilt metaphor is nothing but smoke
and mirrors before eight and a half minutes of slow scrolling
credits.
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