Clunky Women's Horror

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.