Two for One Horror Conundrums

Two for One Horror Conundrums

by Kristin Battestella

These recent horror releases start off as one thing and become something else – biting off a bit more than they can chew with a mixed bag of entertaining, annoying, and even laughable results.

Doctor Sleep – Ewan McGregor (Nightwatch) and Rebecca Ferguson (The Girl on the Train) lead this 2019 sequel incorporating Stephen King's novels as well as The Shining's changes with 1980 campers in the woods and a creepy woman in a magic hat before Overlook Hotel landscapes, that infamous Room 237, and terrified children. Overhead angles, upside down camerawork, and chilling beats accent nightmares, boxing up the mind from evil, seedy movie theaters, and subliminal revenge. Unfortunately, the intermingled The Shining revisits and new inconsistencies keep restarting the plot. It's odd to see people recreating characters from the first movie alongside ghosts, telepathic explanations, birthday parties, and drunken escapades that again reset. The first half hour meanders, leaving the audience wondering how these 2011 strangers, eerie coastal rituals, and tempting offers to stay youthful forever are all connected to Danny's AA meetings and his touching fresh start as the titular orderly using his shine to ease dying patients. The momentum changes once more eight years later thanks to telepathic messages on the chalkboard, chilling Jedi mind tricks, a spooky troop running low on steam, and disturbing abduction vignettes. Interconnected visions made completely clear, automatic writing, channeling clues, and shining lookers experiencing the killer acts are intriguing, if jumbled together when the segments with specific characters each deserve focus. It's great when our shining friends finally meet – there's only a few like them in a lifetime and now someone is eating their shine. Warnings not attract people's attention lead to spooky silhouettes, ghostly catch ups, and filing cabinets to store the evil in the mind. Astral projection distortions are well done with warped reflections, ominous clouds, bloody noses, and flickering electric amid power struggles and who's tracking whom turnabouts. However high stakes are made simple with easy psychic ruses and instant traveling; the build up takes longer than the confrontations thanks to fast captures and fatal changes leaving little time to explore anonymous vampires snuffed out in quick shootouts. Internal struggles between alcohol and gifts are gotten over in a brief choice before car accidents, amplified mental powers, and rushed confrontations as the current action hurries back to the snowy Overlook in the last hour. The powerful psychics are suddenly vulnerable, susceptible to the hungry ghosts as the abandoned hotel awakens – Gold Room, axed door, and all. The payoff would have been worthwhile if we had more time with the characters, for entire scenes mimic The Shining, falling back on familiar corridors, typewriters, and hedge mazes rather than fleshing out daddy issues and alcoholism as a hereditary disease. Although entertaining with great scares and paranormal atmosphere, the back and forth, up the stairs and down the stairs action becomes one overlong movie serving two masters, struggling between pacing the book on its own and falling back on the Kubrick connections when one season of psychic vampires and then a second season revisiting the Overlook would have done wonders.

Skip It

Child's Play – Single mom Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation) leads this 2019 re-imagining complete with uncanny valley ugly designs, compromised safety protocols, and creepy commercials for the new high tech Buddi doll. Stormy nights, disgruntled employees, and customer complaints lead to our pretentious son obsessed with his phone and too mature to play with a returned, defective, re-gifted doll. Instead he hangs out on the dark streets with his hood up – emo yet hip and making friends with a policeman neighbor when not using the doll to frighten mom's jerky boyfriend with generic jump scares. Mistaken commands and bonding moments are meant to be cute, getting the loneliness across in charming montages with social statements about a robot being a child's only friend. However, the supposed fun and games are intermixed with mechanical point of view, glitches, glowing eyes, creepy robotic talking, and knives. We know scary is to come – negating the sympathy with cats in peril, misused technology for one's own gain, and commands not to harm people a la Terminator 2. Internal references to evil robots and horror movies are out of touch, breaking viewer immersion because they are for the adult audience not the young protagonists onscreen. Lighting, shadows, and camera angles accentuate snippets of chilling horror, but then more forced whimsy flat lines the simmering mood. Most scenes also happen at night just for artificial menace – mom's nasty boyfriend even takes down the outdoor Christmas lights in the dark but it's tough to appreciate the ladder dangers, strangling light strings, and kids wearing headphones who can't hear the lawn equipment buzzing because of the crass overkill and laughable chopped head hot potato. How old does a kid have to be before he realizes he can't wish someone dead or cry when the batteries are taken out of his evil toy? Empathy and conflict suffer between the dual attempt at independent technological intelligence warnings and Chucky franchise sardonic. Cheap bathroom thrills and contrived suspense over automated devices not turning on the lights acerbate excessive torture porn as deaths go on and on with redundant stabbings, saws, driver-less cars, and splatter. There's no reason for the extra gore, our youth being deaf, or the family being white. It's downtrodden Chicago but only the supporting players are allowed to be Black in a mainstream horror release, and placing an old black lady in terror as if we're supposed to cheer because she's sassy to the end compounds the back and forth humor or horror insulting the audience. The tweens had numerous opportunities to tell an adult about the violence but they blame the grown ups when they aren't believed. The overlong plot and mixed motivations sway as needed, tacking on shopping hysteria, gory marketing displays, and remote control airplane propellers slicing a trapped crowd. The last fifteen minutes are an absurd department store bloodbath with our kids wielding a laughably convenient hedge trimmer. Despite potential, producer Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) once again runs someone else's I.P. into the ground thanks to reshoots and too many behind the scenes hands in the pot ripping off multiple themes. Maybe this is watchable for casual horror viewers, but the messy, repetitive cliches aren't as fun as the original Child's Play.

What the Heck?

Everfall – I didn't expect this 2017 indie to be good – I just wanted to see figure skaters in a horror movie. Epic mountains and action cam stunts, however, try hard while our melodramatic, washed up ingenue is late to the rink. She says there's not going to be a next time for her boyfriend to choose the rush over her – not because she is ditching this terribly toxic relationship, but because she fell and is out of the competition. Flashbacks and injury scars lead to crying in the shower, insistence that her boyfriend isn't the issue, and a fed up coach sending her to the obscure titular festival. The contrived family troubles, skating struggles, bad vibes boyfriend, previous fires, and cursed arena are all revealed upfront, but our snobby skater refuses everyone trying to help her and most of the characters are jerks or idiots. There's a ridiculous exaggeration about the death spiral maneuver, too – as if someone thought it was something scary and ominous enough to make a horror movie around it without ever showing anyone doing the move properly. Creepy rink officials, “dark atmospheric music” captions, and people walking around an ice rink like it is some latent scary place are too awkward, and no one's in a rush to call the police after an off camera witnessing of a girl shooting herself, because of course nothing in the arena is what it appears to be. Convenient screens show past videos yet phones are deliberately left at home, and it's up to our concerned mom to do a Google search and read Wikipedia aloud. Dressing Room 5 has an evil red door with talk of witches, rituals, and kids said to be scarified in an annual reaping along with everything else that's being thrown in here like candles, heartbeats, and ghostly little girls being chased up and down the same hallway. There's an angry firefighter ex-husband, too, and the useless daredevil douche boyfriend belittling her into pranks, injury, and ruining her skating keeps going on and on as if him being the cause should be some kind of surprise. Emotional music matches the imaginary resets for some of the best moments, but it's all a horror ruse so how are we supposed to be moved when we don't know which has really happened? There's messing with unreliability and then there's paining your audience by faking your way through the holes in the story. There's no reason to care about the past traumas or comeuppance, and if this is about the horror of an asshole boyfriend, we figured that out in the first five minutes. Not only is this a bad horror movie, but there's next to no on ice action. I'm so annoyed.

Recent Horror Questionables

Recent Horror Split Decisions

By Kristin Battestella

When watching horror across the decades, one thing always seems to stand out: most recent macabre movies are kind of iffy.  Whether it’s a case of miscasting, poor effects, or weak scripts, here’s a quick look at a few 21^st century films full of undecided ho-hum or what could have been.

The Divide – Michael Biehn (Aliens), Rosanna Arquette (Desperately Seeking Susan), and Courtney B. Vance (Law & Order: Criminal Intent) star in this freaky and dirty dystopian tale with a conflicted identity. It takes several starts to get going- a disaster, credits, black outs, frenetic camera work, strobe lighting, and action that’s so fast the audience can’t tell what’s happening. Somber music notes capture the desolation as people go nuts early in this crappy, dusty basement; but these depressing montages conflict with the in your face photography. Everyone freaks out as expected, but one critical twist happens too early and is subsequently never touched upon again. Is this SF action or social serious? The Unrated Version may polish the character development, but it is frustrating to the viewer when the plot can go either way and there are two cuts of the film.  The two full hours here are both not enough thanks to the confusion and too long over the slow motion breakdown onscreen. I understand the attempt at substance, but the editing is poor and the plot unbalanced. It’s tough to tell who is who, and all the titular division, paranoia, and desperation can’t exactly be highly stylized with such dirty subject matter. The breakdown of an already fractured group of people is nicer than the herky jerky action start, but the story still degrades into mindless shock value and becomes forced as weak and crazy men create the need for an action woman and veiled political statements. The make up and plausible collapse of health and social systems may be good, but who wants to watch a disaster movie where the assholes end up in charge? This could have been a fine film, but even if a final explanation was given or the ball not dropped on such a significant twist, this one simply can’t end well. What’s an audience to do?

Evil Eyes – The writer-within-a-film-frame aspects of this 2004 thriller intrigued me, but considering it’s a video direct from that pesky low budget embarrassing genre grist mill The Asylum, one can’t expect glory. Already dated thanks to old cameras, phones, laptops, and headphones, the VHS and newspaper clippings in the plot further detract from this contemporary-set film and make it seem even more low budget old. Weird colors and dream photography, jagged angles, unflattering up shots, and music cues are a little too on the nose.  Several breakings of the fourth wall are also too obvious. Sure, the premise is a bit familiar, but it’s sound and doesn’t need all these over the top misses. Simple shots of a blank screen with a blinking cursor in the corner are chilling enough. Udo Kier (Shadow of the Vampire) is a perfectly slick and shady Hollywood executive, but Adam Baldwin (Firefly) is tough to believe as a down on his luck screenwriter to start. Somehow, we expect him to be bad or crazy not the everyman, and the character improves as the twisted action, suspicion, and madness intensify. Is it coincidence that he writes and bad things happen or is it fate? Unfortunately, there isn’t enough mood or atmosphere despite some good gore.  Except for overboard plugs for Dreamworks, the tone here is all about the on the cheap and it just doesn’t go far enough.  It’s not all bad, but everything turns out a little too trite with a dumb ending.

Jennifer’s Shadow – Also called Chronicles of the Raven stateside, this 2004 spooky has a lot going for it. Faye Dunaway (Mommie Dearest) looks classy as always and has fun with all the freaky birds and macabre. The music is moody, adding to the disturbing atmosphere and scary night terrors. Although a full on gothic feeling might have been better served had this been a complete period piece, silent, demented action and chase scenes build the sinister intensity.  The language beats, however, feel weird. There’s a stilted English and Spanish mix that should have been one or the other, not a “No habla espanol bien” bumbling. We never get a real Argentine flavor, either. The dark photography and muted palette are also tough to see at times, and the audience can figure out the curse exposition and obvious twists before their fairly late appearances.  Nonetheless, all that could have been forgiven except for one major pitfall: Gina Philips (Jeepers Creepers) is a completely unfeeling and unlikable ‘pretty American girl in a foreign country’ waste on two legs. Not only is there an additional lookalike cliché tacked on, but thru either bad acting or poor scripting, the audience can’t like such a bitchy and selfish protagonist.  It’s tough to enjoy a film when you want something bad to happen to the lead! There are great surroundings here to chew on, and one really wants to like this little thriller. However, the ridiculous characterization does not make it easy.

The Wicker Tree – A chaste Christian couple from Texas (Brittania Nicol and Henry Garrett) is thrust into the naughty Scottish countryside for this 2011 revisit of The Wickerman. Our young leads lay it on thick with some annoyingly bad acting, and though creepy, Jacqueline Leonard (EastEnders) and Graham McTavish (The Hobbit) simply aren’t as juicy as Christopher Lee was in the original. Sub par cast notwithstanding, the very premise from writer and director Robin Hardy (also of the original) feels off. The young missionaries are written as brainwashed by their religion, too naive to live, and almost deserving of the mocking of their beliefs. Then the preachy pendulum beats the viewer over the head with evidence of how most Christian elements grew from pagan roots, making this not-a-sequel potentially offensive to audiences on either side of the fence. Both cultures are portrayed as oppressive or negative throughout the film, and the mix of country sassy turned gospel turned Celtic music also won’t be for everyone. The ridiculous subtitles during a sex scene and weak TnA here barely earn an R rating, too.  Lee’s brief appearance does add a touch of class; his voice carries a wonderful alluring question- but it isn’t enough. Likewise, the scares and sinister in the final act here can’t redeem all simply because we know what’s going to happen. Rightly or wrongly, this one makes more statements than modern run of the mill slashers, and perhaps it isn’t that bad in and of itself. Unfortunately, it’s just not the original.

And Do Avoid

Bride of Chucky – I thought this 1998 sequel was more recent that it actually is, and the dated music and fashion really shows. While Brad Dourif (Lord of the Rings) as the voice of Chucky is always fun, the line up of Jennifer Tilly (Bound), the late John Ritter (Three’s Company), and a very young Katherine Heigl (Grey’s Anatomy) is also too of the nineties, and the entire horror comedy plot turn comes off as a little impractical to say the least. It’s a little weird that we’re watching two dolls arguing- or worse, having sex! Tilly keeps it bemusing, but if you want true scares instead of puns, this tone just doesn’t work. Perhaps Bride isn’t a bad film on its own, and at the time, it was a good way to revitalize the Child’s Play franchise with a gimmick towards the follow up Seed of Chucky. However, the series has nonetheless ended up in direct to video and reboot territory, having traded in its original childhood fears for self-referential stupidity.

Holiday Horror Viewfest

Holiday Horror Hits

By Kristin Battestella

Looking for something to do with yourself after surviving the horrors of unending holiday dinners, hyperactive family drama, and the fruitcake that will not die?  Take in these classic horror hits and worthy recent scarefests.  

Antichrist – Director Lars von Trier’s 2009 disturbing and controversial family horror drama opens with a bizarre and unique sex scene/baby death montage and gets weirder from there.  Only Willem Dafoe (Platoon) can make dead babies seem so casual- and I say that in a good way!  Although von Trier’s distorted cutting, angled filming, and scribbled chapter plates may be jarring to some, these visual cues akin perfectly to the unreliable feelings of distortion and downward spiral that such grievous loss can bring.  Cannes Best Actress winner Charlotte Gainesburg (I’m Not There) is a little annoying as well, but then again obviously understandable as a mother who was shebanging when she should have been looking after her child.  The altered perception of time, responsibility, and indifference bounces between the leads nicely as we progress towards plenty of violent sex, mental scares, and kinky creepy.  It’s all a little uppity considering the dirty subject matter, and certain audiences will definitely be alienated by the material-but the performances here win against the saucier distrubia. Put the kids to bed for this one.

Bride of Frankenstein – Despite its short length, over the top style, and bad science effects, this 1935 Universal sequel is a classic for a reason.  Boris Karloff (The Mummy) returns with Elsa Lanchester (Witness for the Prosecution) for director James Whale’s (The Invisible Man, Showboat) stylized tale in the spirit of Mary Shelley’s infamous creation.  The theatrics at hand add to the spooky atmosphere and morally ambiguous, hair raising drama and provide plenty of scary hijinks for both young and old.  Even the score is wonderful as well, being tragic when needed and even spiritual and bittersweet. Love, tragedy, death, angry mobs, misunderstood monsters- there’s something for everyone here!  Long time classic horror fans can always enjoy the great, campy classic quotes and old school iconography.  Educate the family while taking in all the subtext, layers, and quality storytelling here.  

Child’s Play – If you want to scare the kids out of wanting THE toy of this holiday season, then this is the film! Though dated, some of the 1988 scares may indeed be too much for the super youngins.  However, nostalgic folks can chuckle with Chucky’s naughty wit courtesy of Brad Dourif (Lord of the Rings, Dune) and enjoy the more intelligent mystery and suspense aspects here.  While the sequels certainly have their ups and downs, Chris Sarandon (Fright Night, Dog Day Afternoon), and Catherine Hicks (7^th Heaven) have some fine moments here.  Die hard marathoners can continue with Jenny Agutter (Logan’s Run) in Child’s Play 2 or go really crazy with Jennifer Tilly’s (Bound) send up in Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky.  Child’s Play 3 isn’t that bad, but Chucky run amok on a military base is a bit much, even for this zany franchise.

Trick ‘r Treat – This 2007 pseudo horror anthology is kind of comical- a diminutive pumpkin boy Sam (short for Samhain) pursues naughty Halloween rule breakers? Some segments here are pretty bad, even stupid and just preposterous beyond belief.  Somehow, however, writer and director Michael Dougherty’s (X2, Superman Returns) quirky style and lighthearted irony keep these tales- among them twisted school principal Dylan Baker (Kings, Thirteen Days) and seemingly innocent and Red Riding Hood-esque Anna Paquin (True Blood, X-Men) - on the bemusing side.  The ridiculousness is actually quite refreshing; especially against other recent horror pictures that try to be sardonic and miss or those copycat sequels and remakes that just take themselves too dang seriously.

The Watcher in the Woods – Although this 1980 Disney thriller might be a little too scary for the super young Santa set, older kids and the young at heart who grew up on this spooky charmer can delight all over again in young Lynn Holly Johnson (Ice Castles, For Your Eyes Only) and crotchety Bettie Davis (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte) as they try to solve the haunting events and disappearances in the forest about their grand English manor.  Yes, it’s a little marred by Disney’s influence and maybe some of the events here are a fairly typical now. However, some scenes are still as scary now as they were to me back then.  When my mother wanted to frighten me indoors from the woods surrounding our own home or prevent me from staying up to watch an eclipse, she’d yell, “Do you want to end up like Karen in The Watcher in the Woods?!”

Bloody Egg Nog, anyone?