Day Thirteen: Dead Silence (2007)
Today’s post was originally going to concern William Castle’s Homicidal, but I’m afraid your humble writer fell asleep right around the time a chilly blonde nearly disemboweled a priest, and woke up to find said chilly blonde now acting as some sort of chilly caretaker. A transformation had clearly been missed, and it would be unfair to Mr. Castle to proceed. So instead of a woman with a Norman Bates complex (I wouldn’t even know that much if it weren’t for Robert Osbourne’s intro), we get an army of ventriloquist dummies to compliment last week’s killer Zuni fetish doll.
The dummies are the co-stars of Dead Silence, which was released earlier this year by director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell, who a few years ago ushered in the now yearly tradition of the Jigsaw Killer with their first film, Saw. These two seem to be trying to create a similar superhero here as well, this time its called Mary Shaw, and dummies aside, she bears quite a resemblance to Freddy Krueger.
No one of a sound mind can call the first Saw a good movie, but it had gumption. I respected how two men only a few years older than myself could scrape a few bucks together, lure a few decent stars, and make a shoestring thriller that caught on. The acting and writing are, to be nice, not good, but its important to note that they’re not awful in that calculating mannequin Gilmore Girls/Maxim spread way that plagues most bad horror movies these days. Saw is awful in that refreshing, nostalgically awful way that you remember from 1980s movies, or further back in, yes, William Castle movies. Cary Elwes’s performance in Saw is particularly diffcult to believe, and even more difficult to forget.
I go on about Saw because there isn’t too much in Dead Silence to go on about. There’s remarkably little ventriloquist dummy action for a film about an army of ventriloquist dummies terrorizing a small town. There’s even less screen time devoted to Wan and Whannell’s new boogeyman, Mary Shaw, who’s the keeper of the dummies. Primarly we’re treated to bad dialogue between Donnie Wahlberg’s cop and a bland actor not worth looking up who’s returned to his hometown of Raven’s Claw (I think) to avenge the death of his wife, who’s the victim of a particularly nasty curse placed on his family many years prior.
Your inner gears may already be rejecting this. Why kill the wife and not him? There may have been an explanation offered, but I think its because the movie would only be about ten minutes long otherwise. Wan and Whannell should’ve further examined this possibility: lower budget, lower shooting schedule, the same amount of dummy action, and a gimmick worthy of Castle: The movie too scary to be 90 minutes long!
Dead Silence is not an offense, you won’t leave it angry, but it is boring, and its just competent enough in the acting department to deny us the unintentional pleasure of the first Saw. The film has a twist at the end that is stupid, but appealingly nuts, it should have been promoted to Act I to start things off in a wilder direction. Wan has a few nice atmospheric touches (like the old Universal logo, or the theatre that looks like Frankenstein’s castle from Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman) but they aren’t enough. Unless you’re trying to smooth things over with a significant other who’s notably taken with dummies, I’d skip this one.
Day Twelve: Black Christmas (1974)
Bob Clark’s Black Christmas is a sort of feature length reworking of the urban legend (that also inspired When a Stranger Calls) where a maniac continues to call a woman. Eventually she gets the call traced and the caller’s location turns out to be a little too close for comfort. Clark’s film is set in a soriority house right before Christmas, so its several women hearing the strange, barely coherent calls. We can make out a few things: the names Billy and Agnes, and a whole lot of gibberish and vicious sexual threats. The ladies, boozing and excited about the Holidays, brush it off, but the calls continue, and the ladies’ plans begin to seperate them from one another.
Slasher films are usually too rigid and predictable for my tastes, but Black Christmas is not just a great slasher film, but a great horror film in general. The film, maybe its because its set during the holidays, has a certain sadness. The deaths feel remote and lonely, the corpses of friends shut off in the attic or the bedrooms as everyone else goes about their plans. A subtle wail of winter wind can be heard throughout the soundtrack and that only exasperates the melancholy, and the relentless calls of the killer who seems to refer to himself as Billy.
A sort of plot eventually arises amongst the soriority girls (Olivia Hussey and Margot Kidder are the most famous of the ladies) but that’s primarily there as a red herring that we never fully buy, and to set up the absurd but perfect ending. The ending would never happen, but as the credits roll you find yourself wondering, what if it did happen?
Bob Clark’s work here is stylish, and economic. Our characters are no richer here than in any other slasher film, but they are convincing and devoid of any major expositional howlers. No “This reminds me of the story I read about the guy who got out of the insane asylum” type crap here, the girls are too drunk, and they never know they’re in a horror film. One of the girls eventually finds out, and that’s fifteen minutes before the picture ends. Until then, Black Christmas has an appealingly loosey goosey catch as catch can structure, our characters are all over the place doing a variety of things, but they eventually always have to go back to where they sleep, where Billy can kill them.
I said the characters don’t have any expostional howlers, but it should also be noted that there’s really no exposition at all. The murders could be random, the sorority house could have been picked out of a phone book or just the first stop in the neighborhood. Our opening shot is the now de rigueur killer’s POV shot, and he just walks into the house by climbing through the window on the side. That’s it. Black Christmas is so airy, so surreal, that it could just as easily be a haunted house film, only the spectre is one very deranged human that we are never able to see.
The ending has the primal terror of an Edgar Allan Poe story. The superb final shot returns us to the corpse of the first victim, frozen mid death cry, wrapped like a dime store mummy. The red Christmas lights and easy access (the characters could see her if they looked up) mock her demise. She was celebrating Christmas a day earlier, now she’s another forgotten relic of the attic. No overly mannered directorial ticks here. This is unlanced, true dread. Black Christmas is easily the most unnerving slasher movie I’ve seen.
Black Christmas would also work as a nice double bill with the 1970s anthology film Tales from the Crypt, which also features a Christmas that goes belly up at the hands of a madman. Both films also have a certain ’70s, clammy cinematography that looks partially like embalming fluid. If you don’t like that idea, you could also pair Black Christmas with Clark’s other Christmas film, A Christmas Story and tell your little nephew that Black Christmas is the sequel and that Ralphie is the guy making all the funny calls to all those pretty girls.
Your Next Break From Horror…
..will probably be posts of
Michael Clayton, and
We Own the Night, which ideally will appear late this weekend or early next week. I’m confident that Clayton will happen.
We Own the Night is fifty-fifty. Either way I’m giving you plenty of notice, dear readers, so you have absolutely no excuse to do anything else this weekend.
Day Eleven: May (2002)
Lucky McKee’s May is not a great horror movie, it’s clunky in places, but it’s a good one, and it has a wonderful lead performance by Angela Bettis in the title role. Bettis and the film were compared to Carrie in more than one review, and the comparison is easy but apt. Both films deal with confused young women whose decision to reach out to society is met with vicious rejection. Both films deal with confused young women who snap.
Both May and Carrie belong to a horror subgenre that doesn’t exist but should called the Compassionate Horror Film. Awful things still happen, and our hero is usually directly responsible for at least a portion of those awful things, but we can’t help but feel for them, and we’re usually even rooting for them at least a bit. The heroes of the Compassionate Horror Film usually haven’t gotten a fair deal (a rather nice way to describe having a bucket of pig’s blood dumped on you in your Sunday best) and they usually have the disadvantage of being at least partially insane. It’s the old nature versus nurture trick, only with death, pitch black humor and an obvious bit of vicarious revenge on the part of the filmmakers.
Angela Bettis is one of the more vulnerable young women to appear in a horror film that I can immediately recall. She always seems to be on the verge of floating away, or evaporating at any given moment, and she has a pensive melancholy that suggests that evaporation might not be the worst thing in the world to happen to her. Bettis looks like a live action Tim Burton doll (this has probably been said before) and its remarkable and sad that more hasn’t been done with her. Tim Burton should give her a call, at the very least, if he ever decides to do a live action remake of The Nightmare Before Christmas. That would be a bad idea, but at least it would give Bettis more work.
McKee knows what he has with Bettis, and he has the refreshing confidence in both his film and his central character to take time with his small story, and build gracefully to the harsh notes that must eventually come. McKee said somewhere that he wanted to make a beautiful horror film, and he’s achieved that with May. The killings are May’s only real connection with these people who’ve betrayed her until the end, and as such the killings are treated as sensual, slow farewells, though they are notably not exploitive, nothing eclipses McKee’s compassion for May.
And then we come to the end, which, unlike most horror pictures, is the strongest portion of the story. We see May at the height of her despair, her bizarre plan a failure, and she tries one last desperate sacrifice…and it works. It’s intensely poignant, mysterious and creepy. Even better yet, its a happy ending in a horror film, one of the few such happy endings that fits perfectly within everything else that has preceded it. May finally finds friendship, in spite of odds or sanity.
Day Ten: Trilogy of Terror (1975)
What is it about Karen Black? She’s like one of those horror stories about the houses that contain geometrically impossible angles that drive people mad. Something about her doesn’t fit with other intangible things that I can’t describe. She’s sexy even though she shouldn’t be. She looks clueless and intelligent at the same time. Cross-eyed but focused. Vulnerable but vicious.
In short, she looks tee-totally deranged, whether she’s supposed to be or not. Karen Black has appeared in several legendary films (Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, Easy Rider) as well as films of less prominent status. Few have worked with both Roberts Altman and Zombie, and that’s a testament to the various seemingly disconnected sensibilities of Ms. Black.
I go on about Ms. Black because she’s the sole reason to see the cult TV horror anthology Trilogy of Terror. She’s most certainly the terror of the trilogy, it’s charge. The first two stories (based on work by the great Richard Matheson) are completely forgettable, save the sexuality that Black injects into the material. Her not quite what she appears to be school marm from the first story deserves a swifter vehicle with a better, less predictable punchline. The second story doesn’t even have a character going for it, its humorless, Grade Z Psycho.
The third story is quite famous, and is also taken from a Matheson story, the primal, effective “Prey”. In “Prey”, retitled “Amelia” here so the stories can all be named after their protagonists, Karen Black is terrorized by her gift to her prospective boyfriend, a Zuni Fetish doll, who, she tells her mother, she picked up at a curiosity shop. The doll madness that ensues isn’t bad as that sort of thing goes, but one has to sit through ten minutes of superfluous exposition to get to the good seven minutes that follow. That may sound a bit impatient, but keep in mind that we’ve sat through two underbaked shorts already by this point. The final image, though, is quite creepy, and sets up a story that may have been scarier than any we’ve just watched.
And let it be said that Karen Black sticks a knife in a floor like no one I’ve ever seen. And those teeth…
Day Nine: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
The musical that most people watch around this time of year is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but, excluding the Meat Loaf number and Tim Curry’s performance, I always found that film to be better in theory than reality. Phantom of the Paradise is that reality, a pop culture blender imbued through and through with director Brian De Palma’s pure cinematic fervor.
You may exhaust yourself trying to play the game of spot the reference. Here’s a head start: The Phantom of the Opera (clearly), Faust (also pretty clear being that the film, typical of its super reflexive nature, works it into the plot), The Picture of Dorian Gray (tied to Faust in an amusingly ludicrous way), Edgar Allan Poe, German Expressionism, Glam Rock, The Twilight Zone, Folk, The Beach Boys, Psycho, etc.
Those were the things I caught watching it myself, I read a few reviews after watching the film and they mentioned others, but I will be fair and not include those here. The most remarkable thing about Phantom of the Paradise is that these references don’t bog it down. The film is a lean, hellfire 88 minutes, and the references fuse and compliment one another in ways that mark De Palma as a swifter and more inventive screenwriter than is generally acknowledged.
The film’s more contemporary at the time musical numbers may be dated, but De Palma’s central black theme is as ageless as a certain someone’s portrait: our infinite moral and artistic flexibility in the pursuit of fame and money. De Palma’s film isn’t weighted down by this though, its a joke, and its underlined by how many people in the film are revealed to have made a Faustian pact (at least three characters, and there aren’t too many more characters in the movie.)
The Faustian pacts ultimately bring our three characters down though, because one of them, Swan (Paul Williams, who also wrote the music, and is very effective here), has an ego too large to properly protect his contract with Satan. It’s hidden along with other records and documents helpfully labeled: Contract. Our hero, Winslow Leach (William Finley), now the Phantom, finds it and turns the tables in a garish climax that’s a comment on garish climaxes, but is still a garish climax in its own right.
The third character is Phoenix (Jessica Harper, from another genre milestone, Suspiria) and she is the object of Swan and the Phantom’s rivalry. Swan seems more interested in her as an instrument to torment the Phantom, and the Phantom is the sort of perpetually hung up artistic putz who thinks she’s the only one to sing his music. Phoenix sells out too, gets hooked by Swan on various drugs, and becomes the embodiment of everything the Phantom loathes, though he doesn’t ever seem to realize it.
De Palma’s techinique can sometimes drown the story he’s chosen to tell (though that’s the point most of the time), but Phantom of the Paradise is the kind of reflexive hall of mirrors that perfectly suits his masturbatory, speed demon cineast tendencies. The film is one of De Palma’s fastest and surest, and works confidently as musical, slapstick comedy, post modern art, and, at times as a straight piece of intense operatic melodrama. It’s also, and this is important, not afraid to be a little silly. It’s a Brechtian Mel Brooks horror film, which, in short, means its a classic Brian De Palma film.
Day Eight: From Beyond (1986)
Fans of horror films owe it to themselves to be familiar with director Stuart Gordon. Like David Cronenberg, he is a director who could have “graduated” to more reputable genres long ago, but continues to visit the murky, the slimy and, for most people, the unappealing. Most of us know his debut, Re-Animator, and if you don’t you should, its as good as people say. I could also go on for quite some time about two other mean little mothers of Gordon’s: Dagon, another Lovecraft venture that occasionally flirts with masterpiece status, and Edmond, a fearless adaptation of the David Mamet play that features some of William H. Macy’s best work.
From Beyond is another keeper: lean, mean, dazzling, one of the most sheerly pleasurable horror comedies ever made. I call the film a horror comedy, but I can’t, as I write this, recall too many actual jokes (and the film is running a second time in the background as we speak). The film derives its humor from its skewed sensibility, its dry point of view. From Beyond is probably the most cheerful movie about insanity, S&M and creatures from beyond our dimension ever made.
The danger with a horror film with a sense of humor is that it newters itself, limping along the theatres as some sort of mutant that doesn’t work in either genre. This was one (of many) problems with the Tales From the Crypt HBO movies, as well as, to a much lesser extent, the over praised Evil Dead 2 (the first Evil Dead however, struck a perfect balance.)
Gordon sidesteps this hazard gracefully with both Re-Animator and From Beyond; the films are ticklish spoofs of our id, and the creepy crawlys that punish us for having to invent excuses to indulge it. Think Hellraiser, only without all that boring crap that Clive Barker seems to think is profound, or think a lighter, brighter version of the great remakes of The Thing or The Fly.
The cast of From Beyond is completely in tune with the material and how it should be played. Jeffrey Combs, as the assistant to a scientist who loses his head trying to find a sixth sense from the titular location, has the presence of a super fey Jim Carrey. We expect scientists to be weird in horror movies, but he trumps even those expectations. He is always a step or two behind the action, and he’s always paying for it in ways that shouldn’t amuse us but do.
Barbara Crampton is the psychiatrist (har-har) who intially investigates Combs, but quickly decides to take over his mentor’s position as the film’s control crazy mad scientist. Crampton is a remarkable object of lust here, and you will remember more than one of her scenes (hint: involves the S&M I mentioned earlier), but it should also be noted, both to her and Gordon’s credit, that Crampton’s character is allowed to do more than bend over for the camera. Her character is tougher than Combs and even stranger, more obsessed, and, in the end, more interesting.
Ken Foree appears here as the third and final member of the party: a former football player now paying the bills as a cop (I think). Foree was memorable in Dawn of the Dead as the audience’s voice of common sense, and he effectively serves a similar purpose here. He also exhibits more self-control than any other hetero-sexual in any horror film that I’ve ever seen. Ever.
My post has been indulgent and rambling, giggly and tongue in cheek. I can’t help it. From Beyond is a joyously gross film, made with talent, discipline and good humor. The only real note I can offer is that it should have further explored the S&M element of the story, but that probably says more about me than the movie.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
I don’t always respond to films where the cinematography could be listed as a co-star. I generally find them self-important and boring (Sam Mendes’ movies come to mind). These are generally the sort of movies where a character spouts some sort of “Sometimes in life you have to blah, blah” nonsense. Everyone involved wins an Oscar, the critics calls the film a “masterpiece” and the audience forgets the film until Miramax puts a Best Picture box set together.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a different breed of movie. The cinematography (by the amazing Roger Deakins) isn’t masturbation here, its at constant, poignant odds with the characters on screen. Jesse James has the look of something that could be meticulously composed, stately, lifeless and Oscar ready in lesser hands, but that, in Andrew Dominik’s film, is partially the point. The characters are trying to live up to the sort of false iconography that most movies offer (though the media of choice at the time would’ve been little paperbacks, penny dreadfuls I think), but their emotions are continually betraying and revealing them. Men cry at several instances in Jesse James and those scenes are more shocking than any of the graphic murders we see committed.
The outlaws of the film are all trying to be outlaws on the scale of Jesse James himself, who’s embodied here by Brad Pitt, in his best performance. Pitt has proven himself a star of considerable charm and charisma in past films, but I’ve never really bought his too self-conscious “actor” performances as much, particularly his overwrought turn in 12 Monkeys, where Bruce Willis should have been the one getting all of that attention.
Pitt is superb here: iconic, haunted, diseased, insane, elusive, with eyes that seem to be constantly shifting, changing perspective. There is something vampiric about Pitt’s Jesse James, or maybe its just the celebrity that dogs him constantly. There’s a mesmerizing scene about halfway through the film where James, rightfully suspicious that the Ford boys are up to something, stares through Bob Ford (Casey Affleck) as he offers an indulgent comparison between himself and James. Dominik keeps the camera on Pitt’s eyes, and they’re scarier than anything I watched in the first week of my Halloween series.
The film, as many people have been quick to point out, is long, but not indulgent. The extra running time allows us to fully soak in the texture and sound of scenes such as the above one, or an early scene between Frank James (Sam Shepard) and Ford that captures the constant alert that probably acompanied the life of an outlaw. In this early scene we get a glimpse of the Hell of the James’ lives, and we see Ford cluelessly tromping into it.
The Hell of celebrity is the one area where Jesse James risks heavy handedness though. I can buy Dominik’s view of the celebrity culture as transmitted disease, but I sense that he’s stacking the deck a bit. We see none of the fun that comes with being one of the most famous people in the world. None of the privileges, none of the favors, none of the initial ego boost. I think a hint of this would’ve added just that much more contrast to the melancholy that hangs over the entire film.
This is a minor issue with a full, vast film that still manages to work tonal wonders throughout. Jesse James, the character, is remarkably unsympathetic here, its as honest a portrayal of a real person as distorted by folk myth that I’ve ever seen. Robert Ford is even more complex, I sympathized with him initially, then, like the James’ I saw him as an opportunistic, shallow little worm. Then, as he’s vilified later in the film, I sympathized again, because he’s hated for doing things that are no more despicable than the acts of Jesse James himself. But timing is everything, and the public is fickle.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a great, great movie and my post here has only captured a bit of it. Is it a masterpiece? I think that movie writers, whether paid or voluntary, use that word too quickly in the hopes that they are the first person to correctly label a real masterpiece. I suspect that this film is, but it will still be around in a few years to receive the praise if it turns out to be true. Let’s wait and see.
Day Seven: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)
Wow. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death really isn’t the movie I expected at all. I remember seeing the VHS box at the movie store, and being afraid to rent it based on that title alone. I had already been appropriately desensitized to violence with Freddy, Jason and whatever other vengeance seeking corpses were available, but the idea of a group of people getting together to drive a young woman insane was too much for this nine year old. I wasn’t interested in (or willing to deal with) psychological violence just yet.
So I never watched the film until last night, and I have to say that the nine year old Chuck (though it was Charlie at the time), would have been disappointed. For one the film is atmospheric instead of gory (a no-no for nine year old Charlie) and two the film isn’t what the title implies. The atmospheric part is better for 28 year old Chuck. The plot is neither better or worse, though, as we’ve already established, few horror films live up to the imagination of a frightened child.
The title doesn’t entirely lie. The film is about a young woman named Jessica, (Zohra Lampert) who’s feeling a bit fragile after a recent stay in a mental institution. Jessica and her husband decide to buy a house in a remote countryside so Jessica can recoup in peace; a good idea in real life, but never in the realm of the horror movie. Her friends aren’t the problem though, its a more traditional, less scary, force at work, and the film, if you’re paying any attention at all, tips its hand real early with a photo found in the newly acquired, possibly haunted house.
I complained yesterday that 1408 was well crafted but let us off the hook too easy. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is not as well crafted, but doesn’t let us off the hook. Jessica solves the mystery, but the movie is quick to point out that that doesn’t really improve her situation, in fact, the mystery may not even exist to begin with (though the movie doesn’t do a whole lot with that possibility.)
The reason to see this low budget little chiller is the atmosphere and an impressively sustained all around general eeriness. I was never too involved in Jessica’s plight (she’s not particularly sympathetic) but the sound design and that creepy as hell lake in late autumn worked on me the way I’m sure it was intended to. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death feels like the way you’d dream about a horror movie the night after watching it; things are hauntingly vague and tradtional filler scenes seem to be missing. People come and go here for long stretches of time unaccounted for. This may have been poor juggling in the script department but it ultimately works in the film’s favor.
The director here, John Hancock, has a light touch. He doesn’t pound away on the score or the things in the background or the faux jump scares, everything is hushed and every shot is held a beat longer than you expect or want. About an hour in you realize that you may be authentically uneasy when Jessica decides to take another dip in the lake. What is it about lakes in Autumn anyway?
Maybe its because only certain things can stand to be in water that cold.
Day Six: 1408 (2007)
1408 is an unusually classy mainstream ghost story, and one of the very best films to have come from a Stephen King work (its based on a short story of the same name, and is most easily found in the collection, Everything’s Eventual). John Cusack stars here as Mike Enslin, a man who once aspired to be a novelist and has resorted to writing Top Ten Scariest Fill in the Blank books to make ends meet. He resents this, he feels its beneath him, and the script, at first, does a ripe job of setting him up for retribution.
The first act is the best in the movie, and we revel in the return to slow build basics that have made past films such as the original The Haunting so pleasurable. 1408 is very old school: polished, lush atmosphere, economic character development, solemn, mysterious connections to past tragedy. Cusack is an ideal stand in for the contemporary movie goer; effectively bridging the gap between old school spooks and a society that finds them ridiculous.
Of course there are nitpicks. I think 1408 is a very enjoyable 90 odd minutes at the movies, and you may want to turn back if you haven’t seen it yet. Because I do want to address a few crumbs that have fallen in between the pillows on the couch.
The second and third acts are primarily effective but more problematic than the superb opener. The script doesn’t continue to trust Cusack’s performance to tell us that he’s a cynical SOB. Which is too bad, because Cusack’s performance does just fine without the added filler that connects the dots a little too concretely for my taste.
The room 1408 turns out to be a sort of scrambler of its’ occupants’ center of reality, and this is a provacative idea. Its been done, but as presented here its still scary. The majority of the past deaths have been suicides, and its made chillingly clear toward the end that this is the only escape from a never-ending cycle of madness.
The last third of the film is too schematic, more A Christmas Carol than The Haunting. Cusack eventually finds a depressingly banal means of escape and finds out that there indeed will be a Christmas morning and that all of his problems have been solved, because he looked within himself to, you know.
What if that was just the final joke of 1408? For a charged moment or two, I thought that was where they were heading, and it would’ve been a hell of a cherry to walk out on, but the filmmaker (Mikael Hafstrom) and the writers (who include Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, of Ed Wood and The People Vs. Larry Flynt) want to teach us a Valuable Lesson, and nothing is less scary than the assertion that life is indeed governed by a kinder, divine set of rules.
I was worried from the trailer that the effects would drown the movie, but they are fairly thoughtfully integrated (a few typical moments of modern overdirection notwithstanding) and work well. Its been a while since I’ve read the King story so I’m not certain, but I think things were a little more up in the air in his version. But who knows? Maybe the movie was never made to begin with.
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