Day Twenty-One: Infection (2004)
Infection opens with several vignettes that gradually reveal to us the various nurses, doctors, and patients that populate a barren hospital one night. The stafff is overworked, underfunded and in danger of mental collapse. The patients, those that aren’t rotting away from burns or a very mysterious disease, are probably clinically insane, or don’t exist to begin with. The entire thing is absurd, particularly the design of the hospital from Hell, but then so are most nightmares, and for awhile director Masayuki Ochiai plays phenomenally on all the little things that nag you while you sit in a hospital waiting room. What if they re-used diseased syringes? What if something really deadly is incubating in the person who sits next to you? What if the doctor is crazy?
Infection appears to be one of those “people get picked off one by one by a mysterious thing that may or may not mutate them” kind of movies. I was thinking John Carpenter’s The Thing or Leviathan. Ochiai does incorporate some of those conventions, but there is also an emphasis placed, particularly in the third act, on something less tangible. Reality begins to crumble for these characters, and we wonder whether the disease is of the tell-tale variety, some sort of mass guilt that plagues the staff over a cover up that happens earlier in the film. The doctors turn on each other, try to figure out the source of the disease and…
…that’s right around when the film totally shoves its head up its own ass. Imagine the end of The Sixth Sense, only instead of Bruce Willis being the ghost, it turns out that yes, he’s the ghost, then, no, he’s not a ghost, then, well, yes, he may be a ghost, but then, no Haley Joel Osment is the ghost and he’s imagining that Bruce Willis is a ghost to deal with his own fear of being a ghost. What I just wrote is much more coherent than the last twenty minutes or so of Infection, which turns into an inescapable house of mirrors for its characters. By the end, convolution has become the disease and, believe me, Ochiai isn’t offering a cure.
It works though, and I normally don’t go for the Japansese horror films that get shipped to the U.S and are, inevitably, remade as more sensical but even more boring American films for teens. Infection maintains interest even in its knottier sections because it’s grounded in a very true, tangible anxiety of a total loss of control, of a fear that people who should know what they’re doing don’t.
Day Twenty: The Monster Squad (1987)
It can be risky to revisit a film from your childhood. As children we don’t have the calculation that we do as grown-up, full fledged film obsessives and it seems a little perverse to go back and ruin a past movie for yourself when you’re so busy ruining present movies for yourself. Let a bad film at least be a good film in false memory if nowhere else. You can’t go home again as the famed literary someone wrote, and he may have been thinking of 1980s childrens films that skate dangerously close to self-parody when he wrote it.
My fear of revisiting The Monster Squad could be summed up in two words, “the” and “goonies”. I knew even then that Squad was more than a little indebted to the Richard Donner film, and this is bad news indeed. The Goonies has aged terribly, and if I had been an adult at the time, I imagine I wouldn’t have gone for it at all. The film is loud, obnoxious, vaguely offensive (particularly with Chunk) and just a general headache of 1980s tastelessness. I’m not trying to steer us down the PC road that seems to be strangling our art today, but it should be made known that not all fat kids are bird brained, food crazed mad men. Chunk is to fat children what the Mickey Rooney landlord in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is to Asian stereotypes.
The Monster Squad is still a ripoff of The Goonies, but, aside from a regrettable Chunk wannabe, its not nearly as overbearing or desperate to be liked. The Monster Squad is agreeably slight, only 75 minutes, and makes sure to give most of the featured monsters, particularly The Gill Man, the Wolf Man, and The Mummy, a moment to shine. The Mummy gets a clever send off, and the Wolf Man has the opportunity to prove beyond a doubt that a silver bullet is the only way to kill him. For further analysis consult the aptly titled Silver Bullet.
Dracula and Frankenstein are a little disappointing though, even by the standards of nine year old boy who doesn’t question how easily the Van Helsing diary comes into a twelve year old boy’s possession. Dracula looks like a host of a notably unappealing Italian restaurant, and Frankenstein’s monster has the unenviable task of playing this movie’s version of Sloth. The Monster isn’t nearly as annoying as Sloth (it helps that he’s embodied by Michael Mann vet Tom Noonan), but one still can’t help but think the big guy’s getting sold a little short.
I’ve saved the best moment in the The Monster Squad for last and this scene alone marks the movie as ok to revisit: a scene of a boy and father, eating burgers and watching a slasher movie from the roof of their home through binculars as it plays at the local drive-in. This one moment, a reprieve from the trouble the father is having with the mother, gets at why some people turn to the movies at a very young age and never turn back. It has the gentle bliss of a Joe Dante film and for this I’ll forgive quite a bit.
Day Nineteen: Severance (2007)
The tedium and hypocrisy of office work is ripe for a smart horror film, but I’m afraid that Christopher Smith’s Severance is not that film. Severance is really just the same old slasher business, the old bit where nothing happens for two acts and we twiddle our thumbs and wait for the good stuff. We go to slasher films for rowdy ultra-violent perversity but the most perverse thing is usually how long we have to wait for the film to finally get on with it. We feel that time is being killed, and that if the director had made the film he really wanted, it would have been about twenty five minutes long.
Severance’s first couple acts do include a few nice barbs, but the film’s set up is really about as primitive as any other slasher movie. We have the goof ball, the sexy girl, the nerd, the clueless boss, and none of them are allowed too much personality. In the hands of a virtuoso (Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) this can be effective, but usually it winds up being about as hypocritical as anything Severance pretends to be lampooning.
To Smith’s credit, the third act here is pretty good. There is a truly wow moment featuring a rocket launcher, and a couple of the hack and slash scenes with the villians (a pack of possibly deranged soldiers freshly escaped from a loony bin) deliver the goods. But deep down you really don’t give a shit, and this wait until the third act structure (that’s probably a mutant of the structure of better movies such as Psycho or the original Chainsaw) needs to be retired or saved for the pros. Remember that film we discussed a few weeks ago, The Descent ? That film employed a similar wait and see peekaboo structure, ONLY THE FIRST TWO ACTS BOTHERED TO BE A REAL MOVIE TOO.
Day Eighteen: Cronos (1993)
Guillermo Del Toro’s Cronos is an unusual vampire film. You don’t become a vampire by being bitten by another vampire, you don’t spend long nights carousing and screwing and joyously killing bystanders. You are simply a corpse who is still animated, and who is powered by one urge, to drink blood so you can continue to be a corpse who’s sole purpose in life is to drink blood. But, even worse, you still have your soul, you still know what you’re doing, and you have to forever live with the mistake you made. Cronos is about greed, and the danger of a “quantity over quality” approach to life.
It’s also about the horror and the sadness of waking up one day to find that your grandpa (you’re father has died much earlier) is dying. Dying, and much worse, dependent on some mysterious golden bug that he found in a statue a few days ago. Most children, at one time or another, are afraid of something happening to their loved ones, and Cronos takes that primal fear, and fuses it with a black comic tale of a classic difference between youth and the elderly. The youth take life for granted, the elderly have a finer appreciation for each moment while it lasts, maybe too fine an appreciation.
I was going to post on Del Toro’s superb The Devil’s Backbone as an example of a contemporary ghost story that understands so well how the ghost story works, but I decided Cronos may have been a little less appreciated, and that perhaps a reminder was in order. Like all of Del Toro’s work, Cronos is a work of amazingly confident tone, Del Toro knows how to tug at the heart strings without mooting the horror. As wonderful as the relationship between Federico Luppi and Tamara Shanath (and grandfather and granddaughter) is, its never played for cheap sentiment and there are still revolting images to be found.
Including one of the more disturbing blood drinking scenes I’ve encountered in the vampire canon. Lupi, an elderly antiques dealer, now under the influence of the Cronos device, desperately licks a sick person’s blood off of a public bathroom floor. The taboo of cannibalism isn’t enough for Del Toro, he laces it with something much closer to home, and much scarier. Imagine seeing someone eat a twinkie off of a 7-11 floor, much less drinking blood.
Above all though, Cronos has a truly felt fear of death that puts it in the league of more primal, classical horror work. The deaths here, whether they occur out of vegeneance or greed or by accident, count, and aren’t laughed off or played as a gorehound come shot. Del Toro takes this genre seriously, and he makes some of the most transporting films in the business (regardless of genre.) His Pan’s Labyrinth is one of the best films of our current decade. It started nearly fifteen years ago with Cronos, which also deals with a young girl’s initiation into the complexities of death.
Day Seventeen: Cat People (1942)
A wonderful movie, one of the very best examples of the “heard not seen” type of filmmaking. Cat People has three very memorable sequences and none of them involve any wolfman style transformations on the part of the lead, Simone Simon. Simon plays a strange young woman who’s hesistant to make love to her new husband because she fears that stirring feelings of intense passion (or jealousy) will cause her to turn into a large panther.
There’s certainly a black joke in that summary somewhere. I’m not sure if Cat People was meant to be any kind of satire of bedroom politics (particularly of a time when couples slept in seperate beds on TV) but there’s a subtext there if you want to go looking for it. I doubt producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur were too interested in exploring the hypocrisy of marriage at the time, but that’s the fun of all these people turning into other creature movies, subtext can be mined in even the flimsiest entires of the genre (maybe not the Stephen King movie Silver Bullet, but that has Gary Busey in one of his best parts, a fair trade).
The funny thing is you don’t really root for Simon’s husband (played by Kent Smith) much at all. He’s ostensibly the hero but, like most heroes of these kinds of movies, he’s bland and uninteresting, a pretty boy who doesn’t appreciate what he has. There’s a particularly annoying scene where Smith confesses that he doesn’t know what to do with his potentially crazy wife, he’s never been unhappy before, he says. Never been unhappy before? Fuck you man. Its also clear that he would rather be off canoodling with his best friend (Jane Rudolph) anyway.The psychiatrist who tries to cure Simon of her suspicions may be a sleazy lech, but he at least knows a hell of a cat woman when he sees one.
Let’s get back to those three scares. One is set on a street near a park, one is in a swimming pool (its one of the most gorgeous scare scenes of any time or movie) and the final is set in the Simon-Smith home, when the good doctor finally discovers the truth of Simon’s heritage. All of the scenes work so well because Tourneur has patiently built to them, and has trusted that the scares would be worth the wait. The film also plays its secrets remarkably close to its vest, the nature of Simon’s problem is debatable until the very end.
I love this movie. The direction, that perfect, dreadful atmosphere, the wonderfully strange Simone Simon, the script that feeds us exposition at just the right times, that final look in Simon’s eyes toward the end of the film. Cat People is one of my favorite horror movies of the 1940s, and you’ll be surprised at how well it holds up. If only that doctor could’ve patented some sort of protective vest for indulging in the elusive, immensely pleasurable, but always difficult to survive panther nooky .
Day Sixteen: The Unknown (1927)
The Unknown is a frank, nasty bit of business by collaborators (and professional legends) Tod Browning and Lon Chaney. Browning directed and created the scenario, Chaney starred as Alonzo, an armless knife thrower who’s madly in love with the circus owner’s daughter, Nanon (a very young Joan Crawford). Alonzo’s disability looks to actually be an advantage with this young woman, as she’s terrified of men groping her (don’t ask, just go with it.) A strong man steps in the way though, spurring surprisingly brutal complications.
Chaney is, as usual, committed and superb as Alonzo, and two of his moments here are authentically scary and devastating. One of these scenes is justifiably famous: Alonzo, who turns out to be a criminal who really has arms, has them amputated so he can appeal to Nanon’s phobia. While he’s doing this, the strong man wins Nanon over, rendering Alonzo’s self-sabotage moot. Chaney’s realization of this, the slip from happiness to madness to madness dressed as happiness, is chilling, and in league with the unmasking scene of Phantom.
The second scene is toward the end, and again is centered on Chaney’s remarkable face. Alonzo watches as the strong man falls into his trap, and a devious, uncontrollable joy invades what’s left of the tortured Alonzo. I know the Joker from Batman is credited to The Man Who Laughs, but I have to wonder if Bob Kane saw The Unknown.
Browning would later go on to do the more famous Dracula and the (even better) Freaks, but, with The Unknown, we can see that the Browning sensibility had been in place long before those later pictures. The Unknown, like Freaks, sticks so well because Browning’s sympathies clearly lie with the deranged. The deck isn’t stacked here as it is Freaks either, Alonzo’s rage isn’t given any remotely rational excuse. It’s a testament to Browning and Chaney’s skill though, that we feel a pang of regret when Alonzo is trampled and the strong man and Nanon are allowed their happy ending. Alonzo was evil, selfish, insane, but he was the only character with any force to him. Everybody else is a pretty boy. Maybe the deck was stacked.
The Unknown is part of a two disc Lon Chaney Set from Turner Classic Movies. This also includes an engaging documentary on Chaney, as well as a still picture recreation of the “lost” Chaney/Browning film, London After Midnight. Chaney is essential, iconic, every bit as good as you’ve read from crusty film journals. I admit that I haven’t seen nearly as much as I should’ve myself. What better month to catch up with a neglected master?
Day Fifteen: Black Sunday (1960)
Black Sunday is the first film by the famed Italian horror director Mario Bava. The film is visually delicious, with a crisp, ripe atmosphere (think the Universal horror movies of 1930s and 1940s as shot by John Toll) that’s as impressive as any I’ve seen, but the story is just too poor, too non-existent.
The opening is impressive and promises a rich, flamboyant bit of gothic. We begin with a witch, or a vampire (the terms are used interchangably here) having an iron maiden hammered into her face, blood spurts and just before she’s to be burned, she swears her revenge. But she won’t burn, Satan seems to be protecting her, and so she’s thrown in a crypt that’s protected by a cross that can be seen by her corpse via a window in the coffin (a nifty image). The witch is Princess Asa (Barbara Steele, also in Shivers), and needless to say, she gets her reprisal when a couple of academics come screwing around the crypt two hundred years later.
Steele has presence, she’s sexual in that death kissed way that films like this require, but she’s given little to do. Over an hour of the film is the, slow, slow, slow set up of the rise of Asa. Bava spends an inordinate amount of time photographing doors closing, or opening, ominiously. I love a rich, dread inducing slow build, but its all in the service of very little. The Universal sequels of yesteryear were silly, but they at least had snap and a sense of fun. Bava takes himself dangerously seriously here, and that can be a killer for a film as purplish as this one.
Black Sunday does, as I say, have incredible black and white cinematography, it should maybe be seen once for this alone, but the story itself is bare bones and uninvolving. If you aren’t into this sort of thing, the ripe Italian horror of the 1960s, you may find the eightyish minutes to be a bit of a chore.
Day Fourteen: The Haunting (1963)
This week we’re going to look at a few movies that favor dread over any major grotesquerie, and The Haunting is one of the landmark examples of such a film, a psychological ghost story that holds up very well some four decades after release. The Haunting is Robert Wise’s adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and it stands as one of the legendary director’s most purely pleasurable films. Beautiful, creepy, exciting and memorable.
There are two major reasons the film holds up. Firstly, Wise favors exacting, subtle scares that rely more on the unstable mental terrain of the heroes than the usual F/X charged ghosts. The most we get here is a bit of slight movement, or awful, overbearing sound that suggests a group of giants marching up and down Hill House’s immense halls. Or, much worse, of an ancient heart that’s somehow learned how to beat within the house’s walls.
Secondly, the script, by Nelson Gidding, maintains the novel’s subtext of repressed and misdirected sexuality. Our protagonist, Eleanor (Julie Harris), bears an unmistakable resemblance to one of the House’s past victims: the daughter of its builder who holed herself up in the place for her entire life. Both women are probably untouched, shy, and faintly bitter. Both women were involved in a death that may have been purposeful, and both women are happy to channel all of this rage and loneliness into a malignant building that is more than happy to swallow them alive. Their names even have the same amount of syllables. Don’t laugh, nothing means nothing in a haunted house.
Eleanor is attracted to Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), who’s heading the experiment on Hill House, and it’s interesting to note that her obsession with becoming part of the house doesn’t reach fever pitch until she discovers that the doctor, who’s not entirely discouraging of her awkward advances, is married. At this point her true love no longer has a rival. At this point Eleanor, fragile, possibly mentally ill and emotionally broken from a just recently concluded lifetime of servitude, has no chance.
Further confusing Eleanor is the sexual current she also happens to share with Theo (Claire Bloom), one of the others along for the experiment. Theo is obviously meant to be taken as Eleanor’s opposite: free, confident, brash. But Eleanor is denied this potential pleasure also, because she’s too repressed for a man much less a woman, and also because Theo is as much a threat as an attraction. Theo resents the attention the doctor lavishes on the needy Eleanor, further ensuring that everyone has quite a bit to be stewing over as the house slowly works its mojo.
The Haunting is confident and rousing, and Hill House itself, while maybe a touch obvious, has been masterfully realized. The creepiest thing about Hill House isn’t the angles, or the towers, or the stairwell that looks to have been shipped in from Dr. Caligari, its the sheer clutter of the place: a suffocating, nauseating, inescapable clutter of mad furniture, books, mirrors, and tables, etc. Watching it you want the characters to go outside not so much to avoid the ghoulies as to not trip over a damn ottoman.
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.
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