Carnography

Children of the Corn (2009)

Into just about every horror franchise comes a time when a remake will eventually be made (with so far the only exceptions we've covered being Hellraiser, Paranormal Activity and the Alien/Predator franchises, and the remake vultures have been circling Hellraiser for some time now). The Children of the Corn series is no different, and so today we come to the 2009 remake, appropriately named... Children of the Corn.

In1963, the children of Gatlin, Nebraska meet in a CGI tent in a cornfield to listen to a child preacher (dressed in a cowboy outfit, of all things) telling them about the evil that grown-ups do and how He Who Walks Behind The Rows isn't going to put up with it any more. Twelve years later - 1975 - unhappily married couple Burt and Vicky are driving to California via Nebraska when they abruptly hit a boy in the middle of the road. They quickly discover, however, that someone had cut the boy's throat before their car ran him down, so they put the body in the trunk and drive to the nearest town to report it. That town, of course, turns out to be Gatlin, apparently long-deserted now and full of corn stalks and pagan symbols made out of corn, and it's not long before the children of Gatlin turn up wanting to sacrifice the "Outlanders" to He Who Walks Behind The Rows. Burt is a Vietnam veteran, but will that be enough for them to be able to escape?

This version of Children of the Corn is much closer to the original short story by Stephen King than the 1984 movie was. On the one hand, this means that there are no twee tow-headed moppets dragging the film down (well, there's one, but he's still on the side of He Who Walks Behind The Rows so it's not so bad). On the other hand... Burt and Vicky spit so much vitriol at each other from almost the first moment they're on screen that by the 15-minute mark I hated them both and couldn't wait to see them both dead. Vicky is the worse of the couple as well, spending about 90% of her screentime shouting, screaming, bitching at and/or belittling her husband, even when it's probably the very last thing she should be doing. I know that in the original short story that Burt and Vicky are having marital problems and that this movie is sticking closely to that, but Vicky is just so ridiculously nasty to Burt. She picks fights with him over just about every little thing, including bringing up his Vietnam tour out of nowhere so she can accuse him of killing children and "raping grandmothers". When Burt eventually snaps and smacks her in the face, it's not exactly understandable but it's certainly not unexpected.

So Burt just about has the edge as the slightly less unlikeable protagonist, but even then the film feels for some reason that they can't just have him killing children even if they are trying to kill him as per the bidding of a Babylonian pagan corn and fertility god, and so they contrive to give him a case of Chekov's 'Nam Flashback. When he eventually snaps in the third act, he ends up running around in the corn, snapping pre-teen necks and shouting about the "black pyjama bastards" and it's not actually necessary. After eight movies of evil kids, we don't need to give our protagonist a Get Out of Jail Free card to excuse him killing them when they're trying to kill him.

As for the kids themselves... well, they're no John Franklin and Courtney Gains. The first preacher of He Who Walks Behind The Rows' word is, as I mentioned, wearing a child's cowboy outfit as he does, and I found it nearly impossible to take him seriously dressed like that. The second preacher child, Issac, does at least have the outfit (and a hat that's way too big for his head)... but he looks and sounds nowhere near sinister enough to pull off the "evil child preacher" role. Meanwhile, Malachai looks like he's just come from rehearsals with his teen boy band and got splashed with some blood along the way. Even when they all shout, "Outlander!" it doesn't feel the same.

(One brief related aside: Toy Story has inadvertently ruined this film and the original for me, because now whenever I hear the children reverently recite "The Blue Man", the only thing I can think of is those alien toys from the claw machine. And now you do too. You're welcome.)

There's one scene that stands out in this Children of the Corn remake though, and it's for all the wrong reasons. In the church, Issac announces to a congregation of mostly pre-teen boys that it is the "time of fertilization". A teenage boy and girl stand up and go to the altar, disrobe and proceed to have some remarkably graphic sex for a movie like this... while all the other kids cheer, dance and wave corn cobs at them. Yes, it's exactly as odd and disturbing as it sounds, not to mention uncomfortable to watch.

So, was this remake necessary? Well, it sticks far closer to the original story and is considerably darker and grimmer than the 1984 version. Its protagonists are far less likeable though, and the cult of murderous children - particularly Issac and Malachai - are not nearly as sinister and bloodthirsty-seeming. But comparing it to some of the other entries in this series, it's a considerable improvement.

2.5 out of 5.

 

 

Children of the Corn: Revelation (2001)

I know, I know. It's February; this series was supposed to have been over and done with way back in January... but my mental health took a dive back then and it really didn't help that whenever I tried starting things back up, this was the movie that confronted me. Children of the Corn: Revelation - a depressive episode in cinematic form.

Jamie travels to Omaha, Nebraska in search of her grandmother, who has stopped answering her phone calls after moving there abruptly some months earlier. Jamie moves into her grandmother's apartment while she looks for her, but no-one she talks to, from the police to the building manager to the few remaining tenants (as the building is scheduled for demolition) are of any help. There are also strange children hanging around as well as a mysterious scarred priest, and a field of corn growing right outside the building. It turns out that, as a child, Jamie's grandmother was part of a He Who Walks Behind The Rows cult, and was, in fact, the only survivor when they all committed mass suicide by fire... right on the very spot that the apartment building was built on. Now the spirits of the children are back and killing all the adults, but will Jamie be able to escape?

Children of the Corn: Revelation was made in Canada. You can tell this because Michael Ironside turns up in it, possibly as some sort of qualification for a tax break. If you thought that David Carradine was wasted in Children of the Corn V, then this movie will be an eye-opener for you. Ironside has a grand total of three scenes in the whole movie, and for two of them, he has no lines whatsoever. In the third scene, he turns up to provide all the exposition about the He Who Walks Behind The Rows cult (just in case this was your first exposure to the Children of the Corn movies and didn't know what the deal was with the kids and the corn) and then exits, stage left. He doesn't even get an actual name, as he's just listed as "The Priest" in the credits. It's (another) waste of a perfectly good actor.

That's not to say that I think the movie could have been improved by somehow utilising Michael Ironside properly because Children of the Corn: Revelation is 82 minutes long and pretty much nothing happens for about 70 of them. Oh, the killings of the various adults are quite gory, and there's something to be said for them being committed by giggling children in old-fashioned clothes... but we've had six other films that do just that better already (and that's saying something). Everything between the murders is just dull. We don't even have a creepy dark-haired child preacher to act as an avatar for good ole' He Who Walks Behind The Rows (who, by the way, also doesn't really have much of a presence in the film, limited to just one mention from Michael Ironside and nothing else).

Children of the Corn: Revelation reminds me of another revelatory entry in a different franchise - Hellraiser: Revelations, in that I wouldn't be at all surprised if it turned out it was made simply for the production company to keep hold of the rights. It apparently had a budget of $2,500,000, but I'm hard-pressed to see where most of that money went. Michael Ironside's salary and the rights to the House of the Dead arcade game that a couple of the ghost kids enthusiastically play at one point, perhaps? It certainly didn't go on any of the CGI effects such as the creepy cornfield and a climactic explosion, which look terrible. The practical gore effects, when they happen, are better, but it's nowhere near enough to bring this film up to even mediocre level. It's not like I've been emotionally invested in this series (at least, not since the last decent one, Urban Harvest), but it genuinely is depressing to see how low a film can sink to when it's clear that the only reason it was made was to hold onto the rights and/or see if they can wring a few more pennies out of the franchise.

After this film, there was an eight-year gap for us to recover before Fox Searchlight decided to try rebooting the franchise with a remake. We shall see next time if they were successful in this endeavour...

0.5 out of 5

 

Dagon (2001)

!Yeah, let's just go and throw that schedule right out the window, shall we? I'm completely off my plans now and pretty much making things (or at least what movies get reviewed next) up as I go along. So let's take a look at a movie I managed to catch last night with a bunch of other horror movie fans, Stuart Gordon's Dagon.

Paul Marsh, his girlfriend Barbara, his friend and business partner Howard and his wife Vicki are holidaying on a boat off the Spanish coast, celebrating the success of their company being floated on the stock market, although Paul is troubled by recurring dreams of a beautiful yet strange woman with a mouth full of sharp teeth. When a sudden storm crashes the boat against rocks and traps Vicki's leg, Paul and Barbara set off to try to get help from a nearby fishing village they sighted from the boat. The village, Imboca, seems to be at first deserted - when the two finally do find some of the village's inhabitants, they seem strange in both behaviour and physical appearance. Paul and Barbara are separated and Paul is sent to Imboca's dilapidated and damp hotel, where he dreams of the strange woman again before having to flee from the townspeople, who have apparently formed a posse to hunt him down and kill him. Coming across the town drunk, Ezequiel, who is also the only other "normal" person in the town, Paul learns the horrifying truth  - that decades ago, the town of Imboca turned to worshipping the ancient deity Dagon, who offered them gold and fish in return for human sacrifice and the town's women to interbreed with. Will Paul and his friends be able to escape Imboca and its distinctly slimy inhabitants, and what do Paul's strange dreams have to do with all of this?

In case you hadn't already guessed from the Stuart Gordan director credit (and Brian Yunza as one of the producers), Dagon is an HP Lovecraft movie. It's based on the Lovecraft novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth - "Imboca" being a Spanish adaption of "Innsmouth". In it, a man travels to Innsmouth to research the town's history and discovers the town's horrific secret as well as terrible revelations about his own family, and the movie Dagon follows that plot relatively closely (so, you know, spoilers if you've only seen or read one so far). Interestingly, there's also a certain resemblance to the video game Resident Evil 4 - the isolated "European" village full of hostile and deformed locals, and a distinct similarity between the merchant in the game and some of the Imboca residents, looks-wise (RE4 came out four years after Dagon, so it's pretty clear who probably influenced who).

Because it's Lovecraft, there's of course a lot of hinting rather than outright showing, at least for the first half of the movie when it's still not clear what's actually going on in Imboca and the town's inhabitants could just be "regular" deformed, inbred murderous locals. People who know their Mythos will easily be able to spot the early clues, however - the slimy pallor, unblinking eyes and awkward gait that indicate that someone is a Deep One - and as more is revealed, little by little, we see webbed hands, gills and that what we had thought were just crippled or missing limbs are in fact tentacles growing in the place of arms and legs. By the end of the film, the townspeople have abandoned all pretence of pretending to be "normal" and at that point, all bets are off and people are growing tentacles from just about everywhere.  For the most part, the effects are all practical as well - there are two moments in the film where CGI is used, and they look exactly as dodgy as you'd expect the CGI in a 2001 low-budget horror film to look - and they're all suitably slimy and unnerving. Special mention, I think, has to go to the character of Uxia, whose top half is really quite beautiful (if a little too much with the stare-y eyes), but whose bottom half is... well, I'm sure you can all guess.

Unlike other films in Gordon and Yunza's repertoire (*cough*Re-Animator*cough*), Dagon isn't filled with wall-to-wall gore, although there are a few moments that are quite jarring - Ezequiel's fate being chief among them. There's also a fair amount of rape threats to helpless women, including a protracted scene where one is tortured before being chained and hung naked over a pit as a rape sacrifice to Dagon that's almost certainly meant to be as uncomfortable to watch as it actually is. For the most part, though, the horror in Dagon is of the bodily variety - the horror of transforming into something inhuman, whether willingly or unwillingly, and of discovering certain unpleasant truths about oneself (the game is perhaps given away a little early in the film when Paul mentions offhandedly that his mother refused to even let him learn Spanish growing up) - as well as the traditional Lovecraftian trope of ancient gods and entities manipulating humans and sending everyone who sees and/or interacts with them stark raving mad.

It all becomes rather mad and overwrought by the film's climax, and the character of Paul might be seen as a low budget and nerdier (if that's even possible) version of Herbert West/Jeffrey Combs who's not the easiest protagonist to root for, but there's still clearly a lot of love for the subject matter in Dagon, and that enthusiasm and energy can make up for a lot of shortfalls elsewhere in the film. Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

 

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Dead Snow (2009)

I think, after the last couple of films reviewed nearly scared me into total insomnia, that we need to look at some lighter horror fare. So, of course, my mind goes straight to zombies - and Nazi zombies at that. Today we're taking a look at Norwegian Nazi zombie horror-comedy Dead Snow (or Død snø in the original Norwegian).

A group of medical students head into the snowy mountains of Norway to spend their Easter break in a cabin owned by one of the group. The group includes Hanna and her boyfriend Martin, who is haemophobic; Erlend, who is a horror movie geek; and Vegard and Sara, the latter of whom owns the cabin they are staying at and who was supposed to be meeting them there. Unfortunately, Sara has already been killed by a group of Nazi zombies who roam the area according to a passing stranger the group briefly meet. During World War 2 the Nazis, led by "Colonel" Herzog, occupied the area and tortured and killed the locals for three years before looting their valuables near the end of the war, but they were attacked by the townspeople and either killed or froze to death in the mountains. Unfortunately for everyone, the Nazis aren't quite dead enough, and when the group find an old box filled with gold underneath the cabin the undead Herzog and his men return to reclaim their cursed loot, and they're more than willing to tear the group apart to get to it...

If you're bitten by a Nazi zombie, do you become a "regular" zombie or a Nazi zombie? One day a movie might appear that tackles that philosophical question that also compares extremist political ideology with a communicable rabid disease, but Dead Snow is not that movie. Which is a bit of a shame, as there could be some comedy in that and Dead Snow is a horror-comedy. It's also another one of those movies that's a love letter to various horror movies that have come before it, not the least of which include Friday the 13th, Night of the Living Dead, Braindead and the Evil Dead (but again, minus any tree rape). There's a Crazy Ralph-type character, for example, whose sole purpose is to be creepy, provide exposition, and then die - he doesn't quite say that the place has a death curse, but he comes close. It's also an unashamed splatter movie, with chainsaws, axes, sledgehammers and even a snowmobile employed to turn the Nazi zombies into so much mulch, and it's all a lot of fun to watch - and of course since it's Nazi zombies on the receiving end, there are no worries that the audience will have any conflicting sympathies for them.

Very technically, the Nazi zombies are more draugr than the traditional modern zombie - Scandinavian undead who guard their often-stolen treasure and punish those who trespass on their burial sites - although the movie never makes this distinction and it matters little for the plot of the film anyway. This little bit of Norse folklore in interesting to note, though, because one of director Tommy Wirkola's other works is Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (remember Chekov's Convenient Diabetic Coma?), and so it's pretty clear that he has an interest in these old stories.

There's a couple of flaws in Dead Snow, although neither of them are really immersion-breaking. Vegard is just a little too competent a survivor and badass Nazi zombie fighter to survive in a movie like this; he's good-looking, sporty, resourceful and takes on several Nazi zombies by himself, but it's when he sews up his own neck wound with some handy fishing line I realised he was probably not going to make it to the end of the film (sorry). Horror comedies like this need more slapstick and pratfalls than Big Damn Heroes, and we have them in spades with Martin and Roy, who moments after Vegard finishes his self-surgery, are seen setting the cabin they're in on fire because they can't throw a Molotov properly, but I just didn't find them as engaging as Vegard. They were no Bruce Campbell, that's for sure.

The other problem I have with Dead Snow... Well, there's a scene in the movie where one character goes to the outhouse to do his business, and one of the women follows him and they have impromptu sex right there in the outhouse. The guy then goes back inside while the woman uses the toilet, whereupon the Nazi zombies drag her through the toilet and kill her. And I can't help but think that's rather meanspirited and unpleasant, and somewhat at odds with the more lighthearted tone of the rest of the film (as lighthearted as Nazi zombies can get, at any rate). I don't think it's actually misogynist, or at least not deliberately so, but covering a woman in poop and then killing her, straight after she's had sex, just strikes me as a little darker than the rest of Dead Snow wanted to be and so sticks out for the wrong reasons.

But these aren't major issues by any means. Dead Snow was clearly made by someone who loves all those splattery movies from the 1980s and beyond, and that love shines through in the film. It's an entertaining, funny, splattery romp through bloodstained snow, and while it's not an intellectual powerhouse of a film or one that's going to make you check behind your doors or keep the lights on all night to ward off creepy clowns or ghosts, it's still a lot of fun to watch.

 

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Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem (2007)

The basic moral of "The Monkey's Paw" is something that I come back to many times when I'm reviewing films, particularly long-awaited ones. "Be careful what you wish for." After the sanitised PG-13 disappointment of the first AVP movie, the people behind the next film decided to make it R-rated, as "it [was] what the fans want[ed] from the series." And so, for our sins, we got Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem.

Starting off at pretty much the same point that the previous film ended, we see the Yautja ship flying off with Scar's body lying in ceremonial repose until his Chestburster emerges and it's got the Yautja facial tusks. It quickly grows to its full size and starts massacring the crew and the ship crashes in the woods outside a small Colorado town called Gunnison. One Yautja manages to send off a distress call before he dies though, and on the Yautja homeworld a sole Yautja "cleaner" receives the call and suits up to head to Earth to deal with things. Meanwhile, a hunter and his son come across the crashed ship, the PredAlien and a pair of Facehuggers that also escaped from the ship. While this is going on, recently released felon Dallas arrives back in town and is met by the town sheriff Eddie Morales. Dallas meets back up with his younger brother Ricky, who's having problems both with a girl he likes and her bully boyfriend... but this generic teenage drama is sadly not pushed aside as the hunter and his son turn up missing, aside from a severed arm. The Yautja Cleaner arrives on the scene and starts getting rid of any and all evidence that the Yautja or Xenomorphs were ever there, but he's too late and the Xenomorphs have started to multiply, helped by the fact that the PredAlien has a new and rather horrifying method of implanting Xenomorph embryos into pregnant female hosts. Chaos quickly overtakes the small town as the Xenomorphs run amok, the Yautja Cleaner chases after them to kill them, and a rapidly dwindling number of humans try to survive and escape...

Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem has several good ideas in it - the very concept of the PredAlien, further showing us how the Xenomorphs take on traits of their "parents" and the Yautja "Cleaner" who became known as "Wolf" after the character with a similar job in Pulp Fiction being the two big ones. The film was also considerably more bloody and violent than the previous film, which was, of course, one of the biggest complaints people had about the first AVP. So surely this means that AVP: Requiem is a welcome improvement to the series?

...Well, about that.

First off, someone forgot to pay the light bill while making this film. Yes, I know there's a part in the film where Wolf tries shooting some Xenomorphs in the town's power station and things explode and the town gets hit with a power cut, but there are still several scenes that are shot in near-total blackness and involving black glistening creatures, sometimes fighting a cloaked opponent, and it's nigh-on impossible to see what's going on. The first time I saw the film I wondered if this was down to possibly watching a bad quality copy, but rewatching it for this review in High Definition I now know that, no, the problem lies with the cinematography. I had to sit hunched forward to watch the film because if I sat back in my chair I literally couldn't see details on the screen, and making people sit in a physically uncomfortable way to watch your film is never going to be a winning formula.

Second, a problem from the first AVP film has continued into this one - there are too many damn humans for a film called Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem and not Aliens Vs Humans and Predator: Requiem. What's even worse is the petty human dramas that get shoehorned into the film as well. I cared not a jot about Ricky and Jesse's burgeoning romance, or about Dallas' life post-prison, or about any problems the returning female Army veteran might be having with her family (and while we're mentioning her, she was clearly placed in the film just because someone thought that, since the other Alien films had a strong female protagonist, this film needed one as well, and never mind that this woman's sole purpose in the film appears to be the ability to fly our plucky survivors out of the town via helicopter). And on that subject... The film is so determined to make Dallas the protagonist of the film that it has the sheriff bringing a recently-released felon along with him to investigate crimes, asks his advice and even follows his lead until one point in the film, and I'm pretty sure their disagreement at this point is to both pare down the core cast some more and further make out the sheriff to be rather useless. Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but they puff him up so much I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd had a fist-fight with Wolf at some point... and won.

Yes, there's more gore in AVP: Requiem than in the last film, but some of it feels like it's been put in to be edgy rather than anything else. Within ten minutes we see a child get a Facehugger to the, well, face, showing us that, yes, this film's not afraid of shying away from stuff like that, but later on the scenes with the PredAlien and the pregnant women in the hospital feel a little like the film is trying to deliberately shock us, because hey, pregnant women and babies! Seeing them harmed is really shocking, right? We're a grown-up movie, really! We've got an R-rating!

In the end, AVP: Requiem takes a shot at improving on the previous film with more gore and more references to the lore from previous films... but between its poor cinematography and ridiculous focus on the humans, yet again, rather than the Xenomorphs and Yautja of the film's title, and its even more ridiculous bigging up of a character with a one-line backstory to try to carry the whole film means that it falls flat on its face and ends up woefully poor.

 

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AVP: Alien Vs Predator (2004)

You know, it's quite possible to draw comparisons between AVP: Alien Vs Predator and that other fan-fantasy crossover, Freddy Vs Jason. Both films were born from a brief shot originally meant as an in-joke; both took a decade or more to actually reach the screen, and both turned out to be disappointments for the fans who'd been waiting and playing out the smackdown in their heads for all those years. We should have stuck with all the comics and books that were released while AVP was languishing in development hell.

A satellite owned by the Weyland Corporation detects a "heat bloom" emanating from an uninhabited island in Antarctica, Bouvet Island. Charles Bishop Weyland (yeah, they went there) organises a team to go investigate the site, discovering that there is a strange pyramid buried 2,000 feet under the ice, and he wants to be the first to claim it. His team includes archaeologists, language experts and Alexa Woods, a survival expert and guide. The pyramid turns out to predate all other known pyramids and civilisations - unbeknownst to the humans though, it is also a "rite of passage" test for young Predators (let's start calling them Yautja), who come to the pyramid every 100 years to face off against and kill Xenomorphs. To this end, there is a Xenomorph Queen kept chained up at the base of the pyramid and thawed out whenever the hunt is on, and humans are lured to the pyramid to act as hosts for the Xenomorphs. In the past, it was all done via a ritual sacrifice aspect of early Aztec/Mayan religions; this time, of course, there's the team investigating the site. Three young Yautja are sent in to prove themselves against the Xenomorphs; things turn pear-shaped however when the humans discover the Yautja's plasma weapons and take them, leaving the warriors without their most important weapons against the Xenomorphs and trying to get them back. The humans find their numbers rapidly dwindling as they're caught between the two alien races, as both sides have no problem killing anything in their way. The human survivors realise that their only hope of survival is to somehow team up with the Yautja - but will that even be possible?

An early warning sign that AVP: Alien Vs Predator was not going to be up to the standards of the films that preceded it was the fact that it was released as a PG-13 film. Looking back at the previous six films from both franchises before this one, the one thing they all had in common was a refusal to shy away from showing gore. Even the much weaker Alien films, ³ and Resurrection, at least still had heads being crushed into a pulp, chestbursters messily emerging from hosts, and people being sliced to ribbons by Xenomorphs. AVP doesn't show any of that. It occasionally shows the aftermath of Xenomorph "birth", and there are one or two shots of humans being impaled on Yautja weapons, but for the most part the film decides to cut away whenever something messy is going to happen on-screen, so all we see is a trickle of blood, maybe, or someone's eyes widening and then closing as they die. And this wasn't even a case of executive meddling because someone thought that making a sci-fi horror film that combines two franchises known for their violent and rather splattery content would make more money if they made it teenager-friendly - director Paul W. S. Anderson (also responsible for Mortal Kombat, the Resident Evil movie franchise and, somehow, the ultra-gory and horrifying Event Horizon) set out to release the film as PG-13. It makes no sense, and I'm not saying that horror films just can't be good if they're not throwing buckets of blood everywhere like modern-day Grand Guignol. It's just that neutering a film like this is just going to alienate fans.

Another early warning sign was the fact that AVP was not screened in advance for critics. For films that aren't independent or underground but instead released by one of the big studios, this is generally seen as the studio and/or director not having any faith in the film getting positive reviews, so they just release it and hope they can make enough back on the box office before the negative reviews come rolling it. And oh, did they come rolling in - AVP currently holds a 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 29 out of 100 on Metacritic - although its worldwide gross did end up being $172 million, so the trick of not screening it for critics did work out for them.

In the end, though, AVP is just a weak film. It's virtually bloodless, has a weak plot (that was cribbed from an Aliens Vs Predator novel I read back in the 1990s), and there are plot holes and glaring errors in it that give the audience the distinct impression that the filmmakers didn't really care about the film they were making. The timeframe from being impregnated by a Facehugger to expiring via Chestburster in this film can't be more than an hour, tops, which flies in the face of every other Alien film we've seen, and has clearly just been fudged for expediency rather than actually having to think for a moment about the plot. In another scene, a Xenomorph is killed by one of the Yautja (the one known as "Scar", for reference) and it doesn't bleed. They didn't even bother to put in a digital acid blood effect. And if the filmmakers seem to care so little for their product, why should we? the working relationship that develops between Scar and Alexa is pretty much the only good thing about this film, and even then I can find flaws with it - there's not enough screen time devoted to it; it suffers from the same problem that the new Transformers movies did in that we're not here for the fleshlings, we're here for alien-on-alien action, and there's just not enough of that in the film.

And of course, the movie's final shot sets us up for a sequel, which people may have thought they wanted with the anticipation of seeing the "PredAlien" in action, but as we were to discover, things didn't go as we hoped they would...

 

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Wolf Creek (2005)

All right, all right. I mentioned it in yesterday's review, it fits with the theme and, at the time of writing this, it's still too hot out for me to go see The Strangers: Prey At Night at the cinema (being of Irish descent, I need something like that 5000 SPF sunblock from Robocop to be out in the sun safely). So let's look at that bane of the Australian Tourist Board, Wolf Creek.

The year is 1999. Two British backpackers, Kristy and Liz, have decided to carpool with an Australian man, Ben, as they travel through the Australian Outback. One of the first places they visit is Wolf Creek National Park, where there is a huge crater made by a meteor strike. While on the way there, Ben tells them stories of alleged UFO sightings and strange phenomena that are said to have occurred at the site of the meteor strike. Their trip there goes well, however, until it is time to leave and they discover that their car will no longer start. Faced with the possibility of being stranded there for an unknown amount of time, the trio starts to worry... until an apparent saviour appears in the form of Mick Taylor, a local pig hunter who comes across them and offers to fix their car back at his camp at an abandoned mine. However superficially friendly Mick seems, though, his true intentions are much, much darker, and the three of them soon find themselves at his mercy, bound and tortured. Will they be able to escape?

Wolf Creek pulls a nice little bait and switch with its first 40 minutes or so, with its slow build and talk of UFOs, and little touches like the trio's watches all stopping at the same time while they're at the meteor crater, to make us think that something otherworldly is going to happen. It doesn't work in 2018, of course, as everyone knows exactly what the film is actually about, but back when I first saw the film in 2005/6 with Nick I remember us genuinely not knowing what was going to happen. But it's still a clever little storytelling trick, making the audience think of more supernatural horrors when the real threat is far more down to earth.

The film also starts with a "This film is based on actual events" statement, and in this case it's truer than usual, as Wolf Creek borrows quite heavily from the accounts of what notorious serial killer Ivan Milat did to his victims - particularly the "head on a stick" - as well as the crimes of Bradley John Murdoch, although neither are specifically mentioned by name. The film proved so controversial, in fact, that the DPP of the Northern Territories asked that the film not be released in Australia until after Murdoch's trial, for fears that it would prejudice the case.

Wolf Creek's main success as a horror movie is down to John Jarrett, who plays Mick Taylor, because the way he plays him is very accurate and absolutely terrifying. People tend to have an idea in their heads of serial killers wither being silent stalkers or erudite gentlemen killers, when in reality they are superficially charming - just enough to get their victims to let their guard down - and then utterly brutal, cruel and, more often than not, misogynistic, and Jarrett plays Taylor like that to a tee. Apparently, Jarrett stayed in character between takes and improvised a lot of his dialogue - particularly Taylor's laugh, which he worked on for four months.

It's another quite bleak film as well, which again is probably not so much of a shock 13 years after its release; but at the time I first saw it before its reputation became known, several of the scenes were like a punch to the gut. The film makes us think it's travelling along the traditional slasher film road, with a Final Girl emerging to fight the killer and save her friends... but then it doesn't turn out that way and we're left reeling at what does happen. Again, this is also accurate serial killer behaviour, which is just so jarring when we're used to the Hollywood portrayals of them being theatrical and bombastic most of the time.

If there's a fault with Wolf Creek, I think it's with the way it handles Ben's ordeal. Yes, Mick Taylor's focus is on the females he captures and tortures and so his male victims are going to receive far less attention, but at the same time it almost feels like the film forgot about him until the very end, when we get his brief scenes before the movie ends. I also think that, while the revelation of just how many victims Taylor has had over the years is a good one, it felt a little too much like it was trying to pull at our emotions with the video of the family with the little girl. We're already horrified by what we've seen; dropping a child into the mix feels like cheap emotional blackmail. But those are minor issues, and ones that don't affect the film overall. It still ends about as bleakly as it could possibly do so without nukes falling or something similar, and it still stays with you long after you've finished watching it.

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The Strangers (2008)

Here in the UK, up until a year or so ago we had a long-running TV show called Crimewatch UK. The premise of the show was that it would show reconstructions and appeals of unsolved crimes from all over the country that the police needed help to solve, and people would call in with any information they had. The hosts of the show would end each episode with a comment to the audience: "Don't have nightmares; sleep well," which was often a bit of a lofty request after watching an hour's worth of armed robberies, rapes and murder reconstructions happening to people just like you. Certainly, the show both terrified and fascinated me in equal measure. It's also why I think an alternate title for The Strangers could easily be Crimewatch UK: The Movie.

James and Kristen have returned home from a wedding reception in the early hours of the morning. There's an awkward silence between them - we learn that James proposed to Kristen that evening but she turned him down; as a result of this James calls his friend Mike to ask him to come and pick him up from the holiday home the couple are staying at. This awkwardness soon proves to be the least of their problems, however, as after a strange girl comes knocking on their door at 4 am and asking for "Tamara",  the couple find themselves being terrorised by a trio of masked strangers - two female and one male - who stalk them inside and outside the house, blocking their attempts to escape or call for help and gradually growing more violent. Who are these masked strangers and what do they want with James and Kristen?

The fear of a "face at the window", especially at night, is a more common fear than people probably realise, even if there's not an actual phobia term for it (the closest term is scopophobia, a fear of being watched in general). I myself have suffered from it for most of my life - which made going to bed in my teenage years an interesting experience, as I had to walk past large windows in the dark to get to my bedroom - and so I think that might have influenced my feelings on The Strangers somewhat, because I find the film really, really unnerving. It's like someone made a movie of one of my long-standing fears that wasn't Arachnophobia. The very idea of people terrorising you in your isolated home, in the middle of the night, for no discernable reason - regardless of the levels of violence or lack thereof - strikes a chord with me and, I suspect, many others, and so for the sheer creeping-out factor The Strangers succeeds as a scary movie. The poster image above, of Kristen standing alone in a room, unaware of the masked assailant there with her, is a prime example of dramatic irony done right, as we can easily imagine ourselves in her position (and most of us probably have at some point, in fact), and so the tension is increased without anyone actually having to do anything.

I appear to be on a mini-run of "based on a true story" movies at the moment, as The Strangers is yet another movie to claim that. According to the director Bryan Bertino, when he was a child a stranger came to his door asking for someone who didn't live there and then left. Afterwards, the family learned that there had been break-ins in the neighbourhood that night. There's also been some speculation that the film was loosely based on the Keddie murders of 1981 and/or that the film is a remake of the 2006 French film Them (Ils), but there's no real evidence for either of those connections beyond plot similarities.

The Strangers is also a relatively bloodless movie, aside from the final act and one other moment in the film which I shan't discuss because of SPOILERS. It relies almost entirely on the tension and psychological horror of the home invasion to get its message across and keep its audience enthralled, and I personally think it succeeds in this pretty well. It's got a minimal cast and the majority of the film takes place in the house, which combine to make sure we feel the claustrophobia and isolation that James and Kristen feel as they're terrorised by this mysterious trio. There's a sequel out now (or it will be coming out next month for those of us in the UK), and I'm interested to see if the filmmakers are able to capture the lightning in a bottle that this first film did, or whether making a sequel to a film such as this only dilutes the terror it caused in up the first time around.

Don't have nightmares; sleep well.

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Cloverfield (2008)

Well, thank you very much, JJ Abrams, for helping to make February more and more my "catch up on films I need to review before I get to the new releases" month. At least I already reviewed 10 Cloverfield Lane in 2016, so I don't have to cover an entire series before I get to The Cloverfield Paradox (and what a change from previous publicity campaigns, just dropping a Super Bowl ad and then saying, "And by the way, watch this literally straight after watching this team sports game.") So today it's time for Cloverfield, the post-modern not-Godzilla movie.

Rob Hawkins is about to head off to Japan for his new job as vice-president of... some company you'd have to have followed the ARG PR campaign for the movie to know the name of (Slusho), and so his brother Jason and Jason's girlfriend Lily have thrown him a surprise party. Also at the party are Rob's best friend Hud, another friend Marlena, and Beth, Rob's long-time love interest with whom he slept with a month previously and then apparently ignored for reasons never explored. The party's awkward moments are brought to an abrupt end when a series of explosions rock the apartment and New York in general, Some... thing has apparently emerged from the waters around New York and is destroying the city in its rampage. Everyone is being evacuated, but Rob decides to go and rescue Beth, who left the party shortly before the giant monster started its rampage, and his friends and family decide to follow him, with Hud filming everything with the camera he had been using to gather "testimonials" at the party earlier. Just what is attacking the city, and will Rob and the others be able to rescue Lily and escape the city before it's too late?

Ye gods. People often complain about the shaky cam that comes with many found-footage films, and for the most part, I think it's little more than hyperbole. But in Cloverfield the motion sickness warning for the camera is well-deserved. Between the constant explosions, tremors and people madly running to escape the explosions, tremors and giant rampaging monster, it's hard not to get dizzy watching this film. Of course, things aren't helped with the cameraman being Hud, a dudebro with the attention span of an excitable Labrador puppy. "Why are you still filming?" one character asks him at one point in the film. "Because people are going to want to see this," is Hud's response, and while I suspect that's at least partly there to lampoon all the other found footage films that use that exact same excuse for keeping the camera rolling when all survival instincts would dictate just ditching the thing and running like billy-o, the fact that later on that same character picks up the camera to keep filming after Hud is... no longer able to do so indicates that the film still can't escape the pull of that particular trope no matter how hard it tries.

Cloverfield is a giant monster movie where we don't actually see all that much of the monster - which requires some pretty impressive framing and plot contrivances considering the thing is supposed to be 80 feet tall and on a rampaging tour of New York City throughout the movie (a tour which, miraculously, has it always within spitting distance of our erstwhile protagonists at that). On the one hand, not showing much of your giant monster in a giant monster movie would seem like a bad plan, but Cloverfield isn't really about the giant monster - much like Train to Busan, it's a disaster movie that just happens to have a giant monster as the cause of the disaster. And honestly, the brief glimpses we do get of the monster (and its dog-sized fleas/sea lice/whatever the hell those things were) are certainly enough to convince us of the gravity of the situation.

There's never a clear explanation given as to just what has brought the Cloverfield monster to New York (aside from the pause-the-movie-or-you'll-miss-it moment at the very end), but apparently, The Cloverfield Paradox will go at least some way to explaining that, so I'll get back to you on that. Not that it matters in this movie - as I've said before, we don't need to know every bit of backstory or exposition to enjoy a horror film. If it can sweep you up in the moment, that's more than good enough, and aside from the nausea-inducing camera and a repeated urge to brain Hud with something heavy, that's what Cloverfield does.

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Battle Royale (2000)

If my house were ever to catch fire, after sustaining multiple lacerations from somehow getting both cats into the same carrier and to safety, I would them rescue the following items from my burning house: my keys, my wallet, my phone, my laptop and my limited edition steelbook with a frame from the original film negative director's cut DVD copy of Battle Royale. Seriously, I love this film. It's one of my favourite films ever (along with the original Dawn of the Dead and To Kill A Mockingbird), and so I figured what better time is there to review it than today, my 300th review?

In a world where Japan won World War Two and emerged as the world superpower, a huge recession leads the government to take extreme measures to deal with what they see as the problem of delinquent youth - they pass the BR Act. With this Act, every year one middle school class is chosen, kidnapped, shipped off to a remote and uninhabited island, fitted with explosive collars and told they have three days to kill each other off until there's only one of them left. This time around, class 3-B has been chosen; their plight being overseen by their former teacher Kitano, who quit after being stabbed in the rear by delinquent student Kuninobu. Also added to the mix are two "transfer students" - BR veteran Kawada and psychopath Kiriyama, who joined up for fun. Out of the 42 students involved, we primarily follow Shuya Nanahara and Noriko Nakagawa, but how will they manage to survive when the odds are stacked so high against them?

Battle Royale is of the dystopian sub-genre, and while that puts it mainly in the sci-fi genre, I think it also has at least a toe or two in the horror genre as well. There's something quite horrific, after all, in the idea of being forced to kill your friends in order to survive - even more so when it's all been government-sanctioned, complete with a cheery instructional video to explain it all to you. Director Kinji Fukasaku said that he decided to direct the film version of the novel by Koushun Takami because it reminded him of an incident in his childhood - during World War Two, he and his class were working in a munitions factory that came under fire. When the shelling was over, the survivors had to bury their dead classmates.

There's also horror in the idea of society sacrificing its children for some form of the "greater good", which is a story that goes all the way back to the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. In the years since Battle Royale's release, there have been other films that have had a similar dystopian theme (The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner being the closest, but The Purge movies also have similar themes, and of course there's also The Belko Experiment), but I think they were simplified and, in the former cases, softened a little for a young teenage audience. Battle Royale doesn't pull any punches and shows everything in blunt and brutal Technicolour, treating its audience (teenage or otherwise) as mature enough to handle the themes and images in the film.

Battle Royale also uses music to tremendous effect. Nearly all of its soundtrack is made up of classical music, the most notable being Dies Irae from Verdi's Requiem and Johann Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz. The former emphasises the drama and, again, the horror of the movie; the latter offers an almost ironic counterpart as it sometimes plays over the aftermath of life-or-death battles with victims' dead bodies lying in situ.

Characterisation is also strong in the film. Though we primarily follow Shuya Nanahara, Noriko and Kawada, during the course of the film we get insights into the majority of the students being forced to participate in the BR Act, and with the exception of Kiriyama, who's utterly round the twist, nearly all of them have at least some aspect of their personalities that make them sympathetic. Even former teacher Kitano, who seems to have taken the job of overseeing the class slaughter as a form of revenge, and students like the psychotic Mitsuko, have motivations and depths that make their behaviours understandable and maybe even likeable in some cases.

Battle Royale has been banned or otherwise censored in several countries over the years, including Japan, South Korea and Germany, and it didn't get a DVD release in the USA until 2012 due to negative reactions from audiences who connected it to the Columbine massacre. Since 2006 there have also been on-and-off plans for an American remake, although in 2012 one of the men behind that, Roy Lee, said that due to films like The Hunger Games, a Battle Royale remake would be seen as a "copy" of the other film. Personally, I can't see what a remake would add to or improve the original story, especially now that we have such "low-brow" lookalikes like The Purge. Battle Royale is as close to a perfect film as it is and should be seen without having a Western filter placed upon it.

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