Carnography

Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1992)

It's actually mildly impressive that it took a whole eight years for a sequel to Children of the Corn to come out (although I am disappointed that its French title wasn't Horror Kid 2). But it wasn't until 1991 that Trans Atlantic Entertainment was formed with the purpose of producing sequels to several films that they had acquired the rights to that things got started. It should be noted that one of the other films that came out of this was Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth and that after this film, all future Children of the Corn films were direct-to-video (or worse, a SyFy sequel). All in all, it doesn't feel like the most auspicious background for Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice.

Picking up where the last film ended (although I think we can assume that it didn't take Burt, Vicky and the moppets eight years to get to Hemingford), the authorities have descended upon Gatlin and discovered why they'd not heard from anyone there for three years. With Issac gone, the surviving children all seem free from the influence of He Who Walks Behind The Rows, although all they can tell of what happened is "I saw the corn." Tabloid journalist John Garrett and his surly teenage son Danny arrive in Hemingford and end up rooming at the local bed-and-breakfast run by Angela Casual (yes, that's her actual name), who has also taken in Micah, one of the Gatlin children. He Who Walks Behind The Rows is still lurking around, however, and possesses Micah so that he - and his new enforcer Mordechai - can once again lead the children to slaughter all the adults in a blood sacrifice for the corn. While Micah starts to persuade Danny to join them as well, John teams up with a Native American anthropology professor to investigate what happened in Gatlin and discover a sinister plot by the townspeople of Hemingford that might turn everything on its head...

Here's what I don't get about Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice. We know that He Who Walks Behind The Rows exists. We saw him in the previous film. We even get to see from his point of view (in extremely low-budget Predator Vision) several times in this film. So why does this film bring in this subplot about toxic ergot on the corn that could be making the children go kill-crazy? (Technically a spoiler, but hey, it's hardly world shattering.) If they had brought this up in the first movie, and perhaps made He Who Walks Behind The Rows more ambiguous, then maybe it would have worked better. But just dropping it on us in this movie and devoting a good amount of the film's second act to discussing and discovering it does nothing for the plot whatsoever - unless the film thinks its audience has been snacking on lead paint favoured popcorn. We know that the ergot has nothing to do with anything, except as part of the insidious plan that Hemingford has to... make people sick from their corn and somehow profit from it? Yeah, it's a big mess, and trying to puzzle it out just makes my head hurt.

This sequel is considerably more gory than the previous film - partly because it is a 90s horror film and partly because, as I noted above, it came from the same people who made Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth. One death in particular is particularly bloody, as Micah whittles a wooden voodoo doll in church and causes a fellow parishioner to basically haemorrhage out of his entire head. Elsewhere, corn stalks are propelled through people, doctors are stabbed to death with their own syringes, and in the film's climax, the corn demon is defeated this time by a combine harvester (and fire). Eris knows what they're going to use in the next film. Agent Orange, perhaps? On the other hand, it has some ridiculous attempts at comedy deaths as well - an elderly woman named Ruby West (get it?) is crushed by her own house, leaving just her feet sticking out from under it - har-de-har-har. It falls even flatter when the evil kids kill her cat before flattening her, just in case you weren't already on board with hating them. Later on, another elderly woman in an electric wheelchair is propelled through a plate glass window into a bingo hall, and I think that's supposed to be a black comedy moment as well - except that it's not actually funny, just over-long and obvious.

If ever there was a pictorial example needed for the definition of "unnecessary sequel", then Children of the Corn II: the Final Sacrifice would be a shoo-in. It's cheap, derivative, unoriginal and catering to the lowest common denominator for a lot of the film. Its human antagonists of Michah and Mordechai don't have nearly enough screen time and/or screen presence to be anywhere near equal to Issac and Malachai from the first film (although they do try, giving Michah a two-tone voice to try to up the creepy factor), and the effects haven't really improved much in eight years. It's true that this was the case of a lot of horror films from the 90s, but honestly, this one is worst than most. And the fact that every sequel following this was direct-to-video pretty much means that any light at the end of the tunnel is going to be an oncoming train...

1.5 out of 5.

 

The Love Witch (2016)

Two days into October and I'm already throwing my carefully-planned-out schedule (I practically colour-coded it and everything) right out the window because I decided to watch films out of order (because I was too lazy to get up off the sofa). But since nothing is date-sensitive, it doesn't actually matter so let's get on with today's review, The Love Witch.

Elaine is a beautiful young woman who moves to the town of Arcata in California after her husband's sudden and apparently suspicious death. Elaine is also a practising witch, and rents a room in the house of her mentor Barbara as well as joining the coven in the town. Elaine has some rather odd, and even traditional views on relationships and how women should cater to mens' fantasies and that the most important thing they can do is love them; she is also constantly hoping to meet her true love, who she imagines almost exactly as a knight in shining armour from a fairy tale. To that aim, she performs a ritual - a "love spell", if you will - to find her true love. Unfortunately, every man she meets and captivates becomes obsessed with her or cannot cope with the feelings she brings out in them, eventually causing them to commit suicide or pine away when she loses interest in them. When Griff, a police detective starts to investigate these mysterious deaths he meets Elaine, and the two quickly start a relationship. Elaine believes she has finally found the man of her dreams, but will that still be the case if Griff discovers her involvement in the deaths of her previous lovers?

My gods, but Elaine - or more specifically Samantha Robinson, who plays her - is beautiful. I mean, really, utterly, stunningly, elegantly beautiful. You look at Elaine and you find yourself wondering why she could ever have any problems finding a man to love her - but of course, that's (one of) the point(s) of The Love Witch, I think - Elaine wants to find a man who isn't just captivated by her looks, but who wants her for her entire being. Love versus desire. It's clear that many men desire her, but she does not reciprocate the attention for most of them - we see the uncomfortable looks on her face whenever the male leader of the coven attempts to get close to her or touch her, for example. Elaine also has created such an idealised portrait of her ideal man in her mind that, inevitably, no man will ever be good enough for her - even Griff, her "white knight" is doomed to eventually disappoint her as we hear his internal monologue stating that he does not truly believe in love.

As you might have suspected, The Love Witch is a feminist film, and so there's a fair bit of gender politics in the film. On the surface, Elaine might seem to be rather anti-feminist, considering her views on how women should fulfil the fantasies of their men, but at the same time, she is the one doing all the pursuing and enforcing her will and power (in the form of her love spells) onto the men she desires. At one point in the film, we watch as Elaine hears the male voices of her past berate and demean her for not being good enough for them, and it's clear that these past events have driven her to become what she is now - a woman who wants to be loved, but is also determined to never again be objectified or belittled for what she is. It's pretty obvious that she's a sociopathic serial killer, but even then she's not so much an antagonist as she is an anti-heroine - you can't help but feel for her even with everything she does.

Something else that's beautiful in The Love Witch is the cinematography. It has a very 60s and 70s aesthetic (so much so that, when the film started, I had to check that it wasn't set in that period rather than the present day), and the colours are all so very striking and lush. They might not be at quite the level of saturation as The Neon Demon or Dario Argento's Suspiria (two other films that also deal with women's power), but they still work together to create a sort of otherworldly atmosphere to the film that works so well with the magical themes within. Things like the Victoriana tea room also feed into the idea of female fantasies - or rather, the feeling that so much of this is just dressing up and playing out your fantasies for Elaine.

If you're looking for a traditional and/or gory horror movie, then The Love Witch probably won't meet your expectations. There's very little gore, and Elaine is far from the "traditional" horror movie villain or slasher. Similarly, if you don't like mixing your horror with your gender politics, then you might find this film difficult to get through. But if you like thoughtful films, with beautiful cinematography and leading actresses, and can enjoy playful, subtle satire, then you should give it a look.

 

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Sinister (2012)

If I were to make a horror movie based on any nightmares I've had, it would come out either looking like the movie mother! or like an episode of Sesame Street gone very, very wrong (including a dream where a man who looked like David Jason circa 1984 cuts off a dog's nose and mixes it in a puddle of cream, which was an actual dream I had when I was five). When C. Robert Cargill wrote one after having a bad dream from watching The Ring, it became the 2012 movie Sinister.

True crime writer Ellison Oswald is attempting to regain the success he had with his first book, and so moves his family to Pennsylvania so he can be close to the crime scene for his new book - although he doesn't tell his wife and children that they are actually living in the house where the murders took place. Four members of a family were found hanged from a tree in their garden, with the final member of the family, daughter Stephanie, still missing. On his first night in the house, Ellison finds a box in the attack that contains a Super 8 projector and several reels of film, each apparently labelled as home movies. When he watches them, however, he discovers that the reels each contain footage of the murder of a family, including the family whose deaths he plans to write his book about, apparently filmed by the killer. As he continues to investigate, strange and unsettling things start to happen to Ellison and his family, but he still refuses to drop the story, even when his research leads him to a connection to a Babylonian deity called Bughuul, who was known as the "Eater of Children". Is an ancient pagan god somehow responsible for a series of family annihilations spanning nearly 50 years and perhaps even longer, and what did happen to the missing children in each family?

The biggest problem I have when watching or even thinking about Sinister is that whenever I hear Bughuul referred to by his other name of "Mr Boogie", my brain starts to sing this song. It tends to kill any and all tension that might have been building. Not to mention the fact that Bughuul looks, to me at least, like the Crypt Keeper going to see KISS live in concert. I know that the image was originally found by the director and writer searching for suitably creepy images online and that it has at least some black metal influences (that can also be seen/heard in things like the symbol painted at the murder scenes and the background music for the Super 8 murder films), but this is what my brain sees (and hears) now, and so it might colour some of my opinions on the film.

Of everything in the film, the Super 8 reels are by far the creepiest and most effective things in the whole movie. Their grainy nature, the way the families are filmed in such a surreptitious way, the way it cuts from families having fun to them being bound, gagged and murdered, and the soundtrack that plays over the otherwise-silent clips are genuinely unsettling, and it's not really a surprise that they're what so many people remember most about the film overall. Although I did find myself wondering why even the most recent murders are filmed on the same Super 8 camera as the ones from the 1960s and 70s. Is this a case of Bughuul/Mr Boogie being one of those old people who just can't get the hang of modern technology, so he's still plugging away with his olde timey camera rather than ask one of the kids how to operate his new camcorder?

The second most effective thing in the movie is the appearances of the ghostly children - particularly in the scene where Ellison is investigating his house in the middle of the night and the spectral children are darting about around him, freezing and/or disappearing whenever he turns in their direction as though they're playing Red Light Green Light/Grandmother's Footsteps. On the other hand, there are also several "scares" in the movie that don't really go anywhere or have any real bearing on the plot - the night terrors that one of Ellison's children suffers from seems to just be an excuse to stuff him in a box like a Regan MacNeill jack-in-the-box, and there's a nighttime Rottweiler encounter that's never touched upon again.

The character of Ellison Oswald is also not the most likeable or identifiable protagonist we could have had. He's desperate to regain the glory he got after writing his first book and clearly thinks himself "above" doing most work to pay the bills and support his family, to the point where he moves them into a house where a family was brutally murdered and just doesn't tell them. Gods only know how he thought he was going to get away with that - maybe that's why the entire film takes place over the course of about a week, because once his wife found out and took the kids and left there wouldn't have been much left to move the plot forward so they had to get things done as quickly as possible.

Sinister's not a bad movie - it's got some good ideas, a genuinely creepy atmosphere at times and is clearly trying to do some new things within the horror genre. But there are also some ideas that just don't work or feel like they're just been thrown at the audience to see if they'll stick, and I'm not really sure that Bughuul/Mr Boogie was strong enough to become a new iconic horror antagonist like I expect they were hoping he'd be.

 

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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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The Windmill Massacre (2016)

This review got a little delayed, because while I watched The Windmill Massacre a week or so ago, all the detailed notes I made on the film for the review got "accidentally" thrown away during a rather botched house cleaning (along with the DVD case for the film and a large number of my DVDs and Blu-Rays, picked apparently at random). So it's taken me a bit of time to get my head together again and remember enough about the film to be able to write a proper review of it, albeit slightly later than originally planned.

Jennifer is a young Australian woman living and working as a nanny in Amsterdam, who is also on the run from a traumatic event in her past. When her employer discovers that she is in the country illegally she flees before he can call the police, and ends up hiding on a tour bus that is visiting various windmills in the country. Also on the bus are a Japanese tourist, Takashi; a French photographer and former model, Ruby; Nicholas, a doctor; businessman Douglas and his son Curt; soldier Jackson; and bus driver Abe. Partway through the tour, the bus breaks down after Jennifer sees a figure standing in the road, but when they check there is no sign of anyone. Jennifer and Jackson head out to try to find help from a nearby windmill they spotted, but Jackson starts to see images and mementoes of a prostitute we saw him accidentally kill the previous night in a PTSD-flashback before he is abruptly attacked and killed by a demonic figure wielding a scythe. Jennifer tries to tell the others back on the bus what happened, but they dismiss her as being mentally unstable and accuse her of killing Jackson instead. When a further accident knocks the bus into a river and injures Curt, the group have no choice but to head to the windmill for safety and to try to get help. As the group continue to experience strange visions of their past, it becomes clear that not only do they all share a common secret... but that the windmill has a horrific past that still lingers to this day...

I was honestly not expecting to enjoy The Windmill Massacre as much as I did. I picked it up on the basis of a trailer I'd seen on YouTube way back in 2013 (and which was very different from how the film eventually turned out), but I was still expecting it to be little more than typical low-budget, B-movie fare that relied mostly on the gore factor to get noticed. Don't get me wrong - it is most of those things, but as we all know by now that's not necessarily a bad thing, and it actually has a clever little plot hiding in there underneath all the splatter, and it really did impress me.

You can probably guess what the "dark secret" all the tourists share is - I'd pretty much figured it out before we'd got ten minutes into the film, and the brief journey into Jackson's life before he gets on the bus pretty much confirmed it - but the film still puts an interesting twist on it that managed to surprise me. Personally, if it had been me making the film I'd have had a "Seven Deadly Sins" theme rather than the way they went, although if you squint you can see hints of at least Lust, Pride, Avarice and Wrath at least in most of the tourists on this ill-fated trip. This is actually the film's biggest flaw - most of its plot developments are pretty easy to see coming, and while that doesn't necessarily ruin the film, it does take some of the wind out of its mill blades, so to speak.

On the other hand, the film's villain - a miller who sold his soul to Satan for the secret of making his mill blades turn without wind, is quite the original antagonist and considerably more original than all the backwoodsmen killing off campers or masked psychopaths stalking babysitters that make up a lot of the slasher genre, and his kills are, for the most part, sufficiently wet and gruesome enough to satisfy any gorehounds watching. There are digital blood effects, and they are noticeable as such, but they don't stand out so much that they break immersion or ruin the rest of the film. Another thing I particularly liked about the film was how, despite the story of the demonic miller being explicitly Christian in origin, he/it could also be held at bay by a non-Christian - in this case Shinto - prayer ritual. It's little details like this that show that real effort went into the making of the film, so that it would stand out from all the other splattery horrors churned out every year.

The Windmill Massacre might not ever be as good as some of the films it's been compared to (The Abominable Dr Phibes, films from Brian De Palma and the works of Agatha Christie, most obviously Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None) but it still manages to have more splattery originality than many of its peers, and is therefore worthy of a watch for that alone. Just pretend to be surprised by the plot twists.

 

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Slender Man (2018)

This movie and I got off on the wrong foot - literally. Partially it was the fact that the only time my local cinema was showing it was at 9 pm at night, and partially it was because I was recovering from breaking two toes and (probably) one of the small bones in my ankle and yet still had to walk to the cinema and back to see it. Does this mean that I might have perhaps been in an unfairly negative mindset when it came to watching and reviewing Slender Man? Perhaps. But honestly? I could have been the happiest I've ever been in my life and Slender Man still wouldn't have been a good film.

Blown it again with keeping my overall opinion of the film till the seconds half of the review again, haven't I?

In a small American town, four teenage girls - Hallie, Wren, Chloe and Katie - are living their average teenage girl lives when, one night, they learn about the urban legend of the Slender Man and decide to do a ritual to summon him. They don't really believe in the entity, but it seems like a fun thing to do (and they'd heard that a group of boys were planning on doing the ritual as well and don't want to be left out). However, after performing the ritual some of the girls seem to be suffering from nightmares related to the ritual and Slender Man - and then one of their number, Katie, disappears without a trace on a school trip to an old graveyard. The three remaining girls search desperately for their friend but to no avail, and gradually they begin to believe that the Slender Man might not be a myth after all and somehow has something to do with Katie's disappearance. They attempt to appease Slender Man in an attempt to get Katie back; this only seems to make things worse though and the three girls start to fall into madness, suffering supernatural visions and seemingly being stalked by the Slender Man himself. Can they survive the horror they have apparently unleashed and get their friend back?

Ah, Slender Man. Slenderman. The Operator. Originally created by Victor Surge as part of a thread on the Something Awful forums to create creepy Photoshopped images in 2009, the Slenderman and his mythos are now practically a household name. This was at least partly because of the web series Marble Hornets, which was the first of several to use Slenderman (or as they called him, The Operator) as a Lovecraftian-esque antagonist, who could distort reality with his presence and who liked to stalk people, especially in the woods. Other web series soon followed - Tribe Twelve, EverymanHYBRID - and even some lower-budget movies as his infamy grew - Windigo and Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story. Slenderman very quickly became part of the internet's consciousness and one of the icons of creepypasta. Unfortunately, with all this cultural awareness came the tragic case of two mentally unbalanced teenage girls who attempted to kill a classmate "for Slenderman". Despite that, though, it was inevitable that one of the big movie studios would pick up the Slenderman rights to try to cash in on the phenomenon.

The problem with that was that they somehow took everything that made the Slenderman so creepy and unsettling... and threw it all out in favour of generic teen horror movie "scares". You know how I sometimes complain that bad horror movies make things worse for themselves by reminding me of other, better horror films they've tried to "crib" things from? Well, Slender Man did something like that, only it was mediocre (at best) films like Sinister, Rings and Friend Request that it reminded me of instead.

The movie was dark, and I don't mean thematically. Many scenes were shot in shadow or darkness, and while that might have worked to set the scene, the movie also had the most annoying habit of shining torches straight at the audience or flashing bright images on the screen from the darkness, which did nothing but hurt the eyes of the audience. Really, making your audience squint at the screen is not going to endear them to your film. Conversely, when it came to old Slendy himself, rather than keeping him something to be glimpsed in the background or far away, the film decided to have some close-ups of the man himself. Now, they had Javier Botet to play him, and I guess if you've got someone good at playing unnaturally tall and thin creatures then you at least want to make sure you get your money's worth from him, but close up... The blank features of Slenderman ended up looking more like a half-finished Jack Skellington to me, at least.

Another major problem with the film is the backstory it invents for Slenderman. In most of the other entries of the Slenderman mythos I mentioned earlier, there is actually very little history or backstory given for the man himself, and it's not really needed. Slenderman exists and does bad things to people or causes bad things to happen to people when he's around - it doesn't really matter where he came from or what he's been doing in previous centuries. In Slender Man, however, he's revealed to apparently be the cause of hundreds, even thousands of missing children over the years, which isn't too bad... but then they start connecting him with the legend of the Pied Piper and other things and it just starts getting overly complicated. Once again, I remind filmmakers: not everything needs to have a fully fleshed-out backstory, and in fact sometimes the lack of one actually makes things scarier.

I freely admit that I've been a fan of the Slenderman mythos pretty much since its inception and followed Marble Hornets through all three of its seasons. I also admit that I didn't really have high hopes for this big-budget entry into the mythos - but I was also hoping that it would prove me wrong; that it would exceed my low expectations. Alas, it was not to be. Maybe it's the creepypasta nature that lends itself better to smaller and more episodic storytelling rather than a glossy full-length movie, or maybe it's that Sony just sanitised things into a pallid grey mess in trying to make another bloodless and scare-free teen horror movie. Either way, this version of the Slenderman needs to fade quickly back into the background.

 

 

The Ritual (2017)

Here's another film that I wanted to see when it came out last year, but in their infinite wisdom my local cinema chain decided not to show it and so I had to wait until Netflix started streaming it... and then wait a little longer because UK Netflix apparently wasn't included in that. Eventually, I just went and bought a physical copy, supporting the British Film Industry, and then I had to just get round to watching it. So finally, here I am reviewing The Ritual.

Four 30somethings  - Luke, Phil, Hutch and Dom - are on a hiking holiday in Sweden together. It isn't the first choice any of them would have made for a holiday together, but they're making the trip to honour a fifth friend, Robert, who had suggested the trip but was recently killed in a robbery gone wrong. When Dom falls and injures his knee, Hutch suggests they take a shortcut through some woods to get back to their lodge quicker. This plan turns out to be a very bad one, as the woods are much larger than they appeared to be from the outside, and when they are caught in a rainstorm they take refuge in an old wooden cabin - which just so happens to have Norse runes carved throughout it and a strange effigy with antlers for hands in an upstairs room. Just being in this cabin seems to have a bad effect on them all, as they all suffer nightmares and bizarre sleepwalking events that night, and when they set out again the next morning it seems that someone - or something - is stalking them through the woods. With tensions running high and the group doubting their own perceptions, will the four of them find their way out of the woods and escape whatever it is that's tracking them?

Sometimes, when I'm watching a film I'm reminded of other films at various points throughout. Usually, this is a bad thing, because it's reminding me of other, better things I could be watching. In the case of The Ritual, however, the comparisons are much more favourable. The two films that came to mind for me were The Blair Witch Project and The Wicker Man, and in both cases, I felt that The Ritual went in some interesting and quite compelling directions with elements similar to both films. There's the element of being lost in unfamiliar woods, with tensions running high within the group, for the Blair Witch comparison, but the tension comes from things far more sensible and realistic than a map getting kicked into a creek. For The Wicker Man, the strange wooden effigy is the clear comparison, but again, The Ritual takes that and goes in a very different direction than that classic film, and this is a good thing indeed.

The Ritual is based on the book of the same name by Adam Nevill and is directed by none other than David Bruckner, who directed the "Amateur Night" segment of the first V/H/S anthology (which you might remember me lavishing quite a bit of praise on). Bruckner is definitely good at creating an atmosphere so tense you could cut it with a chair, not to mention his skills at depicting monstrous creatures (that may or may not be real, as the film keeps that card very close to its chest until the last possible second, leaving us wondering if we're just watching one man's psychotic break in the middle of some woods in Sweden) in brief but tantalising glimpses. The quite minimalist cast all do excellent jobs as well, from Rafe Spall as protagonist Luke, who's wrestling with a massive case of Survivor's Guilt throughout most of the film, to Sam Troughton as the passive-aggressive Dom, who ends up getting a lot of the best, blackest humour lines. They're relatable, even when they're being annoying to each other.

If I had managed to see The Ritual in 2017 like I had originally hoped, the theoretical knife fight for spots on my Top 5 that year would have been at risk of becoming a battle royale, because it is really, really good. There are gore scenes dotted throughout the film, but it doesn't rely on them for the scares of the film. It cranks up the tension that starts with the mundane fear of being lost in the woods in a strange country and then cranks it further with the supernatural events that start to slowly creep in. Perhaps even better, it even manages to tie things up by the end in a satisfactory manner, that doesn't dangle the potential for a needless sequel in front of us at the end.

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Leprechaun (1993)

Oh hey, it's St. Gertrude's Day, the patron saint of cats and those who love them (and also travellers, gardeners, widows and the mentally ill, among others. I don't think there's a Catholic saint more suited to be my patron if I were still Catholic). Since I've already reviewed Uninvited, though, I guess I'd better look at a movie themed very loosely after the culture of that other saint who gets celebrated on March 17 - so here's Leprechaun.

Daniel O'Grady returns from visiting Ireland with a pot of gold he managed to steal from a leprechaun, as he knew the old stories and how to capture them and render them powerless. Unfortunately for him, the leprechaun isn't ready to part with his gold so easily and follows O'Grady to the US, and in their ensuing fight O'Grady suffers a stroke... but not before he manages to trap the leprechaun in a crate with a four-leaf-clover. Ten years later, Tory arrives to stay with her father for the summer in his new house, which of course is O'Grady's old home, complete with the leprechaun still trapped in the crate in the basement. When one of the handymen hired to help paint the house accidentally knocks the withered four-leaf clover from the crate, the leprechaun escapes and starts searching for his gold once more - and he's more than willing to kill anyone who gets in his way. Tory, along with house painters Nathan, Ozzie and Alex, find themselves trapped in the house and fighting off the homicidal leprechaun. Will they be able to fend off the leprechaun long enough to escape, or will he go through them in his quest to recover his gold?

Wow. This movie is a nostalgia trip for me. I remember first seeing it in 1994, shortly after it came out on video in the UK, back when I was going through all the available horror movies at the local video store whenever I was babysitting. It certainly wasn't scary to me back then, but I know I did find it entertaining in a quaint way... Although I also suspect that at least some of my fond memories of it are down to Jennifer Aniston in those shorts (this was a couple of years before Salma Hayek in From Dusk Till Dawn made me realise that I liked women as well as men, but I'm sure my subconscious still appreciated it). Of course, I also grew up with a lot of the old Irish fairy tales and so the idea that leprechauns weren't jolly little elves dressed in green was already clear in my mind (one of my favourite fairy tales, for example, was about a girl who picked flowers from a fairy ring and so was cursed to have every bed she tried to sleep in turn to thorns. Irish fairy tales don't mess around).

One thing that doesn't surprise me today is that Leprechaun was originally meant to be a kids' horror movie, even though I didn't figure that out when I first saw it. Despite the violence that the leprechaun uses against people, he also does a lot of things that are far more comedic, and the violence and gore feel as though they were added in later (which it turns out they were). There's also no adults involved in the fight with the leprechaun, just two teenagers/young adults, a kid and a mentally challenged adult who effectively counts as a child. The absence of parental or authority figures is a key component of kids' horror movies, perhaps even more so than in the teen slasher movie because there's no "safe" adult for the child protagonists to run to for help (see also The Monster Squad for both a prime example of this and a subversion).

So clearly Leprechaun is a horror comedy as well, with things like death by pogo stick and the leprechaun's OCD that makes him need to shine any shoes he comes across (all part of the folklore!). And it is an amusing enough b-movie - one that you shouldn't go into expecting too much of, but hey, it's better than the gritty WWE-produced reboot with Irish Gollem. And one final anecdote - originally the movie made a deal with the makers of the breakfast cereal Lucky Charms to feature in the movie; however, when they saw the movie the company decided they didn't like it and pulled their permission. This led to an expensive reshoot of scenes featuring the cereal, and a script change at the end of the film, where a character delivers the pithy one-liner, "F* you, Lucky Charms," before dispatching the leprechaun. So that's the origin of that line...

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Temple (2017)

You know what the hardest part of writing these reviews is? Coming up with the opening paragraphs. I don't like just going into the plot summary cold, so I try to start things off with a piece of trivia or a (hopefully) interesting anecdote that's at least tangentially related to the film that's being reviewed. In the case of today's movie, Temple, however, I've got nothing. So have this meta-commentary on the topic instead.

In a hospital in Japan, a heavily-bandaged man in a wheelchair-cum-oxygen tent setup is being interviewed by what might be the Japanese police. He is one of three American tourists (we never really find out who, but it's a pretty fair bet it's not Kate, the woman of the trio) who were on vacation to explore old Shinto temples and rituals. There's the aforementioned Kate, her boyfriend James, and Kate's long-time friend Chris, who is both the translator for them on this holiday and, were told awkwardly at the start, recovering from a recent mental breakdown. From an old book mysteriously titled 'Folk Tales,' they learn of one particular temple and decide to visit it, disregarding the warnings that nearly everyone they speak to about this temple gives them about the place. Led to the temple by a creepily-precocious child (who surely has nothing to do with the six children who went missing there decades earlier...) it isn't long before they find themselves isolated and trapped there overnight, which is when the sinister and disturbing things start to happen...

Temple caught my attention because I saw it had been written by Simon Barrett, who was also the writer of films like You're Next and Blair Witch, working with Adam Wingard (they're also apparently working together on a Western remake of I Saw The Devil, which makes me very confused as to whether I should be worried about that remake or not, because I'm still recovering from the Oldboy remake). As it turns out, Barrett actually had a lot less to do with the film than his screenwriting credit would imply, which is a great relief because Temple is bad. Bad, bad, bad and bad.

Oh, gods, where to begin? Our three 'protagonists' are stereotypical and paper-thin, with about three individual characteristics to share between them. Chris is clearly meant to be our audience identification character, as well as possibly an unreliable narrator, but the film never really confirms that one way or the other. His sole traits are: had a mental breakdown; is so deep in the 'friend zone' with Kate that it's painfully ridiculous; and he's allegedly a Japanophile, despite the fact that he somehow doesn't know that Japanese books are read right to left. The very moment he first sees that creepy precocious child, you know exactly where this will eventually lead because creepy precocious children in horror movies are always supernatural in origin - and yet the film insists of dragging things out to the very end.

And speaking of the end of the film, apparently, I'm not alone in wondering, "What the hell just happened?!" there. Technically spoilers follow but consider this a public service: the bandaged man is apparently Chris and is accused of killing James and Kate out of jealousy. This causes him to go a bit barmy and he rips out of his oxygen tent, stabs someone in the neck with a pen and flees... but to where? We're never shown. Then we cut to (probably) Kate screaming in a very dark cave, something approaches her, and we cut to the end credits. Did I fall asleep? Did part of the film catch fire and there wasn't enough time to reshoot the ending? Am I suffering from traumatic amnesia? I am left both confused and angry. It feels like the cinematic equivalent of stubbing my toes on a doorframe in the dark.

At the film's start, over the opening credits we're given some alleged backstory about six boys disappearing at the temple in 1968, and something about a monk who may or may not have been involved who ended up dead. There's a brief reference to strange rituals at the temple, and then later there's a brief shot of a statue that's supposed to represent the temple guardian, allegedly a kitsune or Inari. Do any of these things come up during the remainder of the film? Probably not, aside from the creepy precocious child, because most of the film's third act was in near-complete darkness and made no sense. See the kid on the poster with that mouth? I didn't see anything like that in the film. I'd definitely remember if I had because it would have been interesting. There was probably some connection with the temple guardian and the lost children, and the temple making people mad, but apparently, the filmmakers just threw up their hands and went, "Eh just make it dark and spooky and let the audience figure it out. Coherent ending? What's that?" Well, maybe we'd be at all bothered to try to figure it out if you gave us any reason to care about your story or your 2D characters.

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The Dark Tower (2017)

As much of a fan of the works of Stephen King as I am, I have never actually read any of The Dark Tower. Well, I read about a third of the first book back when I was about 15, but it never really grabbed me and so I probably went back to re-reading The Stand for the umpteenth time or something. So once again, I've gone into this movie more or less blind - relying on my brother to fill in any and all blanks for me from asking him endless questions about the series while drafting this review in my head.

Jake Chambers is your typical troubled 11-year-old movie protagonist. He has visions of another world, and a dark tower (natch) and a Man in Black (not Johnny Cash) who wants to destroy the tower. The Man's attacks on the tower seem to coincide with earthquakes that happen in Jake's world, but everyone just thinks that Jake is suffering trauma from the death of his father a year previously. He manages to find that a house from one of his dreams actually exists in New York, however, and goes there, finding a portal device which takes him to Midworld - the place from his dreams. There, Jake also meets Roland, the last Gunslinger, who is on a mission to kill the Man in Black before he is able to destroy the Dark Tower and this allow the 'darkness' to destroy all of reality. Jake also finds that he has powerful psychic abilities - his 'shine', as they call it - makes him of great interest to the Man in Black, and so he and Roland set off on a quest to stop him and save all of reality.

The Dark Tower had been in and out of development hell for about 10 years before its release this year, which rarely bodes well for a film. It wasn't until 2015 that this final version of the film got off the ground. As I've mentioned before with regard to other films, the longer it takes for a film to come out and the more hyped it gets, the more likely it is that people are going to be inevitably disappointed when it finally does come out. And such was the case with The Dark Tower. It wasn't exactly a box office flop, but it was critically panned from all sides - only some of which I think was deserved.

It's a beautifully-shot film, for one thing, and Idris Elba is, of course, excellent in his role as Roland of Eld, the last Gunslinger. There was some concern when Elba was cast as Roland as to how that would affect the story of The Dark Tower, as in the books there is apparently some racial tension between Roland and a black member of his group, which of course wouldn't work if Roland was black, but in the end the filmmakers dodged that issue by just setting the movie after all the events of the novel series. Of course, that opened up a whole new can of worms and is probably one of the reasons the fans disliked it so much - and I can see their point. Waiting 10 years for a film only to discover it's an entirely new story instead of the seven beloved novels that everyone was expecting (or at least some of the novels, at least) is never going to go down well.

One of my own biggest issues with the film was how much it felt like a slightly darker version of The Never-Ending Story. It has a child protagonist who finds themselves transported to another, more fantastical world and joins in a struggle to save the world/reality from evil. The fact that they made the film PG-13/12A just hammered it home even more - it felt too much like a kids' adventure movie than one based on a dark fantasy/horror western series. And this is even stranger when you look at how desperately the film tries to make references to other Stephen King works that weren't in the book series at all. The biggest - and strangest - one is the referring to psychic abilities as 'the Shine', which never comes up in any of the Dark Tower books and is such a blatant and ham-handed attempt to link two different stories together it's painful. At the beginning of the movie, there's also a scene involving twin girls playing a game which involves them chanting, "Come and play with us..." just in case you needed another glaring reference to hit you in the face.

The Dark Tower is cluttered and trying to accomplish way too much in its 95 minutes - which is also bizarrely short when you look at the average length of other big-name or anticipated films, or at other films based on book series like The Lord of the Rings. If like me you went into it more or less blind then you might find the film enjoyable enough, but even then I think you'd see how rushed parts of the story were, how many plot holes were dug and left unattended - there's a scene near the beginning of the film where the Man in Black kills another Gunslinger, a companion of Rolands... and I didn't find out until much, much later that the dead man was actually Roland's father - and how... sanitized it felt, and all the good actors in the world can't cover up problems like that.

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