Carnography

Unfriended: Dark Web (2018)

It's time for an experiment. After hearing me complain about the upcoming (at the time) film Unfriended: Dark Web for about the umpteenth time, my brother suggested that I watch the trailer and then write the review (or at least the plot synopsis) based solely on that, and then see how much I got right or wrong when I saw the actual film. Well, several months later (because, perhaps in an act of mercy, my local cinemas decided not to carry the film - but then again, they've decided to do the same for the Suspiria remake, so it's a double-edged sword...) I can finally reveal the notes I made when watching the trailer.

A bunch of 20somethings with more disposable income than they really should have get together online via Skype for a gaming night. One of them has a new laptop that he lifted from his work's Lost and Found; it connects to a mysterious network called "The River" and has lots of videos of captive and abused women. It's a Dark Web snuff network! Other members of the network 'hack' the Skype call and start stalking and attacking the group. "I want to play a game," one of them types. Get out of here, John Kramer; this isn't your franchise. The snuff network kills or kidnaps everyone because they're just that powerful, efficient and well-connected. Honestly, the laptop was probably a honey trap.

Now that I've seen the whole film, I can say that the trailer tells a rather different story than the actual film. My John Kramer joke, for example, would have made no sense in the context of the actual film as that moment only happens in the trailer, and a lot of the events and pacing are switched around considerably in the film itself. Whether or not I was right about the film's "twist" I'll leave up to you to discover, however - although I will say that Unfriended: Dark Web doesn't really do too much that's original or groundbreaking plotwise. Frankly, I'm just glad they don't go with their original plan, which was the vengeful cyber ghost of Laura Barns going after another group of teens who had a hand in her humiliation and eventual suicide.

So Unfriended: Dark Web is a Sequel In Name Only (SINO), which can only improve things because the premise of the last film was really, really silly and had a terrible ending. Having the antagonists be (allegedly - I'll get to that) regular humans who just like a bit of the old ultra-violence and snuff film trading is a more grounded hook to hang the film on, and is therefore much easier to watch. And this film even seemed to have fixed some of the biggest problems that the first film had, like everyone stopping talking whenever our protagonist alt-tabbed and cutting down on the digital graphics glitches that just gave me a headache. I was actually starting to think I was going to have to take back much of the things I'd predicted and said about this film.

Unfortunately, at about the halfway mark the digital graphics glitches make their return with a vengeance, and in perhaps the silliest method possible - the original owner of the laptop, who's stalking the group to get it back (and later the rest of the snuff film cabal), apparently generates something that interferes with live camera feeds whenever he's near them to distort his image and so whenever he's on or even near the screen it becomes a glitch-a-palooza. And there's no explanation given for this ability either. Is he wearing an EMP suit? Is he related to Slenderman? The entire conceit behind this gimmick appears to be to just hide his appearance from the audience - but hey, he's already wearing a hoodie and could just as easily wear a mask as well and that would be just as, if not more, effective in terms of tension and creep factor. I suspect that at some point during the film's planning, someone remembered that digital tearing had been a big part of the first film and so it had to be a big part of this film as well, and who cares if it makes no sense.

At least most of the characters in this film were more sympathetic than the ones in the previous film. Our protagonist is Matias, and when we meet him we discover that he's been building a program to help him communicate with his deaf girlfriend via ASL easier, and that's a really humanising touch as well as an original one (as well as leading to Chekov's ASL Skills towards the end of the film). There's also a lesbian couple that I found to be incredibly sweet (and one of them was played by Betty Gabriel, who was also in The Purge: Election Year and Get Out). On the other hand, there's also AJ, played by a millennial Judd Nelson and who unironically uses the term "sheeple" at one point, and I could not count down the minutes until his inevitable demise fast enough.

Once again, Unfriended: Dark Web attempts to get with the zeitgeist by jumping on some of the most relevant internet topics of the day - most obvious is the use of the Dark Web as the ultimate internet boogeyman, as well as the myth of the highly organised and connected snuff movie community (previously seen in The Den) able to trace, track, hack,manipulate and kill people all over the globe on a moment's notice without leaving a single trace or contradictory piece of forensic evidence, but there's also a case of Swatting, just to broaden the internet culture sweep. I'm just surprised that AJ didn't have a Pepe poster in his room/basement, to be honest.

In the end... Yes. Unfriended: Dark Web is a much better film than the first one. There are moments of genuine tension in this film, even if its attempts to have a more "grounded" story are still pretty far-fetched. Its protagonists are also far more sympathetic and likeable as well, which goes a long way in making a film more watchable. It still has some pretty ridiculous moments, however, which run the risk of obliterating all the kudos and tension the film has managed to claw back for itself. If there's going to be a third instalment of this series, can I suggest that the whole digital tearing thing just be dropped altogether? Either that or just bite the bullet and cross it over with Marble Hornets.

 

 

The Meg (2018)

Well, this is a bit of an anti-climax. I was all set to have The Meg as my centrepiece for this whole Shark Week (2: Shark Harder) thing... and then they go and announce that it's going to be a bloodless PG-13 (or 12A in my neck of the woods). Now I'm not saying that a movie needs blood and guts to be any good, far from it - but this is a sharksploitation movie featuring a prehistoric shark. Not to mention that the book it was based on apparently had quite a few gory deaths. It just smacks of attempting to make a movie more family-friendly for the sake of getting a larger audience for a summer b-movie.

Five years after a deep-sea rescue went wrong and cost the lives of his two friends, Jonas Taylor spends his days drinking beer in a run-down bar in Thailand. He is persuaded to return to rescue diving by an old friend, Mac, and Dr Minway Zhang, who need his help after a deep-sea exploration submarine becomes trapped deep in the Marianas Trench. The pilot of the submersible also just so happens to be Taylor's ex-wife, which is what eventually convinces him to attempt the rescue. The operation goes relatively successfully, with only one death, but while they are down there they realise that they are being attacked by a Megalodon - a prehistoric shark measuring around 25 metres long. Once back on the surface, they also realise that the Megalodon has managed to follow them up and is now swimming freely around the sea and devouring everything it comes across. Taylor and the members of the research facility have to come up with a way to stop the Megalodon before it reaches a populated area and turns it into an all-you-can-eat buffet...

The Meg is a b-movie, pure and simple. Of course, all sharksploitation movies are b-movies, even the one that started them all off, Jaws, but The Meg is the biggest one for at least the last 40 years or so. I mean, it contains a dinosaur shark, and thus is wearing its pulpy, b-movie credentials on its sleeve. Not to mention that its (human) star is Jason Statham, one of those actors who will always be playing hard men in gritty gangster movies or postmodern mercenary movies like The Expendables (Other names previously attached to the film included George Clooney and Eli Roth, who at one point wanted to direct and star). So, big star, big shark, big effects... summer b-movie. However, for a movie that has some admittedly spectacular giant shark setpieces, it is also, as I said above, very light on blood. This is a particularly egregious sin when it comes to the film's big "money shot" scene when the Megalodon makes its way to a crowded beach and... Well, I think it's supposed to be feeding on the hapless beachgoers trapped in the water, but the complete lack of blood really makes you question that. It doesn't matter what we've seen the Megalodon chew through before (whales, billionaires et al), the bloodlessness of this scene takes away any and all threat and fear we might have for the human plankton trapped in the water. I do understand that The Meg is a summer blockbuster more than a B-movie sharksploitation film and with that comes a need to be more "family-friendly", but I also think it was a mistake that cost the film dearly.

On the other hand, The Meg remembers where it came from, and honours that granddaddy of all sharksploitation movies, Jaws, during the film - and in some pretty clever ways. I admit I was sitting and watching the film waiting for someone to announce that a bigger boat was needed, but the film was smarter than that. There's a dog called Pippin, and a scene involving a young boy and his mother on the beach that's almost a shot-for-shot reproduction of the scene in Jaws when poor Alex Kintner asks his mother if he can go play in the sea. To find out whether these scenes play out as they did in the 1975 film, you'll have to watch The Meg yourself, but I will say that I appreciated the film not going for the obvious, low-hanging fruit references.

A brief word on Ruby Rose. She plays engineer Jaxx in the film, and while I might have been mistaken I don't think the character is explicitly referred to by a specific gender throughout the film. Taking into account Rose's real-life genderfluidity, I found that to be quite a nice touch (although as I said, I might have missed something somewhere and so this is all in my head). I know she sometimes gets criticised for a perceived lack of acting talent, but I found her to be acceptable enough in The Meg.

The Meg has already been a successful enough summer blockbuster (it recently topped Solo: A Star Wars Story in terms of money made) and for some that might be enough to declare a film both "good" and a success. But I still feel that by neutering it and removing most of the blood and gore, the film was lessened considerably and didn't manage to come close to its true potential. Perhaps we'll get a different version when it's released on DVD/Blu-ray with all the blood added back in, and we'll be able to see then if I'm right. But until then I still feel disappointed by it all.

 

 

Predator (1987)

"Now wait a second!" I can hear you say. "This isn't the film we were expecting today! Where's Alien³? Where's the film that some say marked the start of the Alien series' descent into mediocrity at best?" Well don't worry people, Alien³ will be coming in a couple of days, but we've got a couple of other movies to cover first - starting with the 1987 film Predator. Because, as we all know, the Alien movies and Predator movies eventually cross over in 2004 (after a tease in 1990 much like Freddy Krueger's glove at the end of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday) and you all know how much I hate to review films out of chronological order.

A Special Forces commando team lead by "Dutch" Schaefer is tasked with a mission to rescue a diplomat whose chopper went down in a Central American jungle, where he was captured by guerrillas. Dutch and his team - Mac, Billy, Blain, Poncho and Hawkins - are also joined by CIA agent and old friend of Dutch's, Dillon. Once they enter the jungle, however, they quickly discover that more is going on than they've been told - the "diplomat" turns out to be an intelligence operative; another team was sent in before Dutch's; and something else is in the jungle, hunting and killing people and skinning them and taking their skulls and spinal columns. Trapped deep in the jungle with an unseen assailant stalking them and picking them off one at a time, Dutch and his team must find a way to reveal this hunter and defeat him - before none of them are left to hunt...

Remember in my review of John Carpenter's Vampires, when I discussed the idea of the male version of the "chick flick" (not a "guy-cry" film) - a film that's clearly designed to be a fun romp with action and explosions and a pretty basic plot? Well, Predator is another one of those films (not that any of that means that only men can enjoy them because I generally think these films are awesome as well, as do many other women). Seven very macho and muscular men with guns head into the jungle, shoot some bad guys and set off a lot of explosions, and then get picked off one by one by an unseen killer? It's another 14-year-old's dream movie. Predator is also a pretty clear example of a slasher film, however - if you remove some of the specific descriptors you've got a film where a group go into the woods (jungle) and are stalked and killed one at a time by an unseen killer, whose gaze we sometimes get to see through. Recently, I even read an article that proposed a queer reading of Predator - seven very macho and muscular guys spend a movie showing off their muscles, getting sweaty and shirtless and are all clearly uninterested in the only female they meet - and it does make some sense in an amusing way.

Predator was directed by John McTiernan. This was actually only his second film; he went on to direct such well-known action films as Die Hard, The Last Action Hero and Die Hard: With a Vengeance, so it's pretty safe to say that he's a director with a good eye for action films. His films aren't just dumb bullets-and-explosions, however; there's some actual depth in his films (not too deep though) - the predator-prey ideas in Predator, for example, might be obvious to us now but it would have been very easy to just fill the screen with shell casings, blood squibs and explosions for 100-odd minutes, and of course there are the afore-mentioned slasher movie parallels. The writers, meanwhile, were brothers Jim and John Thomas. Their other works include Wild Wild West, which... well, Nick liked that movie, but he would also defend the Ghost Rider movies so we know his tastes were sometimes suspect. We won't hold that against them, though, because Predator is a very tightly-written film that does a lot with minimal to no dialogue in places.

What really makes Predator stand out though is its cast. There's Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course, future (at the time) Governor of California. There's Jesse "The Body" Ventura, former Navy SEAL and WWE wrestler, future Governor of Minnesota and owner of a chin dimple you could store M&Ms in. There's Sonny Landham, former 70s porn star and future candidate for Governor of Kentucky (he didn't win), who had to have a bodyguard accompany him at all times while the movie was being made, not for his safety but because the insurance company insisted one be on hand to protect people from him, as he had a reputation for starting fights. There's Carl Weathers, former professional football player and Apollo Creed. And Peter Cullen as the (uncredited) voice of the Predator - yes, Optimus Prime (and Eeyore). And that's just half the cast.

While in general Predator is a sci-fi horror, its slasher elements are still clearly there. The entire third act, where Dutch sets his traps and prepares for his final battle with the Predator, could have been taken straight from the Nancy Thompson Guide to Home Defence, with the only difference being that Schwarzenegger can't really play a teenage girl so there's no Final Girl comparison. And while at the time reviewers were less than kind about the film ("slightly above-average... tissue-thin plot" and "...one of the emptiest, feeblest, most derivative scripts ever made..." were just two comments on it at the time), it's become rightly recognised  as an iconic, enjoyable sci-fi/horror/action movie, that would eventually become entangled with the Alien franchise, with... mixed results...

 

Amazon UK

Amazon US

Dressed to Kill (1980)

Now that I've seen Hereditary and pretty much declared it my best horror film of 2018, I've found myself slightly depressed. Part of the reason is that I know it's going to be downhill from this point for the rest of the year, and I can already see an Unfriended sequel and that Purge prequel approaching to make my July harder than it should be. So it's time to look at some genre classics, starting off with Brian de Palma's Dressed to Kill.

Kate Miller is a sexually frustrated housewife in New York. After discussing some of the problems in her marriage with her psychiatrist, Dr Elliott - and flirting a little bit with him - she goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, she has a chance encounter with a stranger that leads to the two of them going back to his apartment for an afternoon of anonymous sex. Her enjoyment of this is marred, however, when she discovers that her new lover has an STI; to make matters worse she then forgets her wedding ring in his apartment and, when she goes back to get it, she is attacked and murdered in the lift by a blonde woman wearing sunglasses and wielding a straight razor. The only witness to this is a prostitute, Liz Blake, but as no-one else sees the murderous woman Liz ends up being considered a suspect. With the help of Kate's son Peter, Liz sets out to discover proof of the blonde woman's existence and identity. Meanwhile, Dr Elliott suspects that a former patient of his, a transsexual named Bobbi, may be behind Kate's murder and also tries to meet up with her...

Here's where I get to show off some of my fancy Film Studies learnings, because if there's one thing that de Palma is known for, it's his mise-en-scène. French for "placing on stage", it refers to telling a story through the design aspects of a film (or theatre) scene, where pretty much everything shown is important to the film overall. It can refer to a single shot or scene, or several scenes placed throughout a film. In the case of Dressed to Kill, there are several key examples of mise-en-scène - the most notable being the almost cat-and-mouse-esque game that Kate and her anonymous lover play at the museum. It runs for nine minutes, and there is no dialogue spoken throughout. That alone is an impressive achievement in filmmaking, even without the delicate storytelling woven throughout it. Later on, we watch Liz Blake being chased through a subway station and train by not only the killer, but a group of street thugs who've taken a dislike to her, and again every detail is important. Overall, even if everything else in the film was terrible, the cinematography is a joy to behold.

When it was released, Dressed to Kill also got the attention of the National Organisation for Women, who picketed the film for being (in their eyes) misogynistic. Their protest ended up boosting ticket sales for the film - and, as with most protests over films of this nature, it was never the film that was misogynistic, just the killer, and (say it with me now) the killer's view in a film is not necessarily the film's view. Of course, the fact that the killer is a male-to-female transsexual is a problem all its own, but in 1980 transsexuality was far less understood and accepted than it is today, and despite such things as saying that transsexuals "think" they've been born in the wrong body, the film seems to at least be trying to present things as neutrally as possible. That being said, Kate Miller does fall squarely into the category of the victim who enjoys some sexual freedom and then is killed for it, from watching her masturbation in the shower at the start of the film to her anonymous sex later in the day (and that and her rape fantasy in the shower are two of the most common sexual fantasies of women - yes, I've read my fair share of Nancy Friday as well), and later on Liz risks suffering the same fate for her open sexuality.

Comparisons to other films are inevitable - Dressed to Kill opens in the same way that a previous film of de Palma's, Carrie, and I'd swear that the score is very similar as well. And of course there's the other film, whose name I'm not mentioning in an attempt to avoid spoilers, but even in the plot beats it becomes very clear as you're watching it. When the director of the other film was told that Dressed to Kill was intended as a "homage" to his film, however, he replied, "You mean fromage." Ouch. Apart from that dissenting opinion, however, Dressed to Kill is a beautifully stylish and tense film, and thankfully the relative obviousness of where the plot is going doesn't marr it overall.

 

Amazon UK

Amazon US

Truth or Dare (2018)

As I continue to avoid reviewing the (currently) last chapter of the Insidious franchise, let's instead look at the latest bloodless teen horror from Blumhouse, Truth or Dare. My brother actually saw the trailer for this and thought that it "looked good", apparently believing that they couldn't have put all the key plot points in the trailer... could they?

And people tell me I'm idealistic.

A group of college students, including the almost-saintly Olivia and her bff Markie, hed to Mexico for spring break. On the last night of their trip, after a week of hard drinking and partying, they meet Carter who invites them all to an abandoned mission to play a game of "Truth or Dare". The game isn't as innocent as it appears, however, and once they're all back home they find that the game has followed them, and become considerably more deadly. The rules are simple - you tell the truth or die; you do the dare or die, and you cannot refuse to do either, or you'll die. The body count starts to rise, and uncomfortable secrets start being revealed as the group are forced to play, whether they want to or not. Olivia and her remaining friends decide that the only way to beat this game is to find out how it began, and so it becomes a race against time to discover its origins and put a stop to the game, before the game finishes and they are all dead...

There are a great many things wrong with Truth or Dare, but before I get into them I suppose I should say what I actually liked about the film. So... I liked the character and subplot involving the gay guy and his overbearing and (allegedly) homophobic cop father. That was actually pretty good and would have had a nice payoff if they'd spent more than five minutes scattered throughout the whole film on it, and not ruined it with a "shock" plot twist about 3/4ths of the way through the film. So there you go: it's not all bad.

And now onto the meat. First of all, if you've seen the trailer you've seen most of the film - or at least all the important parts. I don't know why more and more films - particularly teen horror films - are doing this now, because all it does is make most of its audience annoyed that they wasted money on a film when they could have saved the time and cash by just going onto YouTube. Hell, I'm annoyed, and the film was essentially free for me as I've got a cinema card and already saw three films already this month, so any films after that are on the house. The trailer's got most of the big "truth" reveals and two of the big "money shot" dare consequences, and most of what wasn't shown in the trailer is little more than insipid filler. There's no real tension because we can easily figure out who's going to survive and who's not, and without tension, a horror film is effectively toothless, unless you've got some good gore.

...which leads neatly into the next complaint - it's bloodless. Utterly bloodless. The worst scene in the whole movie is the bit in the trailer where Markie has to break Olivia's hand with a hammer, and that's a blunt injury so no blood. Oh, and there's another scene where blood seeps out from under a door, but we don't actually see anything for more than a split second. There's actually a scene where a character slits their own throat, and they not only didn't give us any CGI blood, they didn't even bother with a CGI wound, so it looks like they died from a terminal case of razor burn. I just can't decide if it's a terrible case of lazy filmmaking or a particularly egregious example of why studios should stop trying to sanitise horror films so they can market them to teens. The only other "scary" string to the movie's bow is the Joker smiles people get when they're taken over by the game or what-have-you, and even that's not particularly impressive because, really, the last people to actually look creepy with that face were Heath Ledger and Cameron Monaghan, and everyone else is just riding their coattails.

And then there's the characters. They come in three varieties: unlikeable cannon fodder, insipid cliches and my favourite character, the gay guy. One character is so unpleasant I'm pretty sure he was a sociopath; another was clearly there just so he could die and the audience wouldn't feel bad, and the "love interest" had the IQ of a can of tuna, deciding to play the game while they're nearly finished stopping it. And our protagonist, Olivia, wears her character arc on her forehead almost from the movie's start. She volunteers for Habitat for Humanity! She gives money to homeless people! She always puts others before herself! It couldn't be clearer that she's going to end up effectively doing a heel turn unless they put it in flashing text in the trailer.

Truth or Dare is really not worth the money to see it. I'm sure there are some people out there who might enjoy it, but the vast majority are just going to go away feeling frustrated and cheated. I wouldn't even dare someone to go see it... unless there's a director's cut out there with more screen time given to Brad, the gay guy. I'd watch that.

 

 

Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013)

Way, way back in February 2016, I reviewed a little film called Insidious, after having managed to avoid watching it for six years out of some sort of stubborn bloody-mindedness because everyone else who'd seen it had apparently raved about it till their heads fell off or something. Well, the good news is that, now that the series has reached a Part 4 (which is actually a second prequel that happens before the first movie, just to keep you on your toes), I'm actually trying to catch up on the other three films sometime before the heat death of the universe. So here we are with Insidious: Chapter 2.

We start off pretty much straight after where the first film left off, with psychic Elise Rainier dead at the hands of Josh... or rather, at the spirit that we saw had taken over Josh's body, the old woman dressed in black. With no evidence that they can find to link Josh to the murder, the police are forced to let the family move on, and they do their best to do so, moving into Josh's mother's house while forensics continue to go over their home. Once again, however, it seems that the supernatural has followed them, as Renai and Josh both continue to experience encounters with spirits and other supernatural phenomena... but Josh seems determined to just move on and deny that anything strange is happening, even when it is happening to him. At the same time an old friend and fellow psychic of Elise's, Carl, and her two assistants, Tucker and Specs, help Josh's mother Lorraine to investigate what is happening to Josh, and just who the woman in black who haunted him in his childhood really is. But will they uncover the truth and save Josh before it's too late?

One day I'm going to write a book where the main character is a psychic who can communicate with ghosts without them having to give obscure and cryptic responses to questions. None of this, "Who killed you?" "SHE DID," nonsense that only serves to add artificial tension to a plot. The spirit will be able to answer, quite clearly, "Well I don't know their name but they looked like this... Oh, and they said this..." Sure, it might take away some of the mystery of the overall story, but at the same time, I'd hope that I'd be helping people who think like me to not grind their teeth with frustration every time a spirit gives a vague answer to a question just to draw out the runtime some more. So yeah, you might be able to guess from this that I wasn't a big fan of the way Insidious: Chapter 2 tried to draw out its plot mysteries, especially after events in the previous film (and at some points in this one) have already told us what's going on. We saw at the end of the first film that Josh was possessed by the old woman in black; why is this film making this revelation such a big deal now?

Honestly, I wasn't as impressed by Insidious: Chapter 2 in general. Many of the things that I liked in the first movie, such as the set-pieces we saw while Josh wandered the Further in search of Dalton, are gone or severely reduced, and it seems that in their place is an over-long middle segment where several characters explore an old house. Even worse, they added some found footage elements to this segment, which in a film that's part of a series where found footage hasn't been and isn't a thing, really sticks out as just trying to jump onto a gimmick train (and that train was looking pretty run-down even in 2013). That's not to say there aren't any good parts - one scene where they're investigating the old house and all the rocking horses in a room start moving at once, in perfect sync, is legitimately creepy - but it definitely feels like much of the previous film's creepiness has been cut out in favour of some overly-drawn out plot revelations.

I also get the impression that the filmmakers really weren't expecting the character of Elise to have been so popular, seeing how they killed her off at the end of the first movie, so it feels like they had to scramble a bit to get her back in this film. This is a rather polite way of saying that the flashback bit at the beginning of the film with a younger version of Elise being dubbed by Lin Shaye stuck out like a very awkward sore thumb. We would have accepted that she was Elise even if she hadn't sounded like old Elise, you know.

Overall, Insidious: Chapter 2 isn't a bad film... but it's not on the same level as the first film. The creepy elements of the Further being missing hurt it a lot, I think, and their replacement with the mystery plot of who the woman in black is (complete with a moment where they manage to spoil their own revelation in a bad moment of exposition) just isn't creepy enough.

Amazon UK

Amazon US

 

 

The Woman (2011)

I think I'm going to give up on trying to plan ahead in my movie reviews. Every time I do, something happens and I end up changing my plans. In this case, I was all ready to start slowly going through the rest of the Insidious films and tackling the tower of DVDs by my desk... and then I hear that horror writer Jack Ketchum died this week. So I figured I should review a film adapted from one of his books, which in this case is the only one I've seen so far (even though I've read several of his books) - The Woman.

Chris Cleek is a country lawyer who seems to have the perfect family - his wife Belle, his teenage daughter Peggy, tween son Brian and youngest daughter Darlin'. He is handsome, charming and has many friends. But there's a much darker side to Chris that we start to discover when, while out hunting one day, he discovers and captures a feral woman. He brings her back to his home and chains her up in the barn, before telling his family that it is their job to "civilize" her. Chris is, in fact, a misogynistic wife-beater and abuser, who has even made Peggy pregnant through sexual abuse, and it is clear that he just wants the Woman as another sex slave. Even worse, his son Brian is following in his father's footsteps. The only hope the Woman has to escape is Peggy, who despite her fear of her father still wants to try to prevent her father from abusing anyone else... and perhaps the Woman is Peggy's only hope for escape as well...

The Woman is directed by Lucky McKee, who is both known for having done several adaptations of Ketchum's works, and for being a feminist filmmaker. From that and from the synopsis above it should be pretty obvious that The Woman is a film with strong feminist themes, and for the most part, it manages to get those themes across with few problems (and I'll get to them shortly). There's the key theme of how this outwardly respectable and charming man, a pillar of his community, is, in reality, a monster, being compared with the feral and cannibalistic Woman. Who is the real monster, the savage? Well, obviously, it's Chris Cleek, and maybe the film does lay it on rather thick, especially with a revelation at the film's climax that goes over the line into absurdity, but this isn't just man V woman; it's also nature V nurture - the Woman, for all her feral and cannibalistic ways, is still a better person than the "civilised" man.

The Woman is also a sequel to one of Jack Ketchum's earlier works, The Offspring, which was also made into a movie, Offspring. The story concerns a clan of feral cannibals who live in the woods and caves of Northeast America, capturing and eating any campers and tourists unlucky enough to stumble into their territory. At the end of Offspring, only the Woman is left alive, which leads her into this movie. So, of course, this film contains some pretty gruesome and splattery scenes of violence and cannibalism - although not as many as you might think because there's also a lot of violence - both sexual and otherwise - directed against the Woman by Chris and, in one particularly uncomfortable scene, Brian Cleek (and that scene should be uncomfortable, considering Brian's age, even though in reality we actually see very little of it).

I really like The Woman, both as a straight horror movie and as a feminist piece, but there is one scene in it that I take great issue with. At one point in the film, Chris and his wife Belle are washing the Woman while she is chained to the barn wall, and our attention is drawn to the fact that one of the chains holding her is coming loose. Belle also notices this, but rather than keeping quiet about it she alerts her husband, thus preventing an early escape for the Woman. The film then seems to mark Belle as deserving of the same "punishment" as her husband for this, for not helping her fellow woman... and oh boy is that problematic. Belle is quite clearly, from the moment we meet her, a woman who has been beaten into the dirt by her husband. She is as much a victim as Peggy and the Woman - maybe even more so because she's too terrified of her husband to dare do anything that might cause him a problem. Her acting out of fear should not condemn her to the same fate as those who rape and torture and kill, and I think the film made a misstep in doing that. There's also the character of Peggy's teacher, who seems to be set up to be a potential saviour but really just gets a variation of the Scatman Crothers Special and becomes another woman to be tortured at the end.

Special mention has to go to Pollyanna McIntosh, who plays the Woman. She has no lines (well, none in English) and communicates entirely in grunts and gestures throughout the entire film, and yet comes across so strongly that it's incredible. Writing a feral cannibal murderer to be sympathetic might be difficult enough, but to portray that character successfully is another thing entirely. Angela Bettis, who is in several other Lucky McKee films, plays the role of Belle and is quite effective as well as an abused, beaten-down wife trying to survive and protect her children, even if she can only do so in the smallest ways.

The Woman won't be for everyone, with its themes of abuse and the extreme gore in the film's climax, but it's definitely a film I think people should at least try to watch - or at least get hold of the trilogy of books - Off Season, The Offspring and The Woman - that Jack Ketchum wrote.

Amazon UK

Amazon US

 

 

The Amityville Legacy (2016)

I am disappointed. I spent two days trying to get hold of a watchable copy of Amityville: Vanishing Point, but I had no luck whatsoever. So I've had to admit defeat - at least for the time being - for reviewing that film and, after a day off, I've skipped to the next film on the list, The Amityville Legacy (which has nothing to do with The Amityville Playhouse). Hopefully, we won't have somehow missed anything vitally important in missing a film out...

After we start, as all these films seem to do, with the DeFeo family massacre in 1974 yet again, we jump forward "40 years" and across the USA to Nebraska, where various family members are gathering together to celebrate patriarch Mark's 50th birthday. One of his birthday gifts is an antique toy monkey that just so happened to have come from the house on 112 Ocean Avenue, and so, of course, it's evil. The monkey wastes no time spreading its influence, and soon Mark is angrily chopping wood, insulting his family and having visions of his dead father telling him to kill them all. Between Mark's descent into murderous psychosis and the fundamentalist grandmother who is beginning to suffer from dementia, will the family survive the weekend?

And here we all thought that we'd left the Yard Sale of the Damned behind several movies ago, didn't we? Admittedly, those old toy monkies with the cymbals are almost always evil and creepy - even the one in Toy Story 3 was creepy (and bore a striking resemblance to this one) - so at least this time around we're not struggling to make a horror movie about an evil lamp or an evil clock. Although the toy monkey actually features very little in the actual movie - it's given to Mark, he cuts his foot on it and then we just see it once or twice more, from various camera angles and sometimes being lit with a red or green light. It doesn't actually do anything in the film.

The Amityville Legacy is also a short film, clocking in at just 66 minutes long, or 59 minutes without credits. 59 minutes! That's not even an hour long. It's certainly not long enough to be classed as a feature film by the rules of the Screen Actors Guild, whose minimum is 80 minutes (although it is according to the Academy of Motional Picture Arts and Sciences, who say that their minimum length is 40 minutes). However, the very least that can be said for The Amityville Legacy is that it doesn't pad out its story unnecessarily. Well, there's some padding, but it's not nearly as bad as we've seen in other films.

You've probably already guessed that The Amityville Legacy is also another zero-budget film, and you're right. Unlike some of the other low-budget films we've seen in the Amityville franchise, however, this film doesn't try to do anything with CGI effects or anything like that. The effects are limited to red and green lights in some of the scenes (mainly the DeFeo murders at the start and Mark's dreams/hallucinations) and a bit of fake blood on a couple of bodies. Oh, and some obviously CG blood splatter once or twice. Even Mark's ghostly father is presented fully solid and walking around like a regular person. It might be a bargain-basement film, but at least it's not trying to do anything above its budget that would just end up looking laughable.

Another thing of note is the inclusion of a gay couple in the film who aren't portrayed as offensive stereotypes or as just cannon fodder for Mark's inevitable killing spree (because the entire family are equal targets there). There are some homophobic comments made about them, but they're from Mark's dead father/the evil monkey and so understandable in context. Oh, and there's a scene of mild BDSM between the couple, but again, it's one of Mark's hallucinations that are supposed to be driving him to kill, so it's understandable in context.

Despite what this review might have implied so far, The Amityville Legacy isn't a good film, but when you look at some of the other films we've watched in the past couple of weeks, it's far from the worst film we've seen. The plot and dialogue are awkward and feel forced for a lot of the movie, with a couple of exposition sledgehammers dropped in at random to try to force plot points and fill in a few minutes before the inevitable shotgun rampage. But it feels like it's at least tried to be aware of its limits and stay within them, and at least some of the characters were relatable. And it was short, which after 14 films is something of a relief.

 

 

Happy Death Day (2017)

As we continue with my annual attempts to catch up with as many 2017 horror movies as possible before the end of the year, we come to Happy Death Day, another one of the films I saw in October just before I got seriously sidetracked. Seeing it a week before my birthday was just an ironic coincidence.

'Tree' Gelbman wakes up on her birthday in a college dorm room after a drunken party the previous night. Starting with that and a Walk of Shame back to her sorority house, Tree proceeds to be a condescending and self-centered bitch to everyone, from her roommate to her father. So it's probably no surprise that she ends up murdered that night by a killer wearing a baby-face mask. What is surprising is that, after being killed, she wakes up again on the morning of her birthday to repeat the same events. No matter what she does, however, she still gets killed (usually) by the masked killer before the end of the day. Apparently trapped in this time loop with no way out, Tree's only option appears to be to try to find out the identity of her killer and live through the entire day...

Happy Death Day is very much a 'teen' horror movie, and boy oh boy did it do its best to remind me of that throughout the film. Now, I know I'm not exactly the target audience for teen horror, but I like to think that I at least try to meet the film halfway, rather than just doing the review equivalent of yelling, "Get off my lawn!" at it. But the characters in Happy Death Day really did make me feel crotchety. Take Tree, for example (and what sort of a name is 'Tree' anyway - no, enough with the old grumpiness, and anyway it's short for Teresa). For the first third of the film, she's thoroughly unlikeable... but as she keeps reliving the same day, she learns and grows as a person. Typical protagonist's journey stuff. At least that's how the movie wants it to go. She still annoyed me greatly, mainly because of her dialogue (more on that shortly). And most of the rest of the film's characters were little more than stereotypes, and borderline offensive ones at that (I'm looking at you, in-denial gay man!)

Happy Death Day was written by Scott Lobdell, a comic book writer who was huge in the 1990s with his work on several X-Men titles, including Generation X. He was beloved back then, but in recent years his star has fallen somewhat - one example would be the controversy over the way he portrayed Starfire in the DC comic Red Hood and the Outlaws, which quite a few people had problems with for... reasons. Personally, I found much of the teen/young adult dialogue in the film to be awkward and forced (as a reference, I tried to think of my two nieces, both in their early-to-mid-20s, speaking in a similar way and couldn't recall any time when they had), as though the writer had once had an idea of how "those kids today" talk, but ended up overcompensating for it and ramping the slang up to 11.

The mystery of who the killer is, however, is surprisingly well done. I had been slightly worried that I had figured out the killer's identity from the trailer, which would have been a new record for me, but no, it really was someone I hadn't really considered for much of the film. On the other hand, there was a short portion of the film where I got quite angry, thinking that Happy Death Day had just pulled a convenient killer out of nowhere to cover its ass, but that turned out to be a red herring.

The comparison to Groundhog Day is obvious (not only is the film described as "Groundhog Day meets Scream" but the former film is even referenced at the end as a little meta-joke), and the film is most definitely a horror-comedy... with more of an emphasis on the comedy than the horror. It's another PG-13 horror movie, with practically no gore whatsoever - and most of what there is gets dialled down to as bloodless a level as possible or played for laughs. In the end, it's a competent enough movie, but it's probably going to disappoint a lot of horror fans who go to see it for the sparsity of horror elements.

The Limehouse Golem (2017)

There is some debate (at least between my brother and I) as to whether or not a film can be both a horror and a thriller. My argument is that yes, they most certainly can, and I point to such films as Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs (and maybe even the original Friday the 13th as well) as examples. The trick is to give the audience both the horror of the situation and/or what they are seeing, while at the same time keeping them in suspense as to what will eventually happen or who is actually behind the horror. And now I can add The Limehouse Golem to the list (And even if some people might not consider it a horror movie, it's my blog and I get to review what I want in it :P )

The year is 1880 and London is gripped by fear because of a series of gruesome murders committed by someone calling themselves the "Limehouse Golem". The Golem's latest crime is the slaughter of an entire family in the Limehouse area, and Inspector Kildare has been brought in to take over the case. At the same time, music hall star Lizzie Cree finds her husband dead in bed, having been poisoned, and is promptly accused and put on trial for his murder. When evidence emerges that makes John Cree a suspect in the Limehouse Golem murders, the two cases begin to intersect, and Kildare becomes convinced that John Cree was the Golem; furthermore, Lizzie must have poisoned him to protect herself. But can he find the evidence to prove this before it's too late and Lizzie goes to the gallows?

The Limehouse Golem is an adaptation of Peter Ackroyd's novel Dan Leno and The Limehouse Golem, and while normally I'm not that interested in reading a book after I've seen its movie version, this movie is proving to be an exception to that rule. It's a Victorian murder mystery that also takes a look at certain parts of the society of the time - specifically, music hall culture and the lives of the poor in the Limehouse area - and all of it is presented in a fascinating and quite gripping way. I've also seen people in other reviews comparing it to From Hell, and I admit I was doing that too - although in my case it was more of, "Thank Gods this is more intelligent, realistic and generally better overall than From Hell."

The late Alan Rickman was originally supposed to play Inspector Kildare, but he unfortunately had to back out due to ill health (which sadly turned out to be the pancreatic cancer that killed him) and so the role went to Bill Nighy instead. It certainly would have been interesting to see Rickman's version of the character; it's not that either actor is/was better than the other, but I think Rickman would have brought a very different style to the film than Nighy did. They would still have been playing an ageing gentleman detective (who may or may not have been a deeply closeted homosexual, but more on that shortly) but they would have each played the role very differently. Meanwhile, Olivia Cooke in the role of Lizzie Cree continues to show us that she plays innocent-seeming waif-like young women that men seem to fall over themselves to try to protect (remember her in The Quiet Ones?), regardless of whether she actually needs that protection. As lovely as she is, I do hope she's not getting typecast.

Onto the subject of the movie's LGTBQ themes... as well as the obvious is he/isn't he subplot involving Kildare's sexuality, there's also the cross-dressing of Dan Leno and Lizzie Cree in the music halls (which reminded me a little of Tipping the Velvet). There's also a question mark hanging over the sexuality of a couple of other characters, Lizzie Cree being perhaps the most obvious, although she could very well have been asexual or a lesbian. And of course, all of this is set against the backdrop of Victorian attitudes to sex and sexuality.

The murders are suitably gruesome for a serial killer horror movie, although for the most part the full imagery is held back until the film's climax, where we finally see the Golem's work in its full, ghastly glory. And as for the climax... I figured out the identity of the killer about halfway through the movie, and I honestly thought it was rather obvious, but then again I'm good at picking these things out, so take that for what it's worth. It's a good revelation, though, and one that's actually threaded throughout the entire film rather than just dropped on the audience abruptly at the end.

The Limehouse Golem has some brief uncomfortable depictions of child abuse and rape, but they're portrayed tactfully (or at the very least not in any salacious way. Some might find it a little bit slow, or not quite gory enough but I found it to be a very entertaining and engrossing film and one well worth seeing.

Amazon UK

Amazon US