Carnography

Wolf Creek (2005)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Killing Ground (2016)

With Killing Ground, I've realized that I've inadvertently ended up doing another theme in my last few reviews. And that theme is, Never Leave Your House.  Whether it's travelling down a deserted road, going on a hiking holiday in some isolated Nordic woods, or going on a camping trip, bad things will happen to you. And of course, today's film is also Australian, which along with Wolf Creek and huntsman spiders, just further cements my decision to never visit that country under nearly any circumstance.

Ian and Sam are a couple heading to an isolated beauty spot for a spot of New Year camping. They're expecting the place to be deserted as it is an out-of-the-way place, but when they get to the area they see that another family has apparently gotten there before them... although aside from their car and tent there is no sign of them. Unbeknownst to Ian and Sam, three days earlier a family had been camping there, but two local men out hunting boar had come across them and decided to kidnap, rape and kill them. Sam finds the family's toddler son wandering the area at the same time that one of the men returns to the spot to make sure they left no evidence or witnesses, and soon the couple is being hunted through the woods by the two killers, who are armed with hunting rifles, a hunting dog and knowledge of the area. Will they be able to escape safely and bring these killers to justice?

There's a scene in Killing Ground where the two antagonists, German and Chook, play a bit of a shooting game with an empty beer can balanced on top of their victims' heads, and watching that scene I couldn't help but think of Ivan Milat - the real-life serial killer who still seems to haunt Australian horror movies to this day. The connection might be smaller and vaguer than the infamous Wolf Creek, but it's still there if you squint for it. German and Chook aren't really portrayed as serial killers though - or at least, they're not already established as such as the film starts - and in a way that actually makes them more unsettling; two men who stumbled across a situation at random and turned it into something horrible for their own pleasure.

Rather interestingly, there's very little on-screen violence in the movie, but the film doesn't suffer for it. The key example of this is with the first murdered family - we see them being bound and led into the woods, and we know that terrible things are going to happen to them... and then the next scene cuts straight to the aftermath: father tied to a tree and mother and daughter lying sobbing or unconscious on the ground. It's clear that they've been horribly violated, but the fact that we didn't see those events ourselves leaves us to fill in the blanks, and apparently, our minds can go to some pretty dark places when encouraged like this. The way this scene is shot is also very effective - long static shots showing everyone in the scene, with the teenage daughter lying mostly naked and still in the foreground, makes a pretty bleak statement that stays with you for a long time.

Killing Ground's story is not told in a linear fashion, which wouldn't be too bad except that it's not immediately clear what's happening. So for the first 20 minutes or so it can get pretty confusing trying to work out what is going on and when. Non-linear storytelling isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's also quite easy to lose the audience if you're not careful and don't have some sort of indicators for what order events have actually happened in. Our protagonists are also maybe a little too sensible in their actions and reactions - we know that the best thing to do when hunted by an armed psychopath through unfamiliar woods is to get out and call the authorities, but deep down no-one watches horror films to watch people doing the sensible thing. And yet, the film's sensible streak falls to the wayside when it comes to Ollie, Australia's Toughest Toddler. He's wandered in the woods for one or two days, in 25-degree heat and with no water or food, then later thrown head-first to the ground, and yet he still toddles off again and his fate at the end is left unknown.

Killing Ground is quite a tense film, one that relies on atmosphere and character rather than scenes of torture and gore to unnerve its audience. It makes a few missteps - early confusion with the order or events; characters being a little too sensible for effective horror movie tension - and one could say that it's yet another Australian film where people in the middle of nowhere are hunted by killers with hunting rifles, but it's certainly not a bad film, and worth a watch if you're still not entirely convinced that the worst thing you can possibly do is go on holiday.

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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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Ghost House (2017)

I first heard about Ghost House earlier this year, when I saw a trailer for it, thought that it looked moderately interesting - and then promptly forgot about it until I saw Temple last week and briefly got the two films confused. But no, while unlikely to win any awards anytime soon, Ghost House is still streets ahead of the muddled misery that was Temple.

Julie and Jim are a young couple of vacation in Thailand. It's a dream vacation, and when Jim proposes to Julie it only promises to get better. That night when celebrating they meet two British men, Robert and Billy, who suggest a couple of places that the happy couple should visit. One of these places is a graveyard of sorts for old 'ghost houses' - shrines erected to mollify and shelter spirits who might cause problems for a household. Thai culture means that people are wary of destroying the houses, lest the spirits become angry, so they place them in 'graveyards' away from the cities. Robert and Billy have ulterior motives, however, and trick Julie into picking up a trinket from one of the ghost houses, thus cursing herself to have her soul taken by a particularly angry and spiteful spirit whose ghost house it was. Now Jim has just three days to find a way to lift the curse from Julie or lose her forever...

It's interesting to look at two similar films one after another, especially when one of those films is as bad as Temple was. I mean, don't get me wrong - Ghost House is hardly a masterpiece, but it's still better than Temple was. One of the first things it gets right is that it makes its important plot points, such as the tradition of the ghost houses in Thailand and the story of the malevolent spirit who ends up haunting Julie, clear to its audience early on in the film and without too much expositional info-dumping. It might not be the most original storyline, but its at least clearly laid out to the audience.

On the other hand, most of our protagonists are quite lacking. Once she's cursed, Julie (played by Scout Taylor-Compton from Rob Zombie's Halloween movies) becomes more or less a non-entity - a walking plot device and little more - and so it's left to her fiance Jim to save the day and carry the movie - and he is so not equipped for that. Sorry Jim, but you have the personal charm of a wet weekend in Weston-super-mare. He's not particularly likeable - mere hours after proposing to Julie, he's off to a strip club with his new 'friend' Robert, despite it being clear that Julie is not okay with this, and then, later on, he fails to understand why she's so upset that he came out with lipstick all over his mouth. Later in the film, when a wizened old witch doctor tells him that he needs to make a sacrifice to help save Julie, and that sacrifice is a finger, he actually baulks at it. Dude, that's allegedly the woman you love there - not to mention that a single finger is quite the bargain in this sort of situation. Usually, it's at least three fingers, or even a hand, foot or eye(s). Do you actually love Julie or not?

Instead, I found myself rooting for one of the secondary protagonists - Gogo the taxi driver. Jim and Julie meet him at the airport when they arrive in Thailand, and he quickly becomes their driver, translator, guide and, once Julie is cursed, he steps up his game to an incredible level. First, he takes her to his home village where his family members and a Buddhist monk pray over her for a day and give her protective amulets. When that doesn't work, he helps Jim track down a shaman called Reno who might be able to help. And then finally, he ferries them to the old witch doctor and even helps in the exorcism ritual. All this for a couple he barely knows - now that's good service. At the end of that, I don't think he deserves a tip so much as them just wiring half their salaries to him every month for the rest of their lives.

The character of Reno - "I'm more of a sham than a shaman these days," - is also an interesting one, although they don't explore him nearly as much. Then again, you could argue that we learn most of what we need to when we first meet him - in the back room of an obscure brothel, surrounded by Thai ladyboys.

The ghost effects are mostly of the "Ooga-Booga-boo!" kind, which is also something of a disappointment as there are occasional moments where we see ghosts other than vengeful ghost house spirit that I'd have liked to have known more about - such as the elephant rider Julie sees at one point. But overall, Ghost House pretty much delivers what it needs to to be an acceptable and mildly interesting supernatural horror.

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The Shallows (2016)

I might have been a bit hasty yesterday when I said that we were reaching the bottom of the barrel in terms of the quality of the films for the remainder of Shark Week. I'd forgotten that today's film was the recently-released The Shallows, a film that seemingly seeks to emulate the isolation and stalking terror we saw in the second half of Jaws. So I guess there was a little bit of quality left after all.

Nancy is a medical student who has taken some time off from her studies after the death of her mother from cancer. To honour her she has taken a trip to Mexico to visit a secret beach that her mother once visited when she was Nancy's age to surf. Everything about the beach seems perfect - the sands, the water, the waves - and Nancy soon loses herself in the moment. However, a humpback whale carcass nearby has brought with it a great white shark, and when Nancy inadvertently gets too close to its feeding grounds it attacks her. Injured, Nancy is forced to retreat to a small rock island that will disappear at high tide, unable to get back to the beach because of the shark's patrolling, and with no-one around to call for help to. It then becomes a battle for survival; woman versus shark...

For the second half of Jaws, when Brody, Quint and Hooper are off hunting the shark in Quint's boat, director Steven Spielberg worked very hard to make sure there were no shots of land visible in any of the shots, because he wanted to emphasize just how isolated the three characters were out on the open sea. The Shallows clearly wants to have that same sense of isolation, but it goes about it in a different way. For both Nancy and the audience, the beach - and safety - is clearly visible throughout the film and is in fact only 200 yards away, but with the shark in the way it might as well be miles away - and at least Brody, Quint and Hooper had each other for company and to talk to. All Nancy has for the bulk of the film is a seagull named Steven (who, I was pleased to see, got his own credit in the cast credits at the end). The isolation and bleakness of the situation is very real, albeit presented in a different way.

Black Lively plays Nancy, and a special mention has to go out to her as she pretty much single-handedly carries the film for the vast majority of its running time. When the film begins she's quite clearly at a crossroads in her life; her mother's death has caused her to question what she wants to do with her life, including whether or not she is going to continue at medical school and become a doctor. Once it becomes her against the shark, however, her existential crisis becomes much simpler - survive or die. Of course, it helps that she's a med student so she can treat her own leg wound to improve her chances of survival after the shark takes a chunk out of it, but we'll forgive that small plot contrivance.

On the other hand, poor Nancy appears to be one of the unluckiest people alive. Not only does she have the great white shark to contend with, but during the course of the film she also has to deal with fire coral, a bloom of jellyfish that she has to swim through (and having been stung down one leg by a jellyfish myself once, at that point I would have just given up and let the shark have me, if I'm honest), the threat of a thunderstorm and the fact that nearly everyone who could possibly help her ends up getting eaten by the shark - and that's not even the full list of bad luck she suffers (some moments have been omitted due to spoilers). At one point I think Nancy was as much - if not more - at risk from dying of gangrene and/or tetanus than she was from the shark.

There were a couple of points in The Shallows that I didn't like - credibility was stretched a bit thin in one or two places, such as Nancy's ridiculously bad streak of luck. I also felt that her climactic final fight with the shark felt as though it would have been more at home in a more action-driven movie than this was. There's also a Blair Witch Project-style confessional moment that I didn't really appreciate at all, and finally I felt that the film's epilogue was wholly unneeded - it just gave us answers to things that weren't really necessary after everything else we had just witnessed, at least in my opinion. Other than these small flaws, however, I found The Shallows to be a very engaging film that succeeds well in bringing a character-driven horror-thriller to the screen, as well as successfully utilizing the bleak isolation that Jaws also gave us.

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Afflicted (2013)

Afflicted first caught my attention when I saw a trailer for it; said trailer reminded me a lot of another film we had seen quite recently at that time, Chronicle (not a horror movie per say but a damn good movie regardless; a superhero journey via found footage). An interesting premise and some good use of found footage (a genre that even I have to admit is getting more and more ground into horse glue as we go on) - what's not to love? And after my last review showed us just how many ways to make a vampire film boring, I figured it might be a good time to look at how a film took an original twist on the vampire film and made it far more entertaining.

Yes, I guess that is a spoiler, but as the film reveals it about a third of the way through itself it's hardly a major one (and possibly not even a spoiler at all if you're paying attention before that and your mind works in that way).

So, Afflicted tells the story of two best friends, Derek and Clif, who are going on a year-long round-the-world trip and video blogging the whole thing. They're not doing this solely for the lulz, however; Derek has recently been diagnosed with a potentially fatal brain condition and is really trying to do as much as possible of a "bucket list" in case he hasn't got much longer to live. In Paris, however, Derek meets a woman named Audrey and takes her back to his hotel room - later on his friends find him bitten and covered in blood and with Audrey nowhere to be seen. Derek doesn't want to go to the hospital and seems fine, so he and Clif continue their journey, but Derek soon begins to exhibit strange symptoms and new abilities - such as the ability to punch through walls and jump 15-20 feet in the air. He also develops a severe allergy to sunlight and finds himself unable to digest anything but blood; human blood to be exact. The duo's video diaries then become a chronicle of what is happening to Derek, how they try to deal with it, and the eventual quest to find out just why this has happened to Derek (and there are no prizes whatsoever for figuring out Audrey's motives here).

Aside from the obviously telegraphed reason as to why Audrey turned Derek into a vampire, Afflicted is a pretty smart film. Just about every question I had about events or plot points in the film got answered by the end of it (what happens to people killed by vampires; do bodies have to be disposed of in a certain way; is there any way to actually kill a vampire) which is a refreshing change from all the films that leave plot holes large enough to drive buses through. It even comes up with (moderately) sensible reasons as to why Clif and Derek keep filming all of this even as things spiral further and further out of control - first it's all part of their video blog; then it's documenting Derek's new abilities and changes; and by the end it's one part confession and one part proof for Derek as he seeks out Audrey. They even address the end result of posting footage of yourself trying to rob a blood bank and apparently assaulting people on the internet - yes, your family and Interpol will come looking for you if you're stupid enough to do that.

The main characters of Derek and Clif come across as refreshingly normal in the film; average best friends and 'bros' who have no idea what to do when one of them starts turning into a vampire. I liked Clif in particular as the sympathetic audience substitute - watching and recording Derek's changes and trying everything he can to help his friend, even though he really has no idea what he's doing. Derek is maybe a little less likable as the film goes on, mainly because he does some really dumb things (posting his exploits online, for example) and not really thinking about the consequences of some of his actions, but he's still "ordinary" enough that the audience can still relate to him and his reactions to what's happened to him.

Afflicted also manages to (mostly) avoid one of the most common pitfalls of the found footage genre - shaky-cam. Clif, the primary cameraman, is a filmmaker, so they get to have an excuse for why scenes are so steadily shot; they also employ the use of body cams, which while not able to completely eliminate the motion-sickness judder-cam, certainly reduce it considerably. Overall, Afflicted is a pretty fresh take on vampire films, and even manages to inject a bit more life into the found footage genre while keeping its audience engaged and on their toes throughout.

 

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