Skinamarink (2022)

JANUARY 17, 2023

GENRE: HAUNTED HOUSE, WEIRD
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

We’ve all been duped with a misleading trailer once or twice, but in the case of Skinamarink, I’m hard-pressed to think of a MORE honest promotion for a horror movie. Outside of the oft-repeated “in this house” not appearing in the film (I can’t tell if the trailer voice is meant to be, you know, TRAILER VOICE or if it’s trying to pass off the line as dialogue), the vibe of the trailer is exactly what the film is, albeit for 100 minutes instead of two. So if you watched the trailer and thought "OK, this is more of a teaser, the real movie can't be like that, right?" - you're not gonna be happy if you buy a ticket.

“But the trailer is just a bunch of random shots of ceilings and stuff?” you might be thinking, and yes, that is correct and that is also what the film offers for its entire runtime. There is some dialogue, but it’s delivered by off-screen characters and often so hard to hear that the film provides subtitles for the majority of it. There are four people in the cast (two kids and two adults) but they could have been sitting right next to me in the theater and I wouldn’t have recognized them, as we never see any of them that clearly. The film’s real star is a nightlight that appears several times (occasionally knocked around by the ghostly presence) or maybe the orange Lego brick separator that shouldn’t have existed in the film’s 1995 setting (I like to think it was another demonstration of the ghost’s powers, myself).

The plot, which is made more clear in the two line description on IMDb than from the film itself, is about a kid who sleepwalks and hurts himself a bit, waking up the other family members in the process. Over the course of the evening, their house begins to change – the windows and doors disappear, their toys start collecting themselves into a massive pile, and then the parents also disappear, leaving the two kids (4 and 6ish) alone with whatever supernatural force they’re being terrified with. It seems to all unfold over one night, but a late on-screen title suggests it's going for much longer, though without any exteriors (or characters, really) I guess it doesn't matter much.

Now, that probably sounds like a pretty straightforward haunted house movie; a sort of “Poltergeist but from the kids’ POV” effort that maybe would make good gateway horror for your own young’ns. But no: as I said, most of that plot is hard to suss out from what you see on screen, which is mostly hallways and floors and assorted toys. The camera rarely moves, the characters appear even less, and the lo-fi approach (super grainy, not always clear VHS type imagery, albeit presented in a 2.40 image) makes it hard to tell what you’re actually looking at on several occasions. Sometimes this is used for an effective scare, like a seemingly empty shot of a wall (or something similarly featureless) that slowly reveals the little girl (I think?) standing there, but most of the time it gives you that inclination to dart your eyes around the frame, looking for something that might appear in a corner or from behind whatever random object you’re looking at.

If you’ve gotten this far you can probably figure out if this is a “for you” movie or not, and alas I fall into the “not” category. I didn’t hate it or anything, and I admired the experimental nature of the effort (doubly so when you consider it was playing in multiplexes, with a trailer for Ant-Man 3 beforehand), but at 100 minutes I got pretty restless waiting for it to switch gears (spoiler: it never does). The problem is, for me, that the movie is basically – occasionally even effectively! – trying to depict the sensation of a bad nightmare you probably had as a kid, in an attempt to get under your skin and creep you out, and I am simply not easily susceptible to such things. I heard that the best way to watch the movie was all alone in your house in the middle of the night with all the lights off, and I don’t doubt it, but I’ve seen a number of films I found scary in theaters (including Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, both of which have been namechecked in the film’s hype), so it should more or less work on the big screen.

In fact, one of the things I was most taken by during my experience was how quiet the crowd was, and it was nearly sold out. A couple people walked out, unsurprisingly (I had to laugh when two girls finally gave up with maybe ten minutes left, something I saw happen at Inland Empire, which was a film I had already mentally compared it to), but no one expressed their frustration until the lights came up at the end, or checked their phones or whatever (at least from where I could see, about dead center of the auditorium). If anything, everyone seemed to be trying really hard to maintain the same sort of quiet intensity the film offered – at one point someone attempted to recline their seat, and the squeaking sound from the leather parts rubbing together had them stop almost instantly. The only other time I’ve seen that sort of commitment from an audience around here was during the first Quiet Place, and considering this was an AMC, with people laughing and cheering for the Nicole Kidman ad, I must say I was practically stunned at how well behaved everyone was and how they all seemed to be aware that they shouldn’t be disrupting the other patrons. More like this, please!

At any rate, I hope those who enjoy this sort of thing (though I can’t really think of anything else to compare it to) get a chance to see it in the most ideal circumstances possible. And again, I’m glad to see a multiplex take a chance on something like this at a time when even family-friendly Disney stuff is tanking because people are so accustomed to staying at home unless it’s a predetermined blockbuster like Marvel or Avatar. But I slept just fine when I got home (except for when my idiot cat woke me up because it managed to stick its head through the handle hole of a plastic bag, then proceeded to run around the house knocking into everything trying to get it off), sans nightmares or fears that my windows would disappear. Making it an experiment that failed, at least for me. But an interesting experience all the same, and if it's not playing near you, it will be on Shudder soon, as they are the co-distributors (which saddens me as it makes it much less likely that there will be a Blu-ray with commentary, as I'd be interested in listening to one if provided - UPDATE: my pessimism was unwarranted; it IS indeed coming to disc with commentary! I'll buy it on principle.). And yes, SOON, so please don't impatiently steal it.

What say you?

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The House Where Evil Dwells (1982)/Ghost Warrior (1984)

JANUARY 16, 2023

GENRE: HAUNTED HOUSE
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

One of the oldest “residents” of my dreaded (but now smaller!) pile is a double feature of The House Where Evil Dwells and Ghost Warrior, a pair of genre films from the early 80s that attempted to bridge Japanese and American audiences now that we were all friends again. In fact, it’s been sitting there so long (I wasn’t even living in the same house at the time!) that the disc is now out of print, so maybe I shouldn’t have opened it and just sold it on eBay for a few bucks. I really should start just sorting them chronologically to avoid such dilemmas.

But alas, I am still cursed with having to know if a movie is any good before I part with it, and if I sold this unseen then I’d be missing out on the insanity of Dwells’ third act! A chunk of film so insane it almost makes up for how slow the previous hour was. After a lengthy 19th century prologue in which a Samurai returns home and finds his wife in bed with his buddy, prompting him to kill them both and then himself, not much happens for a while. We flash to the modern day where an American family has just moved into the house so the husband (Eddie Albert) can start over his writing career in Japan, and his wife (Susan George) and daughter can… I dunno, buy Noh masks, I guess.

Anyway, the ghosts of the trio from the prologue are there, and despite the husband’s clear hatred of the other two, now they all kind of work together, doing basic haunted house stuff like tossing dishes around and making faucets turn on. But they also influence the wife to start banging the husband’s best bud (Doug McClure!) who found them the house in the first place, so you can probably guess why our ghosts have put aside their differences: they want to recreate the circumstances of their own deaths so their spirits can be freed. Not sure how that works (or how they even figured it out) but after all the tedium in the middle – occasionally peppered with some sex (weirdly, despite the affair element, the wife seems to go at it with more gusto with her husband than the other guy? You’re affairing wrong, lady!) things finally pick up in the end.

First, the daughter is attacked by a giant talking crab (!), which she escapes by jumping out the window. This puts her in the hospital and then sent back to America while the parents, now clued into the history of the house, get things packed up to go back as well. But then the ghosts put their big plan into motion, possessing all three of them and giving us the delightful sight of Albert and McClure having a full on kung fu battle. Eventually weapons get thrown into the mix, and… well, the ghosts get what they want! And I sat wondering who was gonna take care of the daughter, since the movie doesn’t have an answer for that.

It's the kind of movie I would have loved to have seen at one of those all night horror marathons when we don’t know what is going to play. By the 3rd movie (at best) I’m starting to get tired and frequently doze off (I am relieved when a movie I’ve seen before ends up playing, as then I can just let myself sleep guilt-free), so this one would have knocked me out pretty quick and then the rapturous response to the crab scene would have woken me back up. So I would have missed the dull middle and assumed that the movie as a whole was pretty action packed/crazy. It wasn’t BAD, per se, just, you know, kind of a “filler” movie, not helped by my usual indifference to haunted house motifs. And it’s nothing I could see myself watching again, because… well, I’m sorry, but how can I be entertained by a mask falling off the wall when I know they could have been giving us more talking giant crab scenes?

The other movie, Ghost Warrior (aka Swordkill) wasn’t even really horror, but instead more of an action/thriller with some occasional gore. It’s the story of a Samurai named Yoshi who falls into the water after losing a battle after failing to protect his wife. The body is frozen and uncovered 400 years later, and when thawed he actually comes back to life. So it’s a fish out of water kind of thing (one highlight: learning what TV is via a W.A.S.P. video) as the scientists who found him (an asshole guy and a kindly woman) try to communicate with him. But after an orderly tries to steal his swords, he kills the guy and escapes, wandering around LA and getting into mischief like killing a few gangbangers who were trying to rob an elderly man.

This could all be fine, but the constant cutting away to the scientist people drains the movie of most of its energy, as their goals are not particularly interesting nor are they even that villainous (basically they just want to kill him because he shouldn’t be alive in the first place, which I can’t really argue with!). And Yoshi never makes much of an effort to communicate or anything, so the fish out of water stuff grows tired and is awkwardly spaced out to boot (with like 20 minutes left in the movie, he learns what a lamp is). The occasional fights are fine, but there’s just no real drive to the narrative, and it’s not helped by the interminable final chase, where the nice scientist helps him evade her jerk coworkers through a forest, with about 9 million cutaways to one of the searching helicopters, presumably because Charles Band wanted to get his money’s worth from the rental.

So, yeah, you aren’t missing much from the films’ current inavailabilty. The action/light horror blend of Ghost Warrior is much better realized in Ninja III, and House’s crazy moments aren’t enough to elevate it above “OK timekiller” status. No features beyond the trailer are on the disc either, so I’m guessing the films were part of a package Scream picked up around that time, or just happened to be a personal guilty pleasure of someone who works there (like how I’d put out The Hitcher remake if I worked for them and had that power). I took a quick glance at eBay and found that the OOP discs are selling below retail price, so I’m guessing there isn’t much of a demand for it either. A curious release that waited seven years for me to finally pick it out of the stack, and will now be traded in for 19 cents off a record I’ll probably only listen to once – the disc has just as sad a fate as the characters featured on it.

What say you?

P.S. For anyone who could possibly care – yes this is a “From the Pile” disc but since it’s so long I made it a regular entry. FTP reviews are supposed to be pretty short, and in my wildest (very boring) dreams I like to assume you fine folk see the "FTP" moniker and know it won't take as much time out of their day to check out.

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House on Haunted Hill (1999)

SEPTEMBER 13, 2022

GENRE: HAUNTED HOUSE, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

It wasn’t long into House on Haunted Hill that a devastating fact occurred to me: it had been 23 YEARS since I had last seen it, on opening weekend in theaters. I mean, there are some reviews on this site where I had decided to watch it as “new” because it had been maybe ten years since I last watched and thus didn’t remember it very well anymore. Hell, more than once I watched a movie thinking I hadn’t seen it yet only to find my own review of it later – and even those were only about half that length of time. TWENTY THREE YEARS!!! Texas Chain Saw Massacre wasn’t even that old when I first watched it.

Anyway, it likely goes without saying that I didn’t remember much at all about the movie, not even why I didn’t like it much (basically all I remembered was that I didn’t feel compelled to give it another look). But my tastes have changed a lot since then, so I figured – along with the seasonal appeal* – it might be fun to finally watch the blu-ray I was sent years ago. Alas, I still don’t think much of the movie, but at least this time I can write down why, so in another 23 years, when I get a copy on 16K Ultra Mega Highest Possible Def Brain Implant Disc, I can hopefully find the brainpower to find this old review and realize that there’s probably something else I should do with my increasingly limited time left.

The weird thing about the movie is that it sets up a more fun, trickster-y narrative than it ends up being, and never quite recovers from the tonal shift. We quickly meet Geoffrey Rush (channeling James Woods just as much as, if not more than, Vincent Price) as he takes some reporters on his fiendish new roller coaster that uses some kind of holographic tech to simulate a derailed car in front of the one that the actual riders are on, and then his wife (Famke Janssen in full fatale mode) in a bubble bath, plotting some future scheme. So even if you haven’t seen the original, you’ll probably get the idea that the movie is about the two of them in a sort of War of the Roses-type battle with the rest of the cast (Ali Larter, Taye Diggs, etc) caught in the middle.

But alas, there’s precious little of that. I think they only have two more scenes together before splitting into different parts of the house, with Janssen “dying” at the halfway point (if that far?) and Rush clearly not behind the spooky shenanigans that are occurring, as he is frightened by a corpse when he’s by himself. It’s the rare remake (in my opinion anyway) that could have benefited from copying more of the original; the tête-à-tête between Price and Carol Ohmart was one of the 1959 film’s greatest assets, and these two are just as up for having fun – but the script barely lets them sink their teeth into the dynamic. And there isn’t anything else fun in its place, unless you are as amused by Chris Kattan’s mugging as audiences presumably were in 1999 (I couldn't even stand him then, so you can imagine how well his shtick landed for me now).

Instead it’s a rather repetitive affair once Famke is removed from the group, as it focuses almost entirely on Larter, Diggs, and Kattan wandering around the dungeon-y basement levels of the house, peppered with occasional scares and appearances by Rush, who they keep thinking is the real bad guy. Alas, we know he’s not, so there’s no real drive to the mystery of it all, and it’s hard to root for the heroes when they keep trying to basically kill the innocent Rush every time he shows up to try to help them (and himself) escape the damn place. And despite a fairly prominent billing, Jeffrey Combs doesn’t appear nearly enough as Vannacutt, the actual villain, the ghost of the insane doctor who ran the asylum that the house used to be.

And that leads me to what really kills the movie for me: the crappy “Darkness” that serves as the primary villain for the film’s final sequence, where the survivors are chased through the house by what is basically a swirling mass of visual effects. It’s NOT CGI (as I may have mistakenly referred to it in the past), but it’s not a flesh and blood being either – it’s a bunch of footage that has been composited together (and not that well, though a bit of phoniness is fitting with the source material) and floats around to give chase but respectfully keeps its distance whenever the heroes are hampered by a broken floor or whatever. It’s just not an exciting conclusion in the slightest, after what’s been a fairly hit or miss series of events to begin with. A knockout ending coulda saved it in an “all is forgiven” kind of way, but instead it blows away what minimal goodwill the movie had built up by that point.

Not that it’s without merit. Again, Rush and Janssen are having a blast, so all that stuff, however brief, makes it worth a look. And the cast is kooky enough to admire; Lisa Loeb and James “Spike” Marsters show up as the aforementioned reporters, Peter Gallagher in a rare genre turn as Janssen’s secret lover, and – hell yeah – Peter Graves even pops up as himself on a true crime show Janssen is watching. Plus Combs, who wasn’t exactly someone you’d see in the multiplexes all that often (between this and the previous year’s I Still Know, it’s a damn shame that the most mainstream audiences ever saw of this terrific actor were in two of his junkiest movies). The production design is also top notch; I realize that I didn’t love any Dark Castle movie until House of Wax (their I think fifth film?) but I’ll go to bat for the sets in everything prior, at least.

Plus, I was surprised how damn WEIRD it got at times; Malone is not a mainstream-leaning guy, and it was kind of charming to look back, with fresher memories of FearDotCom and Parasomnia in my mind, to realize he was getting some of that anarchy through on his first major studio release. The scene where Rush is locked in a deprivation tank is a spectacular highlight (one I unfortunately couldn’t fully watch due to the strobe lighting throughout), with Combs appearing as a sort of painting inside a zoetrope from hell – it’s a legitimately great piece of wtf-ery, in a fairly big budget movie from the same company that would be releasing You’ve Got Mail a few weeks later. Had the script dived fully into that sort of stuff after tossing the comic tone of the first half hour, I might be on board with the film as a whole, but alas, too much of it is simply spent on endless hallway wandering with the only two people you can be pretty sure are going to survive anyway.

Scream Factory’s blu-ray comes with their usual mix of older bonus features and newly created ones. The highlight is actually one of the older ones; a trio of deleted scenes with introductions by Malone, who explains why they were cut. Many of them feature Debi Mazar as Larter’s boss, which explain why Larter’s character is using a different name in the film, and there’s even a full action scene where she falls into a sort of zombie pit, which was cut for time as it was slowing down the climax some. Malone also provides a commentary, though he spends most of his time explaining this or that effect or makeup design, not too much on the story (he also pauses quite a bit, which serves as more proof that solo commentaries are almost never a good idea). He also provided a new interview, along with composer and the VFX supervisor; alas, none of the cast could be roped in to relive their experiences, though by all accounts past and present they were all great to work with and fully cooperative – no one was treating this as some junky horror that was beneath them, even when it came to the less glamorous parts (i.e. getting covered in blood and such).

I wish I could like these earlier Dark Castle movies more; I genuinely loved the idea of reviving the old William Castle properties and using modern gimmickry (i.e. CGI) to bring new life into them, but as I said, it didn’t really click for me until House of Wax, and after that they basically stopped doing remakes anyway. They all seem to start better than they end (Ghost Ship being the best example), so I always end up feeling disappointed, as it’s obviously better to have a good/great finale after a so-so beginning instead of the other way around. I never fully dislike any of them, but until Wax I was always walking out thinking “Eh, worth the one watch but I never need to see it again.” And then I end up rewatching them again 15-20 years later anyway and not really changing my mind. Someone please stop me from revisiting Gothika if that one ever lands in my lap!

What say you?

*As I've said before, the season isn't complete until you've watched at least one Vincent Price movie, and the OG House on Haunted Hill is a perfect option. I probably would have just watched that again if I hadn't already gotten my Price fix earlier in the week with Pit & The Pendulum. But for everyone else - the 1959 Hill is the way to go if you only have time for one this year!

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FTP: Beyond Darkness (1990)

APRIL 19, 2022

GENRE: HAUNTED HOUSE, POSSESSION
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Many moons ago, Scream Factory put out three of the films that were at one point released as "La Casa" (Evil Dead) sequels in Italy, under their original titles. I wrote up a pair of them for HMAD (Witchery and Ghosthouse), but for the third, Beyond Darkness, I switched gears and included it in a BMD (RIP) piece about the wacky La Casa series. That was seven years ago, which meant I couldn't even remember much about the movie, up to and including why I ended up with a second version, this time from Severin with some new bonus features. But I made it my inaugural viewing for The Pile 2.0: Now It's A Shelf!

Yes, it has been upgraded, again. If you'll forgive the slightly bloggy diversion here, I recently decided to rotate my living room layout 90 degrees in order to cut back on the glare that has been severely impacting my Elden Ring adventures. But in the process of mapping that out, I realized that this would also allow me to put all of my DVDs/Blu-rays together for the first time in I think 16 years (they are currently in three different racks in opposite sides of the room), and that to honor such an occasion, I should ditch my older ones for newer, matching shelves since they'll be next to each other. In turn this meant I'd have a spare rack for "The Pile", which got so big that it had to be converted to "The Box", for which the only space it would fit was behind the couch where I never saw it. Hence: a vast slowdown in FTP reviews (out of sight, out of mind). Now that they're all in a rack where I can see them, I plan to get through them more often! I swear!

Anyway, Beyond Darkness. Well, it's easy to see why I couldn't remember much of it, because it's pretty low key and mostly just reminds me of better movies. Even a non horror fan could probably spot the influence of both Amityville (family moving into new house where a tragedy occurred) and Poltergeist (one kid disappears in the house and needs to be rescued from an alternate dimension housed within it), but there's also some Shocker in there, with a vengeful electric chair appointee coming back for revenge, and the score even kind of resembles that film's at times. For a little bonus (for me, anyway), the mom is played by Barbara Bingham, aka the nice teacher who gets blown up in Jason Takes Manhattan. With my mind constantly thinking about other movies, it didn't leave much time for me to focus on what it was bringing to the table, if anything.

I did spend some time thinking about the poor Italian saps who thought they were seeing "Evil Dead 5", however. The other two "sequels" created out of hucksterism weren't exactly Raimi-level energetic, but they certainly had some of that silly flair, which is sadly in short supply here. There's a (possessed?) black wooden swan that rocks menacingly, and at one point Bingham runs around with a meat cleaver, but I'd estimate 95% of the movie is either talking or people slowly walking around the house looking worried, which doesn't exactly produce the same kind of thrills that a legitimate round with the Deadites would provide. Interestingly, part of the plot DOES involve an ancient book that should be destroyed, but I assume that's more coincidence than a conscious storytelling decision to try to make it fit with the previous "La Casa" films. Long story short, while the movie isn't exactly good, I'm glad it has been able to live on with its proper title, so that people can give it a fair shake without the expectations that originally accompanied it. It's not a bad movie really, just a bit too uneventful compared to the films it was clearly inspired by, though it'd come off even worse if watching it as part of a series it doesn't resemble at all.

Severin's disc has a lengthy interview with Claudio Fragasso as well as co-writer Rossella Drudi, both of whom are seen fidgeting with their covid masks during the interview, which makes me think "Oh good, this could have been an ugly Zoom interview but they did it right." Fragasso isn't as candid as he's been in other things, only really getting animated toward the end of the piece when he talks about how his US pseudonym (Clyde Anderson) was mistaken as a new director from a critic who had previously trashed Fragasso, prompting him to call the guy, play along with the ruse, then tell him to F himself. Classic Claudio! Actor David Brandon, who plays the obligatory "priest who has lost his faith", also contributes an interview, but he was having trouble remembering anything specific about the production ("I was in New Orleans once for a movie, not sure if it was this one...") so I didn't last long with it. Still, considering Scream just put the movie out a few years prior (bundled with another movie, Metamorphosis) Severin was smart to (during covid!) put together some bonus features, all of which last over an hour, to sweeten the pot for any Beyond Darkness fans who likely already settled for the other release.

Anyway, I hope these "Pile" reviews are now more common now that its inhabitants will be staring me in the face instead of hidden in a box behind me. Though I assume I will need to finish Elden Ring before I can really start to put a dent into it. I think I'm like 3/4 of the way through? So it's 90 minutes for a movie or 90 minutes running through Caelid to boost my strength stat. A difficult choice to be sure.

What say you?

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The House of Usher (1989)

FEBRUARY 28, 2021

GENRE: HAUNTED HOUSE (?)
GENRE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I've seen a few adaptations of Poe's The House Of Usher, and the fun thing about all of them is that they're all different, for better or worse. And furthermore, all of them take liberties with the original story; the closest adaptation has been the Corman/Price one because it at least retained all of the characters, even if it changed their dynamic around. This one basically only keeps Rodrick Usher, the character Price played in that earlier (and best) version and is portrayed by Oliver Reed here. His character more or less remains intact to the one you'd know (mysterious ailments, lives in a crumbling house, etc) but everything else about it is so different it almost doesn't even register as an adaptation.

For starters, there's no Madeline here, or any other sister. Instead, Rodrick has a brother named Walter, and he is played by Donald Pleasence, so you get two legandary English drunks for the price of one. In fact it was one of two reasons I was excited when I saw the film was coming out from Vinegar Syndrome, because I had never seen the two together on screen and figured their scenes - whether they were partners or enemies in whatever madness the plot required - would be a hoot. Sadly, Pleasence doesn't appear until the 50 minute mark, and it's only in the last twenty minutes that he features prominently, so his interactions with Reed are pretty brief. It's a delight when it happens though, so it's kind of like Heat in that you might be drawn in by the "two legends together!" appeal but thankfully can find lots to like elsewhere since their time together is so short.

The other draw was because I thought it might be the movie I started watching as a kid because "Loomis was in it", only to be completely baffled and not finish it. I can't recall the title, but it was from around this time; Pleasence made a lot of junk in the late 80s/early 90s so it's not easy to narrow down from his filmography. Though now that I know it's not this, Buried Alive is my main suspect, so I'll pencil that one in and just appreciate that I wasn't confused by this one until the very end, when (spoiler for 32 year old movie ahead) there's a suggestion that the whole thing was a premonition from the main character. Unusual for a VS release, there's no commentary track to discuss it (either from someone who worked on it or some historians), but it's a shame that it has to end on such a weak moment.

Because otherwise, it's actually pretty good! Director Alan Birkinshaw was also responsible for Killer's Moon and even co-wrote some of Don't Open Til Christmas, so I was expecting some sleaze and some total nonsense, and I was not let down. Nor was I ultimately left overwhelmed by it; there's *just* the right amount of said elements, opting for a more slow burn kind of pacing until Pleasence enters the story and things get more murder-y. Our hero is Molly (Romy Windsor, who had a bit part in Face/Off and is therefore royalty), who is enjoying a vacation with her fiance Ryan when he is summoned to the house of his uncle Rodrick. Along the way they get into a car accident near the house (of Usher), leaving Molly relatively unharmed but Ryan in critical condition. Or at least, so Rodrick says. He, along with his creepy butler Clive, don't let her see him in the hospital or leave the house at all, so it only takes about eleven seconds for her to get that classic "something's not RIGHT" suspicion that has driven half of the horror movies ever made.

Though I doubt she ever could have guessed what was happening: her would-be uncle arranged to have his nephew killed so he could take her for himself, planning to plant his seed and continue the Usher bloodline. This is another change from the material, where ENDING the bloodline is Rodrick's usual motive; instead, those duties are assigned to Walter, but he's so crazy and murderous that any nobility of his mission is hidden deep within Pleasence's dialed up to 11 performance. He made this around the same time as Halloween 5, and he comes off the same as he did there (far and away Loomis' most insane appearance) as he wipes out the butler's family and then sets his sights on his brother and Molly, often using this little contraption he has strapped to his arm that looks like a cross between a handheld sewing machine and a bootleg of Freddy's glove.

So it's a movie about a woman who is trapped with one guy who wants to rape her and another who wants to kill her, and it's a shame Pleasence wasn't introduced earlier so she could make efforts to play them off each other while planning her escape, since both mean her harm but also occasionally (inadvertently) are in a position to protect her from the other. As a result it gets a little repetitive in the middle, focused mostly on her half-hearted escape attempts (most of which just involved asking any other party - the butler's wife, a random doctor, etc - to help her leave). Unless their schedules only allowed for a few days of filming (again, a commentary really could have helped here!), I have to assume Michael J. Murray wrote the script assuming two less interesting actors would be hired to play Rodrick and Walter and never bothered to update it to take advantage of these two titans of scenery chewing. I mean, this is a movie about a house that is falling apart - they could LITERALLY devour the sets if they wanted!

Long story short, Poe fans will probably be aghast (the "fall" of the House elements are limited to a few moments), but fans of the two actors are given just enough to enjoy here, and I was charmed by the low-key "erotic thriller" approach to the material. And by "erotic" I mean there's a wedding scene where Reed smashes the cake in his bride's face and then shoved his tongue in her mouth, licks some of the cake out/off, and eats it himself. If that isn't #cinema I don't know is. An interview with Birkinshaw (the disc's lone extra, though the package comes with a foldout poster) doesn't shed too much light on the proceedings, but he does admit that he rewatched the movie as prep for the interview and found it to be better than he remembered. He's right! It's pretty good!

What say you? P.S. This German trailer was the only one I could find, which perhaps explains why the Blu doesn't have a trailer. Maybe they never made one for the US? Also, it's part of Vinegar Syndrom's "Archive" line, and very limited, so the only way to get it is from their site. You can find it HERE.

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Ghost Ship (2002)

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020

GENRE: GHOST, HAUNTED HOUSE
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

More than once I have inadvertently written up a review here only to discover I had already done that, but I am pretty sure Ghost Ship is the first example of the opposite being true: I was 100% positive I had watched it for HMAD in the early days, but if that's the case I cannot find the damn thing no matter how hard I try. I searched on the site (both of its search engines!), Googled it, checked my Twitter, etc - all to find a review I swear I remember writing but seemingly does not exist. I know I didn't see it in theaters, so I guess I just watched it in that four year period in between its home video release and when I started HMAD. But I invite you all to try to find the review anyway so I know I'm not losing (more of) my mind!

Anyway, it's better than I remember. My only memory - and I'm sure I'm not alone on this - was the opening sequence, and in my head the review was "that's the only good part of it" but that's not true, as it turns out. It's actually better than Thirteen Ghosts, in my opinion (fair comparison since both films comprise Steve Beck's entire directorial career), and probably better than Death Ship, which its often confused with due to the similar titles and posters. An unsung masterpiece, it is not, but after seeing many lesser horror movies set on ships (Virus, Mary, Rec 4), I can appreciate what this one offers.

For starters, I like that along with all the expected Shining stuff, it's actually cribbing a bit from... Perfect Storm? As is usually the case with these kind of "A small ship comes across an abandoned big ship" kind of narratives (which include outer space versions), the salvage crew's original ship (the Arctic Warrior) is destroyed and forces them to stay on board the haunted one, but before and after that there's a lot of stuff about how they might have to abandon their newfound treasure in order to get back to shore safely. This was Perfect Storm's turning point - the men on the Andrea Gale could have waited out the storm, but it would have meant letting all their valuable swordfish turn bad, so they opted to take the risk in order to cash in (in reality no one knows what the circumstances were that resulted in their deaths since the boat was never recovered, but this sort of "reckless" behavior led the families to sue Warner Bros for making their deceased loved ones look like fools).

Here, they find a lot of gold on the boat, worth just as much if not more than the ship itself, but there's no way to get it all on a raft along with the crew itself. So they set about repairing the rusting derelict ship, which in horror movie tradition is just a good way to split them all up, but I like that they are genuinely doing repairs and making it look like they know what they're doing. One thing that's always kept me a little at bay in Session 9 is that their cleanup crew was seemingly focusing all of their attention on two rooms, which had a real world excuse (too much of the hospital was unsafe to put the actors in) but doesn't help sell the idea of their reason for being there in the first place. Here, you could almost remove the ghost stuff and it'd still work as a sort of survival/race against time kind of thriller.

As for the supernatural goings on, it's hit or miss, but thankfully less reliant on the hokiness that hamstrung Beck's previous picture. As has been reported elsewhere and repeated by Beck on his commentary, the original script (titled "Chimera") was more of a psychological affair with the crew turning on each other (which is why Session 9 came to mind in the first place!) but was rewritten to have more ghosts/people/obvious scares, much to the disappointment of many of its actors - Julianna Margulies has reportedly disowned it like it was Archie Panjabi or something. But they still kept things to a relative minimum - the main ghost we see (the little girl played by Emily Browning) is a benevolent one, and the primary villain appears as a flesh and blood protagonist until his secrets are revealed in the final 15 minutes (the film shares Ghosts' weird decision to race through the exposition when the movie is almost over, resulting in a rushed climax).

Instead, most of the scares are more subtle - doors opening on their own and such, and hallucinations where they think they're eating real food but it turns out to be maggots. There's a real attempt to deliver atmosphere; if anything they might go overboard with it at times, since it seems like a full twenty minutes of the movie are made up of people shining flashlights around. The biggest ghost setpiece is one that has no overt scares until its punchline; it's the one where one character (Isaiah Washington's Greer) is drunkenly wandering around the destroyed ballroom as it gradually reforms to its former glory, with the sultry lounge singer seducing him and leading him to another room seemingly to have some casual ghost sex (hey, we've all been there). Alas, instead of hooking up, MacGruber style, she chooses that moment to become vapor and his attempt to embrace her results in him falling right through her and down the elevator shaft he didn't notice she was standing in front of, impaling himself on some rebar below. Poor sod.

But like Ghosts, the structure holds it back a bit - things are relatively slow-paced for a while, then so much happens at once it feels like you accidentally put the movie on fast forward. One major character's death has almost no buildup, they cut to him underwater only mere seconds before he is caught in something and crushed/torn up by the ship's gears. Another one dies off-screen entirely in a manner that suggests it couldn't have happened quick (he is drowned in a tank that was empty when he entered), even though it seems only a few minutes had passed since he was last looked at. And it doesn't help that the flashback scene that explains how that bravura opening sequence happened (and what transpired immediately after, which the opening version does not) is set to a godawful industrial song written/performed by the film's composer, John Frizzell (whose score is otherwise fine). It's not just a bad song, it's in no way fitting to the visuals it accompanies, making it feel like work to get through when it's actually informing you of what's been going on the whole time. That it goes on far too long just makes it worse. I never thought I'd long for a scene where someone goes to the library to get all the backstory off a microfiche (or even a Google search!) until this sequence entered its 4000th minute.

Sadly, neither Beck nor the moderator mentions it during the commentary, but by that point I kind of figured there wouldn't be much in the way of candid reveals. Beck is pretty diplomatic throughout, with only his pauses before answering certain questions about the rewrites and the post production letting us know that this wasn't a super enjoyable experience for him. He actually laughs when asked if Dark Castle ever contacted him about working on another film, and that's about as directly honest as it gets. But that's what kind of makes it an interesting track to listen to; he's saying a lot by saying very little - except for saying how good the original script was and that he thinks Thirteen Ghosts is the better film, ahem. He also explains why he hasn't made another film - after ten years of false starts on at least six other films, he basically got tired of it and went back to commercial work. But he doesn't seem to be bitter about it, there's an "it is what it is" kind of tone to the whole thing, which is certainly better than whining.

The other features are a mix of new interviews (one via Zoom with Washington) and the original bonus features from the DVD, including Mudvayne's music video for "Falling", a solid track that I actually still hear pretty frequently on the radio (having not realized when it originated, I was surprised to learn it was that old of a song - gun to my head I would have guessed it was from the past decade considering how much airplay it still gets). It also has new art featuring Browning's character instead of the Death Ship ripoff art, though that's still available on the reverse of the sleeve. As a personal bonus feature, to me, the film had a scene featuring a heart locket, which yesterday's movie did as well - back in the original HMAD run, I was always tickled when back to back movies would share some random little thing like that (personal favorite: two unrelated movies in a row that featured a boozy brunette pretending to seduce a handicapped man as part of her evil plan). What little random throwaway thing in Ghost Ship might turn up in tomorrow's movie? I hope it's someone else getting cut in half while dancing.

What say you?

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You Should Have Left (2020)

AUGUST 5, 2020

GENRE: HAUNTED HOUSE
SOURCE: STREAMING (REVIEW CODE)

In an alternate 2020, where life is relatively normal, I use my AMC A-List to get a ticket for a Friday morning (or Thursday night if I'm feeling adventurous) screening of You Should Have Left and wonder why they released such a small movie in theaters, where it was likely to be torn apart by critics and ignored by audiences. Instead, in the real 2020, Universal and Blumhouse seemingly saw the same scenario I did and realized that it wasn't worth saving for theatrical release whenever theaters can open again, and instead gave it the same VOD fate it probably should have been destined for in the first place.

Don't get me wrong - it's actually pretty good! But it's not a "multiplex" kind of movie, even by the already smaller standards for Blumhouse fare. Their formula (one big star, an interesting concept, and a tiny budget) has yielded several smash hits and solid additions to the genre over the past decade, but even they seemingly know that a few of them don't have that extra bit of oomph that can turn them into Insidious type successes. They even distinguished some of them for a while with "BH Tilt", where the films would get smaller theatrical releases or just go DTV entirely, though it seems that moniker has been retired as I can't recall having seen it for a while now.

One such film was The Darkness, another low-key spooker starring Kevin Bacon, which seemingly suffered from some hasty re-editing and what was, at its core, a fairly dull Poltergeist knockoff. You Should Have Left, however, inches into Shining territory, with a family trio (Bacon, Amanda Seyfried as his second wife, and their six year old daughter Ella) living in an unfamiliar, isolated place that seems to harvest some kind of supernatural energy. The nature of the house reveals itself over time, with only the usual cryptic hints from locals to go on, so writer/director David Koepp (reteaming with Bacon for the first time since Stir of Echoes, an underrated entry in both of their filmographies) opts to have Bacon suffer a few nightmares in order to keep the scares coming while teasing out the "We have to leave this place NOW!" kind of proactive behavior until the third act.

He also gets a lot of mileage out of two mysteries involving his protagonists. One is that Bacon's previous wife is dead, and we're told that she accidentally drowned in the tub after taking too much of her meds, but Bacon's anger issues (he listens to self-help tapes and writes in a journal as therapy) suggests perhaps it wasn't just an accident - will Seyfried suffer the same fate? And that leads to the other mystery, which is that she may be having an affair, but is Bacon just paranoid and jealous? She is obviously much younger than him, something that comes up a few times early on ("Are you her dad?" a PA asks when Bacon visits her on her film set - on the day she is filming a sex scene) and never stops being an issue with regards to their physical needs, as she teases him more than once about his lack of stamina. Is she getting her needs fulfilled elsewhere?

SPOILERS AHEAD! SKIP NEXT PARAGRAPH IF NECESSARY!!!

Surprisingly, she is. And she doesn't even try to deny it when he finally confronts her directly about it. It's refreshing; far too many of these "is the dad going nuts?" kind of movies rely on pure paranoia, so to have it not only be a legit concern, but also just rip the band-aid off instead of trying to deny it and make him think he's crazy, was a nice change of pace. Plus, he gets in a line almost as good/biting as Closer's "Thank you for your honesty, now f**k off and die", so that's something. And the truth about his wife doesn't even make him all that villainous - turns out she really did OD and drown accidentally, but he could have saved her in time and just opted not to, as he wanted out of the marriage anyway and he hints she was terrible to him. Sure, this probably denies him a spot in heaven, but at least he's not a psycho ready to snap, which again is something we've seen many times before. As a result, Bacon's final scenes and actions come across almost heartbreaking, as opposed to yet another climax where a mother has to protect her child from a totally unhinged father.

Many people have noted that the film is ripping off House of Leaves, the 2000 novel from Mark Z. Danielewski, but that's - as usual - social media ignorance, because the movie is based on a different book (novella, technically) by Daniel Kehlmann. I haven't read either of them myself, but the things people were commenting on (from the trailer, because why watch something and get context?), such as the fact that the house is bigger outside than it is inside, were taken from his novel. If Kehlmann himself was cribbing from Danielewski, then fine, but blame him, not David Koepp. Anyway, these elements don't take up as much of the movie as you might have expected from the trailer - it's not until the third act that Bacon even notices things like "this room is 21 feet long when measured outside but 25 feet when measured inside". The novella, best as I can tell from the wiki synopsis* is more or less the same, though the previous dead wife stuff seems to be invented for the film, and their age difference isn't mentioned either which suggests it wasn't an issue there if it even existed at all.

Otherwise it seems pretty similar, with even small details in the film (such as the local shopkeeper being slow to retrieve items from Bacon's grocery list) coming from Kehlmann's text. I've always said that short stories/novellas should be more frequently adapted than full length novels, since there's often no need to excise so much material that makes the original as memorable as it is, not to mention room for the filmmakers to add their own ideas without angering the existing fanbase. Shorter works such as this can be filmed word for word without having to sacrifice much, and when the text is shorter, the filmmakers can use it as a foundation to create something closer to an original, like the Poe/Corman/Price films that use the story for a climax, basically, and add in an hour of exclusive backstory.

Long story short, it's a perfect fit for VOD. It's only 90 minutes long, has a few solid scares (Bacon waking himself out of a dream by jabbing himself with a broken bottle is pretty choice), some decent story turns, plus - vague spoiler that you can see on the trailer anyway - a particular wardrobe choice that should please anyone who has been a fan of Bacon's genre movies for forty years. And the man is aging nicely; in The Darkness he had his hair darkened and it looked weird, but here he's leaning into it with some gray showing, and I (far more grayer albeit younger) say go for it, sir. It's not a total 180 from what you've seen before, but the riffs on the formula held my interest more than the initial reviews had me believing I would, and for the first time in five months I didn't wish I was at a movie theater instead. Perfect couch movie.

What say you?

*I would have read it since it's only 110 pages, but they're charging 12 bucks for it on Kindle! As the author of a 600+ page ebook that costs five bucks, I can say with some authority that the publisher can eat shit. Call me when it's $1.99 at most.

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Thirteen Ghosts (2001)

JULY 26, 2020

GENRE: GHOST, HAUNTED HOUSE
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

As any astute moviegoer can attest, there are times where you see a movie you don't particularly want to see due to circumstances beyond your control: your vote got overruled by your date or friends, your first pick was sold out, etc. And on those occasions, you're not likely to enjoy the film as much as you would have if it was what you wanted to see all along, which sucks because it might be pretty good or even great if you were watching it under more desirable circumstances. In some cases I tend to wait a while and revisit it to give it a fair shake - sometimes it pays off, sometimes it turns out I was right the first time. But I usually REMEMBER the movie, which isn't the case with Thirteen Ghosts - it's now been close to twenty years since my one, unwanted viewing.

And it wasn't a case of the other movie being sold out or whatever - it was in fact the "consolation prize" after a soul crushing disappointment. One Saturday night in October of 2001 my buddy Joe called me up in my dorm room to let me know that Halloween was showing at a little indie theater about an hour away. I couldn't believe it! This was pre-Fathom Events and what not - I had never seen my all time favorite movie on the big screen. The showtime was 10pm, and this was just before 9 - he said he was coming to get me and we'd have just enough time to get there if he drove fast. And drove fast he did, hitting the upper 80s during safer stretches of the highway. We get to the theater at like 10:02, praying they had trailers and such, running into the lobby with a breathless "Two for Halloween, please!"

The box office lady looked very confused. "We're not showing Halloween?" she said. We panicked, thinking we had the wrong theater, and this was 2001 so we couldn't exactly double check on our cell phones. Luckily I had called the theater earlier to verify Joe's claims, so I just hit redial in the lobby and listened to their recording. "Yep, we're at the right theater, OK, now here are the showtimes... (whatever non-horror stuff they were showing), Rocky Horror every Saturday at midnight, Halloween 10pm." I look at the lady confused again, "Why is your phone line saying Halloween 10pm?"

Then I look at their marquee/calendar above her, and it all suddenly made sense. They weren't showing Halloween at 10pm that or any other night - on Halloween *night*, they'd be showing Rocky Horror again, except at 10pm instead of the usual midnight. It was just a weird phrasing on the phone line that got misinterpreted by whatever service supplied showtimes to movietickets.com or whatever we were using at the time. So we left, dejected as any horror fans could be, and drove back toward our school, assuming the night was over. Halfway there Joe suggested hitting the usual multiplex to see if anything was starting, and that's how I ended up watching Thirteen Ghosts instead of finally seeing my favorite movie on the big screen.

Needless to say, I wasn't exactly keeping an open mind, and didn't like it all that much. Down the road a bit I penciled in the idea of renting (or buying cheap) the DVD to give it another chance, but never got around to it until now, when Scream Factory added it to their library. And now that I'm watching it when I *want* to, I can report that... well, it's better than my angry self thought in 2001, but not exactly good. The main problem is that it's too cramped, both on a technical level and a narrative one. After a solid prologue showcasing the capture of one of the titular ghosts, and then a fine credit sequence that tracks over time to show how a happy family fell apart after a tragic fire, the seams start to show. First we get proper introductions to our heroes: Tony Shaloub (whose wife died in that fire) and his children, a teenage (?) daughter (27 year old Shannon Elizabeth) and a little boy who has become obsessed with death. But they also have a live-in nanny, which is confusing because the nanny is played by Rah Digga, who is *younger* than Shannon Elizabeth (who is seen doing half the nanny kind of work anyway) and also their financial problems keep coming up, so how the hell do they pay for this woman when they don't even seem to need her services in the first place?

But all their problems seem to be solved when F. Murray Abraham - the ghost hunter killed in the opening scene - leaves them his house, because Shaloub is his distant nephew/only living family. They instantly go check the house out and almost as quickly, the kids get lost, which is where the movie's problems really start. While the glass house with all its clockwork gears and moving walls is very cool looking and well designed, it was also built on a single floor set, which means we never get a really good look at it (even when they arrive, it's hard to get a sense of how big it is). So when the kids get "lost", it leaves you at a disconnect, because there's no sense of how far they could possibly be, and Steve Beck directs almost everything in closeup too, so even basic geography of a single room isn't always clear, let alone how far anyone is from one another. It ultimately feels like someone trying to pass off getting lost in one of those cheap haunted houses they have in traveling carnivals, i.e. a large trailer that sets you in a single zig-zag path from entrance to exit.

And that's pretty much all the plot! I think it's actually told in real time from the time they arrive; Shaloub goes to sign some papers with the lawyer (the film's sole kill in between the first and last ten minutes) and the kids are instantly lost, at which point Matthew Lillard's psychic character (posing as a power company guy to get into the house and find some money he is owed) repeats most of what we learned in the opening sequence. It's at this point you might assume that the opening was added (or at least heavily reworked) to give the movie some action up front, and in order to make sense out of it they had to instantly explain some of the things that were supposed to be revealed later (even Lillard's re-introduction as a power guy seems like we're supposed to just think he's a power guy at first, as we see it from the family's POV).

Then it's just an endless "let's find the kids" sequence, which is somewhat hampered by Shaloub's strange lack of concern (he calls his own son "the kid" constantly, as if he was just some random) but thankfully peppered by brief appearances from the woefully underdeveloped title characters. On the DVD (and possibly the film's website at the time?) and this Blu there's a special feature where Abraham's character explains their backstories, and while we don't need as much info as he offers here, it might have been nice to at least have some of it in the film so it wouldn't feel so random. The only one we get any real explanation for is the Juggernaut, because he's the one in the opening sequence and someone has to give the "how evil is this guy" speech that there is no time for in the house section of the film. Some of the ghosts are actually benevolent, such as a kid who (the bonus features tell us) got killed by a real arrow while playing Cowboys and Indians with a pal, but there is no payoff for this within the film - the only one who directly helps them is their mom's ghost, and the real villain (Abraham, who wasn't really dead, shocking) is dispatched by the Juggernaut and the others instead of the human heroes.

The ghosts are well designed though, so at least they leave an impression during their brief, largely random appearances. In a fun nod to the original film (where Castle's obligatory gimmick was a pair of 3D glasses that would let you see the ghosts during those scenes), Lillard has spectral glasses that allow him to see where the ghosts are, though there aren't enough pairs to go around. So this means a handful of fun "I know you can't see the ghost but I can and you're the one about to get hit, duck now!" kinda moments, though by the end everyone either has a pair (Embeth Davitz' completely nonsensical character stops by with extras) or is so worked up by the house moving around and/or the human villains wreaking havoc that it doesn't really matter where "The Jackal" is or whatever. When the title characters are afterthoughts and it's a haunted house movie that never gives you a good look at the house... it's kind of a problem!

Ultimately the only thing really keeping it from sinking is Lillard, who is dialed up to 11 in nearly every scene and lands some good jokes ("Yes, the ghosts are in THIS house - if they were next door, I wouldn't give a shit!"), plus (spoiler for 20 year old movie ahead) gets a great death when he sacrifices himself to save Shaloub, in yet another scene that Beck's claustrophobic direction prevents from landing as well as it should. It seems like there was plenty of room for them to get away from the approaching ghost, and also Lillard's sacrifice didn't exactly get Shaloub out of their shared predicament (he's still trapped in a hallway with the ghost), but hey. Thought that counts and all that.

Scream Factory's blu-ray has the usual new interviews (including one that runs fourteen minutes for a guy who only appears for about 30 seconds in the opening scene) and two commentary tracks, one with Beck and the other with the crew. I listened to Beck's, but his constantly fuzzy memory (for example, he says Silver didn't pay much attention to Ghosts because he was working on the first Matrix, which is impossible - they shot nearly two years after Matrix came out in theaters, and months before the sequels started their own productions) had me wondering how many things I didn't know were wrong were, well, also wrong. The old making of is kind of fun though, since it's the only time you hear from Shaloub and Lillard (neither of them appear in new features, alas), as is the aforementioned explanation for the ghosts, so once again I want to give props to SF for always carrying over old features when creating new ones.

Oh well. I tried! It just isn't that great of a movie. It's watchable and has some good bits here and there (and the sound design, if nothing else, is a good way to scare off neighbors if you wish), and it thankfully isn't dated (the FX are largely practical, so no CGI blemishes that tend to sink a lot of films from this era, including Bones which was released the same day) but it's just too compressed in both its story and its vision to really come to life. House of Wax is and always will be the crown jewel of the company's offerings - hopefully Scream Factory gets that one down the road.

What say you?

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Relic (2020)

JULY 8, 2020

GENRE: HAUNTED HOUSE, PSYCHOLOGICAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (DRIVE-IN SCREENING)

Heads up: this isn't so much of a review of Relic as it is a "Collins Crypt" type piece on going to the drive-in - I just want to get that out of the way right off the bat.

Because of Covid-19's continued decimation of our daily life, movie theaters continue to be closed, and even the slightest hint of "we might reopen soon!" is met with near universal derision by even the biggest moviegoing champions (i.e. people like me). I have indirectly lost my BMD job thanks to theaters being closed (we were owned by Alamo Drafthouse - it was healthy ticket and concession sales at their theaters that allowed side efforts like BMD to continue) and even I have no real desire to return to the cinema until a vaccine is available. It's literally affected my livelihood and I say wait - what's your excuse, Christopher Nolan fans? Now,dDo I miss going? Of course I do; I consider the lack of being able to go to a movie a big part of why my mental health is increasingly troubled. But I'll take mood swings and staring at a wall over my lungs deteriorating because I caught a deadly disease at a matinee of Halloween Kills.

The solution, sort of, has been drive-in movie theaters, a nearly dead form that is now thriving again. The few that existed are having huge numbers, and places like Wal-mart are turning their parking lots into temporary versions. On paper, it is indeed a perfect consolation prize - you're "sort of" outdoors, and you're "sort of" with a crowd, but you don't really come into contact with anyone beyond the box office clerk (or the snack bar person if you dare; I bring my own food), making it safer than even your trip to the grocery store. And for folks like me, it's the only real way to watch a movie uninterrupted by the other people in the house - by the time my son goes to bed, I'm often too tired to make it through an entire movie (despite being stuck in my house 95% of the time, I'm not able to watch more movies than I did prior to quarantine, because the work/daycare schedule hasn't changed).

However, the drive-ins I've been to - and reports from people going to others - is that the actual experience of watching a movie at one is less than ideal. For starters, as we've learned from the endless supply of recent "Karen" videos, a lot of of people are selfish and/or morons. If I can go a full 15 minutes without someone's headlights glaring off the screen, I consider it a minor victory, and that's just the ones that can be controlled. Last night's presentation of Relic was interrupted by a train going by, its giant light bouncing off the screen the entire time - that's a relatively minor but not unimportant chunk of the film that I couldn't really see, nor could I focus on because I was too frustrated by the interruption. Add in the other sounds and lights from the nearby area (I picked a good spot, then a car in front of me moved, probably to avoid the same harsh light from a garage next door that was now in *my* eyes instead) and you might join me in wondering how it is this was any better than being interrupted by my kid asking to watch Youtube videos instead.

I also began wondering how it is that horror films became such a staple of drive-ins, when they are often filled with dark images and well made sound mixes, neither of which can be properly presented in this environment. Perhaps with a really terrific sound system in your car it can sound OK (Halloween and its first sequel sounded just fine to me last fall when I went for a special presentation), but it's still an FM broadcast - not exactly powerful in the best circumstances. And even if everyone can manage to leave their headlights off, the projection in these places tends to be a bit washed out, since there's nothing to block the light of the environment itself - even the goddamn moon is working against you in this situation.

Let's use Relic as an example! (Ironically, when I said I was seeing Relic people thought I meant the '90s monster movie THE Relic, which was notoriously too dark.) Most of the movie takes place inside a decaying, dimly lit house, so even daytime set scenes are hardly bursting with light, but while this would be fine on a normal (well calibrated) TV it meant that on a drive-in screen the nighttime scenes were often impossible to make anything out. There's an apparent scare in an "under the bed" moment, but damned if I could see whatever spooked Emily Mortimer's character. Also, her mother, suffering from some kind of dementia, leaves notes around the house to help her out, and they were often considered important enough to warrant a closeup insert shot so we could see what they said, but out of around ten such notes I could only read one ("Flush", on a toilet) throughout the film. Even if I bottled the most ideal second of my viewing experience to stretch it out for the film's 90 minute runtime (that is, no trains, no headlights, no morons next to me constantly restarting/shutting off their car), I'd still have trouble simply SEEING some of the film's images.

And as you might expect given the "all in a house" description I just offered, it's not exactly an action packed movie. The plot is simple enough: a woman (Mortimer) and her daughter (Bella Heathcoate) head to the former's mother's house, as they haven't heard from her in a while. The house is in shambles and the older woman (Robyn Nevin) is gone, only to return a couple days later with no memory of where she was. The two stay with her for a few days while they try to find a place for her, but her dementia starts to take scary turns - is she even really their "Nan" anymore? The three actors are terrific, and carry the entire film as there are no other major characters (a neighbor boy has the next most amount of screentime after them, and it totals about 75 seconds, if that), so it's not about a body count or whatever - the focus is entirely on what is happening to the woman and if she poses a threat to her daughter and granddaughter.

In other words it can/will be described as a "slow burn" type of film - which is the sort of thing that might even lose some of its impact in a normal theater, let alone a drive-in. Some movies just work better at home, and this is most certainly one of them, making it a peculiar choice for IFC Midnight to put on drive-in screens ahead of its VOD release this week. I enjoyed it, sure, but the early reviews from a festival described it as a movie that left some audience members completely devastated by its closing moments, and while I can see why they'd feel that way, I never even came close to getting worked up about it. And I'm an easy mark for this sort of thing (potential loss of a parent), especially this time of the year as the anniversary of my father's death is just two weeks away. At home, I'm sure I'd be crying or at least emotional - but it was truly impossible to get that invested given the venue.

So I think from now on I will reserve my drive-in experiences for movies I've already seen, where my own memories can fill in what I might be missing due to this or that distraction (I had a great time at a Jaws/Tremors double feature the previous week) or at least for movies I don't really care about and just need an excuse to (safely!) get out of the house for a while. That Dave Bautista movie where he teams up with a little girl, for example - if I'm ever bored enough to drive an hour to see that, I'm sure I won't care much about the occasional (but sadly guaranteed) interruptions. The nostalgic factor is a blast - the pre-show entertainment they put together last night, with vintage trailers and concession bumpers, put a big smile on my face - but for a well regarded "elevated" horror film like this, that I was really looking forward to? I'll do my best to wait until my son goes to sleep, I think.

What say you?

P.S. If you're heading to the drive-in, I highly encourage bringing a portable FM radio! Every night I've seen people in need of a jump when the movie ended as their car stereo drained their battery.

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Winchester (2018)

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

GENRE: HAUNTED HOUSE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

When I still lived in Massachusetts, the family took a vacation to California to visit my sister, flying to Los Angeles and spending a few days there, then driving up the coast to spend a couple days in San Francisco. While planning the trip, my mom gave me and my sister a tourist guidebook and said we could each pick a place to go as long as it was more or less on the way; she picked Disneyland I think, and I picked the Winchester Mystery House. Well, we went to Disneyland, but my pick was vetoed for reasons I can no longer recall (I assume it's because unlike Disneyland, no one else wanted to go), so the only time I've ever really seen much of it is in Winchester, which is somehow the first feature film (not documentary) to explore this legendary haunted house (or at least, actually film at it, per the IMDb) despite the fact that it should have been a no-brainer. The possibilities are endless - a modern day story about paranormal investigators checking it out, perhaps in found footage style? A wholesome family buying it and discovering its secrets? Or maybe just a Session 9 kind of thing about a team of unfortunate real estate guys trying to put together a cohesive layout map of the damn place?

See, for those uninitiated, the Winchester house isn't just a mansion - it's a maze, complete with dead-end hallways that serve no purpose and doors that open into walls or, more dangerously, second story drops. The reclusive and eccentric owner, Sarah Winchester, had the place built and rebuilt over and over for nearly forty years, with construction workers and carpenters working on it day and night every single day (though her biographer says this is an exaggeration, and that she would actually allow breaks). She did this to give rooms for the ghosts of victims of the Winchester rifles, a company she inherited 51% of after her husband died, even though she detested the weapons and what they were used for. With a huge fortune (and continued income) at her disposal, she used it to make amends of sorts, and this has allowed the house to continue to thrive as a tourist attraction, as it's claimed to be haunted and even if it wasn't it's just a nutty place to see with its interior windows and slapdash design. So again, there were lots of possibilities for a film version, and the one they came up is rather simple: a doctor (played by Jason Clarke) is hired to evaluate Sarah's mental health, to see if she's fit to continue running the company. Her talk of ghosts and endless construction have got the guys who own the other half of the company rightfully worried that she'll do something nutty and jeopardize the business, so they're hoping Clarke will see it their way and officially write her off as a loon.

But Sarah is played by Helen Mirren, so we know right off the bat she's not crazy and that there really is a ghost problem there, because you don't hire Helen Mirren to play someone who will be pushed aside by a bunch of weasely men in suits. She makes this clear in her first big one on one scene with Clarke, sizing up his drinking problem within seconds and insisting that he knock it off ASAP, and when he says he will you believe him - he won't risk further wrath. Still, I liked this angle; even if the outcome was obvious - it's a big improvement on the usual sort of "skeptical expert is called to investigate if ghosts are real" plot. This allows a number of scenes with the two stars merely talking to each other, with Clarke trying to run her through basic tests and Mirren trying to get into HIS head since she's the one who requested him in the first place as (minor spoiler, we learn it like 30 minutes in though) he had "died" in the past for three minutes and thus might have a particular knack for dealing with spirits and the afterlife. Had he been there specifically to deal with ghosts or lack thereof, like Rebecca Hall's character in The Awakening, we'd just have to watch a bunch of scenes of him fiddling with equipment and denying what he saw with his own eyes for half the movie. Instead, Clarke is on board with the fact that the place is haunted pretty early, which is a nice change of pace.

Unfortunately, the script didn't think of much else to do to give the movie some oomph, so after a promising first act it devolves into a standard Insidious/Woman in Black-y kind of deal with vengeful ghosts being dealt with so they can be at rest and blah blah blah. It hits all the buttons one might expect from this kind of thing - there's a bunch of jump-scares (including a pretty great one involving Mirren and her nephew), objects floating around, loud noises... you know the drill. But why introduce this legendary backdrop and not use it for anything of note? Besides implementing the San Francisco earthquake around the end of the second act (which in real life resulted in the house reducing its number of stories from seven to four), after a while there's no difference between this and any other horror movie house, despite the Spierig Brothers' constant attempts to remind us of how huge the place is by cutting to swooping aerial shots of it every five minutes. We're told that it's easy to get lost, but no one ever really does, and the go-nowhere doors and the like are rarely used either. Plus, despite its size, it feels like 90% of the interior scenes take place in one of four areas: Sarah's office, Clarke's quarters, the room the nephew shares with his mother, and a staircase that is sectioned into four paths, making it look like an amusement park queue line. Clarke bumps his head once or twice, and that's about the extent of him being able to work/spring into action within this supposed labyrinth - it feels like a giant missed opportunity to put a stranger in there and never once have it be much of an issue.

Plus it just feels like an Insidious movie half the time, exacerbated by the fact that Angus "Tucker" Sampson has a supporting role as one of the construction guys. You got the kickass senior citizen telling ghosts off, the kid in jeopardy, and, like the first Insidious, a whole bunch of anonymous spirits with just enough detail to make you think "Huh, wonder what their story is." Yet they focus mainly on one, a guy who shot up a place while wearing a bag over his head. His introduction to the story is quite well done (part of that aforementioned first act that had me thinking this would be a winner), but he poses no real menace to our protagonists, even Clarke, whose character, unlike the others is a fictional person and even primed for being offed on account of his backstory. You don't need a body count for a successful haunted house/ghost movie (see: Poltergeist. Do not see: Poltergeist III, the only one in the series where someone is killed because of the ghost-y stuff), but it helps to at least feel like there's a true danger to the predicament. The earthquake does more of that heavy lifting than the ghosts ever do, which adds to the film's ho-hum final act. Like the Spierig's previous film, Jigsaw, it's one of those movies where I kept hoping that the generic proceedings was misdirection for something grander to come, only for it to end with no such upswing.

Alas, it's at its best when it's simply Mirren and Clarke talking, which probably isn't going to help sell tickets. Mirren is of course one of the best of all time and it's wonderful to have her in a "HMAD" kind of movie, even if it's beneath her talents. She commands the screen like few others and seems to be enjoying going a bit out of her element (this is, I think, her first legit horror movie, though she's been in a few thrillers and sci-fi films), though I hope her top billing doesn't mislead you about her screentime, as she isn't in it nearly as much as Clarke, who we're with for nearly every scene. Luckily for me, I quite like the actor - he's handsome but not in a traditional marquee movie star kind of way, and he's got that Terry O'Quinn/John Vernon kinda vibe to him that will ensure if this kind of more heroic role doesn't suit him he can be a great in-demand villain for the rest of his life if he wants. There's a great bit where he tries to fool Mirren with a magic trick that she susses out instantly (probably even before he finishes the maneuver), and the look on his face is priceless - he knows he cannot pull a fast one on this woman, and I started wishing the movie could just do away with the other characters and let this be some sort of off-kilter "romance" between the two of them as they battle ghosts, instead of stooping to haunted kids making scary sounds.

Basically, it's a January horror movie through and through, but since it's coming out in February I guess I expected a little more out of it. The Spierigs have proven that they are capable (Daybreakers) but fail to give this any real life (the score by one of the brothers is quite nice at times though), and there's only so much Mirren and Clarke can do to keep it interesting. Add in some confusing messaging about guns (it would seem like a shoe-in for an anti-gun approach, but then the bad ghost is defeated by... shooting it) and the fact that we just went through this kind of thing with Insidious 4 and you're left with not a whole lot to recommend a big-screen excursion, even as Super Bowl counter-programming. Save your money to visit the real house or contribute to some kind of gun control charity, because those will have a lasting impact - the movie is already escaping my memory less than 24 hours after seeing it, which is never a good thing. As I've said before, I'd rather see something shockingly bad than aggressively forgettable, but it's much worse when it had all the ingredients for something truly interesting.

What say you?

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