Wednesday Review: Don't Breathe

This movie is okay. Not great, but okay.

I really didn’t expect to be saying that, and after all the hype this movie has been getting from critics I feel a little like the jerk coming in to pee in everyone’s cheerios. I feel almost like heaping praise on Don’t Breathe is expected from a guy who praised The Forest. But, the bottom line is that this movie takes an awesome premise and fails to stick with it.

The premise of the movie, for anyone who missed the ads, is that a group of teenagers break into the house of an elderly blind veteran with a large settlement from the family of the woman who killed his daughter in a car accident. The thieves think that the old man will be an easy target, and plan to leave town with their money. Little do they know, however, that the old man has extensive military training that still makes him deadly without his sight. Once the expendable jerk is gone, the cat-and-mouse game begins. Our heroes have to prevent the man from learning their were additional intruders or, failing that, prevent him from locating them.

Discussing the good: The movie does a good job of making you care about the kind of people who would rob a blind man, by establishing that our main character is truly desperate, our secondary protagonist is trying to help her, and the last one is the expendable jerk they don’t like. Many of the early scenes involving the blind man are also quite well done. It’s fascinating to watch how a man used to experiencing the world without his sight has learned to piece together the information he can gather at a moment’s notice, and it’s done without the kind of superhuman woo we get from Daredevil. He touches something that shouldn’t be there, and is able to grasp it’s significance in a second.

Other critics have noted that the twists in this movie were not really needed, but generally felt that they didn’t completely kill the movie. I, however, feel that the multiple twists did exactly that, breaking with a pattern that was strong enough to sustain a full movie. There were plenty of situations the writers could have presented with just the teenagers dodging the old man to fill up an hour and a half.

In the final act, the plot becomes downright ludicrous. Any tension or suspense created by the realism of the setting is pretty much gone, as we go further and further into wacko silly land. The movie has multiple false endings that serve no purpose except to keep the story going.

My friend James did a YouTube video a while back discussing the problems with Blumhouse movies, and while this isn’t one of theirs, I think it has the same basic problem: It doesn’t feel like it was written as a single story. I get the distinct impression that much of the last act was tacked on to an already written script to make it feature length.

The most obvious example of this is that the Blind Man’s abilities change over the course of the movie. Early on it’s established that he’s good at reacting to his hearing, but his hearing itself is often shown to be no better than that of a normal person. If anything his hearing seems to be going, as he frequently has trouble hearing things from a distance, or hearing one sound over another. Later in the movie, however, a loud noise can easily disable him like he’s a bat.

Also, just an aside: It was slightly over a year ago that TheGift came out. Did someone just decide that every August there should be a horror movie featuring gratuitous rape? This movie isn’t as disturbing as The Gift, but it’s use of rape really feels like it’s there just to shock, not to add to the story.

So, do I recommend this movie? Maybe, but probably not at full price. It’s better than a lot of horror, but it doesn’t live up to the current hype.

Masters of Horror: Episode 19 Pelts

I have no idea how the fur industry works in real life. I really doubt that showing off a single racoon-skin fur coat at a fur show, no matter how nice it is, would produce a great deal of profit if the maker did not have the means of producing more of the same quality. Isn't showing what's available the entire point of fashion shows? Jake Feldman (Meat Loaf) makes an effort to get more coons of the same kind at one point in the episode, but it really doesn't seem to be a major part of his plan. That plot point takes up only a few minutes, and mainly serves for exposition.

This really isn't a strike against the episode, however. Dario Argento is the master of stories that make absolutely no sense. I literally had to read the Wikipedia article on this episode to even understand how the curse worked. Like most of his work, this is a story driven by emotion. Here, that emotion is effective. We don't really care about the intricacies of how humans intend to turn a profit, the fact that they mean to turn a profit from the suffering of other creatures at all is sufficient.

The plot is kicked off by a fur trapper and his son (John Saxon and Michael Suchánek) who sneak onto private land owned by a strange elderly woman named Mother Maytar (Brenda McDonald) to trap racoons. They find that the skins they retrieve are supernaturally beautiful, and contact Feldman to sell them. By the time he arrives, however, both of the trappers are dead, the younger having killed his father, and then offed himself in a raccoon trap.

Feldman takes the furs, determined to make a beautiful coat to show off at a major fur show. He's also hoping to impress a stripper named Shanna (Ellen Ewusie) he tried to rape earlier in the episode. Why he's still allowed in the strip-club, or why she'll still talk to him, I don't claim to know. After the attempted rape she treats him mostly as an annoying, pushy, jackass client for the rest of the episode, but never as a threat.

The episode is based on a short story by F Paul Wilson. While I haven't read the story, according to tvtropes it ended with a homeless woman finding the coat. This woman is unaffected by the curse because she only wants it for warmth. This episode has a much grislier conclusion. I think this may be for the best. The curse doesn't really see a person working in a sweat shop making a coat as any less of a profiteer than the shop's owner or the trappers, so I can't see how heat wouldn't be a form of profit in the eyes of the curse.

Argento's narrative here is fairly straightforward, at least by the standards of Argento. He plays around with chronology a bit, but in fairly predictable ways. We're shown the gory aftermath, and then we're shown the death. The deaths are mostly karmic punishments for the deaths and desecration of the racoons. A woman sews up her face, a man is gutted, a woman dies with her hand trapped in an elevator similar to the racoon trap, and of course Feldman skins himself.

The best attribute here, however, is Meat Loaf. After Fight Club it's surprising to see him as such an asshole, but he plays the role perfectly. His attempted rape early in the episode is distracting, and should have either had more consequences, or been left out entirely. We didn't need that to tell us he's a sexist piece of shit.

That said, however, this is probably the best work by Argento I've seen to date, although I don't claim to be an aficionado of Italian horror. I know what I like, though, and I like this episode. It's gory, it's fun, it moves at a steady pace, and I like Meat Loaf.

Masters of Horror: Episode 18 Pro-Life

This is a good episode. It’s disappointing mainly because it’s John Carpenter’s second and final entry in this series, and it doesn’t even come close to re-capturing the glory of Cigarette Burns. Where that episode was a thoughtful deliberation on the nature of film, this episode’s pro-choice message has all the subtlety of a sack of bricks to the face.

As with many Masters of Horror episodes, this is an otherwise forgettable story, saved by great actors. Ron Perlman in particularly is always awesome. Bill Dow can also hold his own as a counter-force to Perlman, and the fact that he’s not a better known actor is sad. Looking over his IMDB page he’s guest starred on countless shows, but the highest episode count I could find for a single series was 8, so he's clearly far from a break-out star.

A girl named Angelique (Caitlin Wachs) shows up at an abortion clinic, with a late-term pregnancy, but claims she’s only been pregnant for a week. Her father Dwayne (Perlman), as it just so happens, is a pro-Life nut with a restraining order requiring him to remain 400 feet from the property. However, he demands to be given access to his daughter.

Angelique demands an abortion, even threatening to stab her own stomach with a scalpel, but she is underage. Her father, meanwhile, is hearing the “voice of God” ordering him to protect the child. The clinic workers become convinced that Angelique was raped by her father, and attempt to buy time. Before long he’s storming the building with his sons (Graeme McComb, Benjamin Rogers, and Chad Krowchuk), while the baby is reaching through its mother’s stomach to crush the scanner when they attempt an ultrasound.

This is yet another twist that you see coming. Just from my description of the episode, you probably already know that it’s the Devil’s child, and Dwayne is getting his messages from the other team. Quite frankly, this is an episode that should have laid its cards on the table upfront. The acting talent was clearly here to pull off something much more nuanced. Personally, I would love to see a pro-Life zealots confronted with the question of aborting the anti-Christ, rather than being deceived.

The episode also gets props for Dr Kiefer (Dow). He plays an abortion doctor who keeps a bullet-proof vest and gun at the ready for just such an occasion. His shift from dork to badass is awesome, and his eventual, and quite brutal, death at Dwayne’s hands is the most disturbing part of the episode. We're not explicitly given his back story, but it's strongly implied this is not the first time his life has been in danger from pro-lifers.

When Satan finally makes an appearance, it’s fairly generic. He looks like a Buffy-villain. I would have preferred he be kept off-screen. The baby, however, is a bit more creative, clearly drawing inspiration from Carpenter’s The Thing.

The episode is good, yes, but ultimately forgettable. It felt like someone was phoning it in the scripting stage, and with lower production values it might have been a Tales from the Crypt episode. I see it, and I think of what could have been.

Wednesday Editorial: Halloween Returns?

When I first started writing this blog, it was always my intention to use Wednesday both for reviews of recent horror movies, and for editorializing. I haven’t, however, had much to say on the editorial front. Today, however, that changes, because I do want to talk about my feelings on a subject: The new Halloween movie. More specifically, I want to talk about the obstacles I see for this movie to overcome.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I’m excited about this. While I’m not always Jason Blum’s biggest fan, I do know that the guy is a businessman who effectively runs a factory. If he believes there’s a dime to be made with the Halloween name he will make sure that the movie happens. Any quality concerns Blum may bring to the project are washed away by Mike Flanagan in the director’s chair, and John Carpenter himself doing the score.

That said, my question for this production is this: So, what’s the story?

It’s kind of ironic that Halloween has somehow kept its roots firmly planted in the legacy of the first movie, while simultaneously having worse continuity than any other long-running Slasher series. Reviewing the ten films, only Halloween 2 and The Curse of Michael Myers followed up on the previous film without any major retcons. All the others were either alternate continuities, remakes, ignored some or all of the previous sequels, or just outright used an asspull to get out of whatever was established in the last movie (looking at you Halloween 5 and Resurrection). Let’s not even get into how Michael Myers can still see two decades after losing both eyes.

Furthermore, Curse only follows the ending of 5 because the makers of 5 knew that attempting to end the series, and attempting to plan ahead, were both equally pointless. So, 5 gave us a cliffhanger so absurdly vague that the next movie was free to do whatever it damned well pleased, and that’s exactly what Curse did. I’m sure we all remember how that turned out.

Getting off my tangent, however, in spite of all of this wild continuity, one constant has remained that’s almost unheard of in Slasher franchises: Every single film in the series (barring 3, of course) has featured at least one character from the original movie. For Halloween 2 we kept both Dr. Loomis and Laurie, in 4-6 Loomis kept coming back to hunt Michael, and just as Donald Pleasence passed away in real life, Jamie Lee Curtis decided it was time for Laurie Strode to make her return appearance. Then, with the remake and its sequel, both character returned with new actors.

Now, I’m sure lots of people are thinking “Laurie was barely in Resurrection.” That’s exactly right! And that’s why it’s Halloween: Resurrection! That was the one time in the series that the filmmakers tried to cut ties with the original Halloween, and it was an utter disaster.

I’m sure we can all list reasons why Resurrection sucked that are completely independent of Pleasence and Curtis. However, we do have to consider that Halloween is not a fresh franchise open to limitless experimentation. We’ve had decades to learn just what Halloween is, and it’s not a series like Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13^th where you can just place the killer in a new environment and let the blood flow. Michael’s story is tied to that town, that house, and those people, who he killed on that night.

With that in mind, we can begin weeding out what stories can and cannot be told in Halloween at this point. To do so, let’s deal with what’s been done already:

-We’ve dealt with a direct follow-up to the events of the original movie, and seen Michael die (even if it didn’t stick).

-We’ve seen Michael return to attack the offspring of the protagonist of the first movie.

-We’ve explored Michael as a supernatural figure.

-We’ve gotten an explanation for Michael’s origin (and were suitably disappointed).

-We’ve seen the protagonist of the first film return to finish old business.

-We’ve seen Michael attacking people with no connection to the first movie.

-We’ve seen the first movie done again with more emphasis on backstory.

-And most recently, we’ve seen a long, bloody meditation on the significance of family to Michael.

That’s a lot of ideas that have already been used. I’m not going to act as if some of them couldn’t be done better, but if the writers choose to go back down a path they’ve already covered they risk redundancy. We’re currently living in the longest gap between Halloween movies since the series premiered. (The last one came out seven years ago. Previously, the longest gap was six.) Do any of us want to end that drought with a rehash of one of the previous movies, no matter how much better?

Getting (at last) to my point, I think there’s only one story left to be told. Since there’s ample precedent in the series to ignore past movies, they can easily ignore Curse, and bring back Danielle Harris to play Jamie Lloyd as an adult. As a horror geek, this is the best option I can think of. However, it doesn’t seem like the kind of risk Blumhouse is likely to take.

While it’s true Harris is now well-known for her horror roles, and was one of the redeeming features of her two films, Halloween 4 and 5 seem to have a reputation as “the ones that are on cable all October because the rights are cheap, and they’re better than Curse.” (Is that still true? I haven’t really watched television in years.) It seems like it would be too risky for studio execs to go back to a story written out of continuity four films ago.

That said, however, it also seems like the perfect set-up for a great Halloween story that hasn’t really been told yet. While it’s true H20 had Laurie facing her brother after many years, the fact remains that he had terrorized her as a near-adult. To Laurie Michael was a human, if a far from normal one. To Jamie, who faced Michael Myers before she faced puberty, Michael is and always will be the Boogieman.

Furthermore, the family aspect of the story is far more prominent with Jamie than Laurie, giving us ample room to explore the relationship between the two, regardless of whether it’s real or a product of Jamie’s imagination. Laurie found out Michael was her brother well over halfway through his initial rampage. The only film in which Laurie acknowledge a strong fraternal connection with Michael was the Zombie sequel, and even there it’s treated as more a part of her insanity than of her identity. Jamie grew up knowing “my Uncle is the Boogieman,” and in any further sequels would presumably be a functioning adult with many years to incorporate that into her understanding of the world. That’s a very different relationship, and Harris definitely has the chops to pull it off.

Will this happen? Sadly, probably not. However, in the absence of a return by Jamie Lloyd I’m drawing a blank on what new things Michael could get up to. Maybe Mike Flanagan and John Carpenter have better imaginations than me. I certainly hope so.

Masters of Horror: Episode 17 Sounds Like

While I have yet to finish rewatching the whole series, I'm pre-emptively giving Sounds Like the award for the single most depressing episode. It's terrifying, yes, but the terror is often overshadowed by how sorry you feel for this main character who wants nothing more than to feel peace. I think the fact that he's still alive at the end of the episode actually makes it worse. He's found momentary peace, but his suffering is still continuing.

Larry Pearce (Chris Bauer) is a supervisor at a call center. Recently he lost his son (Nicholas Elia), and has since become extremely cold and obsessed with his job. Larry has always had an excellent sense of hearing that helped him with his work, but in the wake of his son's death his hearing becomes better and better, until the most minor sounds cause him annoyance and eventually pain.

I'm not sure how much of this is supernatural, and how much of this is simply Larry suffering from some mental illness brought on by his grief. Much of the early episode could be explained by Larry losing his ability to filter out unwanted information, but by the end he's hearing things human ears shouldn't be able to make out, and seems to be experiencing physical pain from it. Furthermore, there are plenty of scenes that could easily be interpreted as Frank hallucinating, and others that really have no alternative interpretation.

The physical pain is backed up by the emotional trauma that comes with his increased awareness. As he becomes more aware of his surroundings, he becomes less able to navigate human interactions. He knows his wife (Laura Margolis) is planning a second child he doesn't want, and realizes that his therapist (Grant Elliott) is hiding a cigarette addiction. By the end of the episode Larry seems to have completely lost faith in any other human's ability to help him, and the only sound he wants to hear is the one he can't: his son.

The ending of the episode wipes out any remaining ambiguity that Larry was delusional. He's kills his wife, cuts off his external ears (which I'm fairly certain shouldn't have made him entirely deaf, but I attribute that to his hallucination), and is walking towards a sea that seems to have appeared at the end of his street. I imagine that, being unarmed, Larry is about to be grabbed by the police and spend the rest of his life in a mental institution, but that's really not the point of the story.

Personally, I interpret Larry's interactions with his wife as two equally delusional people coming into conflict. She claims to “know” that she's pregnant long before it should even be possible. I could easily imagine another episode telling the same story from her point of view that would be just as sympathetic. She's deluding herself in her need for human contact, while her husband is deluding himself in his need to be left alone.

I do recommend this episode. It feels almost like it's from another show. It's much more high-brow and intellectual than most Masters of Horror episodes. Director Brad Anderson is another contributor whose work I have yet to see, although I've heard wonderful things about both Session 9 and The Machinist. If they're up to the standards of this episode, I imagine I'm in for a treat, but I hope to God those films are less depressing.

Masters of Horror: Episode 16 The V Word

I’m not familiar with Ernest Dickerson’s work beyond a few television episodes, but The V Word made me want to change that. This is another episode that improved upon a second viewing. I think I was thrown my first time through because something seemed off about the episode. Eventually, though, I realized what it was: this is the rare horror story that isn’t actually about the villain. We’re presented with our villain as he’s presented to our protagonist. The buildup does not include indications that they’re being watched, or shots of the villain doing horrible things in shadow. Everything we’re given is their perspective, and the horrifying things that happen to them. Watching the episode with this in mind, it’s fantastic.

The episode succeeds largely because our two protagonists, Justin (Branden Nadon) and Kerry (Arjay Smith), manage to embody the spirit of horror-movie teenagers without ever really making you hate them. They’re both young men with a self-destructive need to assert their own masculinity, but they’re treated with enough sympathy to keep us on their side. Justin lives with a single mother and his sister (Lynda Boyd and Jodelle Ferland), and has an abusive father (Keith Humphrey) who demeans him, and Kerry is African American and seen as too “white” by his brothers (not shown onscreen). So, they decide to break into a morgue where Justin’s cousin works in the classic “I want to see a dead body” (yes, they’re old enough to have been to funerals, but it’s implied they wanted to see the body of a young person). As it happens a vampire named Mr Chaney (Michael Ironside) chose that night to attack the morgue. Kerry is bitten, but Justin abandons him and escapes.

I’m a bit unclear on what happens next: either Kerry, in the process of regenerating, runs to Justin’s house for help and ends up biting Justin, or Mr. Chaney orders the vampirized Kerry to seek out Justin. Either way, this episode feels like the vampire equivalent of American Werewolf. Rather than just whining about “hunger,” we see both fledgeling vampires have huge chunks ripped out of their throats, and the visuals give us a real, visceral sense of what Justin is going through.

We’re eventually given some of Mr. Chaney’s origin: he was a High School teacher fired for inappropriate relationships with students, but we don’t find out how he became a vampire. He’s not the point, though, even though he has control over Kerry for most of the episode. The real drama is the relationship between Justin and Kerry, and their views on vampirism. Kerry takes a practical approach, killing Justin’s abusive father to try to get him to feed on someone not worthy of life, while Justin views the act of killing to save his own life as unacceptable. Chaney is just a sociopathic murderer with a barely-concealed sexual interest in the two young men, and is unable to even maintain control of Kerry when he attempts to force Justin to kill his sister.

With Chaney dead, the two reach a truce: Each decides his own path. Justin ends his life, but Kerry agrees to leave town and to travel the country, feeding to live far away from Justin's family. Unlike some vampire works (*cough*Twilight*cough*) in which the audience is expected to simply accept vampires as sympathetic if they're not currently killing a protagonist, this ending doesn't feel like a gloss-over. The portrayal works because we know Kerry is a killer, and our sympathies with him are tenuous. He’s only moderately better than Chaney.

Upon re-watching the show, this is easily my favorite episode so far. I’d love to see a sequel following Kerry, or a feature-length version of this story. It’s one of the flat-out best vampire tales I’ve ever seen committed to film.

Masters of Horror: Episode 15 Family

I don't usually do sitcoms, so I've never seen a single episode of Cheers. That said, however, being introduced to George Wendt by Family made me want to seek out a few episodes. I don't know his role on that show, but here's he's a great villain. It's not clear if he's evil or simply mentally ill, but either way you find yourself liking him and feeling sad for his situation.

Wendt plays a serial killer named Harold. While we don't get his full back story, it's strongly implied that he was abused as a child. As a result, he desperately wants a family, so he kills people who fit the idyllic look he imagines, removes all their skin, and dresses them up in a Norman Bates-esque manner. The influence of Psycho is clearly here, but Harold comes across as quite different from Norman, somehow more aware of his mental illness and in turn more dangerous.

Harold's family is finally complete, with a wife, daughter, and both grandparents. Then, a monkey wrench is thrown into the plans: Celia and David (Meredith Monroe and Matt Keesler), a new couple, move in next-door, and Harold becomes obsessed with Celia.

This is the point at which we run into some ambiguities regarding Harold's condition. We see that he hallucinates his skeletons as living humans who interact with him, and he also imagines Celia making sexual advances on him right in front of her husband. On the other hand, Harold clearly knows that he has to take steps to cover up his murders, with his “wife” (Frances Flanigan) even advising him that Celia is “too close to home.” So, I'm not entirely sure whether Harold is fully responsible for his own actions.

He eventually “kills” his wife, smashing her skeleton. It's implied that this is a repeated occurrence, with Harold destroying old family members when he becomes obsessed with new people. While he only references one previous wife, we see two new victims and an attempt before he goes after Celia, so either he's been through dozens, or his killing is really starting to take off.

Celia and David, meanwhile, are having a fight over whether or not to have a second child after the loss of their daughter. Eventually, David leaves, and Harold lures Celia over for dinner. Just before he can finish her, though, David ambushes him. As it turns out David and Celia were the real parents of his daughter, who tracked him down so they can torture and kill him. David, being a doctor, intends to keep him alive for as long as possible.

The thing that's amazing in the relationship between these three people is that all are fundamentally evil, and yet still friendly and likable. Even if we excuse the vigilante justice, David and Celia seem to treat Harold's murder as a sick sexual turn-on, planning to have a second child once they've eliminated the man who killed their first.

I don't think anything in this episode really scared me, except perhaps the ending. The idea of being tortured by someone with such an extensive knowledge of human biology is pretty sickening to me. Otherwise, I viewed the episode more as a black comedy, but a very good one. I imagine that someone within the demographics Harold targeted might be more frightened by it (I'm too old to be his child, too young to be his grandpa, and he shows no interest in a same-sex marriage). Even then, George Wendt is just hard to not like.

Masters of Horror: Episode 14 The Damned Thing

The Damned Thing is based on an old short-story by Ambrose Bierce. I've never read that story, and aside from the obvious updates I have no idea how closely this episode adheres to the original story. I bring up the original short-story only to save myself from comments left by readers who felt the need to share this information, under the impression that I didn't know.

This is an episode that gets worse in the re-watching. The first time through the creature seemed mysterious. But, watching it again, with an idea of how it ends, I just found it confusing. The creature was an oil monster that came to kill the descendants of the man who started an oil field in the 1930s. It can apparently attack as an invisible but corporeal force, cause people to kill themselves, cause people to kill each other, or just show up as oil and eat people. Why it needs such variety I don't understand. I'm also rather confused by why it's target seems to be the last person it attacks, plowing through the most of the town first.

The main character, Sheriff Kevin Reddle (Sean Patrick Flannery), is an excellent protagonist. It's like the episode got the hard part right, giving us an interesting protagonist, but screwed up the “scary monster chasing the hero” part. When he was a child his father killed his mother, and chased Kevin with a gun, before being killed by something the locals calls The Damned Thing. Now, Kevin is constantly paranoid, but still feels a need for a connection to the family he lost. So, he lives in his parents' home, but has rigged it up with extensive surveillance. He also dreads his own coming fortieth birthday, and the local priest (Ted Raimi) advises him to come in for confession. His paranoia eventually drove his wife Dina (Marisa Coughlan) to take their son Mikey (Alex Ferris) to live in a trailer instead.

Of course, The Damned Thing reappears with his birthday, and people in the town become both suicidal and homicidal overnight, and Kevin becomes increasingly violent. The Priest, interestingly, becomes violent in general, but also gains a determination to wipe out Kevin's bloodline to end the curse. While I'm not totally clear why some attackers seems incoherent, and others can focus their rage, I think it's effective enough to get me to suspend my disbelief. I'd say a bit too much of the havoc takes place off-screen, but what we get is decent enough.

The ending of the episode left me scratching my head, though. I have no idea if The Damned Thing wants to drag out the torment of Kevin's family, or is just doing whatever it feels like at the moment. Kevin's death has very little parallel with his father's. Kevin's father was attacked by The Damned Thing as an invisible force, Kevin is eaten by the aforementioned oil monster. Furthermore, the father's death marked the end of The Damned Thing's attack until Kevin's fortieth birthday. It's implied, however, that The Damned Thing killed Mikey and Dina immediately after Kevin. Bookends with a more clear parallel would have been far more effective here. Or at least give us a reason for the Damned Thing to want to end the bloodline now

I'm not going to say I hated this episode, but it's among the weakest of the series. It's certainly not fit to be the season premiere. It lacks the punch of Tobe Hooper's usual work, and feels more like a cut-rate Mick Garris/Stephen King miniseries slashed down to an hour, and without King's writing talent.

Wednesday Review: Nerve

It’s interesting to note that I saw Nerve the day after the Nostalgia Critic posted his video “Can a Movie be so Good it’s Bad?” If there ever was such a film, it’s Nerve. This is a movie that’s begging to be turned into entertaining trash, and yet it’s been filled with talented actors and polished to a shine, then capped off with a touching love story.

All of this material would be great…in another movie. In this one, however, it’s just boring. The premise of this movie is that a girl played by the ever-talented Emma Roberts is utterly terrified of taking any risks. After her best friend embarrasses her in front of her crush, she decides In an effort to sign up for the titular online game where “Watchers” pay “Players” increasing amounts of money for escalating series of dares. While her goal is simply to do a single dare to prove she isn’t a coward, over the course of the night the game slowly turning her into more and more of an adrenaline junkie.

She finds herself teamed up with a mysterious man played by Dave Franco at the insistence of the Watchers. Despite this movie’s failure, it’s actually convinced me that Dave is the more talented of the Franco brothers. He sells every scene he’s in, managing to make himself likable, without ever losing his air of mystery until the movie is ready to tell us his backstory.

In a movie dealing with a game played through the internet it goes without saying that hackers will become involved. I’ll say that Hollywood has definitely taken major strides towards understanding how computers work. Some things still don’t make sense to me, but Bitcoin doesn’t make sense to me either, so I’m not going to stand on my high horse and claim that I know anything in this movie to be wrong.

The movie really suffers in the area of pacing. Firstly, there’s definitely room for sexual tension here, treating our protagonists like a serious blossoming romance just slows the film down. Secondly, the dares seem too episodic, ending far too cleanly. For one perfect example: When our heroes are forced to flee a clothing store into the streets of New York in their underwear to avoid shoplifting, the Watchers made sure new clothing was waiting for them when they got out. This means the dare doesn’t disadvantage them in any way going forward.

This is a movie that should be mounting insanity, as we see our heroine worn down and destroyed by the game, even as she grows addicted to it. Seeing her at the end, with her hair still perfect, we’re not really given any indication that she’s changed as a person. If anything, the changes the film shows us are entirely positive, which hardly plays into a movie that builds its entire premise around the cesspool that is anonymous internet culture.

On the flip side, the only character who poses loosely as an antagonist gets minimal screen time, none of which is used to do anything especially villainous. So at the end of the film, when we’re supposed to be afraid of him, I found myself utterly indifferent because the movie had done nothing to establish him as more than just another player. If anything, he comes across as likable and savvy to the game.

As with the rest of the film, the ending is far too neat, wrapping everything up in a nice bow. Quite frankly, the idea that this story could end so easily seems preposterous. It’s like Donald Trump’s promise to “shut down parts of the internet.” The viral destruction of people’s lives doesn’t end quickly or easily, and if you don’t believe me just ask Zoe Quinn.

It’s hard to say I don’t recommend this movie, just for the characters. Beyond that, however, it doesn’t feel like the movie I was promised. Maybe I should have been tipped off by the lack of an R-rating, but this shouldn’t be a movie where people talk about their feelings and the ethical use of technology. It should be a movie where these things are seen through implication.

Masters of Horror: Episode 13 Imprint

This isn't an easy episode to review. Somewhat infamously, Imprint was not aired on Showtime, but instead went straight-to-DVD. Officially the content was considered too shocking, but there is some speculation that it was pulled as a marketing ploy. Certainly I can see the appeal of being able to label the DVD as “too shocking for Showtime!”

This is still a shocking episode, either way. But, some of my concerns with it are not simply the shock itself. I think every critic is at some point confronted with a movie that he or she finds objectionable on some deeper moral level. I remember Roger Ebert's review of Wolf Creek as a great example of that. He saw the movie as well-made, but thoroughly unpleasant to sit through. He said that “there is a line, and this movie crosses it. I don't know where the line is, but it's well North of Wolf Creek.”

In this case my issues are more straight forward: This is an episode that clearly tries to portray the horrors of human trafficking, while simultaneously using sexy Asian women as the victims. The use of shibari and erotic needlework as a form of torture further eroticizes the episode. I'm usually reluctant to say that a work of fiction glorifies sexual violence, but if there's ever been a work which I found difficult to defend from such criticisms, it's this episode.

Both seasons of Masters of Horror included an episode by a Japanese horror director. In this case it's Takashi Miike, director of Audition. With that film I had a great deal of trouble analyzing the story because I lacked the cultural context to tell whether the main character was supposed to be likable, or a sexist pig who got his comeuppance. Here, however, it's clear that Miike is telling a story intended for an American audience.

The episode takes place in the 19^th century, and deals with an American journalist named Christopher (Billy Drago) who comes to a brothel located on a small island. He is looking for his lost love, Komomo (an actress credited as the single name Michié). He's told that's she's not on the island, but that he'll have to stay the night and catch the boat back in the morning. While he's uninterested in sex, he sees a woman with a deformed face (Youki Kudoh) being abused by the Madame, and asks to take her to his room for the night simply to help her.

The woman, whose name is never given, tells Christopher that Komomo was on the island, but hanged herself when she believed her love wasn't coming. The woman also tells Christopher the story of her own childhood, and how she ended up trafficked by her mother, a mid-wife, after her father died.

Christopher suspects the woman is lying, and gradually goads more and more information out of her. With each retelling Komomo's fate becomes more and more horrific. In the second telling Komomo killed herself after having been tortured when she was accused of stealing the Madame's jade ring. The final retelling reveals that the woman had stolen the ring herself, framed Komomo, and then hanged her to make it look like suicide.

The plot then takes an even more bizarre twist, as the woman reveals that she has a parasitic twin concealed on her head (the effect has to be seen to be believed) who wanted the ring. The woman's mother was not a midwife, but an abortionist, who married her abusive brother. The woman was molested by a Buddhist priest, who instilled an intense fear of Hell in her. She believed herself to be evil, and by extension believed that anyone who was friends with her would go to hell with her, but by betraying Komomo and severing their friendship, she could assure Komomo's ascent into heaven.

Putting my objections to the episode aside, it's definitely disturbing. We get to watch as the onion is peeled back, showing us more and more just how deep the tragedy goes. The ending, however, still leaves us with many troubling questions.

Christopher is something of a decoy. We expect the white male to be our protagonist. While the episode does eventually end on him in prison, having killed the woman, this isn't really his story. We get only hints of his backstory. He's there only to be our surrogate, to give the woman someone to tell her life story to.

In a simple yeah or nay, I give this episode another yeah. It's certainly thrilling, and could easily be expanded into a full-length movie. Yes, I have some objections to it, but the bottom line is that it does it's job.

Masters of Horror: Episode 12 Haeckel's Tale

Haeckel's Tale didn't stick out in my mind on my first viewing of this series some years ago. Since then, my tastes have changed a great deal, and looking at it now I find it to be nearly as good as Cigarette Burns. It's directed by John McNaughton, whose Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer I have yet to see, but which I've been meaning to check out for some time.

Just as significantly, it's based on a story by Clive Barker, a Master if ever there was one. I haven't read the original story, but Clive's fingerprints are evident here. Perverted sex is mixed with cosmic horror, as people seek out forbidden pleasures.

The episode is presented as a frame story, with a young man (Steve Bacic) visiting an old witch (Micki Maunsell) to beg for his recently deceased wife to be raised from the dead. The witch tells him that if he listens to the story of Ernst Haeckel (Derek Cecil), and still wishes it, she will agree to bring his wife back.

The story she tells is hinted to take place in the same universe as Frankenstein, and I find the episode to be a thematic inversion. In the original Frankenstein novel Frankenstein was inspired by mysticism, but ultimately found the secrets to reviving the dead in science. Haeckel, on the other hand, is an atheist medical student with the same obsession, but seeking to use science, who eventually discovers that the mysticism he initially rejected was very real.

Haeckel fails in his experiments to restore life to the dead, but hears of a necromancer named Montesquino (Jon Polito). Out of morbid curiosity, Haeckel travels to see Montesquino's show, and watches what he believes to be a scam play out. He fakes interest in learning Montesquino's secrets in an effort to get the man to confess, but is blown off.

Montesquino is an interesting character. I'm not entirely sure the extent to which he's on the level. Yes, he can revive the dead, but he still comes across as quite shady. He claims that every dead person he revives takes a year off his life, but later seems to revive several people for a task that only requires one. He also fails to mention that his revivals only last until sunrise, and the people return as zombies, since he has no means of restoring the soul. I'm also unsure if he actually revived a dog in his show, or just used puppetry just because it was easier.

Haeckel then receives a letter telling him that his father is on the edge of death, and he immediately sets off to see him. When he attempts to sleep next to a cemetery, he's approached by an old man named Wolfram (Tom McBeath), who offers him a place to stay for the night. Wolfram shows very little concern at Haeckel's obvious attraction to his wife Elise (Leela Savasta), who spends the night acting very distracted.

When Montesquino comes in the night and takes Elise away to the cemetery, Haeckel convinces himself that he's fleecing the poor couple. Elise's first husband is dead, and Haeckel determines that Wolfram has paid the necromancer to revive her husband to sexually satisfy Elise. Naturally, Haeckel still believes that Montesquino is a con man, so he assumes the necromancer was doing the job personally. So, Haeckel pursues the to the cemetary, as Wolfram follows him and tries to stop him.

To Haeckel's shock, they walk in on Elise surrounded by zombies, being pleasured by her zombified husband, just as advertised. Haeckel, in a rage, kills Montesquino, while Wolfram is eaten by the zombies. While dying Montesquino reveals to Haeckel that the spell cannot be stopped, he will just have to wait until morning and let it play out.

It's been said of Barker that he re-invented Cosmic Horror, independently of influence from Lovecraft. I find it unlikely that he wasn't at least familiar with Lovecraftian horror, but his concept of a Cosmic Horror Story is quite different. Lovecraft dealt in vague, indefinable concepts. Barker typically deals with human experiences, sexuality especially, distorted in ways that are deeply disturbing. Haeckel believes himself to be above Victorian understandings of good and evil, but upon witnesses the restoration of life he seeks he's just as horrified as any of his fellow Victorians would have been.

The ending is a bit predictable, but not really the point of the episode. It serves mainly to wrap-up loose plot threads, and tie the story together. Haeckel is killed by Elise's zombie child, Elise becomes a necromancer of her own right, and we find out that Elise was the witch from the beginning. More disturbingly, she seems to find the entire affair to be hugely romantic.

This is definitely an episode I recommend. Horror and comedy fuse like peanut butter and jelly, and the episode manages to be both downright disturbing, and absolutely hilarious.