Jessabelle

This movie is the plot of Peter Medak's Changeling with the final twist of Iain Softley's The Skeleton Key. If you've ever seen those movies, you know pretty much what happens in this film. If you haven't I fear this review may spoil three movies.

Jessabelle “Jessie” Laurent (Sarah Snook) is moving into her fiance's (Brian Hallisay) house, when they're both in a car accident, killing her fiance, causing Jessie to have a miscarriage, and leaving her wheelchair-bound. Jessie's only option is to move in with her father (David Andrews) in Louisiana, who she barely knows. Jessie's mother died when she was a baby, and she was raised primarily by her aunt.

Once in her father's home Jessie discovers a box of tapes that her mother made while pregnant, reading tarot. The tapes were supposed to be given to her on her 18^th birthday if anything happened to her mother, but her father had failed to do so. He claims that her mother was suffering from brain cancer while making them, and watching them will only upset Jessie.

The readings are notably inaccurate. Her mother incorrectly predicted that Jessie would not leave their town, was associated with water in some way, and was a home-body. However, she also predicts that there's a female presence in the house that wants Jessie out, and this prediction seems to come true, as a mysterious ghost (Amber Stevens) begins to attack her.

Jessie's father attempts to destroy the tapes, but is attacked and burned to death by the spirit himself. This leaves Jessie to investigate the spirit with her High School friend Preston (Mark Webber). They eventually discover an infant's grave, marked with Jessie's birthday, and her full name, Jessabelle. The police examine the skeleton, and determine that the baby was born alive, but murdered. They also encounter members of a local Voodou-practicing church, all of whom have a strange hatred for Jessie, and by extension anyone associated with her.

The final tape, hidden in the wall, reveals the truth: Before marrying Jessie's father, her mother slept with the black man who taught her to read cards (Vaughn Wilson). When the baby, Jessabelle, was born black, her father murdered her, and adopted Jessie to cover the crime. Her mother then killed herself as part of a ritual that would make it possible for Jessabelle to possess Jessie.

This plot twist has some fairly obvious holes in it. We're shown the baby being born in a hospital, meaning there should be numerous doctors and nurses who knew that Jessabelle was black. It's a small town, she never ran into any of them again? No friends came to congratulate them at the hospital? I'd also be curious to know how her father was able to just get his hands on a white baby so quickly. There's absolutely no attempt to explain where Jessie came from.

As I said at the beginning, the movie has an influence from The Changeling, but that movie did it better. There was actual effort made to explain how the father was able to switch out the babies. Furthermore, The Changeling portrayed the spirit as a confused child. When we're shown Jessabelle, she's portrayed as an adult, who should be well-aware that Jessie had nothing to do with her murder. If she's going to take over Jessie's life, she has to have the faculties of an adult. That removes a lot of the ambiguity of the situation, leaving us with just a murderous spirit.

Beyond that, a lot of the set-up doesn't seem to go anywhere. Preston is married, but his wife (Larisa Oleynik) appears in a single scene. It's strongly implied that Jessabelle intends to seduce him in the body of Jessie, and the issue of his marriage seems like a non-factor. Jessie's fiance is rarely mentioned after her death, as is her pregnancy.

Jessie's limited mobility only comes up in one or two scenes as well, because most scenes either happen around the house, or happen with Preston present. Her father takes away her wheelchair at one point, and throws it in the bayou, but then either fishes it out or gets her a new one by the next morning. The final sequence has her wheelchair being rolled into the bayou with her in it, but she was possessed by a spirit, so the wheelchair seems fairly unimportant to that. Is it really different from just jumping?

The movie certainly isn't horrible, but it isn't great either. It felt like it either had too many re-writes, or not enough. It needed to either have the extra plot-threads expanded, or cut entirely. Still, I've seen much worse.

Wednesday Review - Split

Wow, this one’s late.  I know, I know, I’m sorry, I’ve been busy.  That said, however, I couldn’t pass up the chance to comment on Split.  Now, while I think he’s made definite stinkers like The Village and Lady in the Water, I’m not Shyamalan’s biggest critic.  I enjoyed Devil, and I remember getting a morbid kick out of all the suicides in The Happening, even if I remember nothing else.  Also, I’m on the pro-Visit side, despite the problems I have with the portrayal of mental illness.  All of this aside, yes Split was awesome, and comes complete with a twist that’s both surprising, and genuinely good.

I think Shyamalan has ultimately benefitted from his unlikely partnership with Producer Jason Blum, a man known for producing great trailers for bad-to-mediocre horror films.  This movie feels like something that had Blum’s stamp of approval on it before it ever got close to going in front of a camera.  Despite feeling like a Shyamalan movie, with lots of subtext and subtle moments, the plot ultimately keeps moving at a pace fast enough to insure that no viewers will get bored.  It’s a nice sign of learning from a directly who famously changed studios rather than try to turn Lady in the Water into something anyone outside his immediately family would want to see.

While most of the acting in this movie is great, James McAvoy steals the show.  Based on the trailer I was surprised to hear critics suggesting that he might be up for a Best Actor Oscar next year, but now that I’ve seen his entire performance I completely agree.  While his portrayed of DiD is, of course, absurd, he manages to make us by every second of it, while always keeping us fully aware of exactly who he is.

The premise of the movie is that McAvoy’s character, Kevin, is a man with 23 personalities.  Most of these are completely benevolent personas, but three (or two and a lackey) particularly dangerous personalities have taken control, and kidnapped three teenaged girls in an effort to sacrifice them to a mystical 24^th personality.  This ties in with a therapist who’s been treating Kevin, and who believes that DiD patients can alter their body chemistry to match the personas they assume.

The fact that the Beast eventually does show up, and has dangerous abilities that his counterparts lack, goes without saying.  The twist is where the film finally goes from there, and I have to admit that I didn’t see it coming, and my jaw legitimately dropped.  I’ll suffice it to say that it’s a meta twist.

This movie has my complete endorsement.  I now sincerely hope that Shyamalan’s career is back on track for some time to come.

The Guest

It's been said that if you can produce a horror film that scares 60% of the people who watch it, you've already made a classic. We all have things that scare us, and things that don't. The Guest places me firmly in the 40%. I've heard people rave, but I just didn't enjoy it. If a horror movie is going to have an invisible villain he should be a monster of some kind, like Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers. Occasionally you can get by with a character so fascinating that you don't care about his Mary Sue status, like Hannibal Lector. Unfortunately, this movie has neither.

This film has some obvious similarities to The Hitcher. Both have a murderous drifter, whose completely unstoppable except when the plot says otherwise, and who seems determined to inflict suffering on those around them. Furthermore, both are famed as truly scary movies, which I find downright silly.

The movie actually has a fairly solid premise: A family is mourning the loss of their son Caleb in Afghanistan, and are unexpectedly visited by a member of his unit named David (Dan Stevens). David ingratiates himself with the family, playing each of them like a fiddle, while we gradually realize that he's an extremely dangerous sociopath. The elements are there, especially if they were properly used to examine whether David is an inherently terrible person, or damaged by his experiences in the war. Instead, however, he turns out to be the result of a government experiment to create super-soldiers, who killed the researchers and escaped. This plot line is just silly. As with The Hitcher his intended victims are more effective in combating him than the people trained to deal with someone like him (in that film the police, in this the military).

One thing I have to draw particular attention is Leland Orser as Spencer Peterson, the patriarch of the family. He's performance is just laughable. He seems to be going for a version of Ned Flanders that lost God and found alcohol. His alcoholism is telegraphed from a mile away, but never commented upon directly, and plays no part in the story. Most of the other actors do what they can with what they're given, but he just seems to be living in another movie.

Out of this entire film there was exactly one scene that actually left me truly entertained, and that was pure comedy. After the family son Luke (Brendan Meyer) punches a classmate in the face for calling him a “faggot,” David is brought in with mother Laura (Sheila Kelley) to talk to the principle. David promptly explains to the principle that being called a “faggot” makes Luke the victim of a Hate Crime, and that the Peterson family will be suing the school for allowing such harassment against their son. The scene begins with the Principal stating the school has no choice but to expel Luke, and ends with the Principal begging David to accept a month of after school detention.

Yet another strike against the movie: A major subplot is David's obsession with Anna (Maika Monroe), the Peterson daughter. The truth is, these two actors are both good, but they have no chemistry. It seems incredibly strange to complain that a would-be sexual predator has no chemistry with his intended victim, but in this movie it's true. For most of the film I forgot that David cared about Anna in any way, except when the film was telegraphing it.

We're told in the final act that David has “neurological conditioning” to kill anyone who becomes aware of the experiment that created him. This twist is both nonsensical, and counterproductive to the story. Firstly, the people David initially kills under this “conditioning” know nothing about the experiment, only that he's being hunted by the military. Secondly, the entire idea removes David as a compelling villain, now he's just a puppet. It's as if the filmmakers wanted to make sure we weren't, accidentally, left with a compelling plot line.

The ultimate problem with the movie, however, is that it fails to utilize the one obvious shock it has: Over the course of the movie it's established that there was a “David Collins” resembling the one we're shown in Caleb's unit, but we also find out that this “David” has undergone plastic surgery and is not the real “David Collins.” The obvious twist is that the man is actually Caleb, returned to torment his own family, and sexually assault his own sister. Sadly, the movie is too stupid to do the obvious, which would have at least given us something.

I'm quite disappointed that this is what Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett created as their follow up to You're Next. It's as if they decided to suck all the self-awareness of You're Next out of the film, and leave us only with the un-ironic cliches of 80s films, up to and including the villain dying while giving a big thumbs-up to the heroes, and then turning up alive in the final shot of the film just in case there's money available for a sequel.

Are there worse films? Certainly. There are films for which I feel contempt. For this film I feel only indifference. Perhaps I feel a slight annoyance that I stayed up late on a night when I had to work the next day to get my second viewing of the film in. But that's all I feel. Nothing more, nothing less.

Wednesday Review - The Bye Bye Man

The Bye Bye Man is what happens when good ideas happen to bad directors.  The idea of a supernatural figure who spreads himself like a virus to anyone who merely knows his name is indeed scary.  The chant “Don’t think it, don’t say it” even manages to have a decent ring to it, and does start to sound creepy after a while.  Furthermore, even with some of the obvious CGI, there are some genuinely creepy visuals in this movie. That said, however, this movie falls flat.

I don’t want to say there’s no talent here.  The main character is played by a decent actor, and the director does show a talent for visuals.  I’d also note that pretty much all the jump scares are created by the actual villain.  There’s nary a cat leaping-out to scare our protagonist.

What brings the film down, however, is a weak script and a bad supporting cast.  We not only get exposition spouted out (“I’m a college student, who wants to get married and have kids like my older brother who I admire!”), much of it is delivered in a dull monotone.  Not that they have much to work with, mind you.  When one of the main characters was revealed as a murderer it took me a few minutes to even grasp what had been revealed.  And while the underacting is partially to blame, the main character’s reaction is so weak that I’m fairly certain there was no indication of greater distress from the script or director.

I suspect The Bye Bye Man himself had much of his role cut out.  He’s given very specific motifs: dog, train, coins.  That, combined with his sloppy dress, hints to me that he’s the ghost of some kind of hobo or drifter.  We’re never given any information, however.  Just that he’s a being who can cause you to go insane once you hear the name “The Bye Bye Man.”

There are also sporadic flashbacks to 1969, and the BBMs previous appearance.  This likely tied into his backstory at some point, as the entire sequence feels cut short.  It tells us very little we don’t learn in the main, present-day, story.  The Bye Bye Man attacked people once before, his name was written down to be discovered in the future, and now he’s back.

So, do I recommend this movie?  I recommend spending enough money on it to justify a prequel, set in 1969, and giving us the history of the BBM.  I also recommend it if you want a few creepy visuals, and some laughably awful moments.  I can see this movie lasting for a while as a cult feature.