Deathgasm

Deathgasm is a movie with sincerity.  In a day when movies thrive on subversion and deconstruction, this is a horror movie about teenagers and heavy metal.  It’s a movie that looks at the emotions of a young person without mocking them, or considering them petty.  Our main character, Brodie (Milo Cawthorne), is a child from a broken home living with his conservative Uncle (Colin Moy), and bully cousin David (Nick Hoskins-Smith).

However, whenever Brodie listens to metal music he flashes into a power fantasy, matching the artwork he constantly draws.  While these fantasies are, obviously, contrasted with Brodie’s real life, his real life is never used to diminish his fantasies.  They’re a real, positive part of his life that brings him joy amid pain.  That’s treated as a truly significant part of his life.

Brodie makes a total of three friends in his new life.  The first two are Dion and Giles (Sam Berkley and Daniel Cresswell), two nerds who love D&D.  While we don’t get the same vicarious power trip from the game that we do from Brodie, I’d say this is largely because we only see the game from Brodie’s less-than-interested perspective.  His remaining friend, Zakk (James Blake), is another metalhead a few years older than Brodie, who talks the trio into forming a metal band with him under the name Deathgasm.

Zakk convinces Brodie to seek out the home of a metal legend named Rikki Daggers (Stephen Ure), who he claims lives nearby.  The two find Daggers, and escape with what they think is a record of importance to him, just as Daggers is killed by a mysterious, well-dressed man (I haven’t been able to figure out from the credits).  Instead of a lost record of Daggers, it’s a Rick Astley album (ha ha), with some strange documents in Latin.  Brodie is able to translate them to discover it’s “The Black Hymn,” a medieval prayer to summon demons.

A romance begins to blossom between Brodie and Medina (Kimberley Crossman), who isn’t especially interested in metal music, but finds Brodie to be a sweet and fascinating person.  However, when David threatens Brodie for associating with her, Brodie decides he’s finally had enough, and writes the Black Hymn into a song for the band, leading to much of the town being possessed by demons.

Naturally, this leads to a lot of gory action, as Brodie and Zakk rip through the zombified townspeople (and also his non-possessed cousin, because why not?), while trying to find a way to reverse the possession.  Meanwhile, some human villains do some things.  Honestly, the human villains seem like something of an afterthought.  Above I was unable to even give the actor who played the first of them...he’s then killed by his boss who takes over for a fleeting time, before being killed by his mistress.  However, they’re cheesy, they’re silly, and they do their job until they die.

The final confrontation sees Zakk merging with the demon (he possesses the most evil person present, and that happens to be Zakk).  After a battle, Zakk is returned to human form via metal music, and killed, along with Dion and Giles.  Brodie and Medina become a couple, and live together enjoying metal.  The final scene shows that Zakk’s soul survived, still merged to the demon.

This movie is pure power fantasy.  A lonely, bored teenager gets to be a hero using his favorite thing: metal music.  But, it’s a very positive fantasy.  It’s the story of a teenager who makes a selfish decision to summon dark forces, and then defeats them by becoming a better person.  If there’s a better fantasy that exists than overcoming your own selfish desires I have yet to see it.

Medina’s a classic trophy girl, but far from the worst example.  The movie gives her enough focus for us to see why she likes Brodie, and lets us see how she comes to experience metal music and share his love of it.  We get the motions of her being mad at him, then forgiving him, but it’s a fantasy and it is what it is.

...oh, and it’s a bloody, fun mess of a good time.  Yeah, there’s that too.  I’m sure I could preach forever about how the film portrays gender roles, undercuts ageism, and blah, blah, blah.  But, this is a movie that has a metalhead teenager murdering his demonic aunt and uncle with sex toys and a chainsaw.  This is what gorehounds live for.  You need to see it if you haven’t.

Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of the Pinball Wizard

And so Gary (Ross Hull) returns to tie up the season in an episode that’s...okay.  It’s safely not the worst of the season, The Tale of Jake and the Leprechaun sewed that title up nicely.  However, there have been such high points in this season already that this finale really can’t compete. The Tale of the Captured Souls stands out as a tale head-and-shoulders above this finale.

The opening sequence is a bit more relevant this time.  The Midnight Society are passing around a Gameboy, apparently taking turns playing a game.  The conversation they have seems to indicate that the writers had no idea how a video game works.  I wonder if the actors told them that randomly passing your game system around mid-level without pausing is a fantastic way to lose lives.

Gary, however, asks the ominous question: what if you had a play a game in which you couldn’t just reset.  I found myself asking how such a situation would be “game” specific, rather than simply a description of every important activity we ever do in our lives, or even of life itself.  That said, however, I digress.

The story that Gary tells suffers from one basic problem: the characters seem directionless.  Our main character, Ross (Joe Posca), while not necessarily contradictory, seems to have an almost random assortment of unlikeable traits given to him.  He’s desperate to get ahead, and will steal from a mall wishing well, but when a store owner (AJ Henderson) gives him a single shot at a job, he’s so lazy and game-obsessed that he uses the opportunity to play an antique pinball game he was forbidden from touching.  And lest you think he faked interest in the job to get to the pinball machine, he came asking about the job before seeing the machine.
Yes, such contradictory people exist in the real world.  In fact, almost all of us are bundles of contradictions.  However, in this case the contradictions leave us with no traits to latch onto our main character, and by extension no way to understand what he should or shouldn’t be learning from this life-lesson.  There’s also a love interest (Polly Shannon) thrown in because...reasons…

The boss, Mr. Olson, is even more confusing.  Mr. Olson agrees to hire Ross if he can mind the shop while Mr. Olson is at lunch.  However, Ross is forbidden from touching the cash register, or any of the merchandise.  How Mr. Olson expects him to help a customer I don’t have the first clue, and naturally this suggestion is ignored.  To make it even more confusing: Mr. Olson fearfully warns Ross away from the pinball machine, but the ending of the episode indicates that trapping Ross with it was his intention.

To circle back around: Mr. Olson, having recently fired, another teenager, is reluctant to hire Ross.  His concerns prove to be well founded, as Ross begins playing his antique game the instant he’s out of sight.  The writers seem to confuse pinball with video games, as Ross describes a story he can apparently follow from the ball whizzing around in the machine.  Before Ross knows it, it’s night, he’s locked in the Mall, and Mr. Olson has not returned.

Then, Mannequins in suits begin attacking him, and it soon becomes clear that he’s in the storyline of the pinball game...why a pinball game about medieval fantasy involves mannequins in a modern shopping mall is another thing I don’t know, but there’s also an Executioner (Normand James) and a Witch (Nathalie Gauthier), and his love interest returns as a Princess...also, the characters are afraid of water for some reason…

The final twist: after fighting a series of villains, Ross discovers he’s physically inside the pinball game, and Mr. Olson appears above him to tell him he’ll be playing the game forever.  Given that he learned the first time through “smash the glass, take the super soakers, and you can take out all the enemies easily” I imagine he could hold out for quite some time, unless the rules change in every repetition, which makes the ending seem far less frightening.

Was he supposed to learn to be less selfish from this?  Or less lazy?  More honest?  I’m not sure, and in a half-hour show like this I really shouldn’t have any doubt about the nature of the lesson.

The closing sequence gives minimal indication that’s it’s a season finale.  A standard ending, the Midnight Society are now scared of a Gameboy, and the meeting closes out.  Gary says “till next time” while breaking the fourth wall for a split second, and dousing the fire, but that’s it.  I suspect that they didn’t want kids to know they’d be watching reruns for the next few months, but looking at it in the day of serialized storytelling, it just seems strange for a season finale to not be remarked on.

Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of the Prom Queen

And, in this episode, Kristen (Rachel Blanchard) dresses up in a veil and comes to the Midnight Society late to tell a story that she claims is ancient, and has been retold many times. I was expecting them to pull a twist where a real ghost had replaced Kristen, or make the ending ambiguous. But, nope, she breaks character moments into the episode. Furthermore, this is a story about a Prom Queen’s ghost, so how old could it actually be? This is yet another episode where the introduction seems almost random, and unrelated to the story being told.

Regarding the story, I’m not sure if I’m unusual in my susceptibility to a particular type of twist, or if it’s true of most people: I tend to see the main character as an audience surrogate. So, if you want to get one over on me, just make the twist “the protagonist isn’t who were were led to believe he or she was.” This is how the film Lucky Number Slevin got me, despite the hints. It’s also how this episode got me, despite even more obvious hints.

To go through the basics: We have a protagonist, Dede (Katie Griffin), who says she’s from out of town, shows up shortly before a prom queen’s ghost is set to reappear, is unfamiliar with modern technology, immediately agrees to go on a ghost hunt with two local boys (Graeme Millington and Andre Todorovic), and is shocked when she learns that the prom queen’s boyfriend died shortly after the queen herself. Oh, and her plan to deal with the ghost? Convince her boyfriend’s spirit to come and pick her up, as she was apparently hit by a truck when he didn’t get a message to come for her.

And that’s just an over-view. Going scene-by-scene I could break down how every single moment of this episode screams “she’s a ghost!” Analyzing the actual plot is much simpler than analyzing the hints: She’s at a cemetery, she meets the two boys named Jam and Greg. Jam tells her the story of a prom queen who died in an accident because her boyfriend didn’t know to pick her up. They team up, and go to the library to see if there are any records of such an incident, and find that there are...and that the boyfriend, Ricky (Matthew MacKay) died in a crash shortly afterward (the episode leaves it unclear if this was suicide, or an accident caused by his emotional state). They hold a séance at the river where he died, and something strange starts moving in the water and chases them.

Returning to the cemetery at the appropriate time, a cloaked figure appears, and Greg confronts it to find...Jam’s cousin Chuck (Amyas Godfrey) playing a prank...and then Ricky shows up in a car, and Judy magically changes into her prom dress. Surprise! And it got me. Dede was a nickname for Judy, the name of the girl who died.

I do have to give this episode credit for all the hints. While Dede’s demeanor was never quite that of a girl from fifty years in the past, a fair amount of outdated slang was thrown in. Also, her clothes were simple enough to keep her temporal location ambiguous. They were probably a bit masculine for a woman in the fifties, but they likely could have at least existed in that time period.

Is the episode scary? Not really. Not supposed to be. Ghosts exist...and they’re perfectly fine people. They mean no one harm. The show does seem to equate “supernatural” with “scary,” which isn’t always the case, but it works as a story.

Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of the Dark Music

For this review I won’t pretend that I haven’t read the relevant wiki for this show: Jacob Tierney, the actor who plays Eric, left before the second season and Eric disappeared from the group without explanation. That makes this second story, told right after the first, his final chance to impress. It certainly out-performs his first attempt, and I’d say is overall one of the better, if not the best, episodes so far. However, I feel that it’s quality may almost be accidental.

Eleven episodes in and I’m finally starting to understand the show enough to level some real criticisms in it’s direction. While this will make two reviews in a row where I start by ranting away in a tangent, I’m going to just run with it, because I think it definitely relates to what makes this episodes so good.

I think with a show like this, the production staff must have sat down at some point and asked questions of tone. To what extent should the different stories have a consistent tone, and to what extent should they shake up the formula. I think that, for the most part, the episodes up until now have been more-or-less consistent in their tone. They shake it up a bit on their range between humor and horror, but both still have to be present. You can’t scare the kiddies too much, but you also can’t risk making an episode all laughs and having them worry they’re watching the wrong show.

I also noticed that The Tale of Laughing in the Dark is the only episode in which the horror might have a rational explanation. Technically that makes this show as much if not more a sci-fi/fantasy anthology, than a horror anthology. However, this is understandable as the kind of horrors humans usually visit on each other are hardly family friendly.

So, The Tale of the Dark Music gets points simply because it does vary quite a bit from the standard tone. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen to the show staying completely straight in horror, and it has some legitimately frightening visuals. Having the main character (Graham Selkirk) turn evil at the end doesn’t hurt either, and I suspect the host segment reassuring us that he doesn’t actually murder his sister (Jennie Levesque) may have been added in.

The host segments in general for this episode are quite weak. Apparently the theme of this episode is supposed to be fear of the dark. Frank (Jason Alisharan) is mad that Eric left him in the woods without a flashlight. The main story has nothing to do with the dark, except that the horror is in a dark basement, and since most bad things in this show happen in dark places that hardly helps.

Andy, our main character, moves into a new house his mother (Kathryn Graves) inherited from a great-uncle he had never met or heard of. The uncle was apparently a recluse, who somehow made a fortune without ever leaving his house. He was hated by the neighbors, and a boy named Koda (Leif Anderson) immediately attacks him for simply being related to the old man. I think we’re supposed to interpret Koda’s father (Ian MacDonald) as abusive, and feel some sympathy for him, but all Mr. Koda does is tell his son not to talk back, and that he will have to do chores to earn his allowance (apparently by scrubbing the front steps for hours, as we never see him do any other work), so on this count they fell down.

As Andy helps his mother around the house, he makes several trips into the basement, in which strange things begin to happen. Each time, something strange, comes from a closet to greet Andy and invite him to join it. Over the course of the episode we get a glowing set of red eyes, a giant doll, and a carnival barker (AJ Henderson) who turns into a skeleton.

Intermixed with the basement and Koda’s periodic attacks, we see Andy trying to be the ideal son. He delivers newspapers, helps his mother around the house, and tries to take care of his bratty little sister. His character is established well without the need for two much exposition: despite now living in a big house, he’s an underpriviledged kid who feels that his lot in life is unfair.

Two events come together to create the climax: Koda destroys Andy’s bike, and Andy realizes that the force in the closet is summoned by music (no explanation why, but we don’t really need one). In an effort to simply punish Koda for his bullying, Andy lures him into the basement, locks him in, and blasts the music. When he comes to see the cowed bully, he finds that Koda is gone, but has been replaced by a new bicycle.

The closet opens, and a voice tells Andy that it will give him anything he wants as long as he feeds the being in the closet, just as he did his uncle. Just then his sister comes home saying the famous last words “Mom says you have to make me dinner.” We then get the aforementioned cop-out on the ending.

I imagine that if this show had been lower on humor and heavier on pure horror, this episode probably wouldn’t have impressed me as much. That said, with the season we have, this episode stands above most of the previous offerings. Definitely one to check out.