V/H/S

I've found that the hardest films to write about are neither the best nor the worst.  Instead, it's films that simply fail to connect with me, especially after I've already committed myself to reviewing them.  In the case of V/H/S this problem is compounded by the fact that I only occasionally like anthologies, and think that Found Footage is a wildly misused genre.

Don't get me wrong, both formats can work well.  However, in the case of V/H/S we basically get a series of stories that amount to “someone dies a bloody death in a different context than in the previous story.”  I don't feel like I connect with any of these characters, and I don't feel like any of the stories try to set themselves apart visually either.

The film presents itself as a frame story.  A group of criminals who film their horrific crimes are hired to steal a VHS tape from a house.  They find the resident of the house dead, but the house is stocked with hundreds of VHS tapes.  While gathering them up, the criminals begin to watch a few, and witness various people dying in horrific manners, before the resident comes back as a zombie and kills them all.

As with most anthology films, I feel that an in-universe editor would greatly benefit the story.  We're shown the videos themselves, rather than the perspective of the criminals' camera, so clearly someone spliced them in.  What point were they trying to make?  And why not show us even more of the videos?  Why not make some effort to explain how any of these stories are connected?

As for fear, I didn't find any of these stories relatable enough to bother being afraid of.  I'm not someone who brings drunken women to hotel rooms for sex when they can't say no, so the thought of such a woman (Hannah Fierman) turning out to be a monster who plans to eat me doesn’t particularly concern me.  The idea of being killed by my wife's (Sophia Takal) secret lesbian lover (Kate Lyn Shell) isn’t that much of a concern when I can't imagine myself marrying a person conservative enough to be in the closet to begin with (if there was a greater reason for the murder than “I want to be with her” I missed it).  A Jason Voorhees rip-off who can teleport (Bryce Burke) is so far removed from any reality I know that you'd be as well to try to make me afraid of radioactive butter (yes, getting radiation poison from butter would be as horrible as any other source, but until it happens I'm not particularly afraid).  Finally, I find it a bit unbelievable that aliens would use a human woman (Helen Rogers) as an incubator for their young, when they presumably have perfectly good reproductive systems of their own, and barring that could just use livestock (if they can use one species that evolved on another planet, I find it hard to believe others would be a major stretch).

So, in short, I don't get it.  Maybe this movie just wasn't made for me, or maybe I went in with a dislike of both genres.  Lots of other horror fans seem to like it, so I guess there's no harm in checking it out if you're interested.  No recommendation here, but I certainly won't discourage.

Deliver Us from Evil

When I was first starting this blog, I planned to review Deliver us from Evil between The Conjuring and Annabelle.  My reasoning was that the real-life Ralph Sarchie (Eric Bana) worked heavily with the real-life Warrens, so I could kind of squint and pretend I have a trilogy.  However, now The Conjuring 2 is long out, and Annabelle 2 and The Nun are on the horizon (as of editing the former is out), so I’m still doing this because...meh, why not?
That said, this has fairly little to do with the real-life Ralph Sarchie as best I can tell from glancing over his Wikipedia page.  I imagine that if the man had murdered a suspect it would have been mentioned.  But, instead, Wikipedia tells me only that he was raised Catholic, his faith waned, and his faith was restored when he became a demonologist in addition to being a cop.

To deal with the actual movie, however, my feelings on it aren’t that different from my feelings on the original Conjuring.  I’ve said in the past that I don’t relate to movies about demons and the devil, because my beliefs do not include the concept of ultimate good or evil.  If a villain doesn’t have at least some selfish motivation, or a belief that their doing the right thing, then I just can’t relate.

That said, however, this movie lacks even the pretense of being well made or compelling.  We get a bunch of clichés thrown together in a movie that seems to have been shot without a lighting crew, because I can’t tell what’s going on half the time.

Officer Sarchie is a cop with a strained family life because of his work, and a lapsed Catholic dealing with the Problem of Evil.  However, a woman (Olivia Horton) at a zoo goes crazy and murders her own son.  Sarchie is told by the woman’s recovering addict Priest (Edgar Ramirez) that she’s possessed.  The two turn into an unlikely duo, hunting down a possessed marine (Sean Harris) who is turning people into murderers whenever they read ancient text.

Could they at least pretend to take “based on a true story” seriously?  If it was that easy to cause people to become possessed, teenagers would use it as a prank all the time.

Even the exorcism scene at the end gives us nothing new.  There’s no acknowledgement that Sarchie might have seen The Exorcist, or serious attempt to subvert the expectations of the audience.  Just “well, time for an exorcism scene.”

There’s a few creepy images from time to time, but for the most part it’s just a standard cop movie with a supernatural overtone.  People are chased, the exorcism happens in the interrogation room, bodies are found, etc.  Nothing to see here.

This is a bad movie.  The people involved all deserve better.  I’m among the few defenders of Eric Bana’s version of The Hulk, and I feel that he can really pull of great work.  But this is a project that no one cared about, and already I doubt anyone remembers.

Annabelle

Note: As of this posting I’ve decided to wrap up my review for the time being.  I still have several months of posts to edit, but not all of the series I was working on will be reviewed in their entirety.  The only one I still intend to finish is the show Nightmares and Dreamscapes.

This is another case of a movie that was just boring in the theatre being more tolerable in my living room, as I struggle to care enough to pay attention.  Annabelle is a bad film, no doubt, but it’s much harder to be mad at on my television screen.  In fact, after I completed my second viewing of it, I found myself disappointed that I originally saw it in theatres before I began this blog, and was thus unable to compare my current reaction to my earlier viewing.

I have the same bias against this movie that I have against The Conjuring, of course. That is, I don’t believe in absolute good or evil in the sense that this movie promotes it.  However, where the first film was able to at least attempt to squeeze some degree of realism from it’s boring story, Annabelle has gone so far off the tracks of anything Ed and Lorraine Warren ever claimed that it’s impossible not to role your eyes.

Before the events of The Conjuring, John and Mia Form (Annabelle Wallis and Ward Horton) move into a new house in which they hope to raise their first child together.  John, being a loving husband, gives Mia the beautiful antique doll we all saw in the first movie.  However, shortly after they move in, the “real” Annabelle Higgins (even IMDB can’t give me the actress), daughter their neighbors, returns with her boyfriend to kill her parents and attack their neighbors.  John and the police intervene, and Annabelle Higgins commits suicide while holding the doll.

It’s never made entirely clear what kind of bizarro cult Annabelle and her boyfriend were members of.  It’s referred to as satanic, but that could just be the 1970s calling anything outside of monotheism and Eastern religions “Satanism.”  Either way, it seems like a shallow excuse for demon summoning.

Naturally, the doll is possessed by a demon pretending to be the ghost of Annabelle.  If I can say one positive thing about the movie, it’s that they don’t waste our time trying to force a premise we learned in the first move into a twist.  We have a priest on hand (Tony Amendola) ready to tell us that no, it’s not really a ghost, it’s a demon.

The twist we do get, however?  A baby is not able to offer its soul to a demon.  Apparently, that was supposed to be surprising, but the movie tells us that the demon wants a human soul offered willingly, but still expects us to believe that its target is John and Mia’s infant daughter.  No points for figuring out the goal is to get the mother to trade her soul for the child.

The ending confuses me deeply.  Our token black character, Evelyn (Alfie Woodard), leaps out a window in exchange for the infant.  Apparently, this was an attempt to atone for the death of Evelyn’s daughter Ruby, in a car crash she blames herself for.  But, did Evelyn go to hell?  Apparently committing suicide to save her innocent daughter would have sent Mia downstairs, but Ruby’s death was God’s plan?  I have no idea what just happened.

The scene that amused me most in this movie was seeing Tony Amendola attacked by a demon and live.  But, that was more of an inside joke.  My primary reason for getting frustrated with Stargate: SG-1 was the show’s utter unwillingness to kill off any important characters after ten years.  I’m a believer in the occasional character death as a necessary sacrifice for good drama, and Amendola’s character practically had “I will be a martyr with a great death scene” stapled to his forehead.  Notably, I directly asked him at a convention if there was ever talk of killing off Bra’tac, and he confirmed “all the time!”  Apparently Amendola just won’t die.

But, overall, there isn’t much to recommend here.  It’s a bad movie, you might not regret watching it on DVD, but people don’t regret much on DVD.  There are better time wasters out there.