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.

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.