The Conjuring 2

James Wan, 2016, Canada-USA

Oh, surely full of the kind of stuff that a horror audience usually both laughs at and with: although not really marred by bad acting, it has bad dialogue and an over-earnestness that only amplifies the condescension of the conceit that this is a “true story”. Oh, it’s bad with a lack of focus because it’s so busy squeezing out a franchise. The popularity of the extending empires of James Wan’s ‘Insidious’ and ‘The Conjuring’ is probably down to the most obvious mainstreaming of horror slickly reduced to the noise/jump scares: not that horror fans don’t like them too, but they also act like your unhip uncle’s idea of “scareee” and “spookeeee”. They don’t care for depth, just noise/jump-scares that are supposed to sate that most superficial and perpetual horror qualification of “Was it scary?” Now, there is nothing wrong with just being a vehicle of dispensing horror vignettes – the recent ‘Terrified’ and ‘The Grudge’ series does that nicely – but for any artistry Wan has, there is something phoney at work here. 

‘The Conjuring 2’ feels like his laziest yet, not really providing a truly distinctive scare or surprising set-up and frequently veering into unintentional comedy. The use of “I Started a Joke” to accompany the emotional moment when the girl is found falsifying the possession is hilarious – and then it rains for some pathetic fallacy; but I laughed out loud from the first chunk of dialogue when Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) is conducting a séance in Amityville (!) and tells those around the table, “Envision yourself in a halo of glowing white light. It will protect you.” It’s too professional to be in ‘Troll 2’ territory but it’s wading in the same shallow waters. But then again ‘Troll 2’ was sincerely intended, not realising how deliriously stupid and delightfully inept it was being*; ‘The Conjuring’ franchise by contrast is deeply cynical, peddling noise scares as fear and the “True Story” as some badge of validation, ransacking the grift of a couple of con artists for material.

It cares not for the truth: if it did, “Annabelle” would be a seemingly innocuous rag doll and the original “demon” Valek plaguing the Hodgsons wouldn’t have been swapped for the more franchise-friendly Nun; not that Valek was “the truth”, but just that his replacement by the Nun shows how fast and loose this will play with the source. And it also shoe-horns in The Crooked Man. The thing with ‘The Exorcist’ however silly it may be (and silliness is a general genre ingredient), there is no doubt that it absolutely and vividly believes in itself and so the silliness doesn’t matter; it doesn’t register because it’s too busy being unnerving. But yes, streaming trivia pop-up does say this is "loosely based" on the Warren's Enfield investigation and it's probably redundant to expect credibility. ‘The Conjuring 2’ is so starkly a shrug at the lowest common demands of horror tricks it has the conviction of someone jumping from a closet shouting “Boo!” and then getting all unconvincingly serious and earnest about the motivation.

With ‘The Conjuring’, there was at least no doubt that James Wan could stage and frame a scare, but aside from a prolonged Nun sequence in this sequel, this just feels indifferent and baggy. It’s unnecessarily over two hours long, which I guess allows for the inclusion of Patrick Wilson’s Elvis impersonation and gives him time to knock up a painting of The Nun (!) (“Hey, I know I’m no Picasso but I didn’t think it was that bad.”). It also allows a brief trip to Amityville at the start, but despite a pleasing reveal of the iconic Amityville windows (which can be seen as a nice nod to horror aficionados) it appears that that “true story” was just another set-up for The Nun.

In Enfield, Wan seems to have no idea that the cramped interiors of an English house would allow for all kinds of memorable claustrophobia and cramped cold corners: instead, we get a house with the most unconvincing interior; it’s too big and no poor family on their last pennies would not have such a place (and the “Trivia” pop up when streaming points out that the spooky chair’s corner changes size repeatedly). What’s amusing is that the film closes with a series of pictures of the real Enfield haunting and Hodgsons which imply the actual cramped conditions. And what about that seemingly permanently flooded basement? …and why don’t they just get rid of the apparently possessed chair? I’m sure the Warrens could have found space for it in their lounge.

And it’s a shame because Wan has proven he can set-up trashy scares (even if he then hammers the point home) and the cast of kids all seem to be acting with a great conviction even as the dialogue lets them down. It’s bright and glossy enough, but it’s unconvincing and has that unintentional comedy in that special way that horror can provide.  

·        See Michael Stephenson’s ‘Best Worst Movie’ on the making of ‘Troll 2’.

mother!

Darren Aronofsky, 2017, USA

The trailer for ‘mother!’ was shown frequently at FrightFest 2017 and it seemed to be a home invasion/scary cult ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ kind of thing: I was thinking that the trailer gave away too much. But of course, now I see that is all those things too but that a trailer could not give it all away even if it tried, because Arofonsly’s latest is all allegory and that’s the kind of thing a teaser cannot convey. I went into it with a horror fan’s mindset, feeling unease at the infiltration of the domestic setting between Jennifer Lawrence (“Mother”) and Javier Badhem (“Him”), enjoying the bonkers escalation of events when their siblings turn up. But by the time it becomes clear this is all symbolism and metaphor, such tension dissipates and the main job is to decode and ride the escalation of events as things go off the rails. 

And then, as they are all symbols, it becomes apparent that involvement with the characters as personalities is moot, although Lawrence and Badhem and the cast in general are great: they provide the human ingredient. There is a lot of humour and farce to be had in the scenario of people just turning up all the time – and Michelle Pfeiffer’s increasing scathing looks got frequent laughs when I saw it – and there is a underlying affinity with schlock and exploitation that is surely being lost on people that simply see it as pretentious: this is in accord with Aronofsky’s previous work as much as the religious allusions. It has a visceral full-throttle and swelling trajectory that is surely derived from the horror genre.

When I first came out I said that I didn’t think there was much to decode: but that is obviously wrong and what I think I meant was that it it’s so evidently an allegory that there is no mystery. Aronofsky has posited ‘mother!’ as an allegory for our times: Lawrence represents mother Earth and so on; and then there are the multitude of religious references. But I am of the mind that people think religious references instantaneously meaningful instead of lazy and obvious and I am not the receptive audience for parables. A friend of mine saw it as an allegory for abusive relationships. Indeed, it can easily be seen as a tale of how men use young women up and then just move on: if you find this critical of patriarchy may depend on whether you think Aronofsky is being empathic or guilty of relishing a little too much the suffering of women (I tend to think it’s sympathetic, but like ‘Black Swan’, it treads a fine line). And if one subscribes to its value as parable, it can be read as equally as scathing of how religion abuses women as ‘Martyrs’. 

As I am not one to think religious insinuation is intrinsically profound, my interpretation was that ‘mother!’ was an allegory for the creative process with Jennifer Lawrence being the somewhat mistreated muse. You let the fans in, they inspire you, they are weird, have a party with and start wars/arguments over your art and eventually they tear it all apart with their cult fandom – they find the unbraced sink of weakness and test it until it brings the wall down – and then you have to start again with a new muse. That such a conceit has been promoted in such a mainstream style amuses me no end. It’s going to be so divisive –and it is – because it isn’t what you expect and behaves more like one of those films that mainstream audiences hate (and where the goal was to get people through the door, the promotion surely worked). It’s certainly a film that grows in stature upon consideration afterwards – if you do like it at all – but as a film that straddles the absurdities of the horror genre and the pomp of art cinema, it’s certainly a go-for-broke effort. 

FrightFest 2017 - Day 2

Ugh, well I couldn’t get the time off work so I had to miss the first three films on Friday. These things happen. My FrightFest friends vouched for ‘Freehold’ (Dominic Bridges), ‘Sequence Break’ (Graham Skipper) and ‘Radius’ (Caroline Labrche & Steeve Lonard). So I did end up thinking I had missed out. I’ll catch up with them later.

On the plus side, the whole weekend had glorious weather so once work was over and I rushed to Leicester Square and took my seat, all was right with the world. Dark stuff within; sunshine without.

68 Kill

Trent Haaga. USA. 2017-08-30

A totally winning comedy-thriller where women are nearly all trouble for a guy who evidently likes them a little crazy. Chip’s a pushover who doesn’t quite realise how crazy his girlfriend is until she persuades him to help her rob a house. Then it goes wrong, of course, and it’s all killing and lunacy from thereon as he tries to negotiate all the bloodshed and women around him. Fast, furious and funny, it’s the kind of noir-ish plotting where one bad thing leads to another extreme thing. Female empowerment means that the women are just as demented as any man, but there’s texture as AnnLynne McCord as Liza effortlessly flipflops between psychopathy, goofiness, sexiness and forcefulness.

As Chip, Matthew Gray Gubler manages to avoid making his character a pathetic sad sack but rather a smart guy who can’t help being gullible for assertive women. Its wink at the audience is sly without being its overt goal so we can all feel in on the joke without being pandered to. Its ultimate “women-are-just-trouble” coda may unintentionally tilt towards a misogynistic aftertaste, but that isn’t the whole story and this is a thorough riot of a horror-farce that puts women as the ringleaders.

LEATHERFACE 

Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury. 2017. USA

The fact that Bustillo and Maury were directing what was presumably an unpromising cash-in prequel meant that I was intrigued and open-minded about ‘Leatherface’ than I otherwise would have been. They’re the team behind ‘Inside’, ‘Livide’ and ‘Among the Living’ after all. At the very lkeast, they're so good at bacvkdrop and locale. Like ‘Among the Living’ (which I also saw at FrightFest), ‘Leatherface’ feels like a far stronger, less conventional film is trying to get out; but ‘Leatherface’ doesn’t even quite exhibit the sheer cruelty of ‘Living’. Young Leatherface is taken from his family and incarcerated in a mental institution, which, as a teenager, he then escapes with a bunch of others. I admit, it wasn’t quite clear to me that this was meant to be a game of guess-who-Leatherface-will-turn-out-to-be, but otherwise it’s a solid but unremarkable thriller of delinquents on the run from equally barbaric cops. It’s slick and better than it ought to be, but only Lili Taylor as psycho-mum really stands out.

And, of course, the announcement of the death of Tobe Hooper also cast a shadow over this title.

DEAD SHACK

Peter Ricq. 2017. Canada

On the whim of a mostly dopey dad, a family goes to a holiday home in the middle of nowhere to bond; unfortunately, the neighbouring lady has an undead family to feed… And so here’s a scenario where none of the good guys are really up to the task, the teenagers being a little immature and the dad being irresponsible, drinking and doping and disbelieving. ‘Dead Shack’ takes the familiar farcical premise of some American family comedy and gives it directions to the nearest rural horror shack. Donavon Stinson gives a glorious turn as dad – truly distinguishing the chaos – and Lauren Holly grounds things with seriousness and armour as the neighbour.  As the teenagers take charge of proceedings without being overtly precocious – Gabriel LaBelle is that annoyingly smartass pal without being obnoxious – it emerges like a ‘Goosebumps’ premise or some other teen-leaning horror except they forgot to water it down for the kids. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing as ‘Dead Shack’ maintains its horror-comedy gruel until the end when it hits a hits a few serious notes to try and give the romp some substance. It’s a lot of fun.

I am the pretty thing that lives in the house

Oz Perkins, 2016, USA-Canada

Generally my superficial rule for ghost story satisfaction is that it be waist-deep in atmosphere and comes bearing one big scare. ‘I am the pretty thing that lives in the house’ delivers this, although I am sure its slow pace and somnambulistic narration will put many off; yes, your mileage may vary. It’s arty and modern in execution but old-fashioned in sentiment.  Director Osgood Perkins (son of Anthony) offers the complete opposite of the James Wan style ghosts, those that blur into demonology and embolden the concept of the horror genre as cattle-prod cinema. They don't even have the malevolence of those in MR James. These ghosts just wander around – like cinematographer Julie Kirkwoods’ camera that seems to get into every corner – and it’s the human’s reactions to them that defines the encounter. It’s a bold move, to resist making the ghosts engage in the pro-active behaviour of poltergeists to force scares, to simply allow their presence just to seep into the wallpaper over years. In fact, it’s just about popularist suicide to draw out the aesthetic and not to give in to conventions as they are now for the genre, for commercial cinema doesn’t really like to wait five minutes for things to happen. It seems that Netflix is showing that they can be backers and home to these cult offerings that won’t be for everyone.*

But this is a tale slight of narrative (some may say underwritten) and acute with atmosphere. I don’t tend to like voiceovers but here it is essential to the mood as it is a voiceover with character agenda as opposed to a narrative expositioning and filling in gaps or telling you what you are seeing. It works much like a hypnotist’s voice, quietly lulling the viewer as it’s saying how the ghosts of houses just allow tenants rent the space. Lily (Ruth Wilson) is a loner, retreating from a soured relationship by taking a job as a carer for a once successful author (Paula Prentiss). But she’s walked into an already haunted scenario. And it’s a feminine one too, pinned upon the vulnerabilities of characters as many great ghost stories are.

You may be thoroughly bored at the slow-slow-burn, or you may wallow in the measured unfolding, the deliberate passing of time. Its uncompromising nature is what distinguishes it, the thing to be celebrated. Have ghosts ever been portrayed so prosaically? Here they creep around and have an afterlife consciousness that is surely candidate for the closest rendering of the ambivalent but pervasive existence ghosts are often imagined to have in the casual encounters we all anecdotally hear. We see the ghosts long before Ruth does, time quite falling upon itself as impressions such as prose poetry and balladry take over the idea of straightforward narrative as we wait all the while for Ruth to have an encounter. And we know she will: “Three days ago I turned 28 years old,” she begins; “I will never be 29.” You can feel the makers relishing the old-fashioned tropes and showing that, yes, they still work. Yeah, and I did jump at that one scare and marvelled at its banality in retrospect (it’s all in the editing and reaction). 

·        Even Netflix offerings such as ‘iBoy’ are surely to be commended for their efforts in demonstrating low-budget ambition over big budget tendency to play safe.

Under the Shadow

 زیر سایه‎‎ ~ Zir-e Sayeh

Babak Anvari, 2016, UK-Jordan-Qatar-Iran

There’s something malicious haunting the apartment, which is old news - but  what will be mostly new for a Western viewer is the Iranian context. Set during Iran’s war with Iraq, Shideh (Narges Rashidi) seems to be trying to break out of the confines that being a woman in a man’s society imposes on her. She is grieving over the loss of a mother that had bigger dreams for her than just maternity and her frustrations are apparent in her prickly personality. It’s striking and complex portrayal by Narges Rashidi that highlights how bland her equivalents are in other similar films as she vents by working out to illegal Jane Fonda videos, argues through impulse rather than logic and then softens up to play tea party with her daughter. In fact, the workaday, unquestionable, unsentimental but loving portrayal of motherhood the film presents puts it firmly in recognisable reality that is refreshing in its honesty. This is greatly helped by a non-cherubic but winning performance by young Avin Manshadi as Dorsa. All this is the film taking its time to establish characters and context before a missile pokes into the building, which is when her daughters says it let in Djinns that proceed to take things, come through cracks in ceilings and threaten possession. But the feminist streak is just as vivid as the supernatural, producing the celebrated moment where Shideh quite sensibly simply runs out of the haunted building only to be arrested for not wearing a hajib. (AA Dowd gives a good account of this moment.) But this oppression is there in the smaller moments where Shideh has to hamfistedly hide her video or has to quickly cover herself to answer the door.

And it’s no mistake that djinns resembles a burka or a bed sheets or tablecloth gone mad, tapping into the feminist themes; one apparition resembles a malicious vision of her absent husband merged with the marital bed. It resembles a drama like Asghar Farhadi’s ‘A Separation’ being possessed.

At the screening I attended, one jump scare had the entire audience jumping in their seat en masse. I can’t quite recall when I genuinely jumped in that way and then approached the rest of the film with a genuine unease that resulted from that moment. Make no mistake, if Barak Anvari favours a slow build-up with slightly edgy pacing, he also knows how to unleash a horror funhouse too. This is how you do jump scares; it makes ‘Insidious’ and ‘The Conjuring’ and all their cattle-prod scare ilk look like horror babyfood, no matter how well staged. If you prefer your frights with proper drama, here is a fine example. 

The fact that aside from the Middle Eastern context, this narrative follows mostly familiar beats means that it is sure to have great crossover appeal. This seems assured with its acquisition by Netflix. It’s superior fare that like ‘The Babadook’ – most likely the film it will be most compared to – it uses subtexts as driving themes and its spooks as clear metaphors. This may be too obvious for some but nevertheless, this is engrossing, assured, scary and creepy stuff. 

Salem's Lot

Tobe Hooper, 1979, USA

  

This scared the hell out of me as a kid, so I will always have a soft spot for this Stephen King adaptation that tells of a small American town gradually destroyed by vampires. This deterioration is watched by typical King heroes: a successful novelist and a teenage horror fan. Central is the old Madsen house with a gruesome, haunted reputation and the arrival of antique dealer Straker (James Mason) and his employer Barlow (Reggie Nalder). Overnight, the vampire is delivered to the quiet town in a crate and the deaths begin.

With two genre heavyweights Stephen King and director Tobe Hooper at the helm, expectations were high for this adaptation. The general consensus amongst critics appears to be that King’s novel suffered from the limitations of television, but the novel was never particularly explicit in its horrors. It was more interested in the menace, in atmosphere and weakening community. In this way, the TV film format

seems ideal for King’s picket fence society threatened by the supernatural. The wide cast of secondary yet vividly drawn characters that populate King’s fiction often offer a soap-like backdrop, yet there may be something to Peter Nicholls’ accusation of David Soul being a “predictably wet bit of television casting.”¹ It is up to James Mason to deliver the acting delights in a nicely ambiguous turn as Straker. And it is also true that the moments of horror  that crescendo to a freeze-frame might hint at CBS censorship more than subtlety and yet the lack of gratuitousness doesn’t make any less scary. The same year, John Carpenter’s ‘The Fog’ created a similar community under supernatural threat horror, yet also demonstrated how a film may be both bloodless without compromising its violence too far.

Hooper’s ‘Salem’s Lot’, as Kim Newman has written, is a “respectable rather than devastating” adaptation that lives under the “baleful shadow of ‘Psycho’.”2 He identifies the more typically Hooperesque moment as that when a husband catches his wife and her lover and humiliates them with a shotgun. The feel of this scene - with the over-wrought facial distress and violence implied by editing rather than by outcome - is certainly more akin to ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ than the rather plain direction elsewhere (don’t forget that ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ was relatively bloodless too). For a moment, it seems as if it might transcend the Seventies TV demeanour and head into the  grimness of the period’s more notorious horrors. Nevertheless, there is enjoyment in its long running time and slow build-up of character and incident that is closer to the novel than the 112 minute film that was subsequently edited from the miniseries.

‘Salem Lot’s greatest improvement upon the novel is in its use of the Glick brother vampires. In the novel, what mostly happens off-stage and is known through exposition is here given an unforgettable visual rendition. The vampire boys float outside windows, scraping on the glass, demanding to be let in. It is perhaps the film’s most memorable and chilling image, although certainly not it’s only one. I remember as a young teenager watching ‘Salem’s Lot’ and being terrified, not only by the vampires-at-the-window moments, but also at the graveyard cliffhanger and the Mr Barlow reveal. I remember being excited that it was on television a second time (this was in the prehistoric era where there was no guarantee such a thing would ever surface again) and watching from behind a cushion because I knew it was going to be scary.

The film’s greatest deviation from the novel is in its conception of Barlow the vampire. Hooper has opted to make Barlow a homage to Max Shreck’s ‘Nosferatu’: he is no longer the pretentious, condescending orator of the book; he is now primal and animalistic with Straker now his mouthpiece. Barlow’s entrance is another unexpected shocker, but his appearance gains the story little more than monster-make up which is nevertheless a strong defining image. It is at its best when Barlow invades an ordinary domestic dinner scene. Its ambience and shock moments certainly worked on me again and I am sure this particular mini-series traumatised a generation of horror fans. Those Glick brothers…

In many ways, ‘Salem’s Lot’ is a successful King adaptation. Despite its TV conventions, ‘Salem’s Lot’ manages some rawness, black humour and shocks. It is at least frightening and atmospheric and has aged better than the televised and fondly remembered version of ‘It’. It’s a long way down from here to ‘The Lost Boys’. There is no vampire genre deconstruction as in Romero’s ‘Martin’, but ‘Salem’s Lot’s greatest strength is in allowing the vampires the vivid visual set-ups and juxtapositioning them against the otherwise naturalistic framing. Vampires sitting in rocking chairs and coming to life on autopsy tables will still provide the delights for genre fans. I will always be fond of this TV shocker.

·         Larry Cohen made A Return to Salem’s Lot, another television horror in 1987, but its relationship to the original novel and film was highly tenuous.

·         The 2004 remake of ‘Salem’s Lot’ with Rob Lowe and Donald Sutherland is slicker but it does nothing to improve the story.

·         Stephen King’s anthology ‘Night Shift’ contains a short story that vaguely follows up ‘Salem’s Lot’ called ‘One for the Road’. Typical of the collection, it is a slight, only mildly satisfying short.

*

1              Peter Nicholls,  Fantastic Cinema: an illustrated survey, (Ebury Press, London, 1984) pg. 145.

²               Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies: a critical guide to contemporary horror films, (Harmony Books, New York, 1988) pg. 54.

The Haunting in Connecticut

Peter Cornwell, 2009, USA-Canada

The opening credits of Peter Cornwell’s haunted/possessed house film are an example of the problem of Twenty-First Century supernatural horrors. It starts with a gallery of old black-and-white photographs, pictures of families posing with their dead loved ones in the style of old mementoes. However, this is broken up by flashes of running blood, all red and here-and-now. It is as if the film is anxious about holding the attention without the promise of contemporary gore. Tales of hauntings subsist on atmosphere and build-up, on the slow seeping in, of an unsettling ambience and the character of a troubled building and, usually, correspondingly troubled characters. It seems to be that the tempo of contemporary film-making and modern editing trends is all wrong for a successful supernatural horror. This tempo is so hungry for and anxious about holding audience attention, the audience attention-span being taken as uniformly and shockingly short, that it is oblivious to build-up and ambience. We are barely ten minutes in before we have our first fake-shock courtesy of a dream. This is unnecessary: the film does not know that simply having big, locked, imposing doors in the basement are enough to generate the creeps once our unfortunate protagonist decides to use the basement for a bedroom (!). Perhaps I am being unfair: a film like Fulci’s “The House by the Cemetery” has little rhythm, but it does somehow generate atmosphere and is redeemed by a couple of key set pieces, mainly the cellar denouement. Perhaps then “The Haunting in Connecticut” will pull a similar stunt.

The family has moved into this old big house to be closer to the hospital so that their son can be nearer his cancer treatment. Again, we don’t need scares so early when the pathos of a cancer victim engages our sympathy straight away: decent character involvement around this would hold our attention. Merging the son’s cancer with the haunting pays off dividends, but not as much as it ought: there is no ambiguity as to whether his hallucinations and visions are the product of his illness, for example. The ghosts pop up all over the place, all the time. And then there’s a nasty eye-lid clipping. It’s all too much too soon and counteracts the development of the uncanny that the best ghost stories ask for. The flashbacks should be far spookier than they are, but spooky flashbacks in the modern mainstream are frequently sabotaged by the snappy editing and film effects that refuse to let them breathe. Every supernatural occurrence is edited with jump-cuts, flares, black-outs and juddering effects so that they verge on the incomprehensible and certainly resemble music videos rather than visions of terror. The most hilarious sequence of sped-up editing and exposition is the cliché visit to the library where, seemingly in an hour or two, our characters unearth The Truth. Libraries are often the undoing of supernatural terrors.

There is family interaction winningly modelled on examples such as “Poltergeist” and the performances are all fine, considering the material given. Such schlock often benefits from seasoned actors, but what Virginia Madsen, Martin Donovan and Elias Koteas are doing here other than picking up a pay check is the film’s real mystery. Well, that and why after experiencing terrifying supernatural phenomenon, the family doesn’t just leave. Koteas’ character - a minister also suffering from cancer - is especially silly, reeking more of deux ex machina than genuine character.

The film exhibits ickiness concerning death: a funeral home is obviously an undesirable building and host to all manner of angry spirits; the good family tries to keep bad things away with prayers. Surely this is a product of the side of American culture that has such difficulty dealing with death. It is ironic that so often with horrors that are so softly religious in a Judeo-Christian manner that prayers are inevitably all part of the creepiness, even as they are calling on the supernatural to provide solace and justice in life. Ghost stories often distrust the past, presenting it as a dangerous place, but ghost stories are also about grief and loss. But “The Haunting in Connecticut” is having no truck with death. Indeed, our cancer-ridden hero survives, returns from the dead even, fully recovered from terminal illness. All you need are God’s mysterious ways, which apparently involve a violent haunting, grave robbing and necromancy and a heavy dose of sentimentality. Yes, a haunting cures cancer. It’s an insultingly juvenile vision of mortality and one heavily mired in a denial that I am not even sure the film-makers care about.

To call this muddled, ridiculous and most of all grotesquely offensive is an understatement. If the Horror genre is chiefly concerned with death in all its guises and our fantasies for it, rarely has a religious horror film gone about so nakedly denying its omnipotence.  And not for one minute would I entertain this as a “true story”.    

Insidious 3

Leigh Whannel, 2015, Canada-USA

A prequel to the 'Insidious' franchise that has psychic Elise Rainer (Lin Shaye) helping teenager Quinn (Stefanie Scott) to fend off a demon… ghost… thingy. A shadow waving through a window is creepy indeed but otherwise the jump-scares here are poor imitation for atmosphere. Ambience requires moody lighting, especially turned up to eleventy when Elise speaks of scary things. The dialogue is risible. The characters barely tick boxes: dad doesn’t understand the teenage generation – tick; a younger brother being an annoying younger sibling – tick; a neighbour boy fumbling his way through a crush – tick; etc. Nothing seems to lead on to anything consequential:  for example, the neighbour’s crush disappears (it’s just there to allow for the knock-knock scare); the younger brother has nothing to do; the moment where Quinn walks on broken legs has no lingering effects afterwards (hey, she’s fine!) and when Elise tells the guys to record her trip into the other dimension… well, that contributes nothing. Also, for the record, Quinn surely qualifies for the most unconvincing physical injuries ever.  And then we go into The Further. *snigger* At one point, one of the aggravating stock comic relief ghost hunters says that the name The Further is “cool”, and it’s hard to know if the film is being insistent or having a little fun at its own expense. And for what it’s worth, The Further is nothing more than a gloomy, ill-lit ghost house where Elise bullies victim’s spectres for help and says “Come on, bitch!” to aggressive others. One could try to find a message of overcoming fear here, but… nope. It gets worse as it goes on. Long before Darth Maul cameos at the end for the final nonsensical send-off jump-scare, you’ve long since realised you’re watching a pile of sloppy, uncaring shit.

Crimson Peak

Guillermo Del Toro, USA-Canada, 2015

Jake Cole is onto something when he says that Guillermo Del Toro is probably closer to Wes Anderson than his horror peers, although Katie Rife mentions Mario Bava.  And then there’s 12 Gothic flicks to watch before you see “Crimson Peak”. But perhaps that’s the problem:  one may feel this is highly trodden Gothic ground, story-wise, and with that only holding mild interest, the set designs and costumes come to the fore. Indeed, they threaten to smother the story being old – that of a woman being seduced by a man to live in a deteriorating house and her seeing warnings from aggressive ghosts – and as distinguished as they are, their dominance tends to affectation. That’s a pretty dress by costume designer Kate Hawley, you’ll be thinking, distracted instead of being gripped by the plot. Although the collar of a dress that seems to be sprouting mushrooms is probably a bit much.

The film is a triumph of colour-coding, not least of which is a house that sits atop a hill of and is sinking into red clay which rises to the surface when the snow comes. Hence the title. It’s in these details that the film succeeds: a head is bashed in against an overflowing sink, so violently that the sink breaks and the water turns red as it spills on the floor. It’s a moment to rival that celebrated bathroom scene from Del Toro’s ‘Cronos’, but this is followed by characters assuming he simply fell and cracked his head open, which is surely preposterous given the obvious carnage  at the scene. I mean, I’m no coroner or policeman, but…. So where the details succeed, an overall carelessness seems evident and ambivalence sets in. You can see the joins. Oh, the violence is indeed brutal and brings things to life whenever it is onscreen, but again – like the ghosts – it is an element adrift in a story that feels it could exist without.

The oily black and blood red ghosts – referring to FW Murnau’s “Nosferatu” for an entrance - mostly overcome their CGI trimmings to have some effect, but in the great scheme of things they don’t mean much. Del Toro tweeted: “About the Ghosts in CRIMSON PEAK: ALL except for one are entirely REAL actors in prosthetics IN SITU w digital touches.” [Oct. 24-2015] But it’s telling that Del Toro issues an explanation about resembling full CGI creations because audiences will probably react to them as such: if you don’t mind CGI, then there’s no problem, but if you think CGI is too artificial then there’s probably an issue. Near the beginning, wannabe author Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska – and that’s right: “Cushing”) says that the story she’s writing is a love story that just happens to feature ghosts, and we’re probably meant to read this story the same way (and that’s not the only moment of meta-commentary). But when the ghosts do appear it’s dangerously close to the James Wan model, cued with musical blares instead of allowing the creeps to set in. “Crimson Peak” isn’t really creepy or scary: it’s too bright for that, but not in a way that achieves the delirium of, say, Argento’s ‘Suspiria’. The ghosts feel more superfluous than woven into the fabric of things: they’re there to spice things up because, well, that’s what Del Toro does. Can you imagine a Del Toro flick without monsters/ghost/etc.?

There is nothing particularly understated here, little of the genuine brooding that underpins genuine Gothic. When Jessica Chastain’s clearly psychopathic sister-figure feeds Mia Wasikowska soup to “help” her recovery, the spoon on the bowl scrapes and sings so loud that although the effect is meant to be unsettling, it feels as if someone is over-egging the pudding (and I couldn’t tell at first if it was meant to be read as funny). It’s not that there isn’t subtlety – Tom Hiddleston plays the conflicted Thomas Sharpe for as much sad-eyed ambiguity as he can, for example – but much is so overdone and obvious that it’s like someone trying to do a Guillermo Del Toro impersonation but can’t quite avoid the habits of more obvious contemporary mainstream horrors.

If a film so obviously a Gothic homage is just replicating the tropes and there is no sense of trying to truly subvert them or flesh them out, then a dullness is left at the core. All the flare here is in the visuals, so the story is left floundering. It looks the part but there’s a lack of the feeling. Tonally inconsistent, narratively derivative, aesthetically interesting, ‘Crimson Peak’ doesn’t quite gel and Del Toro doesn’t succeed in bringing the focus of his Spanish language films to his English catalogue. This lacks the foundations of genuine realism from which his fantasies flourish, creating a pretty but lacking confection.

Sinister 2

 

 Colin Foy, 2015, USA

Ciarán Foy’s previous film ‘Citidel’ wasn’t remarkable but it was a decent little horror flick made interesting by its protagonist’s agoraphobia and newly found fatherhood in a bleak world of poverty horror. ‘Sinister 2’ is similarly family-centred but succumbs to horror genre hokiness very, very early on. We are barely minutes in before we get our first jump-scare without any creepiness gaining a foothold first. There are no real surprises in store in this sequel because it follows mainstream genre trends so slavishly. It's all surface. Any correlation between the malevolent spirit Bughuul and a violent father is never explored, for example, and any investigation of how the spirit may exploit childish misconceptions and grudges are never really acknowledged in any depth.

Simply, on the run from an abusive husband, to hide out Courtney Collins (Shannyn Sossamon) takes her two sons (brothers Robert Dylan and Dartanian Sloan) to an apparently abandoned house that won’t sell as it was the site of a family massacre.  (The boys spend their time tuned to the ‘Night of the Living Dead’ channel; you know, that one that shows the Romero classic all the time in horror films?  But it does quote the moment  where the girl kills her mother, which I guess is foreshadowing.) Unbeknownst to their mother, her son Dylan is being visited by ghostly children, emissaries of Bughuul. He is paying night visits to the adjacent deserted church to their Spooky Kid Drama Group and to view those snuff movies that will apparently turn him into a killer.

 

Soon, Deputy So & So (um) is on the scene as a connection to the last film, replacement father figure and love interest. James Ransone as Deputy So & So is a likeable enough presence and his klutziness is perhaps a nice contrast to the paternally-capable way that a lot of men purport themselves in these scenarios (which is touched on in a nice interview here). But any good work done by the adults is hobbled by the badly written flirtations he has with Courtney. In fact, there is always the danger of unintentional humour that plagues ‘Sinister 2’, long before the ghostly children reveal their bad otherworldly make-up and the film turns into ‘Poltergeist’. Is it perhaps how cartoonish the characters become? Is it the bad dialogue? Is it the ridiculous emergency word that the mother has chosen? Is it the mashed potato incident? Is it the lack of Ethan Hawke to keep things grounded? Is it the aesthetic observation of violence?

Speaking of which: the most disturbing aspect of ‘Sinister’ was surely the snuff films Ethan Hawke found himself watching. His fascination with them at the expense of his family tapped into that horror of being unable to stop yourself from falling into the abyss as it were – as in fear of our own obsessions and weaknesses - but this sequel relies on, Bughuul for scares, and that is a mistake. Bughuul isn’t particularly scary: he just looks like an extra from a Goth music video. And asking the kids to both (a) kill their families in ingenious torture-porn fashion and (b) film themselves doing so in the creepiest way possible produces remarkably coherent results. Luckily, Bughuul seems to have a demonic editor to hand to craft these films with the cinematic language of horror. Actually, the snuff movies have grown so convoluted that one can only imagine the kids have been inspired by the likes of ‘Saw’. For example: how did one kid get their whole family suspended above a crocodile pool and then filmed them just at the moment the crocodile attacked (did the croc wait for the appropriate moment, giving the kid time to suspend his family?)? Is there an endless supply of Super8 film stock - is there a supernatural supply? And why aren’t the kids scared of the ghosts that appear to them while they are awake? Haven’t they seen ‘Insidious’? And how exactly does the ghostly threat work? Watch this snuff footage of a family massacre or... we’ll massacre yours! If you’re looking for an exploration of the accusation that horror content makes killers, this ain’t it.

 

The first ‘Sinister’ benefitted from keeping a lot offstage and concentrating on the mystery: it wasn’t any great shakes, perhaps, but it was a reasonable example of contemporary mainstream trends. It also contained those snuff movies and one genuinely startling image of Hawke’s son unfolding from a cardboard box during a “night terror”. It was able to work up at least some creepiness. ‘Sinister 2’ shows everything and doesn’t dwell on how horrible the scenario is to make the horror palpable. It plays things far safer than the original in that only those it paints as the deserving get to die. And then it ends on the most desperate and nonsensical final jump scare that is bound to make you (a) dismiss all that went before out-of-hand, and/or (b) laugh. Or simply to confirm that it wasn’t much more than rote in the first place.

In A Dark Place

 

Donato Rotunno, 2006, Luxembourg-UK

 

Another failed adaptation of ‘The Turn of the Screw’, demonstrating again what a fine balance of ambiguity, delusion and repression Henry James’ novel is. This version is contemporised, but this proves detrimental rather then enlightening: despite impressive exteriors, this updated Bligh has no atmosphere or eeriness (and there is little sense that the exteriors have anything to do with the interiors). Elsewhere, the shoving of lesbian titillation and highlighting of child abuse is as crass as if the governess was made to stalk the empty hallways of Bligh with a strap-on. She is an obvious head-case from the beginning, even before meeting the children, whom she then subjects to endless art therapy. The film also has no idea what to do with its apparent ghosts: they barely register, and a mark of what is so wrong and clueless with this translation is how it resorts to Miles (Christian Olson) jump-scaring Flora (Gabrielle Adam) in order to get its cheap shocks before ultimately descending into slasher motifs for final chase sequence. Leelee Sobienski’s performance as the governess gets increasingly embarrassing at more-or-less the same pace as the film. As Miss Grose, only Tara Fitzgerald  manages to step away from this fiasco with dignity, despite a ridiculous scene where she is sent into a masturbatory frenzy by playing the violin and incongruous electronic music. The novel is a tricky one and there is nothing to be gained, not here anyway, by making modern awareness and translations of sexuality as its calling card.

"Chopping Mall"

 

"Chopping Mall", Jim Winorski, 1986

Starting decently enough with a mock-commercial for security robots, preceding “Robocop” by a year, “Killbots” otherwise known as “Chopping Mall” soon descends into ‘80s campy fun and that is all. These new security robots get a taste for killing people when their rooftop computer gets zapped by lightening (!). They also acquire the ability to: (1) be sneaky by hiding here and there; (2) pretend to be turned off when they are really getting ready to kill; (3) go up escalators even though they move on big treads; (4) find our partying teenagers wherever they run throughout the mall. The teenagers that foolishly stay in the mall after hours for some sexy time are the kinds that do nothing for the prejudice that Americans are stupid as a culture. They mostly go about getting themselves killed and reacting in ridiculous manners. It’s the kind of film where you find yourself saying things like: (1) “Wait, the robots can hide bodies? (2) “Wait, how did the robot open those doors?” (3) “Wait, they have lasers now?” And all in the same scene.

 

Mostly logic free and coasting on its camp qualities, “Chopping Mall” offers one impressive breast-bearing followed by an exploding head, but then all it has, from this distance, is ‘80s nostalgia value. The shopping mall makes for an interesting “house of horror” – as it did in Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” – but the robots delightfully clash with the retro-vibe and provide a lot of humour, intentional and otherwise. The credits sequence establishing the mall itself may be the most lingering and pleasurable moment it has.