oldsharky

The Road (2011)

Purely for marketing purposes, they should have called this movie something other than The Road. The Cormac-McCarthy-post-apocalypse-tale-turned-Viggo-Mortensen vehicle was barely two years old, and it’s hard to create word-of-mouth excitement if you have to continually explain that the movie you’re recommending is not that one. But recommend it I will.

This curious import from the Philippines is both a fearsome ghost story and a very soulful meditation on evil, and more specifically “the sins of the father” concept.

Three restless teens borrow a car and go out for a midnight joy ride. None has a driver’s license, so they turn off the freeway and head down an old unmarked road—and the trap is sprung!

A nightmarish sequence ensues as the kids are stalked by vengeful ghosts and an unseen killer. Eventually the cops arrive on the scene under the command of recently decorated Detective Luis (TJ Trinidad) who sees uncanny parallels in this case to those of an old unsolved homicide.

There are plenty of supernatural fright elements at play in The Road, but writer-director Yam Laranas puts the most muscle into telling a ghost story born of an all-too-familiar domestic tragedy. The movie is a triptych of tales (the present, the past, the distant past) that remain firmly rooted in a poison tree that bears deadly fruit. (Note: trees don’t figure into the story; this is what we call a metaphor.)

The pace can be a bit sluggish, but in my opinion, the added weight given to characters and landscape makes The Road a much more vivid trip.

The Bay (2012)

The director of one of my favorite non-horror movies (Diner) hangs out his genre shingle in the found-footage eco-thriller The Bay.

Yep, Oscar-winning writer-director Barry Levinson, best-known for marquee attractions like Good Morning Vietnam, The Natural, and Rain Man, takes the no-name, low-budget road this time around, but still manages to scare the bejeebers out of me with a seemingly plausible environmental disaster scenario set in a small Chesapeake Bay community.

The story unfolds via video edited together from various sources, chiefly confiscated footage seized by government agents—after the fact. Former news station intern Donna Thompson (Kether Donohue) is interviewed on camera about a harrowing incident that has left her traumatized and paranoid.

The year is 2009 and the picturesque town of Claridge, Maryland is preparing for a festive Fourth of July weekend. (Considering the number of horrible things that happen to small towns during annual tourist-trap wingdings, I say we outlaw all community celebrations—forever!)

The assembled footage reveals that the polluted waters of the Chesapeake Bay are infested with parasites, now whimsically grown to the size of collies from steroids in the chicken manure dumped in the water from unscrupulous neighboring factory farms.

The nasty little critters infect the local water supply and cause the citizenry to boil over in gross, awful boils and blisters before the monstrous isopods grow to full size and chew themselves free of their human hosts.

The lion’s share of the blame for this catastrophic turn of events goes to Mayor Stockman (Frank Deal), a crooked, money grubbing shitheel who willfully ignores environmental regulations and dooms his community. Needless to say, he will not be getting my vote come re-election time.

If you’ve seen The Blair Witch Project you’ll be fairly familiar with the dramatic structure. The stitched-together scenes evolve from mundane and curious bits of exposition to choppy, nightmarish fragments, that show an all-American town overrun by fast-moving alien predators.

Fans of Discovery Channel fair like The Monsters Inside Me will no doubt be charmed and delighted as the hideous parasites soon have the run of the place requiring the feds to step in and hush up the whole affair.

It’s no masterpiece, but Levinson and writer Michael Wallach definitely succeed in creating an intense, effective piece of enviro-horror that doesn’t waste any time, thanks to a minimum of preachiness and pretense with “the message.” Recommended.

Pig Hunt (2008)

Now this is more like it! Plenty of weird shit as far as the eye can see.

Writers Zack Anderson and Robert Mailer Anderson and director James Isaac are obviously genre geeks—observant viewers will spot references to Alien, Road Warrior, even Apocalypse Now—who understand exactly what elements will best play in Peoria.

Blood sure, but even more, carnage. There’s enough carnage in Pig Hunt to fill Carnagie Hall. Yeah, I know.

Rugged leading man John (Travis Aaron Wade), his super-hot girlfriend Brooks (Tina Huang), and John’s three dopey bro buds drive out to the California equivalent of Appalachia, to go hunting for wild pigs on property owned by John’s uncle, who perished under mysterious circumstances.

But since the movie is named Pig Hunt, probably not all that mysterious. Look, just play along!

The gang goes through all the familiar check points (or plot points, if you prefer): They stop at a backwoods general store for directions—this one run by blues harmonica great Charlie Musselwhite, who gives them dire warnings—and encounter a hostile clan of indiginous rurals, a rattlesnake, and a van containing a muscular black gentlemen with a hippie-chick entourage, part of a nearby weed-growing commune.

Somewhere in here, we discover that John grew up around these parts, and that he’s actually a skilled hunter and woodsman, unlike his three hopelessly doomed friends.

Some hillbilly acquaintances of John come a-visiting, and they all decide to go hunting for “the Ripper”, a legendary 3,000 pound killer hog that most likely wasted John’s uncle—and the train goes off the rails, big time.

This sounds like it has all the makings of Troma Team farce, but somehow Pig Hunt avoids broad comedic pitfalls, and plays it somewhat straight.

The Andersons actually have the guts to develop the characters beyond stereotype to the point that I actually felt sorry for John’s friend Quincy (Trevor Bullock), a gentle chef who accompanies his more macho comrades. He and his beloved dog Wolfgang come to a bad end that they really didn’t deserve (though, to be fair, Quincy has no more business being outside the urban landscape than Ned Beatty does).

Collateral damage, as it turns out.

What the filmmakers demonstrate most effectively in Pig Hunt is that it’s the various human tribes (duh!) that wreak the most havoc, and that in order to survive, you have to become the biggest monster of all.

Hell, the giant pig is almost an afterthought until the one-hour point in the film. Bonus: The music is by Primus bassist Les Claypool, who also doubles as Preacher, one of the bloodthirsty hillbillies.

I love that shit.

The Innkeepers (2011)

Based on viewings of The House of the Devil and now The Innkeepers, I feel prepared to weigh in on writer/director Ti West.

He’s certainly a talented visual stylist; there is some awesome, unsettling snake-crawling camera work in The Innkeepers. He knows how to build tension; his films are painstakingly set up, as the female protagonists become ever-so-slowly enmeshed in a deadly web fueled by their own curiosity.

My beef with West is that in both cases, the payoff falls short. It’s as if he’s used up all his tricks in the first three-quarters of a slow-burning movie before deciding to end the thing with … I dunno, ghosts or some shit. It’s really frustrating.

Nutshell: Claire (the plucky Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) are stuck with desk duty for the last weekend of business at The Yankee Pedlar, a century-old hotel somewhere on the east coast.

Luke has a paranormal website that tracks “supernatural” events from the hotel, as it’s rumored to be haunted by a jilted bride who hung herself several decades earlier.

For the final 48 hours, the bored employees double-down on their investigations in order to get hard evidence of an actual spook.

There is a definite post-modern vibe to The Innkeepers (sassy pants celeb Lena Dunham even has a cameo as an overly chatty barista), that’s somewhat distracting. Luke and Claire are funny and likable, but in a generic, woefully underdeveloped way, and they come across as “types” rather than characters.

Paxton gives it her all, but the film’s transition from meta, self-aware horror movie to genuine horror movie is clumsy. When the ghosts start to make their presence known, I honestly didn’t know whether to prepare myself for scares or to just keep the action at an analytical arm’s length, as I’d done up to now.

The first half of the movie is so … tame and lightly goofy, it could almost be a spooky after-school special or latter-day Disney film. And then there’s ghosts.

This probably isn’t my most articulate review, as I’m still debating the merits of the Ti West oeuvre. What I can say for sure is that there’s something crucial missing from his films, perhaps a willingness on West’s part to commit to either tongue-in-cheek hipster amiability or full-tilt frights.

He’s trying to have his cake and eat it too, and his work seems disjointed, neither fish nor fowl—and his finales are decidedly unsatisfying.

In the words of Mrs. Sharky, who watched this one with me, “That’s it? Hell, this movie could have been 20 minutes long and you wouldn’t have missed a thing.”

In other words, your patience is not rewarded.

Chromeskull: Laid To Rest 2 (2011)

Pardon me while I spill my gushing guts. I admired the heck out of the original Laid To Rest, but the sequel is everything the second installment of a film series should be: bigger, artistically bolder, and rife with disturbing implications. (See Evil Dead—Evil Dead II. )

Like the Raimi films, LTR2 is an evolutionary leap beyond its predecessor, as it takes virtually the same story and creates a whole universe for it to live in. And like Romero’s zombie epics, Chromeskull has the chutzpah to place a modern horror film into the larger and more provocative context of a thoroughly corrupt and predatory society—one that bares a striking resemblance to our own.

Even though writer-director Robert Hall’s sophomore effort isn’t quite in the same league as the aforementioned films and folks, it’s still a bloody good time.

The second film opens just moments after the conclusion of the first: The relentless killer known as Chromeskull (Nick Principe) is apparently kaput after having his noggin pulverized by a pair of plucky survivors, but modern science can do amazing things these days.

The mutilated maniac is heroically raced to a hospital and sewn back together by the finest surgeons money can buy and so embarks on a three-month convalescence. See, it turns out Chromeskull can afford top-drawer health care—he’s friggin’ rich, the CEO of his own shadow corporation.

Like any successful man, he’s got disgruntled employees and ambitious rivals, or in this case both, in the person of his right-hand flunky Preston, played with gonzo panache by 90210‘s Brian Austin Green!

While the boss gets his head back together, Preston entertains ideas of moving up in the company.

Naturally, another woman is methodically stalked and many people are gutted, carved, and filleted in excruciating detail. A big round of applause should be directed to the special makeup effects team of Cris Alex and Joe Badiali, who seem to be cut from the same gruesome cloth as the master himself, Tom Savini.

Laid To Rest 2 is a rockin’ righteous bloodbath. The kills are teeth-gritting in their unfettered savagery, as Chromeskull is clearly a man(?) who loves his work and has a near fetishistic reverence for his tools—which should serve as inspiration to his ungrateful underlings.

Seeing the boss working the line and getting his hands dirty is an increasingly rare thing in corporate America.

The Tall Man (2012)

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Is The Tall Man HINO (Horror in Name Only)?

Sure, it takes place in a brooding rural slum ala Winter’s Bone (except this one’s on the West Coast—Washington, to be exact), and it’s about a prolific bogeyman who abducts children in a dried-up mining town.

What ensues is a provocatively ambiguous thriller (and yes, it is thrilling) with a fairly blunt social agenda.

Cold Rock, Washington is a mildewed husk of a town decomposing in the overgrown backwoods of Washington. The local Chamber of Commerce undoubtedly has its hands full trying to lure tourists to a cheerless gray community where 18 children have disappeared over the past few years.

A focused and fascinating Jessica Biel plays Julia, a recently widowed nurse living in the area who tends to the medical needs of the hapless hillbillies in her sector. Shit gets personal when her beloved toddler gets snatched from her house by the legendary “Tall Man.”

Julia channels her inner Ellen Ripley and sets out to get her bambino back.

The tagline should have been: “Who’s The Monster Here?” The Tall Man is a brisk, well-crafted, and shifty film that never allows you to get comfortable from any perspective.

And while the supernatural elements are mostly of the red-herring variety, there is a very real horror at its heart—namely are we becoming a society that might require fantastically drastic social engineering in order to survive?

Echoes of P.D. James’ Children of Men and Dennis Lehane’s Gone Daddy Gone bubble to the murky surface.

You have been warned.

Fear Island (2009)

A low-wattage variation of I Know What You Did Last Summer, in which a handful of amoral dirt-bag twentysomethings, who once did a terrible thing, end up paying the piper on a remote island.

Not very bloody, no nudity, and only one plot twist, that’s immediately obvious to anyone who’s seen The Usual Suspects.

What else is there to say? Haylie Duff is in it. Pass.

The Reeds (2010)

Boy, I hate it when my tranquil weekend of boating with friends turns into a blood-soaked nightmare.

After thousands of movies in which a back-to-nature retreat results in death and dismemberment, you’d think people would just stay the eff home. Watch Nature Channel, or some shit. But noo-oo-oo!

Three unexceptional couples hit upon the brilliant idea of renting a boat for a river excursion through a remote British waterway that’s choked with (cue the title) reeds!

So what form of doom will they encounter on their nautical getaway? Ruthless delinquents as in Eden Lake? An insidious beastie from the depths? Piranhas? Killer kelp?

Nope, the crew gets mired in a tragic feedback loop between an angry loner and a bunch of scruffy mute kids, who are seemingly locked in an eternal spiral of antagonism—despite the fact that the rugrats have been dead for decades. Talk about holding a grudge…

The claustrophobic spell cast by the forlorn, colorless landscape gives The Reeds a crucial boost of atmosphere, and the silent band of urchins are a creepy lot. And while director Nick Cohen is possessed of sufficient skills to keep things relatively interesting, it’s a glacially-paced affair without much in the way of action—though the anchor impalement scene was a welcome highlight.

The Reeds is worth a viewing, but only if it’s a slow news day and all your chores are done.

Dread (2009)

A beastly unsettling adaptation of a Clive Barker short story by writer/director Anthony DiBlasi, Dread doesn’t require supernatural elements—other than bad dreams—to really make us squirm in our seats.

Sure, Barker’s psycho-sexual hot potatoes (blood, sex, domination, and cruelly testing one’s limits) are in play, but it’s a character-driven nightmare first and foremost, as a student film about mapping out the territory of fear runs amok and lives are annihilated in the process.

Film student and Johnny Deppleganger Stephen Grace (Jackson Rathbone) meets Quaid (Shaun Evans), a charismatic loner, who wastes no time in reeling his new pal into exploring the roots and boundaries of real fear, and soon a student film project is born.

With the help of Cheryl (Hanne Steen), a fellow film studies major, the young auteurs interview a range of students about their earliest and most profound memories of fear.

Quaid, who seems to be majoring in villainy with a minor in degradation, believes their project lacks juice, so he takes it upon himself to “take things to the next level.”

By the way, never trust anyone who uses this expression.

Dread succeeds on the strength of its well-drawn characters, particularly in the homo-erotic jousting between the curious, but virtuous, Stephen, and the increasingly deranged and manipulative Quaid, a fellow who was obviously, in the words of the most articulate sociopath in the world, Dexter Morgan, “born of blood.”

DiBlasi takes his time, slow-cooking the horror till it’s falling off the bone. And in Quaid we have a charming sadist with his own terrifying baggage, who actually believes he’s helping people “confront the beast” by tormenting them with the things they fear the most, in the hope that they be destroyed and born anew, as fearless warriors.

Needless to say, his victims don’t appreciate the effort. There’s gratitude for you.

The Burning (1981)

Probably the best way to describe The Burning is that it’s a post Friday The 13th knock-off and an interesting conversation piece.

It features a gonzo Exorcist-meets-Yes score by Rick Wakeman, a script that was doctored by future scumbags Bob and Harvey Weinstein, and some recognizable actors in teeny teen roles—and in the case of Holly Hunter, make that downright microscopic.

Yes, that’s Seinfeld foil Jason Alexander as Dave, a wisecracking camper (with a full head of hair!) who miraculously doesn’t get his jugular severed by Cropsy (Lou David), the hideously scarred former camp caretaker out for bloody revenge.

Nutshell: A bunch of snotty boys at summer camp punk Cropsy, the alcoholic caretaker, by placing a burning skull next to his bed. Things get shitty real fast as the clumsy bum catches himself on fire and spends the next five years fuming in a hospital while doctors point and laugh at his freaky face.

Eventually Cropsy leaves, kills a hooker to get warmed up and goes back to camp to carve up the current crop of kids. His weapon of choice is a deluxe pair of hedge clippers.

Were the writers inspired by Cropsey, the legendary Staten Island boogeyman? Well, duh!

Seeing the likes of Alexander, Larry Joshua (The Rundown, NYPD Blue), Leah Ayers (Bloodsport), Fisher Stevens (Short Circuit) and Brian Backer (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) pay their dues as Doomed Campers is worth a giggle or two, but sadly, The Burning is slower than Granny’s bowels.

It takes a whole friggin’ hour for the first camper to get carved! Note to the writing department: we do not now, nor have we ever given a shit who has the hots for whom—unless it leads to a nude scene.

Too much yakkin’ and not enough whackin’ is no way to create horror history.

Fortunately, director Tony Maylam had the good sense to leave the gruesome special effects to the best in the business, namely Tom Savini (Friday The 13th, Dawn of the Dead, Maniac, and so many more).

So by the time Cropsy finally gets around to some serious slicing and dicing, the blood arrives in buckets, including a sensational canoe sequence where he wastes five kids in a flurry fit for a ninja.

Worth a look.