Survival – Page 27

Malevolence (2004)

I believe the concept of crooks on the lam hiding out in a haunted house dates back to Buster Keaton. True, in Malevolence, the crooks are hiding next door to a haunted house—and it’s only haunted inasmuch as there’s a deranged serial killer living there. A very similar motif is used (more successfully, I might add) in the Andy Serkis black comedy The Cottage (2008). But Malevolence is not a waste of time.

Julian (R. Brandon Johnson) and Marilyn (Heather McGee) are the couple we’re supposed to care about, but they’re not all that likable. They get mixed up in a bank heist with Marilyn’s hoodlum brother Max (Keith Chambers) which concludes with everyone fleeing the scene and Max mortally wounded. As Marilyn thoughtfully reminds Julian several times that it’s his stupid fault her brother took a bullet, one gets the distinct feeling that this couple ain’t gonna make it. Meanwhile, the other member of their gang, Kurt (Richard Glover, a poor man’s Jeff Conaway), kidnaps a young mother and her tomboy daughter, and takes them to the remote hideout where the robbers are supposed to reconnoiter and divide the money. Unfortunately, the hideout isn’t quite remote enough; right next door there’s a decrepit factory farm inhabited by a bargain-brand Michael Myers (the Halloween killer, not Austin Powers) who brings his steely chopping knife to the party.

Nothing too subtle at work in Malevolence; it’s a lot of chasing back and forth outside at night, with a little bit of Ed Gein rural weirdness mixed in. Writer, director, producer, and composer Stevan Mena does a competent job of keeping things lean and tense, though his protagonists suffer from a kind of collective amnesia that prevents them from making sure the killer is dead, which probably would have shortened the movie by a good 20 minutes. Come on people, it’s the 21st Century! You know as well I do that if you’re fortunate enough to knock the maniac down, you MUST continue to beat on the body till it resembles guacamole. And we’ve known this for at least 25 years.

Prometheus (2012)

An ambitious and overwrought failure. Whereas Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) surely ranks among the upper tier of 20th century horror cinema, it’s “prequel” is more like a latter day George Lucas Star Wars gewgaw: too acutely aware of its own lofty place in our cultural consciousness, and as a result, trips all over itself trying to catch lightning in a jar a second time. Prometheus looks sensational, but the story is pure hash, and it’s certainly not horror, despite occasional horrifying imagery. Sadly, it’s another example of corporate hubris: a big-budget, hastily rewritten spectacle that no one knew what to do with.

If I sound bitter, it’s because I am. After shelling out $17.25 to see Prometheus in IMAX 3D, and another $15 for a bottle of water, a small popcorn, and a box of M&Ms, I was treated to a movie that reached for the heavens—and pulled a muscle doing so. Scientific sweethearts Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and her partner Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) find some provocative cave paintings that lead them to outer space aboard the titular vessel in search of “the engineers” who may have created mankind. Naturally, there is a crew to escort them, but they’re a flimsily drawn bunch that includes Janek, the sturdy captain (Idris Elba), Vickers, a cranky company bitch (Charlize Theron), and David, an affable, secretive mandroid (Michael Fassbender). Naturally David’s protocol and that of the corporation aren’t exactly in perfect sync. After a few years in cryo-sleep, the crew awakens to find themselves hovering over the planet depicted in an assortment of prehistoric murals. Shaw and Holloway are gung-ho to “meet their makers” but they end up badly disappointed. Welcome to the club!

Once again, Prometheus is fairly sumptuous in the high-tech eye candy department, but the failure of writers Jon Spaights and Damon Lidelof to come up with a character we can invest ourselves in weighs heavy. Noomi Rapace as Shaw is the best of the lot, but most of the time it seems like various attributes of Ripley, Dallas, Ash, and Parker are simply doled out sparingly to everyone on board. It’s like looking forward to a gourmet meal and getting pricey, reheated leftovers.

Furthermore, it’s easy to see that there isn’t a firm hand at the wheel. My goodness, how many back and forth trips between the ship and the alien station are there? It feels like half the movie is spent getting into and out of space suits and then very slowly trekking to the next location. The suffocating atmosphere of dread and isolation that made the original movie such a tension fest, is nowhere to be found. Instead, there’s a forlorn flourish of heroic horns, ala John Williams, that wells up every now and then as if to remind us that this is meant to be an epic tale of exploration and valor, you know, like Star Wars. I suspect that too many opinions and too much studio meddling scuttled this ship, because Prometheus ends up way off course.

Grizzly Park (2008)

No sense beating around the bush: Grizzly Park flat-out sucks. But it’s a scrappy sort of crappy, that you can almost, sort of, grudgingly admire.

Writer/director Tom Skull is obviously a rank amateur; I’ve seen children’s birthday party videos that were more professionally shot and edited. The acting, from top to bottom, is godawful. Plot points are gathered and randomly discarded without a second thought (e.g., why bother to give a character a gun if it’s never used?).

To give credit where it’s due, the gore effects, when they finally appear, aren’t too shabby. Oh, and they use a real bear.

Eight young adults (who seem to range in age from 18-35) are assigned community service for various offenses and because they’re all grotesque examples of humanity. Vain, selfish, shallow, stupid, greedy, bigoted, you name it—there’s nary a deadly sin left unaccounted for in this bunch.

These hateful dipshits are assigned to no-nonsense disciplinarian Ranger Bob (Glenn Morshower), who guides them deep into the wilderness of Grizzly Park, where they must pick up litter and (more importantly) serve as a snack tray for the wild critters of the forest.

There’s also an escaped maniac running around, but he’s so quickly dispatched by the ravenous bear that you wonder why Skull bothered to introduce him in the first place. Just another tossed plot point.

The tone of Grizzly Park careens from horny adolescent “humor” (it’s not in the least bit funny) to vague, weak-ass moralizing, to guts and gore—and you won’t care one little bit.

Eden Lake (2008)

Talk about grueling; Eden Lake makes Straw Dogs look like a Frankie and Annette double feature. Writer-director James Watkins (The Woman in Black) methodically stokes the fear furnace until the tension is nearly unbearable—but you don’t dare look away.

By firmly establishing his protagonists as something more than pale quaking stereotypes, Watkins succeeds where Eli Roth and James Wan fall short; namely giving the viewer a good reason to be shocked and horrified about the cruelties inflicted on them.

In search of a romantic weekend, Steve (Michael Fassbender) and his girlfriend Jenny (Kelly Reilly) drive way out to hell and gone in the English countryside to camp on a secluded beach that’s about to become the centerpiece of a condo development. The couple incurs the wrath of local juvenile delinquents on BMX bikes and things rapidly spin out of control. Sure, it’s all a big joke, till someone gets hurt—or in this case, killed.

While Steve and Jenny definitely do not deserve their eventual fates, it can be rightly said that the awful shit pit they land in is due mostly to Steve being a colossal asshole who should have just walked away before everything went to hell. He has several chances to do so, but his idiotic pride won’t let him.

Eden Lake should look familiar: the plot is nearly identical to The Strangers (or Deliverance, The Hills Have Eyes, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Wrong Turn, for that matter). Above all else, never ever pitch your tent in an isolated rural area, especially after witnessing the casual cruelty of the locals.

But there is a critical difference. There’s no explanation for the amorality and astonishing lack of empathy on the part of the teens in The Strangers. Boredom maybe? Gangsta rap? Point and shoot video games? Guess we’ll never know.

In Watkins’ film, the young miscreants are squarely under the sway of Brett (Jack O’Connell), the group’s psychotic Alpha male, who, like any good tyrant, whittles away his subjects’ humanity with bullying and threats. (I kept thinking of African child soldiers, forced under impossible pressure into remorseless killers.)

Each nightmarish escalation of the action is presented as a transgression that could have been avoided, but also as a disturbingly believable development, considering the hellish circumstances the characters find themselves in. And that is why Eden Lake is so damn terrifying and transfixing.

The Midnight Meat Train (2008)

I haven’t read enough Clive Barker to decide if I’m a fan or not, but he certainly spins a fascinatingly lurid yarn. The Midnight Meat Train is based on one of his short stories, and it’s a bloody fun ride, even though I kept thinking I was watching a chopped up version that had scenes missing. There are moments when the action inexplicably jumps from Point A to Point M, and you wonder how the hell we got here.

A right-before-he-got famous Bradley Cooper plays Leon, a wannabe artsy photographer trying to capture “the beating heart of New York City” to impress snooty art dealer Susan Hoff (Brooke Shields), who advises him to take more chances, and not run away when danger rears its ugly head. He starts hanging out in the subway during the wee hours of the morning and stumbles upon a very dapper and intense-looking butcher (Vinnie Jones, in a silent part), and is immediately compelled to follow him around. (How do we know he’s a butcher? Well, he carries a meat mallet the size of Mjolnir, for one thing.) Sure enough, it appears his new-found subject is a methodical serial killer who’s been making late-night subway riders disappear for quite some time. Poor Leon realizes too late, that the butcher’s grisly nocturnal rituals are all a part of (sung in Elton John voice) “the c-i-r-c-l-e of l-i-i-i-f-e!”

Anytime you pad out a short story into a feature length film, there’s going to be filler, and The Midnight Meat Train is no exception, but for the most part, director Ryuhel Kitamura and screenplay scribe Jeff Buhler keep it fast and gruesome. The ending is pure Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, but it’s not a cop-out. It’s surprisingly weird and horrible, and hints at a “bigger picture” that’s even more terrible than we had first supposed. And that, folks, is what good horror should do. What, no sequel?

Salvage (2009)

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Atmosphere and the unpredictable flow of tension is the life’s blood of any Horrific Flick.

A successful horror movie is one that could be just as effective if it were staged as a play, and you can count Salvage among them. It’s a “trapped in the house” potboiler about a neighborhood under siege, from both a bloodthirsty (alien?) creature and a trigger-happy military—and we’re left to decide who’s the bigger threat.

Paranoia, infidelity, and xenophobia coat the air like cheap incense.

Much of the film’s running time is consumed with the domestic complications of Beth (Neve McIntosh, who’s a badass!), the hot divorced mother of Jodie (Linzey Cocker), a sullen teenager.

Are there any other kind?

Jodie gets dropped off by her dad to spend Christmas with her estranged mother who lives in a snug little cul-de-sac near the river Mersey.

A touching mother-and-child reunion ensues as Jodie walks in on Beth getting shagged by Kieran (Shaun Dooley), a bloke she met in a bar the previous evening. Disgusted with her slutty mum, Jodie runs off to stay with the neighbors. A-a-a-n-n-d-d, cue the monster as a mysterious container washes ashore a mere stone’s throw away.

The little community is soon crawling with soldiers shooting at anything that moves. A trickle of gore leaks out as a (largely offscreen) body count mounts. The messy mutant monster wreaks bloody havoc, leaving a parade of mangled souls in its wake.

For about a third of Salvage, you’re wondering if it’s just a movie about paranoia. Neighbors turn on each other, some seeing terrorists behind every bush. Or perhaps the military has staged a coup, and they’re rounding up citizens on Christmas to work in the mines.

Don’t laugh, it could happen. Director Lawrence Gough understands the times we live in very well.

The creeping tension is made all the worse due to the dicey relationship between Beth—a woman who seemingly chose a career in science (and getting shagged by blokes) over being a wife and mother—and Jodie, the prudish progeny who judges and resents her.

Like Ellen Ripley before her, it’s up to Beth to get in touch with her primal side before she can really earn the title of “mother.” Fortunately, there’s a vicious creature nearby that’s threatening her nest.

Cabin in the Woods (2011)

Autobiographical side bar: I am old, old, old. I am not Li’l Sharky, Teen Sharky, or even Adult Contemporary Sharky. I’m Ol’ Sharky, an ancient relic from a cooler and weirder world. I carried Agamemnon’s sword; argued with Aristotle; and dogged Cleopatra like she was made of bacon. I shit the pyramids and danced with dinosaurs. I used to carpool to work with Gilgamesh, and even he called me “Gramps.” So when I tell you that I don’t go to the movies much anymore, you’ll begin to understand why. It’s too risky. I can’t be away from my climate-controlled condo for lengthy periods or my aorta will explode. I tried once, and the Visigoths that run the multiplex refused to let me pitch my oxygen tent in the theater. Bastards. All bastards.

Even so, I found myself in the vicinity of a theater with time to kill yesterday, so I purchased a ticket for the moving pictures and saw Cabin in the Woods. I’m very glad that I did. Joss Whedon is getting justifiably blown by critic and fanboy alike for hitting a box-office home run with The Avengers, but that’s no reason to overlook this marvelous muffin basket of a monster movie that he produced, co-wrote, and (second unit) directed. Sadly, the specifics of the story arc prevent a detailed critique, but let’s just say that this is a horror movie on a grand “meta” scale that dwarfs Wes Craven’s Scream series.

What Whedon does with Cabin in the Woods is place the late 20th century horror movie, and more specifically the subcategory known as Hack and Stack (a.k.a. Doomed Teenage Campers), into a miraculous context, one that weds the most dreadful aspects of Lovecraft and Phillip K. Dick. Whedon has created a horror movie mythos that dares to explain why its characters make such monumentally bad decisions, and why it’s imperative that the fools suffer before meeting their (mostly determined) gruesome fate. It’s a groovy concept, but really, just this once.

I don’t anticipate a rash of imitators, because this looks to be a genre only big enough for one. And Cabin in the Woods is it. At the same time, I can understand why some horror fans didn’t care for it. To them I would say, don’t think of this movie as an attempt to subvert the genre in a contrived or overly clever way—it’s more of an elegant novelty, an intricate lark that stands as a singular testament to outside-the-box thinking. In other words, Whedon’s laughing with us, and not at us.

Shark Night (2011)

The budget for Shark Night was reportedly somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million. So where did the money go?

My guess is $24 million went to the 3D effects (which don’t magically appear on my TV—I even tried wearing an old pair of glasses, but all I got was a migraine) and the rest was divvied up between fake blood, a few hair metal songs, and (hopefully) a decent payday for one of the coolest character actors going, Donal Logue.

Judging by the results, Will Hayes and Jesse Studenberg probably got a case of beer and a couple frozen pizzas. For cryin’ out loud, this even had a theatrical release and it’s only marginally better than something from the Asylum crew, who would have at least had the decency to throw in a little nudity.

The story (such as it is) concerns a group of reasonably attractive Tulane college students who decide to drop the books and have a wild weekend at Sara’s (Sara Paxton) McMansion on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain—a body of water that’s allegedly got enough salt in it to sustain gangs of roving ravenous sharks.

In case you’re interested, the prevailing theory is that the sharks arrived as the result of a particularly tempestuous hurricane season, but this notion is quickly discarded when local rednecks Dennis and Red (Chris Carmack and Joshua Leonard) confess to stocking the pond with 45 varieties of shark (out of a possible 350!) in order to shoot footage of idiots getting eaten for “a cable channel.”

Really? That’s the best we can do?

There’s gallons of blood, but not much gore in Shark Night, and the effects (which include sharks leaping balletically out of the water to chomp people in trees and boats) are ludicrous and lame enough to be for Crockasaurus Meets Robo Squid (Hey, I have a script!), on SyFy Channel.

The previously mentioned Donal Logue is always worth watching (especially in his late, lamented FX series Terriers), and he manages to sneak off with a couple of scenes as a metalhead sheriff, but the rest of the cast is unremarkable.

And the sharks? Those fish should go back to school.

The Pack (2010)

Stop the Interwebs! In fact, just drop what you’re doing for the next 81 minutes, crack a cold one, and summon The Pack from your Netflix netherworld. Don’t think! Just watch, because it’s a gem, a Horrificflicks revelation.

The Pack, a French-dubbed rural nightmare, is quite simply the most finely rendered horror film I’ve seen in a long, long time, at least since Neil Marshall’s The Descent. It’s successful in every sense: Original yet referential; gory but restrained; funny but not goofy, and it’s not horror lite, either.

It’s chock-a-block with cringe-inducing scenes, but the delicious jolt of shock doesn’t get washed away in a tedious “pain for the sake of watching pain” tidal wave. It’s too artfully evocative (it’s a beautifully shot movie) and carefully orchestrated to be mere torture porn, but it is relentless—like a dream that keeps going from bad to worse.

Final (Only?) Girl Charlotte Massott (the gutsy and striking Émilie Dequenne), is driving through uncharacteristically blighted French countryside, cranking speed metal, and smoking. Some bikers have been on her ass, hassling her for a while, so she decides to pick up Max (Benjamin Biolay), a hitchhiker who is perhaps a touch less sinister than the bikers she’s trying to avoid. She pulls up and says, “If you pull out your dick, I’ll hammer you!” With a stone impassive face that he wears for the entire movie, Max replies, “It’s too cold anyway.” (Practically a Truffaut opening!)

Evidently Charlotte is a remarkably trusting soul, because she takes a catnap while Max (whom she’s known for about 6 minutes) drives. When she wakes up, they’ve stopped at a ramshackle backwoods saloon/gas station/arcade, run by massive Madame La Speck (Yolande Moreau, whose maternal, Kathy Bates-like performance is terrific). At this point, the wheels come off for Charlotte and everything gets real weird and bleak, real quick.

A true horrorphile will be happier than a puppy in puke spotting subtle and shady references to Psycho (“Oh, Mother!”), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (horrible hillbillies); Night of the Living Dead (flesh-eating, blood-sucking stumbling humanoids); and Pumpkinhead (farm setting, hayseed occultism, genuinely frightening beastie[s], lots of shots of windmills), not too mention every variation of Why Strangers Passing Through Blighted Lonely Territory Should Never Pick Up Hitchhikers, Much Less Go To Their Lair.

Writer-director Franck Richard’s The Pack boasts so many well-chosen fiendish delights, that I could sit here all day singling out its virtues. Instead, I’ll just point out a couple:

It’s a real shock when the monsters arrive. They don’t look stock or schlocky. I would compare them favorably to something dreamed up by Guillermo Del Toro.

The acting is strong across the board, including Phillippe Nahon, a Charles Durning lookalike who plays a Columbo-ish cop, and wears a shirt that reads “I Fuck On The First Date” throughout the film.

The action gets progressively grimmer, but Richard doesn’t dwell overly long on the suffering. There is a “circle of life” at work here that’s hideous in its organic inevitability. Make no mistake, no one will be disappointed with their level of discomfort.

Even so, The Pack never panders; it’s never sensational and garish for its own sake. Rather it has a soupçon of Tim Burton’s fairy-tale-gone-horribly-wrong sensibility, combined with Sam Raimi’s quick, decisive cuts. And the gruesome proceedings are tastefully seasoned with odd, welcome interludes of humor.

If I really had to compare The Pack to another film, it would be Clint Eastwood’s The Unforgiven: It’s genre filmmaking utilized to its full potential. It’s a familiar template that Richard is working from, but he raises the bar on quality and originality to the ceiling. I kept thinking I knew what was going on, because I’ve seen these stranded-motorist scenarios in hundreds of movies. But I was always surprised by something far stranger than I was expecting.

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but instead, Richard kicked my ass with it. To my fellow fans hungry for a quality horror experience, all I can add is, go and enjoy. Heck, I may watch it again. What’s 81 minutes on a Sunday?

Shadow Puppets (2007)

Several folks (mostly attractive women) wake up in a mental institution, dressed in generic undies, with no memory of who they are or how they got there.

They spend the remainder of the film wandering around the facility while trying to steer clear of a dark, shadowy, spider-type thing with a face, that shows up once in a while to kill someone.

Despite the presence of genre-pedigreed actors James Marsters (Spike from Buffy and Angel, who hasn’t aged well); Tony Todd (the Candyman himself!); and Joleen Blalock (she was the Vulcan hottie from that lame Star Trek series with Scott Bakula), there really isn’t much to recommend Shadow Puppets.

This is another one of those annoying “walkabout” movies, with endless scenes of wary characters moving (very slowly) through a largely featureless industrial landscape.

It’s an approach that’s quite different from a movie like Cube, for example, where shocking and creepy details emerge from both the alien environment and the characters’ own heads.

We do discover the identities of the captives, but it doesn’t add up to anything worth writing down. We learn the origin of the smoky, spider thing, but it’s all argle bargle that’s forgotten two seconds after the explanation is delivered. (“It’s the distilled essence of the victims’ life forces,” or some such drivel.)

Note to writer-director Michael Winnick: If we don’t care about the monster or the characters, then you’re going to need lots more gore and gals to maintain a passable level of interest from the average horror fan.

And a brawny dude in a rubber suit would have been a major improvement in the monster department.