Castle Keep’s Ghosts - short documentary June 7, 2008
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Horror, Artfully Deranged, Short Film , add a commentI’ve been locked in the editing room with some raw footage of a paranormal investigation at Castle Keep in Newcastle, making a Most Haunted-style film about possible ghostly activities. I watched The Exorcist to get in me in the right frame of mind which, essentially, made me me simply terrified and constantly looking over my shoulder.
Anyway, my first cut is complete and ready to view HERE.
Poltergeist III (Gary Sherman, 1988, USA) February 19, 2008
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Horror, 1980s, Film reviews, Sci-fi/Fantasy , 3 commentsDirected by Gary Sherman; written by Brian Sherman, Brian Taggert; starring Nancy Allen, Heather O’Rourke, Tom Skerritt
Talk about smoke and mirrors. Director Gary Sherman, he of Dead and Buried fame (or perhaps shame, depending on who you are speaking to), utilises this old magicians trick to, at least at first, great effect. Indeed, Poltergeist III begins with far too much going for it. Here is a film that is following in the footsteps of a poor sequel to a great horror movie. The original leading star names (Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams) have decided against reprising their roles, and it’s fighting a battle with all the other high profile horror sequels appearing in 1988 (Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood). Yet, surprisingly, Sherman manages to create an opening that is both intriguing and genuinely unsettling through, almost primarily, the use of mirrors, reflection, and depth of field photography. It’s a shame then, that around the halfway mark, what originality there was is thrown from the sixtieth floor window of the film’s main high-rise location, and Poltergeist III quickly, and I guess inevitably, becomes just another throwaway franchise filler.
The film follows on from Poltergeist II as Carol-Anne (Heather O’Rourke) is sent to her Auntie’s in a bid to put the events of her recent past behind her. Almost immediately, she begins to have visions of Reverend Henry Kane, a dead priest whose grave was desecrated when Carol-Anne’s father began a housing project over it. At the special school Carol-Anne attends, her psychiatrist doesn’t believe her stories of evil supernatural beings, deciding that she has a gift for hypnotic suggestion. When one of his experiments goes wrong and he sees what Carol-Anne can see, Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein, the caring medium from the first two films) is alerted telepathically that the dead have once again awoken, and that they want Carol-Anne to lead them into the light.
Poltergeist III was a product of the horror franchise culture that plagued the genre throughout the late 1980s - lazy producers who wanted to make a quick buck through audience recognition of memorable characters, plot lines, and high-concept ideas. It is a shame because there’s a good film in here somewhere – there’s flashes of skill and craftsmanship, certainly in the first half hour – but it’s lost in poor scripting and a waste of acting talent.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Who directed the original Poltergeist? Read my article…
Disturbia (D.J. Caruso, 2007, USA) September 26, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Horror, 2000s, Film reviews, Thriller/Suspense, Romance , add a commentDir. D.J. Caruso; screenplay by Christopher B. Landon, Carl Ellsworth; starring Shia LaBeouf, Sarah Roemer, Carrie-Anne Moss, David Morse
If the best thing about Disturbia is how it updates the age-old story of the mysterious next-door neighbour for a 21st century audience groomed on mobile phones, Ipods, and online gaming, we’re clutching at straws. I’m talking about the sort of straws Tom Hanks couldn’t get his hands on in The ‘Burbs (there was no following people around taking pictures on phones, or getting mini-DV footage of the culprit doing nasty deeds). Yet he, and the film, was better for it. Indeed, dress-up any bad movie in all the bells and whistles you can find from jump cuts to scantily-clad young actresses to pop culture references and you’re still left with a bad, uninspired cinematic experience.
Director D. J. Caruso has potted around the film industry as a producer and second unit director on many throwaway Hollywood movies of the past few years. His notable work on the poor sequel to Stakeout and the mildly entertaining Drop Zone provide clues of his inspiration when at the helm, but it’s his own films that give a clear indication why Disturbia is just another notch on his C.V. that fails to succeed. One of the major problems I had with the movie was how it appeared to be two different films pieced together at around the forty minute mark. You can stick half an apple and half an orange together and call it original but what you really have is a rather odd looking fruit salad. When he makes it work in his 2002 thriller The Salton Sea it’s intriguing and entertaining, but when it doesn’t (Taking Lives didn’t know whether it was Seven or a feature episode of The X Files, and likewise Two For The Money tried to be too many things and was let down by a poor third act) it’s an unfortunate but glaring example of a director trying to be better than he is.
In Disturbia it’s unclear whether Caruso wants to play on suburban culture (the sort of American dream paranoia characterised by 1950s television, and youth culture and the breakdown of the family unit in seventies movies by Spielberg and Lucas) or indeed homage the techniques and style of Hitchcock’s suspense thrillers. Certainly, there’s obvious reference to Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Spielberg/Lucas protégé Robert Zemeckis’ What Lies Beneath, but Disturbia fails to live up to its inspirations. Because the film is so derivative it becomes far too predictable and loses any suspense the director attempts to build in the final third. It’s far too easy to spot what could be termed the ‘binocular shock reveal’, where a long lens is used to track around a position in space – for example empty windows in an apartment block or house – and suddenly someone or something appears in full view. It’s even easier to spot ‘whodunnit’ by unoriginal red-herrings that, because of their overuse, act as giant arrows pointing directly at those culpable.
Yet, perhaps the worse thing is that it takes forever for the film to get going. We’re forced to watch American Pie without the jokes for forty minutes as, after a good set-up, the plot meanders around Kale Brecht’s electronically monitored house arrest, his frustrating attempts to occupy himself (I suppose if this was American Pie he’d be masturbating furiously, but Caruso has him downloading music, playing online gaming, and testing the range of the electronic tag strapped to his ankle), and spying on the neighbours. It could have been so much fun with a bit of mystery and some oddball characters but Caruso forgets about plot development or the themes of loss established in the opening sequence, deciding to have Brecht vie for the attentions of the beautiful girl next door. When the characters eventually decide that something nasty is going on and investigate, the audience has already been lost. It all untangles so quickly you don’t have a chance to take it in, and there’s very little to care about. Caruso makes the cardinal sin of creating people who you can sympathise with (and therefore don’t want to see come to any harm) but fails to ever put them in a situation where you genuinely believe they are in danger. Even when the annoying best friend Ronnie seems to be a goner, Caruso has Brecht casually playing tonsil tennis with Ashley Carlson (Sarah Roemer). Is he not upset about losing his friend? Of course he isn’t because Ronnie is still alive and kicking, making the supposedly surprising reveal of Ronnie’s reappearance a complete failure.
Essentially, D. J. Caruso’s film wants to be part Rear Window, part The ‘Burbs, part What Lies Beneath, but ends up like an unfunny version of American Pie meets The Girl Next Door with a murder-mystery lumped on the end. Disturbia’s crowded collection of influences, its director who tries to do more than his limited talent allows, and its untidy, predictable script, make for a viewing that’s as uneasy as the movie title would suggest. And sadly, that’s not a complement.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Jason X (James Isaac, 2001, USA) May 20, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Uncategorized, Horror, 2000s, Film reviews, Sci-fi/Fantasy , 1 comment so farDir. James Isaac; screenplay by Todd Farmer; starring Kane Hodder, Lexa Doig, Chuck Campbell
The beauty to watching a film you have zero expectations of is that when it delivers, in the smallest, almost insignificant way, it can be a thrilling event. Jason X might be yet another addition in the Friday The 13th franchise but its way better than some of the awful later sequels. You can tell it’s post-Scream with its self-reflexive attitudes but unlike many of the slasher films that appeared after 1997, director Isaac puts most of his effort into playful use of the character and to not taking itself too seriously. The film is silly and at times quite funny, but it doesn’t insult its audience by trying to be something that it’s not. Isaac knows his limitations and runs with what he’s got. It makes for a frequently enjoyable entry in the series.
After the federal government fail to kill Jason through various executions including hanging and electrocution, they decide, because of his ability to regenerate dead tissue (oh, that’s how he keeps coming back to life is it!) that he needs to be experimented on. However, he escapes when they try to move him to a new facility and Rowan (Lexa Doig), a government official sent to make sure he stays locked up, gets killed trying to get Jason in the cryogenic freezer. Four-hundred years later, a group of students and their teachers, find the perfectly preserved bodies of both Jason and Rowan. Taking the bodies back to their spaceship, they manage to revive Rowan, but by the time she’s told them about Jason’s destructive capabilities, it’s too late and the killer is running a deadly rampage aboard the ship.
It would be foolish of me to continue singing the praises of Jason X without clarifying that it isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a very good movie. The production design is awful, and the plot is a cobbled together mismatch of all the Alien movies. In fact, you can make up the whole story from each of the Alien films. For instance, scientists find the cryogenically preserved body of a woman who defeated an unstoppable killer (the beginning of James Cameron’s Aliens), and then bring her and the killer aboard their spaceship which docks with a larger mother ship (the set-up in Ridley Scott’s Alien). We then see the scientists and students not heeding Rowan’s warning about Jason (David Fincher’s Alien 3), before the unscrupulous Professor Lowe decides he can use Jason for his own monetary gain (a plot thread that runs through Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection). There’s also the whole idea that Jason can be used for military purposes which is a prominent idea that features in all the Alien movies, and when Jason does start to reek havoc onboard the spaceship we see a group of gun-toting mercenaries trying to bring him down (seen also in Jeunet’s film, as well as Cameron’s first sequel).
Yet, the film works because it’s a crazy confectionary of outlandish ideas hinged on a tried and trusted plot, and generic conventions. As a slasher film it’s a rather turgid and hardly frightening experience, but the playful use of Jason as an entity certainly makes it a worthwhile viewing for the post-Scream generation. For fans of the original film, it rather makes a mockery of the heritage with Jason, just like Freddy Krueger and Micheal Myers, becoming a comic freak show that a paying public can throw things at. But, it’s an enjoyable mishmash of teen slasher cliché and science-fiction intrigue. The whole last twenty minutes has to be seen to be believed.
Rating: 2 our of 5
The Friday the 13th Series so far:
Friday The 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980, USA) - The raw and bloody original was a lot less influential than people think. It was massively inspired by John Carpenter’s Halloween and not nearly as good. Rating: 3 out of 5
Friday The 13th - Part II (Steve Miner, 1981, USA) - The second film is the first where Jason actually is the killer. It’s more enjoyable than the original film but far too similar. Rating: 2 out of 5
Friday The 13th - Part III (Steve Miner, 1982, USA) - It’s exactly the same film as the previous two, with the unfortunate bonus of 3-D. Rating: 2 out of 5
Friday The 13th - The Final Chapter (Part IV) (Joseph Zito, 1984, USA) - The film stars a young Corey Feldman who has to come to his older sister’s aid when Jason takes a fancy to her. This is silly fun and follows a very similar path to the films that proceeded it. However, it’s a better film than Part III and the most enjoyable of the sequels. Rating: 3 out of 5
Friday The 13th - A New Beginning (Part V) (Danny Steinmann, 1985, USA) - The best sequel is followed by the worst. A plotless mess and the worst Jason Voorhees film in the franchise. The fifth film tries to reignite the series after Jason is seemingly killed for good, but it fails to do a good job, simply stringing together bloody deaths for the sake of showing off the latest prosthetic and make-up effects. Waste of time. Rating: 1 out of 5
Jason Lives: Friday The 13th Part IV (Tom McLoughlin, 1986, USA) - A coherent plot helps Part IV be one of the better sequels. Rating: 3 out of 5
Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood (John Buechler, 1988, USA) - A nice premise that sees a sort of Carrie V Jason battle is sadly under-developed. However, it makes for some fun sequences and a little inventiveness to what had, by this time, become a rather dull retread of the same plot line. Rating: 2 out of 5
Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Rob Heddon, 1989, USA) - A terrible mess that lacks any sort of plot. There’s some nice special-effects towards the end but you’d have fallen asleep by the time you get to them. Rating: 1 out of 5
Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (Adam Marcus, 1993, USA) - Jason gets killed at the beginning which is about the only decent bit of the movie. Rating: 1 out of 5
Freddy Versus Jason (Ronny Yu, 2003, USA) - A gimmicky piece of rubbish seeing Freddy Krueger battling Jason Voorhees. On paper it seems like a crowd-pleaser but it’s bad filmmaking 101, and isn’t as fun as Jason X. Rating: 1 out of 5
Doom (Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2005, USA) May 18, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Uncategorized, Horror, 2000s, Film reviews, Action/Adventure, Sci-fi/Fantasy , 6 commentsDir. Andrzej Bartkowiak; screenplay by Dave Callahan & Wesley Strick; starring The Rock, Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, Ben Daniels
In one of the great self-reflexive moments that Kevin Smith does so well, Ben Affleck tells Matt Damon in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, ‘you gotta do a safe picture, then you can do an art picture. But then sometimes you gotta do the paycheck picture because your friend says you owe him.’ It’s a great little moment in a great little movie, and fittingly, describes the sentiments of Rosamund Pike who turns up in Doom surely because she either has bills to pay or she owes a friend. The Libertine, Pride And Prejudice, and the Devil You Know actress surely knew what a mess she was getting herself into when she read Callahan and Strick’s script. I’ll just backtrack for a second – did I just say it took two people to write this awful film – I think I did.
Essentially, Doom is like a high-budget TV movie with nothing resembling conflict, characterisation, or originality. Any videogame conversion to the big-screen can be forgiven for a lack of original material but the film struggles to find any conflict within its rocket-scientist mumbo-jumbo and over-complicated plotting. For a film that concerns a group of combat marines going into battle (after a distant planet issues a distress call), you’d expect a certain amount of tension, but director Bartkowiak seems either unable or unwilling. There’s a silly moment when The Rock tells his marines it’s ‘game time’ as they exit a helicopter to go into a building. The marines check the area for danger as an elevator opens with the audience half expecting something nasty to appear. Alas, it doesn’t and the men enter the elevator. Danger must surely be close? Not exactly, as the marines find their floor, we learn they’ve entered a building that acts, much like an airport, and transports them to the planet that needs their assistance. Essentially, they’re at a futuristic airport. So, we wonder, why all the gun-ready, macho-posturing as they first got into the elevator, because there was no danger whatsoever. Retrospectively, it’s laughable, as you could see the Wayans brothers or the Zucker’s using such a gag as parody, not serious, supposedly tension-building drama. In fact, I countered at least three false starts for The Rock and his gang of idiots before they face any real danger. By then, I’d switched off and started self-palm reading, something that was difficult because it was far too dark to do it properly, and secondly, I have absolutely no idea how to palm read.
Fundamentally, Doom is a complete failure because it doesn’t do the one thing it should. That is, to offer exciting and dramatic action, underscored by a relevant and overpowering threat. You think about the films it wants to be - Aliens and Predator - and they both had what was required in abundance. In Aliens, even before the marines face any direct threat, tension is created because they go to a planet they and the audience know could be populated by evil, unstoppable monsters. The fact that when they initially get there, everyone on the planet has disappeared, heightens this level of suspense (what happened? Why? Where are all the people?). The soldiers are faced with desolate corridors, artificial lighting beginning to fade, and the obvious signs of struggle, a last stand. Likewise, in Predator, when the soldiers find another slain group of marines, they begin to question what exactly they are up against. Can they defeat it, where another group of soldiers failed? Both these scenes appear well before any proper combat and yet the audience is left excited in anticipation. Doom is far too confused in its build-up, pedestrian-paced, and makes the cardinal sin of paying homage to films far better than itself.
Perhaps, the film’s main problem is Bartkowiak, a cinematographer-turned-director, whose credits at the helm include Romeo Must Die and the Steven Seagal film Exit Wounds. He paints Doom in stylish blacks and greys, with futuristic colour flourishes, and doesn’t allow himself to show too much of the excellent production design, wisely keeping it in shadow. Yet, his control of off-screen space is less refined. He struggles to focus our attention as the messy plot that features caricature, paper-thin characters has them scattering all over the place. Bartkowiak doesn’t know whether to stick or twist, and we’re left with a languid pace that meanders on a very confused course. He draws too much on what other filmmakers have done before, and can’t overcome the clichéd script with its uninventive plot and awful dialogue. The film is also devoid of humour, something that has certainly helped other videogame and especially comic book adaptations.
Maybe I went into the film with higher expectations than I should have had. I didn’t expect an especially great action film, but I did expect a sense of adventure. When Bartkowiak goes to Doom-vision (filming the shot in much the same way as the game is played in first person perspective) I felt it was inspired. At the very least it celebrated the film’s roots, and gave the videogame fans something intrinsic to enjoy. It was also a very good piece of filmmaking (but arrives far too late in the movie), probably attributed to Bartkowiak’s cinematographic background, as he uses fast-paced edits and a claustrophobic mise-en-scene to place the audience directly into the action with danger all around. Yet, unfortunately, it’s one bright spot in a great expanse of humourless, tensionless black. Doom is uninspired, big-budget Hollywood. Where have we heard that before?
Rating: 1 out of 5
Top 10 Horror Films of the 1980s May 7, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Horror, Top 10s, Artfully Deranged, Genre, The Film Industry, Audience , 52 commentsWhere there is no imagination there is no horror.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I vaguely remember my introduction to the horror film. My cousin was visiting, the curtains had been drawn on a sunny afternoon, and John Landis’ An American Werewolf In London had been placed in the VCR. I was seven years old. I recollect that evening, and for many nights consequently, I hardly slept. There was something under my bed, and there was even something in the closet, I knew it too well. Of course, it was easy to see since I’d cry bloody Mary if anyone tried to turn my light off. Could I keep my eyes open? It was becoming more difficult, all I could see were those green hills shrouded in the black cloak of night, and the warning: ‘Stay on the road. Keep clear of the moors,’ delivered in that Yorkshire twang. Bryan Glover’s short, controlled outburst – probably his unusual form of goodbye – ‘Beware the moon, lads.’ Then our hero David and best friend Jack are stranded. They’ve wandered off the path, there are no lights around, no one to help. They hear a sound, distant at first but growing louder. Could it be a dog, no, it sounds much bigger. Then the screams, the tearing of flesh, the quick cuts and extreme close-ups; we see a gun fire, all goes silent, and the darkness pervades.
I grew up as part of the video generation. Cinema was changing again – attendances were down and people were far happier watching videos or catching re-runs on television than they were venturing from the comfort of their own home. By the early 1990s, eighties babies were beginning to enjoy cinema beyond family movies, cartoons and the Wizard of Oz. In Britain, this audience - post-1984 Video Recordings Act - wanted to find their niche and what better place to start than the forsaken shelves of the video nasty. Bootleg, grainy copies of The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre tormented young minds, while the horror film cemented its place firmly in cult circles. This fervent popularity from both adults and teenagers for the horror film encouraged the industry (especially Hollywood) to produce some wonderfully surreal, engaging and stylish pieces of cinema. We saw the rampant emergence of the ‘Slasher’ movie from Wes Craven and Sean S. Cunningham, gore and special-effects from Tom Savini, the body horror of David Cronenberg, the dreams and nightmares of Clive Barker, the cross genre comedy-horror from John Landis, Tom Holland, and Dan O’Bannon. There was franchised sequels, villains-as-heroes, gothic homage, iconic theme music, lunch boxes, action figures and other cross-promotion. Indeed, the horror film was as much derided as it was loved. But the eighties produced some of the greatest examples of the genre following, and certainly inspired by, the fears and trend-setting new traditions of the new-age horror from the seventies.
The genre has failed for years to get recognition from a critical standpoint. Much of the recognition it did receive was negative – throughout the 1930s and 1940s, horror movies were thought to be harmful to society and many local authorities banned films they deemed unsuitable. During the 1950s, Hammer Studios used negative press and liberal scare tactics to promote their films, and it was as much the backlash from politicians and critics that helped cultivate underground following for the genre. However, by the late 1960s, there was a trend beginning in France that saw critics warming to the genre, and by the time Carlos Clarens and Ivan Butler’s books were released, there was a new feeling that looked at the films as serious art forms. Instead of lambasting horror movies as detrimental, even dangerous, to society, writers were beginning to look at the long literary traditions that had first inspired these films. And they also investigated the history and transformation of the genre since the first examples were seen in such German expressionism as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. By the 1970s every critic who wanted a name for themselves had written about the horror movie, whether their point of view was positive, negative, or indifferent. Most importantly, horror had become a mainstream commodity with the obvious example being Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. It isn’t surprising that the seventies produced the best and most influential films of the genre (The Exorcist, Halloween, The Wicker Man, Dawn Of The Dead), with audiences, the art form, and the industry all benefiting from this budding type of film.
Yet, the eighties was a period not far behind the previous decade in terms of quality output. Certainly, the genre was much more diverse with self-reference, parody, and hybrids such as Kathryn Bigelow’s brilliant Near Dark, showing what could be done. On top of that you had some lovely original pieces of cinema with such films as Dan O’Bannon’s special-effects homage to Romero The Return of the Living Dead, Joel Schumacher’s coming-of-age vampire flick The Lost Boys, and beyond Hollywood with the Dutch/French production The Vanishing, and stylistic Italian director Dario Argento’s Tenebre and Inferno. Indeed, the vibrancy for the genre in the 1980s came from films which embraced and celebrated horror. Prime examples would be the self-referential Fright Night, gore-fest The Evil Dead, Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste, John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing, and Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock-inspired Dressed To Kill. It has been said the eighties was, much like very early film, the cinema of attractions. It pushed the boundaries of the medium to new frontiers, backed by Reagan’s forward-thinking plans. Director’s thought visually, and nothing held their creative minds back. It was the period where dreams and nightmares were displayed on screen more realistically than had ever been seen. In effect, there appeared no better time for horror (much like science-fiction during the same period) – with its otherworldly themes – to prosper on a grand scale. In a sense you’ve got to thank George Lucas because with Star Wars he reintroduced audiences to escapism, which had somewhat been lost during the dominance of social-issue and character studies of the seventies.
The genre, which would continue to diversify into the nineties (postmodernism in A New Nightmare in 1994, which led to Scream and the revitalisation of the Slasher film; and the digital video revolution and use of new media with Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s masterful manipulation of the audience with The Blair Witch Project), still retained a very distinct set of conventions that primarily challenged normality and distanced the real from the unreal. Reading many different theorists views about how the horror film works makes for wide reaching, and often, very politically motivated ideologies, but it’s interesting nonetheless. There’s a school that believes American horror is dominated by the struggles created by consumerism, patriarchal social relations, and family struggle, and that the location of the horror is in the home and our way of life. Others believe the monsters prevalent in horror films represent institutional fears, like the affect the church, government, or the police can have on breaking or changing familial tradition, while some writers look at the way the audience is manipulated through the aesthetics of the films by the way they play on the insecurities that defy rational explanation. There are also people such as Stephen Neale who believe the genre satisfies a fetish for violence and terror that is inherited by the society and cultural structure we live in, while feminist theorists argue the genre is dominated by misogyny and the ‘female’ as victim.
Whether you find yourself agreeing or disagreeing, the fact remains that the horror film is, and has been, a very popular genre for audiences. Despite its early critical backlash, the genre has been important as far back as the 1930s when Universal produced Dracula and Frankenstein amongst others, which were so well received by audiences, it enabled the company to become a major Hollywood studio. In the 1940s RKO created many films including Cat People, which pioneered a style which would be imitated by filmmakers for years to come. Instead of showing the monster, filmmakers used off-screen space, sound, lighting and deep shadows, character reaction, and the ambiguity of the audience’s imagination to produce stylish and emotionally impacting movies. Independent production prospered in the 1960s with the most influential film being George A. Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead, which led to a new respectability with Roman Polanski’s mesmerising Rosemary’s Baby, and the best film the genre ever created, William Friedkin’s terrifying The Exorcist.
For me, the best decade for horror was the 1980s and that’s why I present my top 10. Below, you’ll also find my Top five favourite moments:
10. Fright Night (Tom Holland, 1985, USA)
‘’Apparently your generation doesn’t want to see vampire killers anymore, nor vampires either. All they want to see slashers running around in ski masks, hacking up young virgins.'’
Top 10, why?: Tom Holland’s superb self-referential horror-comedy is both delightfully funny and darkly sadistic, wryly telling the story of a teenager who knows a Vampire has moved in next door but no one believes him. A standout performance from Roddy McDowell is the centre point of a film that simultaneously celebrates and parodies the genre. This unique film inspired a lot of the post-modern sentiment later seen in the 1990s.
Critic quote: ‘…it’s hard to get into this movie and not have a little fun…’ (Nadd Yapp)
External review: Absolute Horror
9. Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987, UK)
‘’We will tear your soul apart'’
Top 10, why?: The film embodies the idea of nightmares displayed on screen as Clive Barker creates a terrifying vision of hell on earth.
Critic Quote: ‘I have seen the future of the horror genre, and his name is Clive Barker.’ (Stephen King)
External Reviews: British Horror Films, Blog of the Rotting Dead
8. The Vanishing (George Sluizer, 1988, Holland)
‘’The only way to tell you, is to make you share the exact same experience'’
Top 10, why?: Sluizer’s film is about pacing and atmosphere. He plays with audience expectation (even telling us who the killer is half way through) and concludes the film with one of the best and most devastating conclusions to any horror film ever made.
Critic Quote: Sounds like an overworked premise for Alfred Hitchcock (The Lady Vanishes), Roman Polanski (Frantic), or Jonathan Mostow (Breakdown), but The Vanishing quickly veers into new and intriguing territories. (Matthew Kennedy)
External reviews: Bright Lights Film Journal, Combustible Celluloid
7. The Return Of The Living Dead (Dan O’Bannon, 1985, USA)
‘’Did you see that movie, “Night of the Living Dead”?'’
Top 10, why?: Dan O’Bannon’s homage to Romero is fun, pacy and full of great production design and prosthetic effects. The film was essentially fighting against Sam Raimi’s excellent sequel to The Evil Dead, but I decided to go with O’Bannon’s effort because it’s a more polished affair with several good performances.
Critic Quote: ‘It’s kind of a sensation-machine, made out of the usual ingredients, and the real question is whether it’s done with style. It is.’ (Roger Ebert)
External Reviews: Dr. Gore, Apollo Movie Guide, Club IGN
6. The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986, USA)
‘’What am I working on? Uhh… I’m working on something that will change the world, and human life as we know it.'’
Top 10, why?: Anchored by a brilliant performance from Jeff Goldblum, director David Cronenberg continues his investigation into the renowned body-horror, as Goldbum’s Seth Brundle attempts metamorphosis but it all goes wrong when a house fly gets caught up in the machine. As Brundle struggles to find a cure to his problem, he falls deeper in love with Geena Davis’ concerned Veronica. When he learns that his body structure is becoming that of a fly, the fruits of his new powers soon challenge his own sanity, and his own survival. The Fly is one of several great horror films made in the eighties by Cronenberg but it stands out because it his most accessible, and probably most accomplished piece of work.
Critic Quote: ‘It’s hard to watch; not only because it takes a strong stomach to cope with the necessarily gruesome special effects but because the emotions depicted are so honest and direct that they eventually becomes overwhelming.’ (Mike Sutton)
External Reviews: Reel.com
5. Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987, USA)
‘’We keep odd hours…'’
Top 10, why?: Near Dark has always fascinated me because it’s a horror film that only really works within the constraints of the genre based on the audiences expectation and understanding of the gothic, and of past vampire films. It’s almost a western love story, with the premise setting the scene for two star-crossed lovers from distinct families that cannot mix. It’s the Romeo and Juliet of the vampire world. The film features half the main cast from James Cameron’s Aliens, with Lance Henrikson, Bill Paxton, and Jenette Goldstein all working together again, and Paxton and Henrikson are superb in their roles as rogue bloodsuckers. This small-budget film was a given an awful marketing campaign that saw it fail at the box office, and also saw Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys become the remembered vampire film of 1987. However, Bigelow’s beautifully paced tale is a fantastic film because it was the most unique horror movie of the 1980s, and looked at the gothic story from a completely different point of view than had been seen before.
Critic Quote: ‘Near Dark is the best vampire movie you’ve never heard of…’ (Rod Armstrong)
External Reviews: My full review, Horror Movies.com, Alex Jackson, My New Plaid Pants (for an interesting take on the film), Grave Robber
4. A Nightmare On Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984, USA)
‘’Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep.'’
Top 10, why?: It says a lot that this is the only teen slasher film to make the top ten. Wes Craven’s excellent film, much like Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, embodies the idea of a nightmare on screen. It’s also backed by a brilliant premise that has a killer who can only hurt you while you sleep. Fantastic!
Critic Quote: ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street is tailor made for those who like their gore leavened with thought-provoking ideas - something that is a rarity in this genre.’ (James Berardinelli)
External Reviews: Alex Jackson
3. An American Werewolf In London (John Landis, 1981, USA)
‘’A naked American man stole my balloons'’
Top 10, why?: John Landis’ 1981 classic was an easy choice for a top ten spot because it’s one of my all time favourite films. It’s also a horror film that Roger Ebert absolutely hates, which means it has to be one of the best films ever made. Not that I’m trying to have a dig at the renowned critic (I’ve used one of his quotes for Return Of The Living Dead), but I do believe he simply doesn’t get Landis’ film. He seems to believe horror and comedy have lived seamlessly for years, but not like this they haven’t. An American Werewolf In London is equally funny and frightening, and Landis is one of only a few directors to actually make it work. Ebert, while celebrating special-effects maestro Rick Baker’s work on the film, merely disassociates that quality for his overall appreciation of the film. Baker’s werewolf transformation was not only one of the most realistic special-effects ever to be put to celluloid at the time, but it was underpinned by Landis’ superb use of music (the brilliant irony of classic Blue Moon). It works so perfectly because it flirts between a line that doesn’t tell the audience to laugh or cry, and by breaking convention, the audience is left not knowing what might happen next. The sequence makes for the best werewolf transformation ever put on screen, and is one of the primary reasons the film has such a cult following and is regarded by horror fans as one of the best examples of the genre ever made.
Critic Quote: ‘…in the summer of 1981 came John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London, which has, in many ways, set the standard for the modern werewolf movie.’ (James Birardinelli)
External Reviews: DVD Times, Jeffrey Wachs, Chrissy Deberyshire, Darth Jamyz
2. The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982, USA)
‘’I dunno what the hell’s in there, but it’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is.'’
Top 10, why?: Much like The Fly, I’d have to question whether to put this in the horror or science-fiction category but essentially they are both horror movies at the most primitive level. The Thing was John Carpenter’s sixth major feature production, and for me, it’s a work that he has never surpassed before or since. He made many excellent movies within the genre through the eighties, but the sense of paranoia amongst his ensemble cast in The Thing makes for wonderful, suspenseful viewing. The blood test sequence in the middle of the film is one of the best scene’s in horror cinema ever put to celluloid.
Critic Quote: ‘John Carpenter may be better known for Halloween or Escape from New York, but The Thing is easily the famed horror director’s best film.’ (Evan Pulgino)
External Reviews: James Berardinelli
1. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980, USA)
‘’Here’s Johnny…!'’
Top 10, why?: This was an easy choice for number one. It’s Kubrick’s best film and one of the greatest films ever made, no matter what genre. What I love about the movie is that it gets better with every viewing, and I know the next time I watch it I’ll enjoy it more than the last.
Critic quote: ‘Stanley Kubrick doesn’t anything by halves. What this die-hard perfectionist has created, during the years of post-production work that went on while tucked away in a British film studio, are exemplary pieces of artistic refinement: 2001, A Space Odyssey was a masterpiece in science-fiction, Barry Lyndon set a new standard for historical epics and The Shining redefined the meaning of horror altogether.’ (Der Spiegel)
External Reviews: Alex Jackson, Chris Justice, Robert Castle
Round up
There’s obviously many great films that didn’t make my top ten, notably the Evil Dead’s, Dressed To Kill, The Lost Boys, Innocent Blood, The Howling, The Fog, Christine, Prince Of Darkness, a whole heap of teen slasher movies, Dead and Buried, Manhunter, Tenebre and other European independent films, Bad Taste, Cannibal Holocaust and a lot of exploitative filth, Critters, Gremlins (but I always enjoyed the sequel more), The Hitcher, Scanners, Re-animator, The Serpent and the Rainbow, Silver Bullet, Child’s Play, the list goes on.
I probably realised this before making my top ten, but it confirms that I don’t like sadistic horror films that set out to repulse the audience. You may notice that I’ve chosen mainly mainstream horror films. It’s all well and good making social comments like Wes Craven’s The Last House On The Left, but when a film becomes the director’s perverted wet dream, it isn’t fun anymore. For all that the horror genre does to its audience it should always be fun and entertaining, leaving the viewer with a feeling of adrenaline, not sickness. For that reason, I think the eighties produced some of the best films from the genre (and don’t get me wrong, it also produced some of the worst). They were and still are entertaining movies. The improvement of special-effects may date the films now but the nostalgic feeling of watching them again makes up for that.
Top Five Moments from 1980s Horror
1. An American Werewolf In London – The Transformation
David Kessler tries to keep himself occupied in Nurse Alex’s house when she leaves him to go to work. As night falls, and the full moon comes out, he feels a terrible pain in his chest. His skin begins to burn, and his bones begin to crack, as his body changes into that of a werewolf. The great thing director John Landis does here is to make the whole scene painful to watch and clearly painful for David. This isn’t the easy transformation that had been seen in cinema before. This was bones, and flesh, moulding and changing; it hurt. The scene is very realistic, and the prosthetic make-up effects look better than any CGI would today. Landis beautifully underpins the scene with the blues classic Blue Moon which is sadistically ironic.
2. The Thing – Blood Test
Working out that alien and human blood react to each other, the surviving group conduct a blood test to work out which, if any of them, are alien. Carpenter infuses the scene with paranoia, creating a level of suspense he hangs on to for several minutes as the scene plays out.
3. Evil Dead II – Ash battles his own hand
When Ash’s hand gets possessed, he’s forced to cut it off. However, after the gruelling dismemberment, the severed hand (clearly pissed off at such an action), comes after him in one of the great comedic horror moments.
4. The Vanishing – The final twist and devastating conclusion
The film leaves both the viewer and main character Rex in completely darkness over the fate of his girlfriend. Although, we meet the man who abducted her, we are still unsure whether she is dead or alive. When Rex agrees to take a sleeping pill in order to find out what really happened, he awakens to have all his questions answered. This is one of the best endings to any horror film from the eighties. It’s both devastatingly affecting and cruelly ironic.
5. The Hitcher – They thought it was all over…it wasn’t.
The audience, and the characters, are left thinking the terror might be all over…but it isn’t. Jim leaves his hotel room to find Nash (the girl he had fallen for over the course of the film) tied between a truck and its trailer. If the police shoot the driver, his foot will leave the clutch and the truck will roll forward, ripping Nash in half. In order to save her, Jim gets into the truck with the driver to talk him out of it. He doesn’t succeed.
FURTHER READING:
Inside Out: Body Horror, Films of the 1980s
Final Girls and Terrible Youth: Transgression in 1980s Slasher Horror
Everything I need to know, I learned from 1980s Horror Films
Happy Endings (Don Roos, 2005, USA)
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Horror, Comedy, 2000s, Drama, Film reviews , add a commentDir. Don Roos; screenplay by Don Roos; starring Lisa Kudrow, Steve Coogan, Jesse Bradford, Bobby Cannavale, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Ritter, Tom Arnold, David Sutcliffe, Laura Dern
Counting how many movies writer/director Don Roos was trying to make with Happy Endings is about as difficult as deciphering Steve Coogan’s unusual pseudo-American accent. Not that I’m saying Coogan is bad in the film. I clocked he was gay from a screen shot of the film based on his feminine poise, which indicates he’s believable in his role as he does indeed play a gay character. Yet, Coogan, like so much else in this film, is wasted. The British comic’s talent is much more akin to the sort of offbeat niches seen in A Cock and Bull Story, 24 Hour Party People and his television roles. He actually suited an American-style character in The Alibi much more because it served his awkward humour, giving him a character on the wrong side of weird. In Happy Endings, anything Coogan brings to the film is lost with everything else Roos is trying to achieve as he can’t find the sum for all his parts. The film is full of quirky story arcs and possibly interesting characters, but the switching from story to story, character to character, makes it very difficult for an audience to keep up. Tarantino was able to make it work in Pulp Fiction with brilliant dialogue and sensationalised stories. Roos, in trying to keep attention on his characters, tries to work the interlocking element of their lives into a coherent narrative but he misses Tarantino’s trick. Instead of the interlocking nature of the plot being a sort of negligible oddity, Happy Endings’ is contrived and predictable.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Reeker (Dave Payne, 2005, USA) May 4, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Horror, 2000s, Film reviews, Thriller/Suspense , add a commentDir. Dave Payne; screenplay by Dave Payne; starring Devon Gummersall, Derek Richardson, Tina Illman
Forgive me for paraphrasing but I believe it was Francis Ford Coppola who said in the documentary A Decade Under The Influence that after Jaws and Star Wars the film industry began to take less risks and simply reproduced the stars, the plot lines, and the theme’s of movies that had made a lot of money. There’s nothing profound in his reasoning, the obvious fact was that the industry had to make money and the easiest way possible was always going to become prevalent. However, it is disconcerting when trash like E.T. cash-in Mac and Me and its ilk dominate the market. The Star Wars-inspired The Last Starfighter, Flight of the Navigator, Enemy Mine, and Battle Beyond the Stars are all enjoyable little movies but the lack of fresh ideas is only detrimental to the medium. You just have to look at how heavily Wes Craven’s Scream influenced the industry with the overbearing number of teen-inspired horror flicks. Did we really need Valentine, I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, Cherry Falls, and useless remakes of Black Christmas and When A Stranger Calls? I find it hard to say, sad almost, that I enjoyed Cherry Falls immensely, so perhaps I’m helping feed the frenzy, but the others were poor at best.
That brings me to Reeker - a film that might make you think people die from a killer who uses flatulence as his weapon of choice. You’d be wrong, but it’s a rather funny presumption. The film concerns five college students who end up driving down a very lonely, desolate road and run out of petrol at a deserted Motel (stop me if you’ve heard this before). Then as night begins to fall, things start to go bump. People have sex, or at least they try to, and others decide to camp outside in a tent (are you kidding me!). It is amusing how, with all the self-reflexive, post-modern horror films we see today, characters still act like they’ve never seen one. Am I being over-paranoid - even I check to see if an axe-wielding madman is in the back of my car when I’m driving at night. No matter what happens, horror film characters still go wandering alone, say ‘I’ll be right back’, and pretty much ask to get murdered in the most horrific ways possible. Alas, you have to admit that’s part of what makes a horror film so enjoyable, but the great thing about Scream was the way it reversed those conventions and it goes back to originality, something that is all too commonly lacking. And it’s originality that is seriously A.W.O.L. in Reeker which at first glance is influence by The Hills Have Eyes and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As you watch the story unfold you see that it is more heavily influence by the recent films Identity and Dead End to the point it’s almost a direct copy. The film basically takes Dead End’s beginning and ending, and attaches it to Identity’s middle. If you’ve seen Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa’s excellent Dead End you’ll recognise Reeker’s stench a mile off, and you’ll have no problem predicting the twist.
Reeker is in many ways the embodiment of what Coppola was talking about when referencing trend changes during the late seventies and eighties. It shows little artistic merit or skill with a script that is nothing more than derivative and direction that lacks any flair. Indeed, director Payne struggles to create tension. His killer is too ambivalent, and the ambiguity at the source of the ‘evil’ is underdeveloped. He looks very much like a man in-at-ease with (comparatively) big-budget, big-studio constraints, and with his back catalogue of rubbish like Alien Avengers II, Alien Terminator, Showgirl Murders, and Addams Family Reunion, you know you’re seeing a film by an under-skilled, awfully average director. He even completely fails to capitalise on an interesting dynamic with one of the characters who is blind. I found it intriguing to have a character which couldn’t see and used his working senses to control his environment. It crossed my mind how the suspense might have an added angle if a character couldn’t see his or her attacker. After all, the likes of Micheal Myers and Jason Voorhees in Halloween and Friday The 13th (well, the second movie onward) didn’t rush on their prey, using slow and controlled methods of capture. But, as victims saw their fate, they tried desperately to escape. Taking away the ability to see seems to me like an interesting set-up, and other directors have exploited disabled characters in the past (see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th: Part II, Friday the 13th: Part V, and Leprechaun) but Payne seems less concerned, simply using the disability as a cheap red-herring as if blind people automatically have something to hide.
If the film had any merits they’d be thrown out in a court of law because it’s all a big con anyway. It’s like sending your car in for a service and getting something back that looks and feels like your car, but is actually an imitation, made from cheap parts, dodgy oil, and wheels that look half on, half off. Even the acting is uninspired. These young actors look desperate for parts and as such took the opportunity to star in this tripe. It all adds up to a nightmare of gigantic proportions, and sadly, it’s for all the wrong reasons.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Bob Clark (1941 – 2007) April 6, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Horror, 1970s, Film reviews, Thriller/Suspense, Biographies , add a comment
On the 5th of April 2007, writer/director Bob Clark was tragically killed when an unlicensed, drunk driver, smashed head first into his car. Sadly, his 22 year old son, who was travelling with him, also died.
The director was most famous for the irreverent Porky’s films which saw, amongst other things, a group of horny, under-sexed teenagers spying on the girl’s shower rooms. The sudden appearance of a penis through a hole in the wall is what most people remember about the movie.
The director also brought us the holiday classic A Christmas Story, and worked with Dan Aykoryd and Gene Hackman on the action-comedy Loose Cannons. Certainly, Clark came under fire from critics who saw a lack of consistency within his work, and it is saddening he never found the form to surpass his horror masterpiece Black Christmas.
His later career was dominated by children and family entertainment both for television and film. Unfortunately, his new horror film Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things had production pushed back from its start date in 2006 to Spring 2007, and will therefore be left incomplete.
Below is my review of Bob Clark’s best film. This was first published by DVD Times in March 2003.
Canada, 1974 – director Bob Clark, unbeknownst to him at the time, waters the seeds planted by Hitchcock’s Psycho, and to a certain degree Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, to which would fruit to bare a new sub-genre in horror cinema. Four years before the supposed fire starter, and most famous film to grace the genre Halloween, Black Christmas began the refining of conventions in laying the groundwork for Carpenter’s film to bloom. True, Halloween was the catalyst to a whole heap of movies which followed in the very late seventies and eighties, but it was Clark’s film that shone at the roots in terms of the generic aesthetics which became so prevalent.
Soon after Carpenter’s student years, he and Bob Clark would have a conversation, that ultimately spawned 1978’s Halloween, in which Carpenter told Clark how much he enjoyed his earlier horror film. According to Clark, Carpenter asked him if he would be willing to make a sequel to Black Christmas, to which Clark replied with an unequivocal ‘no’. However, Clark did divulge to Carpenter how he thought a sequel to Black Christmas would go, plot wise. If it were made, he told him, it would be titled Halloween, and would be based on a serial killer who was caught but then escaped from a mental institution to stalk victims on Halloween night. Clearly, Carpenter took this food for thought on board and with the help of Debra Hill, turned the idea into reality. So in essence, Black Christmas could very well be thought of as the unofficial prequel to Halloween.
The story is quite simple. At a sorority house, the girls are getting ready to go home for Christmas but begin receiving phone calls from a strange caller who won’t give his name. The next day, many girls leave, but one who should have met her father doesn’t turn up, which causes great concern for her safety. When another girl goes missing, the police begin searching the area and find a body nearby. Meanwhile, with only three students left in the sorority house, the phone calls continue, getting more and more menacing each time, but unknown to the remaining members of the house, the caller, and perhaps the killer, is closer to them than their nightmares could ever imagine.
Bob Clark’s career needed a boost, and as he showed with his later comedy Porky’s, he wasn’t someone who would shy away from breaking norms and subverting audience expectation – who would have expected the events of the shower scene, and that hole in the wall that overlooked the girls shower room!? Violent, shocking, and horrific stories were becoming regular pieces of American cinema, and Clark sensing this, grasped the opportunity to direct his first horror picture. Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs in 1971, Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left in 1972, and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist in 1973 were proof that the obscure, dangerous films put your name on the map, for better and for worse. His film hardly made the splashes the three prior films made for themselves, but it put his foot in the water, and it was in his small, but significant ripples that would elevate his film beyond just cult status.
Clark begins his film looking through the eyes of the killer, as he examines the house from the outside, and scales the wall to find a way in. The subjective, voyeuristic nature of the point-of-view camerawork beautifully places the audience inside the killer’s mind, as we stalk the house and become the voyeurs too. Clark mixes objective and subjective aesthetics to create scenes of intensity and suspense, not seen on film before, and rarely matched since. Unlike Tobe Hooper’s documentary style voyeurism in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which the audience is dared to keep their eyes on the screen, Clark throws the audience no room for a breath of oxygen as he cuts from an objective shot into a point-of-view shot of what the killer sees, as if we are forced to partake in the action of killing itself, and not just in the selfish act of watching someone else’s life being taken. Clark compounds this with brilliant use of sound, deafening the listener with ear haunting rasps and screeches, as if he wants to hurt your senses.
Indeed, the director wants to unsettle the audience rather than give individual viewers incessant shocks, only for viewers to forget about them once they’ve left the theatre, or once they’ve turned off the television. What violence occurs in Black Christmas is largely implied, rather than explicit, and adds to the overall sense of physical emotion in the audience, because the ‘horror’ unsettles you on a personal level with your imagination creating the ‘terror’ implied. One wonderfully created scene has one of the girls being killed juxtaposed with carol singers singing at the door. The Christmas song plays over the violent, loud, blood bath, with images of happy children singing their hearts out combined with jerky, dark glimpses of a knife entering flesh, and a blood soaked hand becoming more and more lifeless with every blow.
Clark uses the phone as an extension of the killer, an extension of the evil, to great effect. Mixing different voices with jagged, undecipherable language, the director is able to create a monster, existing above human capacity through alienating the solid form of a human being into the detached, multi-faceted voice of grotesque, unseen evil. Elsewhere, he owes a debt of gratitude to Murnau’s 1922 classic Nosferatu, and Fritz Lang’s brilliantly unnerving, sombre tale M from 1931. The killer moves within the shadows, his/her form largely subliminal, and what we do see of him/her is that of disembodied evil – hands holding a weapon, or an erratic eye, peering through a crack in the door. It also becomes apparent that the film doesn’t just share the voyeuristic nature of the photography with its counterpart The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, incidentally released the same year, it also shares similar themes regarding the real life serial murderer Ed Gein. In Clark’s film, like Hooper’s, the killer has a penchant for ornamental corpses, and here, he/she likes to leave them in the attic in ‘hello death’ posers, culminating in a viscerally, haunting final image that ends the film.
It wouldn’t be surprising if this film were cited as playing a major part in so-called feminist horror films made afterward, like Meir Zarchi’s I Spit On Your Grave, but of course Zarchi’s film could be looked at in a completely opposing way. Nevertheless, unlike the genre’s films to come where the clean, young virgins survive, and the dirty, man-eater’s meet horrible deaths, Black Christmas’ main female cast are largely the only ones for which we have any sympathy. Barb, played superbly by Margot Kidder, rises above any authority put before her. She doesn’t allow, at least visually, the caller to frighten her and in fact tells him/her where to go, and later when talking to the police she plays a little game when asked what her phone number is, telling the inept male cop that the number is Fellatio 20880, to which the cop unknowingly writes down. She has a rather unfeminine personality, she drinks too much, and swears in most of her sentences yet we get the feeling there’s some inner turmoil perhaps down to jealousy of some of the other younger girls and the beautiful, quiet but authoritative Jess, played by Olivia Hussey. Hussey caries the film with her quiet, pondering and wistful looks, grounding the almost unreal events, in real life reality, and in her character Jess, rebels against her boyfriend after she tells him she’s getting an abortion of which he is adamantly against, but she sticks to her guns. And the father of one of the girls who goes missing expresses dismay at the fact she might have been experimenting with drugs, drink and sex saying, ‘I didn’t send my daughter here to be drinking…and picking up boys’. The women in the film rebel against the constraints put upon them, and for the most part these restraints are embodied in the male characters, most of which are either inept or out of touch with present day reality.
As for the rest of the performances, well, for the most part they are very good. Keir Dullea, as the insecure, neurotic boyfriend broods around breaking things, shouting and acting like he has the credentials to be the killer, while John Saxon, as usual, is the ultimate professional giving his chief lieutenant a strong backbone, and Doug McGrath offers some comic relief as the inept cop.
Black Christmas is a fantastically, effective horror film, easing its way under your skin and it stands as a major contributor in the creation of a new sub-genre in horror culture. Halloween has a more refined characteristic and is arguably the better film, but Black Christmas inspired it in so many ways you have to give the plaudits to Clark’s film.
Lady In The Water (M. Night Shyamalan, USA, 2006) March 22, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Horror, 2000s, Film reviews, Sci-fi/Fantasy , add a commentSomewhat of a return to form for M. Night Shyamalan, but Lady In The Water doesn’t reach the glorious heights of his best work Unbreakable.
There’s an innocence to the story that shines through, and Lady In The Water savours good storytelling. Perhaps ironically, it’s the film’s fundamental storytelling that lets it down - for example, there’s far too much exposition delivered in a haphazard way. However, Shyamalan’s love of a good bedtime story that is steeped in mysticism, magic, and folklore, jumps out of the movie with every transition, with every scene change, with every character.
Shyamalan also has time to have a dig at movie critics with the brilliantly realised Bob Balaban character. Balaban’s demise is one of the film’s best moments.
Overall, it’s a good film. I felt the photography could have been more inspired, but Lady In The Water is much better than The Village. Paul Giamatti holds it all together with an excellent performance and Shyamalan himself crops up in his biggest role to date.