From Zombos Closet

Movies (Ghostly)

Hollow’s Grove (2014)

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Hollows Grove movie posterZombos Says: Good when the horror kicks in.

Once you get past the irritatingly sophomoric and time-wasting improv at the beginning, we follow S.P.I.T (Spirit Paranormal Investigation Team) as they prepare for an episode of their show that will film at Hollows Grove, a derelict orphanage and hospital. This collected-footage narrative of their would-be fake investigation turns into a screamer with some good chills.

Lance Henriksen provides a cameo at the beginning as the special effects guy who sets up the fake scares for every episode. Only this time around the scares are on him and the rest of the crew as they are suddenly faced with malevolent occupants who like to play; and by this time, are probably very bored at not having anyone living to slay with for a long time.

Probably the worst evil monsters you can write about in horror are kids gone bad and this orphanage has a lot of them. The backstory has the children dying from disease and cremated in the basement. I know a lot of the usual horror outlets downgraded this movie when it first hit digital in 2014, but they’re wrong: there is a lot to like here, with most of it coming from a really downbeat  mood — that always important constant dread — permeating every scene the minute these bozos realize it’s all real. Films like the recent Until Dawn may have more graphic kills, but the tradeoff is no mood, leading to a rote checklist of you die this way, you die that way. The fun in watching Hollows Grove is seeing everyone on the team suddenly step knee deep into it and realizing that they are knee deep into it, while still falling for the old divide and bicker and die alone formula. Given their earlier goofiness I enjoyed this even more. With Until Dawn, I kept looking at my watch and wondering when a gritty and emotionally pummeling story was going to kick in. Hint: it never did. Towards the last quarter of Hollows Grove, the manic panic is well executed, along with the team.

The wrap around contrivance isn’t the most stellar. An FBI agent sets up the disturbing collected footage to watch, but the actor is really bad at being an FBI agent, so it lands with a thud; especially when given the weird (not in a good way weird) epilogue where agents supposedly captured some evidence. The frantically paced ending before that deserved better.

Of course, every good horror story usually has an idiot leading the way to doom. In this one it’s Tim (Matt Doherty). Ignoring the grounds keeper Hector’s warnings (Eddie Perez), they blow past him and enter the building after he removes the thick chains on the front door. Setting up the cameras and beginning their walk-through of the premises, the first and best reason to not continue pops up in the kitchen. It’s a sudden blunt statement of get out now or else, clearly punctuated with a splash of blood. For the horror movie to continue though, they ignore it and keep going. Go team.

Interesting use of two cameras to provide the footage is a novelty: Chad (Val Morrison) handles the closeups with his camera, though rather clumsily and we never really see his footage, while Harrold (Matthew Carey) tags along with his camera, capturing the team and Chad filming them. The rest of the team includes Julie, who handles the logistics, and Roger, who handles the EMF gadget.

Camera batteries dying, weird noises, bad smells, a cold spot, and things moving by themselves are par for the investigation. At one point both Chad and Julie (Bresha Webb) are left alone in the staging room on the first floor. He turns on his damaged camera to see if it is still working and captures the best scene in the movie. It’s all downhill for the rest of them from there. The next best scene is when Harrold screams for Tim to close the damn door, for good reason.

Pretty soon the lights are going off and the No Exit signs are lit. Watch this one late at night. And feel a little pity for Harrold. The poor schlub just needed the job to perk up his career. He should have stuck to comedy.

Exhuma (2024) Movie Review

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Exhuma movie poster“Hello?”

“I’m calling for Zoc.”

“Yes?

“Hi. I’m Will Cast from Mirackle Streaming.”

“I’m sorry, who?”

“Will Cast. You know. Our motto is if it’s good streaming it’s a mirakle.”

“Oh, right. I think I got you in a bundle with Disney+ and Shudder. What can I do for you?”

“Yeah, don’t get me started on those bundles. It’s like cable all over again. Anyway, we’re pushing the South Korean creeper, Exhuma. Made a lot of money over there and its got some legs with all the Korean and Japanese political and supernatural elements. They do good ghost stories, though a bit slow-walking to watch, but always moody and broody, you know what I mean?

“Yes, on pacing. Just finished watching the Norwegian Handling the Undead. A lot of slow-walking there but has its moments, some intense ones, so memorable.”

“Yeah, well this baby keeps your eyes busy with inquisitive camera movement, ominous and dreary atmosphere, and murderous ghosts. Especially one really big Japanese ghost–really an anima, as they say in the movie–that likes sweetfish and mellons and slaughtering people for their livers. Reminds me of that big demon, Samri, in Purana Mandir.

“It’s gory then?”

“Nah, tame stuff compared to what the U.S. puts out today.”

“What about the characters?” …

Exhuma (2024) Movie ReviewRead More »

Tap Dancing to Hell and a Pot o’Gold Part 1
The Living and the Dead
Castle of Blood (1964)

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Castle_of_blood.jpg

Do to an issue with Google still showing my older posts after I removed my typepad blog, I will be reposting some posts through wordpress to kick the search engine in the ass a bit. 

 

Zombos Says: Very Good

“More hot chocolate please,” I said to Chef Machiavelli.

He put down the large and very sharp looking knife he was using to fillet the eel for his incredible eel livornese and refilled my cup. His hot chocolate is exquisite; filled with little lumps of white vanilla, a little anisette, and lots of dark, sweet
chocolate. It’s the perfect warmer-upper. I was sitting in the kitchen waiting for the plumber to find the problem with our recalcitrant boiler. He was sure taking his time.

“I will take a cup, too,” said Zombos joining us to bask in the warmth coming from the brick oven. “I wonder what’s taking the plumber so long.”

“You did give him the map?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. I do not want to lose another plumber down there. They are skittish as it is. Lucky for us this fellow is new.” He sipped his hot chocolate.

It was so hard trying to get plumbers to come out to the mansion; even harder keeping them once they saw our basement. The labyrinthine passages and rooms below us would give even Erik, the poor suffering Phantom of the Paris Opera, a run for his money.

While we waited, I looked at the long, gleaming knife Chef Machiavelli was using. I found it fascinating that a sharp implement can slice through atoms and molecules, severing their tenuous connections so easily—and the whole concept of self-sharpening was beyond me.

“How is the time doing?” asked Zombos.

We looked at our watches.

“Merda!” cursed Chef Machiavelli. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his eel-skin wallet. He handed Zombos five dollars.

“I’m still good,” I said as Zombos tucked the fiver into his shirt pocket with a grin.

“We will see about that,” he said.

We had placed bets on when the plumber would be done and Chef Machiavelli’s chosen time had passed. I was still on target, though. I crossed my fingers. I really hate losing a bet to Zombos: he was rich enough.

“This wagering reminds me of that horror movie, Castle of Blood, where the journalist bets he can stay in a haunted castle for the night,” I said.

“I remember that movie.” Zombos sipped his hot chocolate. “Barbara Steele is in it.”

“Yes, and gamboling fog as the journalist enters the Poor Devil Inn—how apropos,” I continued. “When he comes upon the table where Edgar Allan Poe (Silvano Tranquilli) and the owner of the haunted castle are discussing the reality of the supernatural, he can’t help but listen and take the wager of staying overnight in that place where no one has survived the stay. Soon they’re off to the castle and the journalist’s misadventure with the undead begins.”

…

Tap Dancing to Hell and a Pot o’Gold Part 1
The Living and the Dead
Castle of Blood (1964)Read More »

The Victim (2006)

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The-VictimZombos Says: Very Good

“Maybe you can reenact the mystery?” said Lawn Gisland. He stretched his unusually long legs out in front of him and yawned. “Like Ting, ‘cept less’n the melodrama a mite.” He pulled at his cookie duster. “Say, Zoc, squeeze me ‘nother one of those cappurino’s, por favor.”

“Sure pardner,” I said, firing up the old cappuccino steam engine. The sound of pent-up steam escaping echoed through the cinematorium.

Zombos continued to look high and low for his eyeglasses, holding up our viewing of the Thai horror movie, The Victim. We were half-way through it before Zombos needed to hit the toilet; three large mocha cappuccinos were a record for him. When he came back he realized he misplaced his second pair of eyes.

Lawn stood up, all six feet and three inches of him, and joined the search. Having starred in
numerous Westerns on the little screen during the 1950s and 1960s, he and Zombos went way back together. He had hung up his spurs and retired to Florida to wrestle gators for the tourists. Getting bored with that he scratched his itch by touring as a circus cowboy, doing trick shooting and fancy riding. He was visiting the mansion while the Smith and Walloo Brothers 3-in-1 tent show set up somewhere in Long Island. For a man his age, he didn’t show it. Zombos often joked that Lawn must have a decrepit looking portrait in his attic like Dorian Gray.

I bet he did.

“Here. Wet your whistle while you search.” I handed the cappuccino to him. He downed it in three gulps. Something crunched sharply under his right Black Jack Hornback Alligator boot heel as he handed me his empty mug.

Zombos froze, his eyes widened.

“Found them,” said Lawn. He stooped to pick up them up and handed the mangled eyeglasses back to Zombos.

After I hastily retrieved Zombos’ second pair from the library we continued our viewing of The Victim.

 

Considering Thailand’s strong superstitions about ghostly phenomena, it’s a wonder Ghost Hunters Jason and Grant haven’t visited that
country yet. In The Victim, spirits are everywhere, especially as the sprightly aspiring actor Ting (Pitchanart Sakakorn) goes around reenacting the victims’ parts in real-life crime scene recreations, places where bad karma is rife.

One spirit in particular piques her interest, and challenges her acting skills to the fullest as she reenacts the circumstances surrounding the disappearance and death of Meen, a former Miss Thailand.

It soon appears that Ting is losing herself as she prepares for the reenactment of the crime, succumbing to violent flashbacks involving Meen, and disturbing, sometimes bloody, visitations by earthbound ghosts looking for help or vengeance.

The ghostly  imagery, directed by Monthon Arayangkoon, moves between poetically eerie glimpses of a genuinely unnerving twilight world filled with pitiable and vengeful spirits at arm’s reach, and the usual shocks we are now accustomed to. The pacing slowly moves the story along, and the interplay of bright colors across light and dark scenes, contrasting with darker-toned scenes earlier in the movie, provides visual cuing for the sudden story within the story transition. Just when you think you know what’s going on, bingo! you scramble for the remote to go back and see if you missed something.

In an unusual move for Thai horror, Arayangkoon pulls the rug out from under Ting, Meen, and the whole criminal scene investigation storyline by beginning a new storyline, creating a story you thought was happening within the story that is happening. While it starts out as a ghost story, it morphs into a “who’s the ghost?” story, and even then, not satisfied with changing Ting’s role completely, and meddling with the principal ghost involved, the reasons for all the vengeful havoc befalling Ting and others is revealed to be entirely different from what it seemed to be.

The Victim is an ambitious, more complex movie than usually comes out of T-Horror cinema, and it can be confusing, especially with
the little helpful English subtitles that fail to capture the nuances of the Thai language; but it’s still a pleasantly surprising departure from the usually straightforward horror fare we’ve come to expect from Asia. The cultural oddity, for us, with Thai police reenacting crime scenes using actors and the alleged criminal to provide the press with a photo op, and perhaps the spirits of victims with a modicum of peace, separates us from the business as usual horror shown in American cinema, and puts us off-balance immediately.

Drawing strength from its cultural perspectives, the movie draws on real crimes, and was shot on the actual locations where victims met their violent deaths. Building on this unpleasant reality, the movie’s artificial reality has an earnest sense of its supernatural underpinnings. The carefully accentuated coloration of these locations, Ting’s flashbacks, and the ghostly phenomena that befalls unsuspecting victims creates stark contrasts against each other, especially the later scenes, using a carefully executed palette that is above the over-used blanched fluorescent lighting simplicity seen in Saw, Dark Corners, and other American hard horror endeavors.

With the revelation of the second story, entering on the heels of a revealed lesbian relationship, the movie becomes a who’s next? more than a whodunit, and characters are powerless against a malevolent spirit that neither a traditional Thai spirit house or magic-bestowing tattoo inked with a bamboo needle will appease or avert. In one notable scene, framed through a narrow doorway, a pair of ghostly hands, at the ends of stretching…stretching…stretching arms, reach out to grab one unsuspecting victim.

Watch this movie late at night, when all is quiet and the world is right, and you just may find yourself checking to see if the front door is locked. Again, and again. Just remember that doors don’t stop ghosts, especially when you’re alone and in the dark.

With them.

Digging to Death (2021)
Not Quite Enough Digging or Is It?

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DiggingtoDeath_Keyart_3x4_2160x2880Zombos Says: Good-. Not quite good enough, but worth your attention if you like art house style with your horror or just something different. Add a good wine–a sweet one would be best–and you're aces.

The IMDb rating is 4.8 and Rotten Tomatoes is not on the meter yet due to insufficient reviews for Digging to Death. That is a shame. While the acting is a tad as slow as the pacing, this art house styled entry in psychological horror that wraps itself around the Jungian Shadow of the poor programmer, David (Ford Austin), who finds three million bucks in his back yard is rather engrossing. Sure, you'll watch it thinking it will neatly wrap up the plastic bags (body bags that is) eventually, but it doesn't. And sure, you'll think back and forth on whether he did or he didn't, it was or it wasn't, and who the hell puts in their own septic tank anyway?

The puzzle starts with what's found in the basement. Yes, I know, there's the corpse and the money, but the real puzzle begins in the basement, when he pulls the keys off of the corpse to open the small door in his closet that leads to the basement steps. How did they get there? Who put them there, the corpse guy? It's all sort of like a cart before the horse problem or maybe more like a Japanese-styled horror element of recurring terror like The Grudge. Only you never will quite know, which can be a bummer; but we do know the problem is not just the plastic bag filled with lots of hundred dollar bills. 

More questions arise: was the production budget so lean that they couldn't actually bury the damned box that held the money and the corpse? The corpse, by the way, is makeup-fresh straight out of Carnival of Souls. Wonderful job there and perfect for the tone of this movie. I mean, who sinks a huge box like that, with lots of money and a fairly fresh corpse, so close to the surface? 

Either way, David, who works for Mind Crash, the software game he's managing the programming on, keeps returning to the box and the money and the corpse. It's when he takes a few hundred dollar bills that things start to really sink a lot lower than that box. The corpse apparently wants to break that old adage of not being able to take it with you. David's daughter, Jessica (Rachel Alig), is worried about him after his divorce, and David is more worried about paying for his new home, helping her with her medical bills, and moving up in his long-held job. And he needs to put in the septic tank and finish his software project sooner than later. When that money shows up he was already all over the place mentally. The money just moves him more into all over and further from a mentally safe place. 

Let's be clear about one thing up front. This is not a horror-comedy. There are some black comedy bits tossed in, some social commentary about working your ass off for a job that only cares about what you did for them in the last hour, and how really annoying it is when you just want to spend a lot of hot hundred dollar bills and even the bank says to open a trust fund or the feds will wonder where all the cash came from. Oh, and that corpse (Tom Fitzpatrick) that keeps showing up, who turns out to be more lively than David, makes digging a septic tank a cakewalk. 

Being a geek, David fights back with tech. But is he fighting an ambulatory corpse wanting its money back or is he fighting himself? Or both? Depending on how you look at it, the ending scene either puts this movie firmly into The Grudge or the shadow territory. Either Michael P. Blevins, the writer and director doesn't write good screenplays, didn't have enough money to show us everything, or he is showing us just enough to keep it vague or abundantly clear (unless you're a horror buff overthinking everything), I can't say with certainty. 

But I do like horror movies that make me think this much about their stories. I hope you find it as engagingly puzzling as I do.

Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018) Arrives September 18th

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Gonjiam haunted asylumGonjiam: Haunted Asylum arrives on DVD/Blu-ray September 18th, 2018. Here's the neatly pressed info for you for this South Korean horror. I like haunted asylum ghost stories, but found-footage, not so much. But I'll still catch it and let you know how it goes.

News Flash! – The crew of a horror web series travels to an abandoned asylum for a live broadcast. They soon encounter much more than expected as they move deeper inside the nightmarish old building in the horror  thriller GONJIAM: HAUNTED ASYLUM, terrorizing on digital, Blu-ray™ Combo Pack and DVD September 18 from Well Go USA Entertainment. An updated take on the “found footage” genre of thrillers, Director Jung Bum-Shik (Epitaph, Horror Stories) assembled a cast of mostly newcomers for GONJIAM: HAUNTED ASYLUM, including Wi Ha-Jun, Park Sung-Hun, Lee Seung-Wook, Oh Ah-Yeon, Park Ji-Hyun, Yoo Je-Yoon and Mun Ye-Won.
 
The Story: 

Based on the local legends and stories of people who’ve visited the real-life abandoned hospital, GONJIAM: HAUNTED ASYLUM follows the crew of a horror web show who plan to stream live from inside the asylum. To attract more viewers, the show’s host arranges some scares for the team, but as they move further into the nightmarish old building, they begin to encounter much more than expected.

Death Passage (2017)
Movie Review

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Death-Passage-Lemon-Tree-PassageZombos Says: Fair Plus

A confounding script mishandled by inexperienced direction. 

Frustration is more likely to occur watching Death Passage (originally Lemon Tree Passage, 2014) than chills. James Campbell's direction is a jumbled mixture of mystery, bewildering ghostly occurrences, and insufficient clarity to progress the story where it would have done the most good to build suspense instead of confusion. It's a ghost story loosely built around the Australian Lemon Tree Passage Ghost, but the ghost here has nothing to do with that other ghost, so you may wonder why they even bothered. 

Once again, American tourists in Australia get into mischief. Of course, American tourists in horror movies always get into mischief and usually die horribly. In this movie, the mystery is whose death is fostering more death and why. Slasher film dynamics, urged on with a Grudge overlay, begin the victim pile up while the camera can't decide which one to focus on more–the slashing, the mystery, or the jumble of victimizations, familiar dialog, and murky flashbacks through it all. Given a pacing sensibility that would be more at home in the 1970s (or perhaps even a VHS shelf-warmer in the 1980s), there isn't much to engage the eye or the mind here, although the production is more than competent and the actors do provide the necessary energy, even if their characters are so much the worse from horror movie character-template wear and tear. More style, less muddle, now that would have greatly helped the storyline.

The muddling begins when American brother and sister Toby and Amelia (Tim Pocock and Pippa Black), and along-for-the-trip Maya (Jessica Tovey), befriend Aussies Geordie and Oscar (Tim Phillips and Andrew Ryan) at the beach. True to quick-scripting form, Geordie is the soft-spoken, sensitive type and Oscar is the loud, carefree sidekick who builds big dicks out of sand. Which, as we already know, is a great way to break the ice with American tourists. A quick round of cricket and some ghost storytelling by a bonfire ensues. The Lemon Tree Passage Ghost comes up and soon they are driving down that road to see its ghostly light. A flash of light does appear as they speed along the road, but that is all they, and we, see of that roadside ghost. It's the other ghost they pick up that commands the storyline from this point on. 

What could have been a refreshing switcheroo is quickly not. Not enough sense or terror is generated as the mystery progresses but does not deepen. Maya starts flipping out from frenzied visions (shown in too much closeup motion) as she becomes possessed. Sam (Nicholas Gunn), Geordie's brother, is bedeviled by an unseen force. Maya's new found friends and fellow travelers start flipping out and eventually dying around her. (What, spoiler? This is a contemporary horror movie silly. Victims die; get over it). Sam's off on his own most of the time, dealing with his own nightmare. What is happening to Sam and to Maya is kept separate until most of the running time is spent, then slammed together for a quick denouement.

When the explanation for all this mayhem finally comes it is a letdown, leaving you with the feeling that too many rewrites had left it mostly stuck in the keyboard. One curious thing: aside from the overuse of fade to black scene shifts, a quick scene switch causes a bewildering how did that happen moment, with someone suddenly tied to a tree.

Now that was spooky.

A screening link was provided for this review, courtesy of Breaking Glass Pictures.

The Forest (2016) Movie Review

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TheforestZombos Says: Good (but  not scary)

Director Jason Zada's camera framing is chokingly tight in The Forest, opening up once for a drone mounted camera overhead view that tellingly follows Sara (Natalie Dormer), Aiden (Taylor Kinney), and Michi (Yukiyoshi Ozawa) as they walk a path through Aokigahara Forest, at the foot of Mt. Fuji. The forest is a notorious place for hikers looking to commit suicide, and legend has it, is filled with Yurei (spiteful ghosts), who play deadly tricks on those who stay after dark. So you must not leave the main path and you don't stay in the forest after dark, or so goes the warning. But this is a horror movie and warnings are always ignored in horror movies. Sara meets Aiden, a reporter, who in turn knows a forest guide, Michi. Michi takes regular hikes through Aokigahara looking for suicides, and Aiden goes along for the walks, looking for a potential story.

The story Aiden finds in Sara is that her sister Jess is missing, last seen in this potentially scary forest. Being twin sisters, Sara knows Jess is still alive because she feels it. They share a preternatural ability of knowing when something is wrong with the other. It's not much help beyond that since it doesn't work like GPS, and after the few times Sara keeps insisting she knows her sister is alive because of it, you wish it had been left out of the story. It's not used well or needed. (This is when I noticed there are three credited writers, so maybe an undeveloped thread?)

Sara convinces Aiden to convince Michi to take both of them along on his jaunt through the forest. He's not happy with the idea, but agrees to help. He explains that those who are sad are most vulnerable to the dangerous spirits that lurk there. The question that unfolds and eventually is answered for us is who is actually the sad one: Jess, who's had a rocky life, or Sara, who has a happy marriage but seems to worry a lot about her sister? This becomes the underpinning for the story and provides a layer of involvement missing from the visuals. It's also an essential element within J-Horror: the character who doesn't know herself or himself and who is taken advantage of because of it.

We travel with Sara to Japan fairly quickly, slow down once we get there while she languishes lost in thought, then take the train ride and long walk to the forest with her, where we slow down again for a somewhat confusing (is she dreaming, is this real?) stock scare in the basement of the tourist cabin, and another half-hearted scare at the inn she's staying at. Then Zada jumps out of his routine by capturing the essence of Japan in a scene at twilight, involving schoolgirls crossing her path while she's, once again, lost in thought, snapping her out of her reverie to notice the inn she's standing in front of. An evocative scene that stands out among many less memorable ones. 

Finally walking through the cheery forest (those chirping birds do sound cheery), Sara ignores all of Michi's warnings and insists on staying the night after she finds her sister's yellow tent. And this is after they find a somewhat gamy suicide hanging from a tree. Aiden agrees to stay with her. As night falls, the Yurei come out. The scares do not. Either I'm too jaded or Zada hasn't seen enough Japanese horror to realize breaking a tradition or two here would have made a smarter movie. We didn't need to travel to Aokigahara to see his spirits, we've seen them often enough elsewhere. After getting us and Sara into the forest, he doesn't make us lose our way in the creepy darkness with the visual or stylish flair promised by his birds-eye view or twilight scenes earlier. What he does do well is build the paranoia Sara feels as she questions what's real and what isn't, while opening her backstory to us.

It's infectious. Why did Aiden stay with her? Does he know what happened to Jess? What exactly happened to her parents? Is Sara being tricked and lied to by malevolent spirits dressed as Japanese schoolgirls? Zada reaches a good level of uncertainty but fails to really sell it without more visually unique horrors. What he shows are standard images, within standard events, and providing standard clues. The story unfolds as it should, and there's a nice twist ending–just who exactly is the lost one here?–but it all boils down to an often seen horror scenario presented without enough visual flair or tricky timing to make it more than simply good and not nearly good enough. 

Lady In White (1988)

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LadyinwhiteZombos Says: Very Good

As the sun waned, I moved into the study and popped the Lady in White into the DVD player. After our Hostel experience, I wanted Zombos to watch a more
subtle and traditional horror movie: one that treats murder and depravity in a respectable and nostalgic way.

It’s 1962 in Willowpoint Falls, and in the opening montage, director Frank LaLoggia introduces us to the small town during Halloween, and to the Scarlatti family’s eccentricities. Told as a flashback by the older Frankie Scarlatti (played by LaLoggia), we see the story lightly filtered through his memories as the sensitive young Frankie (played by the big eyed and big eared Lukas Haas) let’s two bully boys trick him into getting locked into the classroom’s foreboding cloakroom. All alone, and a stone’s throw away from a cemetery to boot, Frankie soon falls asleep on the top shelf of the closet, by the window.

An in-camera time lapse shot, done through the half-moon window of the cloakroom looking onto the cemetery, reminded me of a similar effect used in Hammer’s Horror of Dracula, where the sunlight rapidly fades to darkness as seen through the tomb’s window. Darkness is not a good thing when facing vampires or when locked in ominous cloakrooms on Halloween night, to be sure.

When 10 o’clock rolls around, it’s quiet, darker still, and also time for the murder mystery and ghost story to begin. Right off the bat I can identify with Frankie: he’s wearing a black cape
and a Bela Lugosi mask. In a later scene in his bedroom, he also has the Aurora monster model kits displayed in all their magnificence.

That certainly brings back memories for yours truly. But I digress.

An eerie reenactment begins as Frankie wakes up from a bad dream involving his dead mother. A cold blast of air enters the room, along with the ghost of a little girl, laughing and
playing. An interesting touch here is that this is not an atmospheric haunting, where events merely play over and over again, but the ghost of the little girl responds to Frankie’s presence in the room. She seems as startled to see him as he is to see her. But past events must still play out, and soon she is callously murdered by a shadowy adult figure.

Using a black screen process to create the transparent apparition of the girl, the scene is a harsh contrast to the lighter tone presented earlier in the movie, and sets up the next, more
violent scene, where young Frankie finds himself in the unenviable position of sitting on the top shelf of the cloakroom when the real child-killer enters, looking for something that he had dropped into the floor grate after strangling the girl.

The killer realizes he is not alone and shines his flashlight onto the small black caped form, wearing the Bela Lugosi mask, sitting in the corner of the top shelf. Frankie tries to escape,
but quickly has the life nearly choked out of him. An effective out of body experience has Frankie meet Melissa Ann, the ghost of the little girl so cruelly murdered long ago. He finds out she is trying to find her mom. Frankie is brought back to consciousness and he is soon delving deeper into this mystery for us.

True to form for the 1960s thematic, the school janitor, an African-American, is found drunk in the basement and is immediately blamed for the attempted murder of Frankie and the murders of 11 other children, including Melissa Ann, who was the first.

Reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird, the movie maintains a good balance between the fanciful, Frankie’s adventure with the ghostly Melissa Ann against the blue-lit night scenes in the fairy tale stylized woods, and his coming of age and the painful loss of his mom. This theme of loss is borne also by the ghostly Melissa Ann who is looking for her mother, the ghost of her mother who is looking for Melissa Ann, and not to give too much away, one sister mourning the loss of another.

LaLoggia, who oddly enough grew up in an urban environment, creates a charming small town nostalgia and through the use of carefully controlled colors and lighting brings the hues of autumn inside to his interior scenes. The pharmacy window decorated for Halloween and the classroom scene where Frankie reads his monster story to the class is filled with shades of orange, yellow and the various colors of crisp autumn leaves.

In stark contrast, he uses reds and blues to denote the darker side of this story, and effectively uses dimmer panels to bring the light down or up to transition between important story
points in the scene. The overall mood of the movie changes from charming to alarming and back to charming as the story unfolds to its incendiary ending atop the cliffs by the white cottage. LaLoggia’s simple, old-time, approach using in-camera effects combined with basic process shots build his story in an economical but creative way. Like a good ghost story, simple elements combine to create an ethereal dread, making Lady in White a memorable movie.

The Woman in Black (2012)

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Woman_in_black

Zombos Says: Very Good

Hammer Film Production’s return to period supernatural horror is a strongly rendered traditional ghost story set in Britain’s Edwardian time. While not as scary as Robert Wise’s The Haunting, or as surprisingly twisting as John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House, director Jack Watkins conjures cheerless environs, a foreboding decaying mansion, and a pervasive malevolence poised to strike, in this adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel. Most striking are the period sets; I kept fancying Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee would tumble out of a room at any moment with Lee baring his vampire fangs and Cushing crossing two iron candle sticks together.

The oppressive atmosphere of London’s oily, sooty fog, changes to the oppressive dreariness felt when Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) arrives at Crythin Gifford, a small town of frightened adults beset by a vengeful spirit murdering their children. Kipps, a lawyer still grieving from the loss of his wife, with a son to support and a job in jeapardy, is tasked with settling the immense amount of paperwork left behind by the late Mrs. Drablow of Eel Marsh House. The desolate house is only reachable by Nine Lives Causeway, a long stretch of road that, at certain points, becomes submerged under water during high tide. Surrounding the causeway are marshes filled with impassable, dark, viscous muck, and impenetrable fog.

At Eel Marsh House, Kipps finds Victorian stuffed monkeys, dusty tapestries and faded carpeting, creaking floorboards, thick cobwebs, peeling wallpaper, and lots of papers to go through. The phantom sounds of a carriage accident and cries in the fog, as well as seeing a mysterious figure of a woman dressed in black, put him on edge. Tragedy soon follows and the villagers want him to leave, except for Sam Daily (Ciaran Hinds), a wealthy landowner with the only car (a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost) for miles around. Invited to dinner by Daily, Kipps learns that Sam and his wife (Janet McTeer), have lost their son when Mrs. Daily enters an automatic writing trance she says is her son’s way of communicating with her.

Kipps decides to spend the night at Eel Marsh House to finish his business. Sam lends his dog to Kipps for company. The Woman in Black makes sure he and the dog don’t get much sleep. Apparitions, ghostly wet footprints, a very disquieting nursery, and the revealing letters Kipps discovers in a window bench keep his attention, and his wits, alert. The next morning more tragedy strikes, and worse still, Kipps learns his son and nanny are coming to Crythin Gifford and he can’t stop them.

The ending of Watkin’s movie is not the same as the novel, so devout readers of Susan Hill’s work may be surprised. Daniel Radcliffe is superb as Arthur Kipps. The wind-up toy animals, monkees, and clowns in the nursery are quite creepy. The story has an atmosphere Ti West can only dream of. It isn’t in 3D.

And as for Hammer Film Productions, you can rest assured that Hammer Horror is back with a vengeance.

Grave Encounters (2011)

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Grave_encounters

Zombos Says: Fair

You can sum up Grave Encounters by saying “the joke’s on them.” ‘Them’ would be the Grave Encounters ghost-hunting team, a band of charlatans bolstering their television show with bought sightings of ghosts and the melodramatics of a pretend psychic (Mackenzie Gray) hamming it up for effect. After five bogus shows, they unexpectedly meet the real deal in the Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, an abandoned structure harboring a dark past and soon to be discovered irritable inhabitants. Or is there just one joker tricking them, like the evil Emeric Belasco in Hell House?

Initially starting out with the usual furnishings moving ever so slightly and unnoticed, the team experiences more aggressive activity, then physical atacks by a demonic force. This is where the movie breaks down, abandoning the more traditional–and demanding–scares of ghostly fright that rely on subtlety and vagueness for in-your-face phantoms with CGI facial ticks and a building that refuses to let them leave.

If you recall the terrors in House on Haunted Hill (1999), the time trap of The Sick House (2008), and the standard modus operandi seen in Ghost Hunters on the Syfy channel, you already know what to expect. Like 2006’s The Gravedancers, the story loses credibility by pushing its special effects beyond the story’s required contextual belief, then ziplines J-horror-styled attrocites in and out of night-vision camera views, sending the Grave Encounters team screaming and running in all directions, and us watching it all collapse into the standard divide and conquer scenario. The mystery of the open window only tantalizes us with possibilities that never transpire; the room tucked away in the tunnels hints at black magic, but to what purpose? And the force stalking the Grave Encounters team never bothered the solitary caretaker, so why pick on them now?

Even if you aren’t already exhausted by the cheap to produce found footage, point of view, movie schtick, this one would have been better filmed without the handheld shakycam pyrotechnics. It’s a classic story: a group of unbelievers are trapped in a haunted house, teach them a lesson they won’t forget (or survive). It’s also the type of storyline you can fritter away when you overstep the reality-pretense of POV by squeezing it to bridge sub-genres. Grave Encounters starts as a haunting, then veers into demonic stalking, where the rules of engagement require more visual frenzy, setting up a plot contretemps that skewers the more suspenseful, understated unfolding of ghostly phenomenon. Oddly enough, when the sinister force in the hospital exerts its influence over time and space, there is no religious counter within the Grave Encounters team, a fault many horror movies that play the occultism card fail to take into consideration. Atheist or believer, when confronted by demonic activity and the breakdown of natural laws, there’s a natural tendency to become very religious, very fast.

Sean Rogerson as Lance Preston, the team’s leader, self-consciously chews up his role  instead of allowing it to digest. White (Juan Riedinger), the tech expert, wears a KICK ME  sign early on, so we know he’s going down first. Sasha (Ashleigh Gryzko) is the token screaming female; not much hope for her, either. The camera guy, T.C. (Merwin Mondesir), acts like every other black camera guy character named T.C. is supposed to do–anger, frustration, despair, and done. Mackenzie Gray’s psychic is the only character to play it evenly. He looks like a psychic should look, a little weird, a lot of Hollywood groom. He should have had more to do.

Grave Encounters should have had more for its characters and story to do, too.

Whispering Corridors (1998)

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Whipsering corridors
Zombos Says: Very Good

Of all the places to die, why choose school?

Ki-hyeong Park’s Whispering Corridors (Yeogo Goedam)  balances commentary on the psychological and physical abuse found in South Korean girls’ schools, sympathy for a lost spirit dwelling equally in daylight and black of night, and a symbolic use of pouring blood to tell a story of loss, brief redemption, and continued loss.

It opens with the ghost prowling school grounds at night, seeking vengeance on a teacher who mistreated her.  The discovery of the teacher’s hanging body the next day is seen first in the surprised face of the student who finds it, then next from behind her as she views it, but her head blocks our view. Finally, a step to her left and we see the entire body in the farground with the back of the student in the foreground, side by side. Other student’s reactions are then shown in still shots as they come upon the body.

Muted, somber colors inside and out lend starkness to the secrecy unfolding to discovery in the school, toned by the callous mistreatment of the students and the teachers’ indifference to their emotional needs. Male teachers in the school are chauvinistic and condenscending, and become violent with little provocation. Mr. Oh (Mad Dog, as the students call him), with his stick and sarcastic temperament, reminded me of a math teacher I suffered through one semester in grade school. He also carried a stick and whacked us on the head with it at little provocation. It is in this restrictive, competitive, and individuality-stifling environment the ghost haunts day and night: by day, as one of the students blending into class for years without any teacher realizing she’s hung around year after year, and by night as a vengeance spirit, murdering those teachers who mistreated her or mistreat other girls.

It isn’t impossible for a student to attend classes for years and not be noticed: I sat in two college classes, back to back, with the same boring professor and he didn’t remember my name or that I had taken another class with him the previous semester. And I sat in the second row, directly in front of him all that time. Park is simply emphasizing how teachers are more involved with keeping authority and class order instead of attending to students’ individual needs.

The ghost just wants to be normal, to relive her classroom life again and again in hopes of getting it right. She doesn’t want to harm anyone, but vindictive and sadistic teachers keep mistreating the students, bringing on her vengeance-side. While it appears only three times, each occurrence is heralded by supernatural events, leading to a bloody attack, but without gore. Blood isn’t used for shock value, especially at the end when a classroom becomes inundated with it, but to convey the flow of life can be either positive or negative, given the ghost of a chance either way.