From Zombos' Closet

Movie Review: Frankenstein's Army (2013) The Dieselpunk Dead Are Alive!

Zombos Says: Good (in spite of the found footage POV inconsistencies and inaccuracies)

I was expecting a larger scale of military engagment from director Richard Raaphorst for Frankenstein’s Army, but he and his scripters (Chris W. Mitchell and Miguel Tejada-Flores) create strong dieselpunk and art house aesthetics with a haunt attraction’s worth of frenzied creature-fest chills. Madcap amalgams of mech and flesh kill anything and everything within striking distance with their propeller heads, long drill-bit snouts, and skull crushing claws.

I wasn’t expecting the gimmicky found footage approach. Even if Raaphorst and cinematographer Bart Beekman know how to exploit it for all it’s worth with clever POV positionings and digitally mottling the "film" to show Frankenstein’s grandson Viktor's (Karel Roden) sadistic megalomania and perverse family skills with dead body parts (or living ones). With a Hammer-styled blood infusion of pacing and cinematography (I'd also add a touch of Amicus) and a Hostel and Saw-liberated gory relish, and even maybe a Fulci's sensibility for crazy deep-dish body-zombie-horror, the use of a wind up motorized handheld camera interferes as it goes well beyond what would have been possible with such technology available during World War II. Ignore the fancy but impossible use of the camera and you have an artsy-trashy Octoberfest delirium dressed with exposed brains and sudden deaths that is compellingly and intentionally awful; don't ignore the found footage inaccuracies and inconsistencies with the then level of technology and you are left with only an artsy-trashy misconception filled with nightmarish haunt-attraction worthy monsters doing serious body damage to anyone unlucky enough to cross paths with them.

The unlucky ones include the Russian soldiers, whose unsavory character traits are given as such to alleviate our concern over their eventual splattery dispatch, or Raaphorst is making a political statement but it's lost in the helter skelter. In either case, cracking open the skull of one unfortunate individual--which is as upsetting to watch as it is for the poor bastard to experience--to remove a hemisphere's worth of gray matter from his head, and then chop around the edges to make what remains fit with another person's other brain half, is effectively over the top (or off the top, to be more precise). Watching this movie is like re-experiencing the tacky excesses of the Video Nasties from another decade, but done here with more verve for shock value to compensate for our jadedness.

And it does work to a good degree.

Horror can be most memorably terrifying and perversely exhilarating when it assaults our sense of propriety or dares to insult our intelligence with clever but contrived artifice. Frankenstein's Army does both, which makes for great critical analysis on the one hand, and great criticism on the other. At its center is a highly creative and well executed terror movie for those who like their horror served raw on the plate without garnish. Story elements are minimal, focusing on the Russian soldiers being filmed for propaganda and archival purposes as they travel through enemy territory to find supposed comrades held captive by the Nazis. It's toward the end of the war and the Nazis are in retreat. Except for Viktor. He's following Henry Ford's assembly line process to create undead zombie robot (zombot) soldiers: Mr. Potato Head assemblages of men, spare body parts, and whatever machinery or tools are at hand. Once assembled they roam around, killing anyone they come across. Whatever Viktor's purpose was originally, clearly his insanity has reassembled it, too.

Slowly the Russians come across the remains of Viktor's surgical skills. For a spring powered camera it runs for a noticeably long time without needing rewinding. Held by Dimitri (Alexander Mercury) it never falters to record everything, stretching our credulity as does every POV found footage movie since The Blair Witch Project. A failed zombot hooked up to a generator eviscerates one soldier, signaling the stalk and skewer phase of the story. Another zombot with a crushing propensity leads to a grossly funny helmet removal as more than the helmet is accidentally removed. Each zombot appearance is more outrageous than the other, and the terminal visit to Viktor's fright-assembly factory reveals more secrets and more horrors.

Given a larger budget, grander scale of Allied military carnage, and a lighter, more mainstreamy tone shot with conventional camerawork, Frankenstein's Army could have won over a larger audience. But there is no nostalgia here or matinee popcorn to be served. The Andrews Sisters do not perform their musical interlude of Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, and no U.S. Commandos come to the rescue.

But the zombots and Viktor's crazy behavior make up for what's missing, at least for those horror fans who don't cover their eyes when it gets messy and who aren't enamored of subtle terrors and highbrow storylines.

Movie Review: Evil Dead (2013) Back to the Cabin

Zombos Says: Very Good 

You already made up your mind about this reimagining, didn't you?

If you're a fan of the original, you're thinking why bother? Even if you're not a fan, you're probably wiped out from all the bad remakes and updated takes on the tried and true, right? So you already have the notion that if Hollywood can't think of anything new, why bother, right?

It's easy to say this movie isn't as good as the original The Evil Dead because it doesn't have Bruce Campbell, but that's not entirely true. What's also missing is Sam Raimi's hysterical camera that follows the demonic torture so well in the original: it tilts dangerously, it frantically moves around, and it becomes another panic-stricken character desperately trying to survive the night. Fede Alvarez can mimic those camera motions to some extent, but he never reaches the feverish pitch of frenzy in this film that assails Bruce Campbell in the last 15 minutes or so of the original.

But that was 1981. You can be nostalgic all you want for that wonderful decade of horror movies—I do fondly remember it—but this Evil Dead does have its moments, and considerably better practical makeup effects, and even more gore, vomit, and mutilations to shake up the respite in the derelict cabin in the woods.

This backstory isn't as much fun, though. How can you top finding a Panasonic reel to reel tape recorder in a deserted cabin's decrepit basement, and that professor’s unusually calm voice setting events in motion by repeating all those bad words?  And what about that smoky atmosphere of waiting evil, pouncing willy-nilly on each victim, produced with less production gloss and more average-looking victims, making it more effective because watching pretty people get offed isn’t all that thrilling: average people getting killed brings it closer to home for average you and average me.

Comparison nitpicking? Yes.

I even watched the original movie after seeing this one to jog my memory. When you do a remake of a horror classic it's to be expected you’d want to watch the original to see which one’s better.

Okay, make that the first original movie: the original remake of the original movie, Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn, doesn’t count here. Although it's called a sequel, it really is a remake, but done as a horror-comedy.

Critics and fans look for differences and similarities and fret over them. But it’s the little things that amount to whether a movie that’s based on another movie will stand or fall. So, yes, everything counts.

Now, of course Alvarez and company take bits and pieces from both the deadly serious Evil Dead and crazy-sh*t Evil Dead II, but I'll stick to the serious movie for comparison since Fede keeps his movie serious.

For one thing, this updated script is more practical. Instead of college kids on Spring Break heading to the woods for a weekend of fun, a group of friends are set on a noble mission, to rescue the drug-sopped Mia (Jane Levy), whose brother, David (Shiloh Fernandez), has been less rescuer and more absentee, so you know he's got guilt up the wazoo. Which is why he's slow to realize Mia's problem is not the drugs but a demon possession. Even when her voice gets all demon-like and her face turns to demon-veiny-and-puss face, David's slow on the uptake.

A little too slow to sustain our credulity, but this is a horror movie, and much dramatic tension, or so some directors today believe, is garnered from an audience screaming in their minds how dumb-sh*t stupid YOU ARE DAVID! and when ARE YOU GOING to realize Mia's not Mia but the Taker of Souls come to make you and your friend's the devil's bitches.

Then again, maybe it was just me thinking that.

But after all the juicy face-slicing, gallons of blood-vomit projecting, lots of dead cats hanging in the basement, the finding of an evil looking book wrapped in barbed wire and human skin, and enough demented woodcuts in it showing nasty things happening to anyone stupid enough to read the bloody damned thing, well, my mental scream sparked naturally from my credulity dial getting twirled way past the red zone.

Then David starts pulling out the duct tape to patch up the slicing and dicing and meaty chunk craters of damaged flesh in his friends and I start to wonder if Alvarez is going Three Stooges intent here, but below the radar and without the yucks, which pulls my brain right back into the story.

A gushy and stringy dismemberment or two later and David's doing a Bruce Campbell with a bit of the chinny-ness to save Mia, creating a memorable ending that makes this movie stand on its own and looking good for a sequel.

I think Mia's got even more chin going for her than Campbell.

So, yes, it’s groovy.

 

Movie Review: The Lords of Salem (2013) Not So Mighty

Zombos Says: Typical Rob Zombie Fare

Listen to the Movie Review

The Lords of Salem is a visually complex fever dream (or confused one; I can argue for both) from director Rob Zombie. We know how it will end. We already know how all his movies will end. Zombie's blind spot is being unable to fool us through tension and suspense. Each movie becomes an exercise in the downward descent, the great fall, the whac a mole hit squarely every time. This, of course, kills any hope of seeing anything more than a mono story done in stereo colors.

But what colors!

I do love his use of older black and white movie clips, too. And then there are those large Andy Warhol style black and white pop art prints in various rooms of Heidi's (Sheri Moon Zombie) apartment. He even manages to include a print of Commando Cody, who bleeds profusely on the bathroom wall as Heidi withers away. The movie clips Zombie uses will be familiar to genre fans, but his enthusiastic deployment of them, in-between his deliberately overbearing religious and sexual imagery, errupts everything into a Pop Rocks experience: it loses its novelty and significance with continued use.

With Rob Zombie there's only one ending to all his movies—I mentioned that—but how he gets there is also a familiar trip with familiar characters. The Lords of Salem has a lot of scenery to look at while we make the trip. He takes us through the neighborhoods of pre-1980 Times Square porno, with all the subtlety of a black velvet clown with neon color highlights, and stops to hammer us with cackling old crones reveling giddily in their evil, stepping out of their ancient woodcuts to overboil this pot of nihilistic stew as they spit and gloat and reek of foulness. I can't tell if he's going for femjoy dominance and parody or deep down he secretly fears castration so his witches are really what he thinks of women.

Those crones toil well beyond Shakespeare’s boil and bubble in their roles of the Devil’s desciples. Meg Foster is stunningly unrecognizable as the decrepit and saggy high priestess, Margaret Morgan. After being burned alive and hankering for revenge, she takes aim at the female descendents of the puritans that baked her and her covenors to a crisp.

The bizarre music the witches play winds up on vinyl and is mysteriously delivered to the radio station Heidi and her fellow DJs (Ken Foree and Jeff Daniel Phillips) burn the midnight oil at. The music casts its spell and we watch its effect on Heidi.

And watch.

And watch.

And the one possible tense string brought into play by Bruce Davison’s Matthias, an author who is slowly realizing the witches he declares extinct are actually quite alive and currently in the process of serving him tea, is plucked only once, then abruptly stopped; a wasted note that would have truly surprised me if Zombie stepped out of his limitations and played it for all it was worth.

And we continue to watch.

And watch some more as Heidi misses her radio broadcasts, ignores her friends, forgets to walk the dog, and drags her tiny butt in and out of the nightmares Zombie stitches together for visual impact more than emotional context. Providing intertitles to let us know what day of the week it is, time isn't really important. Everything blurs to an ending that reaches further in its reckless abandon than any of Zombies previous films. I applaud the attempt while lamenting the near-sighted vision.

Whether you view all this as an LSD trip or a redux-psychedelia tab pressed from oils of Rosemary’s Baby, Suspiria,and 1970s trash-art esthetic,or you just want to take Zombie as film auteur reaching out to the rows in back of the theater, his continuing metal-crashing against white-thrashing Christian dogma and precepts is the same bellicose vein throbbing excess seen through each of his films.

After all his movies share the same bleak monotone, you start to feel Rob Zombie hates himself, hates the stain-free life, hates the bad to the bone life, and hates having to make sense of any of it for us, or himself.

And especially hates us for having to pass judgement on it or daring to derive entertainment from it.

That’s refreshing. I admire his zeal even if I think he’s thick as a brick in his approach to horror.

Movie Review: Mama (2013) The Horror of Motherly Love

Zombos Says: Very Good

Japanese long-haired vengeance-ghost dynamic meets folkloric tragedy in Andres Muschietti's Mama when two young sisters, 3-year old Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and 1-year old Lilly (Isabelle Nelisse), are lost in a spooky deserted cabin deep in the woods. Lost with them is a forlorn entity they name Mama, who is trapped between here and ethereal-there, feeding them berries to stay alive and entertaining them as time passes. In the ensuing years, the girls become more feral and forget their parents. 

Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), the brother of Victoria and Lilly's dad hasn't forgotten, and he eventually finds the girls. As they move from the cabin to their new home with him and their new reluctant mother, Annabel (Jessica Chastain), Mama follows; many big moths, miasmic black moldy wall stains that grow, and unsettling creature-induced discomforts ensue.

What is it with moths and wall stains in horror movies these days?

At least here they are given plausability: the moths provide a meal for the girls (berries can only go so far), and the wall stains act as portals for Mama to travel through.

What keeps Mama from devolving into the familiar slap-death histrionics of a long-haired, malcontented ghost with demonic powers and anger management issues are the girls' growing attachment to their new and more tactile mom, Mama's sad life before and after death, and Annabel's nurturing instinct slowly kicking in over her need for punking out with her rock band. A sad moment has Mama removing the older Victoria's new eye-glasses so she can't see how terrible Mama's appearance really is; Lilly, of course, being younger, doesn't remember her life before Mama and bonds strongly with her ghostly mom; being flown around the room for fun helps solidify that bond.

CGI enhancements to Mama and her distorted facial features, combined with bone-cracking contortions only horror movie corpses can do, become more distracting than frightening, but the relationship between mothers and children provides a more thoughtful approach; especially when Lucas is removed from the action early, leaving Annabel to deal with her ambivalent feelings and increasingly dire situation. A clever use of long-hair running around like Cousin Itt provides the best chill-thrill moment.

Eager to learn as much as he can from the children's 5 year ordeal in the woods is psychiatrist Dr. Dreyfuss (Daniel Kash). A more creative story thread has him shift gears when he realizes Mama is not a figment of the children's imaginations conjured to help them cope with their isolation. Unfortunately, this thread is clipped too soon, in a blatantly script-convenient way, to bring Lucas back into the finale. Getting everyone back to the cabin in the woods turns almost funny as first Dr. Dreyfuss, then Lucas, then Annabel, and finally Mama and the girls converge for a showdown that will certainly annoy those looking for a happier resolution.

But on the positive side, it doesn't leave room for a sequel.

You've got to love any horror movie that dares to do that. 

Movie Review: The Possession (2012) Jewish Demons Can Be a Mouthful

 

Zombos Says: Good

Two thoughts pushed their way to the top after I saw Ole Bornedal's The Possession. The first was how much less frightening the dybbuk  demon is than Pazuzu in The Exorcist: I find that evil, when it's personable, when it speaks directly to you in  a normal, conversational fashion, is more terrifying than the silent type. The second thought was how Bornedal's beautifully moving camera, along with Anton Sanko's suitably depressing piano tinkling heralding austere, fade to black, moments, fairly killed the story's momentum. Antiseptic, plain vanilla, no contrast, these are some of the words I would use to describe how the story unfolds. This is still a good movie, mostly due to Jeffrey Dean Morgan's intensity as Clyde, a father who slowly realizes the truth, Natasha Calis's sinister behavior as the possessed girl, Em, and a delectably creepy hint of a backstory for the wooden box that traps the dybbuk (or fails to). This is the kind of movie I found myself wishing they'd stuck with that backstory because the present is comprised of moments we've, mostly, seen before (and were done with more con brio when we did). Except for that exquisitely bad to the bone looking box.

It not only looks old but it looks like one you'd fear was full of dark secrets.  Its contents are even more bizarre than the ones seen on that cable show Oddities. It made me wonder what its oddly shaped jars contained and why those contents were put there, and especially how the dybbuk was trapped the first time. Instead,  we see the diagnostic-tests-at-the-hospital scene, although this one does provide the scariest moment of the movie with a brightly conceived visual; and, of course, there's the now standard family situation to generate budget tension--mom (Kyra Sedgewick) and dad are divorced and mom has an annoying suitor (Grant Show); and, of course, there are langorous scenes of bodily invasion, like moths flying in and out of mouths.  What is it with winged bugs and possessing demons?  Can someone, anyone, please give me an explanation for their overuse in horror movies and their preference for oral cavities? 

Picking up the box at a yard sale, Em opens it and the possession begins with her becoming more and more Goth in appearance (no offence to Goths or Emos intended, but hey, it's a spooky look). Em also puts on a large, hard to miss, ring, which turns her hand all veiny and purple. Her parents and sister don't seem to notice. Another reviewer noted how odd it is that neither parent notices the purpling hand or the Victorian nut-cracker of a ring. Dracula wished he had a ring like that.

The usual quirky behavior of the new man in Clyde's ex-wife's life provides the usual banter and time-filler between more serious moments with Em being sucked dry of life by the demon. Bornedal is so visually artistic and thematically structured in his approach, however, there's no meat on this horror bone. Comparison's to The Exorcist, and other possession movies, are inevitable. Where Bornedal brings a fresh take  is when he jostles Clyde's predictable, coaching-life world alongside an older, steeped in tradition, Hasidic world in Brooklyn as Clyde seeks help from the experts, who in this case are the rabbis. 

They see the box and tell him to take a hike, with it. A brilliant and unexpected move. In The Exorcist, the priests tackle Pazuzu as a matter of faith and conviction. And both priests do not survive the ordeal. Here, the rabbis choose survival first, knowing what's in the box is serious enough to warrant being in the box. The head rabbi's son, Tzadok (Matisyahu), still retains his faith and conviction: he's young, what does he know? He leaves with Clyde and both must do one thing first: find out what the demon's name is because that is what's needed to force the demon back into the box.

The name is found a little too quickly, but it leads to the showdown between the rabbi's son with conviction, the father with conviction, the mom with conviction, and the demon with conviction. Bornedal doesn't ignite enough hell fire though, and compromises the showdown by resorting to strobe-lighting views as the demon pulls itself out of someone's mouth (there's that foreign object in mouth again theme: see the movie poster) and crawls along the floor, reluctantly, toward the box. Stylish? Yes. Dramatically hot? No; tepid. Terrifying? A little.

The ending follows the prescribed sequel-antic expected for generating a horror movie franchise. I doubt, however, this box will turn up again unless it's straight to DVD.

Movie Review: Total Recall (2012) Not Too Memorable

Zombos Says: Good

Watching the action unfold in director Len Wiseman's Total Recall, I couldn't help but compare it to the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone star vehicle of the same name. But that movie was in 1990, when writers could play around the science fiction edges with cheekiness and guile and directors couldn't overplay their hand with computers and saturate us with non-stop action hurtling through uber landscapes filled with mini and mega structures moving with tantalizing, but numbing, techno-complexity and velocity. But now is now, after all, and cinematic now is filled with the heat of global meltdowns, the incessant beating of warring drums, a tiresome fusillade of political bull dung flying in all directions, and a lot of sour and dour events preoccupying our thoughts. So it's only natural science fiction movies, super hero movies, and movies formerly filled with imagination and inspiration, now, have tuned down the inspiration while hustling us faster, and very predictably, through a patented and familiar imagination.

Instead of becoming involved with characters through association or taking wild rides to Mars and having our eyes comically bug out from the lack of oxygen, we're enveloped by hover car chases--albeit breathtaking hover car chases--evocative, rainy, cityscapes dotted with dreary hanging apartments that seem to sprout out of the congested city's concrete megastructures like weeds thriving in the incessant rain, and homogeneous huddled masses yearning to find a free space in all the hubbub or, at least, a cool palm phone. So yes, this Total Recall's production design by Patrick Tatopoulus is stunning and easily runs away with the film while leaving its script a tad short on wit and gumption, but tall on action of the bullets flying, people dying, and big send off explosions kind.

The Fall figures heavily in all this pyrotechnic destruction and sets up the Metropolis-like dystopian dynamic for the two class structures--the wealthier United Federation of Britain and the poorer Colony--both vying for habitable land after Earth is decimated by chemical warfare. The Fall is a gigantic gravity elevator that travels through the planet between the two nations, bringing Colony workers to and from "below," to toil at building synthetic police (THX 1138 anyone?) for the UFB. The Fall provides the film's more intense moments and thorough special effects, but the plausibility factor is nil and a pivotal (I'm being literal here) standoff borders on the periphery of silliness: elite commandos conveniently fail to realize something important about the daily commute and they lose their advantage because of it.

Plausibility wobbles again when factory worker Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell), plagued by a violent dream with a mysterious woman and dissatisfied with his assembly line life, heads to ReKall, the happy memories franchise. He gravitates to their secret agent memory product, but implanting fake memories over real, similar ones stops the process cold and sends Quaid on a bumpy and lumpy journey to discovering who he really is. In-between all his huffing and puffing as he runs from his wife (a guns-blazing and hips hugging typecast Kate Beckinsale) and UFB President Cohaagen’s (Bryan Cranston) police force, he stops long enough to find clues to his past in places I thought the police should have gotten to first, like his safe deposit box and his former apartment, since they know who he really is even if he doesn’t.

The woman in his dream, Melina (Jessica Beal), much like Maria in Metropolis, provides the romance and the reason for his actions. Unlike Maria, she also wields a mean handgun, drives a hover car better than Mike Mercury, and kicks ass more believably than the wispy Beckinsale. Melina helps Quaid find Matthias (Bill Nighy), the leader of the resistance against Cohaagen's political meanderings. Unfortunately, Matthias is not as interesting as his namesake in the original and doesn't have a mutant humanoid brother living in his belly.

With the main storylines of both Total Recall movies being similar, what's the difference here to warrant a remake? If blazing action, dispensed heavily through computerized imagery and wild futuristic technology is your bag of popcorn, than this movie is definitely for you.

Movie Review: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

Zombos Says: Good

In Disney's  groundbreaking 1937 animated version of the Snow White fairy tale, the wonderfully wicked and least kid-friendly moments take place in the Dark Forest, when the witch-queen is spellcasting, and when she plummets to her death after being chased by the rosy-cheeked dwarves. In Snow White and the Huntsman, Charlize Theron as the monomania-driven Ravenna provides splendidly wicked moments throughout, returning this Brothers Grimm story to its darker meaning of sorcery, depravity, vanity, and the lust for power. The few glimmers of romance seen flashing between Snow White (Kristen Stewart), the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) who saves her, and her childhood friend William (Sam Claflin) who blames himself for abandoning her, pale against Theron's mordsdurst for eternal beauty. If Mirror, Mirror left you with a Pop Rocks candy aftertaste, here's your chance to replace it with the bite of a mature licorice liqueur.

Ravenna seduces then kills Snow White's father, King Magnus (Noah Huntley), and imprisons her in the castle's North Tower. As Snow White grows into a fair young lady, Ravenna ravages the countryside, draining the beauty and youth from attractive female villagers to remain the fairest of all; until Snow White becomes of age that is, and the Magic Mirror warns the Queen that to remain the fairest and gain eternal beauty, she must eat Snow White's heart. 

Ravenna sends her white-haired, Moe haircut-styled, brother (Sam Spruell) to fetch Snow White. He fails and Snow White takes a powder to the Dark Forest. Ominous black shrouded figures, gnarled, black shriveled trees, and creepy big black bugs galore play on her mind and she swoons, luckily landing on the one dry spot of ground in an otherwise murky nightmare of marshes and muck.  Ravenna sends Eric the Huntsman to bring her back with the promise of bringing his wife back from the dead. She lies, so Eric sides with Snow White and takes her out of the Dark Forest, where they meet a small group of women who have disfigured themselves so Ravenna will leave them alone. Her brother doesn't, and Eric must quickly return to protect Snow White.

Ms. White not only enchants the Huntsman into helping her, but also the sourpuss dwarves (Mini-Me versions of Bob Hoskins, Ian McShane, Ray Winstone, Toby Jones, Eddie Marsan, Johnny Harris, Nick Frost, and Brian Gleeson) who capture her and Eric. She also beguiles a bridge-watching troll, some fairies, many cute woodland creatures, adorable one-eyed mushrooms, and a majestically rendered white stag, in CGI animated scenes that harken back to Disney's hand-animated ones. 

At Ravenna's "mirror, mirror, on the wall..." this Magic Mirror flows golden across the floor and forms into a tall, shrouded figure with a male voice to reassure her she's still the fairest or to give direction on how to stay the fairest. A telling moment comes when Ravenna is speaking with the golden figure as her brother watches unnoticed. He doesn't see the figure standing in front of his sister and he doesn't hear it speaking to her. I suddenly thought it's all in her mind! The mirror isn't magic. The male figure is her solace and her guilt personified.

The battle between good and evil in Snow White and the Huntsman reminded me of Ridley Scott's Legend.  Although the stakes are somewhat different, Ravenna is as evil and purposeful as Legend's Lord of Darkness, and Snow White is as determined as Jack in stopping her and restoring the balance of goodness to the land. Unlike previous versions of the Snow White story, romance and housekeeping are not the priorities here, but beauty is. 

Ravenna's beauty runs only as deep as her skin; Snow White's beauty runs to her soul.   

Movie Review: Silent House (2011) Filled With Noisy Memories

Zombos Says: Good (but only just)

(This review contains key plot spoiler)

Chris Kentis and Laura Lau Americanize Gustavo Hernandez's La Casa Muda into Silent House, adding Elizabeth Olsen's strident histrionics in the form of Sarah, a young girl trapped in her lakeside childhood home with her unconscious father (Adam Trese), lit by a few hurricane lamps and flourescent lanterns throwing lots of shadows (mostly across her bosom), and being stalked by an intruder or intruders, unknown or known, making her scream a lot as she looks for a way out upstairs and downstairs.

No, it isn't quite like the French movie Them, though at times I wished it followed that film's straightforward simplicity of unremitting terrorization. And no, it also isn't at all like 2009's The Uninvited with Emily Browning, except perhaps for a familiar psychological scrambling involving mirror mirror on the wall duality. This duality provides answers at the end of Silent House as well as the twist ending that's not so twisted because of the neon-sign-obvious inclinations of Sarah's uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens), and the polaroid snapshots, popping up in unlikely places, he and her father are unnerved by.

The anachronistic use of a polaroid camera to take photographs of mold, and to provide intermittent flashbulb light for Sarah as she becomes more terrorized by what's happening around her in the dark, distracts more than it sharpens the suspense. The camera exists for the sole purpose of implying a relationship between those unnerving photographs and their possible photographer, therefore diminishing uncertainty, too early, as to what is really happening to Sarah and her perceptions of what is happening; a cinematic contrivance so threadbare it's obvious, even if we see mysterious people in the house, and Sarah talking to a strange childhood friend she doesn't remember, although they played dress-up together.

The audience promotion gimmick of filming Sarah in one long take (more or less) as the camera shakily follows her, looks at her, sees what see sees, and runs from the house with her, doesn't bring anything to this production that a less shaky view would have. Lighting throughout the house is impressively sinister, but the rooms and hallways get slightly brighter toward the climactic ending, either a studiously planned subtlety showing Sarah's growing realization of the truth, or the camera crew got tired of tripping over their feet in the dark house.

What makes this movie good is Olsen's intensely executed performance (or cleavage, I've not fully decided yet), and its (the movie, not her cleavage) ability to hold our fear within the shuttered house, at least for a short while. And then there's the "lift-gate open" scene outside the house. It sparkles with terror more than any other moment.

Now there's a gimmick I would like to see more of: more moments of sparkling terror, without unnecessary pychological twists to tarnish them.

Movie Review: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010) A Taste of Country Dying

Zombos Says: Very Good

You know the saying, dying's easy, comedy is hard? Try doing horror-comedy, now that's hard. Eli Craig and the rest of the cast and crew of Tucker and Dale vs. Evil do a stellar job playing off usually more serious slasher grint and gore to show the funny bone in awkward body impalements, whizzing buzzsaw head-slicing, woodchippered ground round torsos, and assorted lacerations as hillbillies Tucker and Dale's vacation keeps getting interrupted by a group of city-bred college youngin's who've seen too many horror movies. You'll laugh, you'll cry (from laughing), you'll wonder how grisly death can be so funny. We needed these guys around when Freddy took on Jason.

The way out-of-the-way gas station Allison (Katrina Bowden), Chad (Jesse Moss), Chloe (Chelan Simmons), Chuck (Travis Nelson), Jason (Brandon Jay McLaren), Naomi (Christie Laing), Todd (Alex Arsenault), Mitch (Adam Beauchesne), and Mike (Joseph Sutherland) stop at is typical for The Hills Have Eyes and Wrong Turn kinds of gas stations: shabby, grimy, and frequented by droopy eyed, scruffy types wearing dirty clothes, construction boots, and sour looks. Tucker prods the shy Dale into meeting Allison. Already spooked by the milieu, Dale's greeting, made with a bad stammer and while holding a scythe, scares off Allison and her friends. Tucker continues to lecture Dale on being more assertive as they drive to Tucker's recently purchased dream cabin in the woods, which is also rundown, filled with cobwebs, dirt and dust, and a dangerously loose, nail-studded beam poised to do some serious head-whacking.

This comedy of errors begins its blood-letting when the frat kids, camping nearby, listen intently to Chad's Memorial Day Massacre campfire story about a hillbilly rampage that happened twenty years ago, leaving only one survivor. They laugh it off and go skinny dipping. Allison is startled by Tucker and Dale, who are on the lake fishing. She falls, knocking herself unconscious. Tucker and Dale rescue her and take her to the cabin. Her friends, thinking she's been kidnapped, plan her rescue. Much accidental carnage ensues when hillbilly massacre-primed college students stumble, run, and turn abruptly into sharp objects each time they confront Tucker, who's not very good with power tools to begin with. Inside the cabin Allison wakes up, and after her initial fright learns that Dale is actually a nice guy, and very smart, when he pulls out the board games. We also learn Allison is a nice girl and also smart.

Meanwhile, her friends are dropping faster than whack-a-mole. Mike's full-body slam dunk into the woodchipper leaves Tucker and Dale holding incriminating evidence when the sheriff (Philip Granger) pulls up. The sheriff steps into close proximity of the nail-studded beam, which results in more screaming and panic from Allison's friends. She tries to explain how they've got it all wrong, but now they think she's suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome.

Somewhat like the comedy duo of Abbott and Costello, Tucker plays straight man to Dale's fall guy, but it's Dale who must save Allison from the psycho-killer suddenly popping up. Backwoods horror characters and situations are refreshingly skewed: the beautiful blond is approachable and wants to be a psychologist; the unsophisticated hillbillies are kind-hearted, average guys--on vacation; the sophisticated college kids expertly self-destruct; and the sheriff is ineffective (oh wait, that's to type, actually).

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is one of those rare events: a festival-shown horror movie that's actually intelligently produced, well acted, witty, gory, and surprising in that it didn't get a wider theatrical release in the U.S. I hope Tucker and Dale go on another vacation real soon.

Movie Review: Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance (2012)

Zombos Says: Good

There are moments in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance when Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage), as the demonic Ghost Rider, forces men to gaze into his big, dark, empty eye-sockets with his penance stare. The penance stare makes his victims experience all the suffering they've caused. During those long staring matches, I anticipated seeing pinpoints of red that would slowly grow to become like eyes, filling his dark skull-orbs with crimson light.  The pinpoints never come. Someone in production should have noticed how dull it can be looking at someone else looking into dark, empty, eye-sockets with little else happening. Other moment's  in this second, more pyrotechnically intense, yet more oddball, franchise entry should also have received notice. Watching Ghost Rider's magical chain, whipping around to char-broil assailants into glowing embers and ash, and his flaming touch consuming everything is more exhilarating than the first movie, but everything else is underdone.

Johnny Blaze isn't doing well with his deal with the Devil. He's sulking in Eastern Europe (which considerably cuts production costs).  A mysterious religious order needs his help to protect a boy the Devil (Ciaran Hinds) wants badly. The boy, Danny (Fergus Riordan) is the Devil's son. In order to become supremely powerful on Earth, the Devil needs to take over his son's body. Although Danny has the required "D" sound for being the Devil's offspring, he's not evil. Not yet. His mother's (Violante Placido) deal with the Devil is going sour, too. 

That's it. You now know the whole story. Johnny Blaze reluctantly agrees to become the boy's protector, but Ghost Rider provides the seering muscle. Weapons with escalating destructive power are employed by the underlings hired to kidnap the boy. The weapon-toting underlings are employed by suitably nasty Carrigan (Johnny Whitworth). He gets whumped in spite of all the fire-power, but Roarke (that's the Devil's human name), brings him back to life, adding the power to decay everything he touches. With Johnny Blaze turning everything to smoking charcoal and Carragan turning everything to rot, the computerized special effects team earns its pay. One funny bit has Carrigan unable to spoil a famous snack. It's sweet and moist, and a zombie hunter in another movie has quite a hankering for it. Guess?

When the boy is safely sequestered with the tattooed monk, Methodius (Christopher Lambert), who lives in a cave, Blaze gets a new deal to become Ghost Riderless. But the tattooed monk is Christopher Lambert, so any genre fan worth his or her salt will already know how safe that situation is. A not so surprising reorganization of effort to stop a Satanic Mass and save the boy leads to a Mad Maxish road rage confrontation that flames out too soon.

Perhaps that's because the four or so writers and two directors, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, don't all go in the same direction. There's a Ghost Rider hissy-piss that either will crack a smile for you or insult, brief tender moments that should have been felt more, and Cage's crazed and damned Johnny Blaze needs a bigger plot to simmer and boil in. Every other character is two-dimensional in spite of the flat 3D embellishment. Animated, graphic novelish, backstories show strong visual flair (and provide a cheaper way to bring an audience up to speed), but their tone doesn't jive with the rest of the movie.

Opportunity for another sequel is given, but it better run on a higher octane than this one or I'll be using the penance stare myself.

Movie Review: Attack the Block (2011) Bad Kids Do Good

Zombos Says: Excellent

"Oh, I can see its eyes."

"Not sure those things its eyes..."

Sometimes the simplest premise and the necessities of moderate budget constraints can lead to an understated sci-horror movie that shines with low-key wit, involves us with colorful characters by not forgetting their humanity, and dares to completely tell its story instead of neutering it in hopes of lucrative franchised bastardizations. Joe Cornish manages to accomplish all of this in Attack the Block, a zeitgeist experience, if ever there was one, of realness, fakery, nonplussed attitudes, a variety of cliches, and decade-spanning B-movie horror sensibilities. If that weren't enough, there's fur-ball monsters with large day-glo mouths and teeth to match, with wonderfully nondescript black bodies, yet ingenious in design because it's all about those teeth, and desperately keeping necks, arms, and legs away from them, that propels this sci-horror gem's action along. 

Thomas Townend exploits those wonderful teeth with his cameras in two key scenes: during the first appearance of a fur-ball alien the boys think is as easy a target as the hairless, light-skinned one they attacked and killed earlier, and when pot dealer Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter) makes the mistake of not looking out the apartment window. It's amazing how much bang for the buck you can get from such a simple creature design when paired with those ominous, neon teeth.

The many meteors carrying these aliens crash into the neighborhood on Guy Fawkes Night, while fireworks are going off all around. The first crash comes after would-be youth gang's Moses (John Boyega), Pest (Alex Esmail), Biggz (Simon Howard), Jerome (Leeon Jones), and Dennis (Franz Drameh) hood up to mug Sam (Jodie Whittaker) in the street as she's heading home to the Block, the apartment building they all live in. The smashed up car the small meteor hit provides Moses an opportunity to rifle through it,  and the chance for Sam to get away. She does, and Moses avoids being nipped by an alien. He and the boys chase after it with youthful abandon, after first grabbing their assorted weapons including bats, a samurai sword, knife, and some firework rockets. Moses kills it and takes it to pot dealer Ron (Nick Frost), who then takes Moses and the creature to see Hi-Hatz, the bigger dope dealer, in his steel-door fortified, ultraviolet-lighted, pot-growing room. Moses is looking for a place to stash the creature safely, but he also wants to impress Hi-Hatz so he can accelerate his criminal career path.  

It's the deviation from this path that Moses must ultimately confront when he realizes the consequences of killing the first alien. The fur-balls are nastier, bigger, and unrelenting in their pursuit of him and his gang, but why they keep coming after him is a mystery eventually explained, while holed up in that fortified pot-growing room, by Brewis (Luke Treadaway), the pothead, nerdy, white kid caught up in the mayhem. (Sure, go ahead; imagine a hash pipe's worth of Cheech and Chong-styled humor undercut through all this, if you like.)

Between the gang's bikes and scooters transportation, the frantic chases, Sam and Moses reluctantly teaming up but growing to understand and like each other , Hi-Hatz having it in for Moses because Hi-Hatz refuses to understand or like anyone, the Block's cramped apartments and dreary hallways becoming a battleground, and those fur-balls climbing the building when they're not prowling its hallways--you may feel a subdued 1980s deja vu, but the sensation may also bring some 1950s kitsch and 1970s flow along with it, modulated by Steven Price's techno score.

Then Cornish rythms up with dialog that's one-liner bright and character revealing, pushing his story up two notches beyond the superficial people-fodder most often seen in horror and sci-horror. You may not like these kids at first, but after the movie, you'll wish you had them living in your Block when the alien invasion comes.

Movie Review: Husk (2011) Not All Dried Out

 

Zombos Says: Good

"Stop me if you've heard this one, but there's this movie with an abandoned farm house in the middle of a cornfield and--" I started to say. I was preparing Zombos' tax information, and my library desk was littered with receipts, scraps of paper notations, vexing forms, and two bone china cups of cold coffee. I decided to take a break. 

"--You mean Dead Birds?" interrupted Zombos without looking up from his New York Times newspaper. 

"What? No! The cornfield has this smelly, burlap sack-for-a-head decrepit scarecrow--"

"Dark Night of the Scarecrow, then? He turned a page.

"No! If you let me finish, it's a more recent movie. There are these five college people--well, really they're too old to play college kids unless they just love to hang out there, but for the sake of the movie you've got to go with it--traveling down a country road in an SUV and--"

"Oh, Hallowed Ground, then."

"No way. Their SUV crashes when a flock of crows bury their beaks deep into the windshield and bleed their guts all over the car."

"Kakashi, that Japanese horror movie?"

"Definitely not."

"Scarecrows?"

"Fun movie to watch it's so bad, but no! Can I finish? All right, then. The movie's Husk."

"Oh, one of those After Dark entries." Zombos turned another page.

"Why aren't you using the iPad Zimba bought you for Christmas? It's got the Times on it," I asked, changing the subject.

Zombos ignored me. Some old people can't seem to shake the habit of smearing black newsprint ink on their fingertips and crushing pulp paper into awkward folds, I suppose. 

"Anyway, getting back to Husk, it's one of those good After Dark movie entries," I said. "I mean, if it weren't for the careless day-for-night lighting used in every supposedly dark scene, I'd even go as far as saying it's very good."

Zombos continued to read his newspaper, but he did it with much less crinkling noise and his lips had stopped moving, so I knew he was listening. I continued.

"The crash knocks them all out, but when they wake up,  the jock (Wes Chatham) and the nerd (Devon Graye) go looking for help and their missing friend (Ben Easter) , while the cool guy (C. J. Thomason)--it's his  SUV that got slammed by the birds--stays by the car and waits. We don't know much about their missing friend, but the jock's girlfriend (Tammin Sursok) stays behind, too. She and the cool guy don't get along. One of those, she's-getting-all-the-attention-now kind of sticky buddy-buddy situations, you know?"

"I am not sure I would," said Zombos. "What is a five letter word for 'corny' and 'artificial'?

"Hokey," I answered. "Leave the Jumble alone for a minute and listen. And there's no hokey in Husk, by the way, but a few good twists around familiar characters; the nerd doesn't die first and he actually figures things out; the girl isn't kept as a screaming foil; the jock actually acts fairly smart and doesn't wuse out when the terror starts; and cool guy turns out to be not so cool.

"Natalie, the jock's girlfriend, gets antsy waiting, so she goes for a walk and finds a scarecrow lying on the ground."

"It does not sound overly taxing in the terror department so far," said Zombos.

"The scarecrow, when she pulls the burlap sack back, has teeth. That's pretty much when things perk up. The mystery involves the upstairs room with the foot-pedal sewing machine, dead people walking and sacking up, and flashbacks the nerd, Scott, experiences. Those flashbacks involve the former tenants of the farm house and what happened to them.

"Action kicks in when they try to leave through the cornfield; they can't; turmoil erupts when the jock won't leave without his girlfriend, but it's a moot point, though I won't spoil it for you by explaining why; and there's a frantic escape attempt by the formerly cool guy now acting like girly man, which leaves much blood on the ground but a clue as to the limitations of the scarecrow creeps.

"Director and writer Brett Simons, with the help of his actors and production design team, whip up a nifty ghost slash scarecrow monster slash terror-in-the-corn story with a backstory that adds familial, country-gothic depth to the mayhem. The only stretching of credulity comes into play when everyone gets so battered, you wonder how they can keep going with all their blood leaking out like that."

"So what do the scarecrows do to bloody them up, throw corn husks at them?" asked Zombos, dryly.

"Don't be silly, of course not. The scarecrows pound long metal nails into each of their fingers, giving them quite a terminal grip."

Zombos put his newspaper down. "Perhaps we should do a marathon viewing of scarecrow-related horror movies. What do you think? It has been a while since we last saw something in the cinematorium."

I looked at the pile of papers waiting on my desk and thought about it. I jumped up after a brief moment of reflection. "Definitely! We can start with Husk and go backwards. I'll have Chef Machiavelli bring the coffee cart. This will be an all-nighter for sure."