The Amityville Horror (1979)

*1/2 out of ****

Jay Anson’s “The Amityville Horror” is considered to be one of the most important, controversial, and polarizing pieces of horror literature ever committed to a few hundred pages. At the time of its release and afterwards, it was subject to speculation whilst Anson faced various lawsuits. I haven’t read it in full but I have read excerpts from the book before, and I can already tell you that it’s a more terrifying supposed “real-life” story than this poor, messy film adaptation makes it out to be. Regardless of what you believe and how honest the story being told may actually be, Anson had conjured up an accumulated sense of dread that this 1979 adaptation helmed by Stuart Rosenberg never quite captures.

George (James Brolin) and Cathy Lutz (Margot Kidder) are a young couple who have just purchased a new home that rests by a lake of sorts. The film starts off by showing us horrible things that happened in that house just months earlier; namely a homicide case involving a father killing his entire family in the middle of the night at random with a shotgun. The couple is unaware of these things and until further notices settles down quite nicely with their three children (two boys, one little girl; they also have a much older son who is to be wed soon). The house is quite large and creepy; and you know something’s really up when the daughter has a new imaginary friend and the local priest comes to bless the house and hears a loud, booming voice that tells him not-so-kindly to “Get out!”

The one most affected by the haunting aesthetic of the house is George. His mental state starts to collapse very slowly and he comes down with a cold. He also stops attending work and instead spends hours on end splitting logs outside in the yard; something that a co-worker takes notice of. I only mention the co-worker because his wife, a woman with a peculiar interest in the paranormal, agrees to come to the Lutz residence to do some paranormal investigating after George expresses concern. Perhaps those who died in that house are communicating from beyond the grave, hmm? It wouldn’t anything particularly new, would it?

Everything is in place. You’ve got a large and demeaning house, creepy theme music by Lalo Schifrin with children singing an ominous tune, and a set-up that calls for some seriously surreal and ghostly going-ons. Instead of taking advantage of all these things that are essentially handed to him on a silver platter, Rosenberg decides to essentially direct this one on auto-pilot. It’s not God-awful, annoying direction; but it’s so bland an uninspired that it might as well be either better or worse than, well, that. Even the scenes intended to be scary and strange, like the one with the babysitter getting locked in the closet and another involving two red inhuman eyes being seen outside of the daughter’s bedroom, are practically useless and completely forgettable. The only striking image is the house and the excessive red color tinting that is so frequently employed.

 

The pacing feels incredibly slow. So slow that I came this close to just giving up on this damned movie. I don’t dislike “The Amityville Horror” because of its pacing – I actually enjoy a good suspense flick – but because it just doesn’t have a good enough story or compelling enough actors (although the leads do their best to give it some zest) to hold up and capture the viewer’s interest. Therefore, it drags on and on and comes off as rather boring. It makes the general mistake of thinking that big special effects will compensate for a lack of talent in the areas of building tension and generating scares. It comes off as neither surreal nor terrifying. Stupid, overlong, and uninteresting is more like it. This is just another textbook example of a studio horror film made with the pretense of being scary in exchange for profit. Well, look where that gets you; in this case, quite a bit of money and in the five dollar bin at Walmart. I personally don’t think I could live with the shame.

Bug

**** out of ****

I suppose this is how one should go about making a film that truly intends to screw with the viewer’s mind and perception. William Friedkin’s “Bug” is claustrophobic brilliance; an engrossing, multi-layered cinematic mind-fuck that straddles so many different genres at once and maintains such a consistent sense of isolated horror that it all becomes too overwhelming on the senses by the end. The first time I watched it, I knew I had just witnessed something that felt fresh and new and exciting; but it wasn’t until the second time through this bat-shit insane ride down to the deepest depths of motel hell that I realized just how complex Friedkin’s direction was. It proves, among other things, that not all directors make one great horror classic (in his case, “The Exorcist”) and then become Hollywood hacks; Friedkin is a director unafraid to go against the system and produce truly polarizing yet artful works.

The screenplay by Tracy Letts is adapted from his play of the same name, which was a hit during its original run on Broadway. Having never read the play but also having seen the film, I can see why it might have been popular. The story concerns a shy young woman named Agnes White (Ashley Judd) who is hiding out in a motel located somewhere on the side of an Oklahoma road from an abusive husband, Jerry Gross (Harry Connick Jr.), who might have just been granted parole after being imprisoned for a little while (it’s said that he tried killing poor Agnes). Her friend R.C. (Lynn Collins) tries dragging her back into a more exciting existence by bringing with her to Agnes’s room a peculiar but polite man by the name of Peter Evans (Michael Shannon). 

A wild night of drug and alcohol use commences. R.C. has to leave to help out a friend of hers who could be dealing with a domestic abuse problem of her own, and will then go to a party afterwards. Peter, initially her “date” (although R.C. is a noted lesbian), decides to stay with Agnes for a little bit. He’s kind and complimentary towards her and in time she comes to accept what appear to be his eccentricities. He stays the night at her place, nothing happens. However the next morning when she awakes to find Jerry in the shower, at which time he beats her and finally leaves when Peter arrives before it can escalate any further; the two make passionate love. The sequence takes a trip for the nightmarish and descends into absolute madness when Peter discovers bugs with a vicious bite infesting the bed.

He believes they’ve got a full-scale infestation on their hands. He thinks he knows the source, but he’s reluctant to tell Agnes. I guess it wouldn’t be spoiling too much to tell you what the big secret is; Peter says that the origin of the insects dates back to when he was in the Navy, the subject of a series of terrible army experiments, one of which involved the eggs of the bugs being placed behind a tooth of his (which explains why it’s been hurting lately, an issue which becomes one of the film’s most disturbingly gruesome scenes). He lures Agnes into his seductive web. Within the final 30 minutes of the film, they cover the motel room head-to-toe with tin foil and illuminating blue lamps. And that’s when things get really crazy…as if they weren’t crazy enough already.

This appears to be a genuinely polarizing film. I can totally understand why it might be. The trailer advertises a film different from the one that you actually get; a more conventional horror film, although Friedkin insists that it can’t be labeled under one genre at all. But if there are several different genres that can be applied, they are most certainly romance, sci-fi, horror, and even pitch black comedy (believe me, it’s positively there). To some, it might come off as unsatisfying and too weird for their tastes. I personally loved every last moment of it; it achieves a sort of deep, relentlessly tense sense of over-the-top claustrophobic terror. As a piece about two lovers going insane and continuing to love each-other as they spiral downwards, it caught me completely off-guard. The performances from Judd and Shannon are uncanny and unpredictable; almost absurd at times, yes, but also very dramatically complex. The film is very dialogue-driven, and the psychotic ramblings are absolutely compelling.  It definitely feels like it’s based on a play, not only in style, but in its embrace of the performance art.

Friedkin is a fine director and keeps his style to a minimum for the most part, whilst in the third act indulging himself in plenty of wicked surrealistic pleasures. He shows a general understanding for Letts’ play, which I want to read sometime soon after seeing this awesome adaptation. Somehow I feel that not many other directors would have truly “got” it. It couldn’t have been successfully made into some conventional horror film. Instead, it had to be a delightfully demented psycho-trip to hell that works as a fantastical display of human emotion and feeling; that it most certainly is. I can totally recognize that “Bug” is not for everyone – in fact, it’s not for a lot of people – since it balances many different tones (and dark humor appeals to about as many people as it doesn’t others). But what I know is that I adored the film, and that Friedkin is a brilliant and visionary filmmaker who rightfully earns the title of the Super Mother Bug. 

Alien: Resurrection

*1/2 out of ****

Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the heroine of the “Alien” franchise, just can’t seem to catch a break. At the end of the pretty-much-terrible “Alien 3” – the first bad movie of the series – we thought she had died, only to learn right from the beginning of “Resurrection” that she’s literally been resurrected from the dead. In my opinion, Ripley died at the end of “Aliens”, since that’s where they should have just stopped it. Neither of the films that followed did anything for her initially fascinating character of the universe that all these wonderful people had once come together to collectively create. Just like its predecessor, “Alien: Resurrection” is nothing more than a cash-in brought to us by a talented director, this time Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet of “Delicatessen” and “Amelie”, whose distinctive craftsmanship seems to have been lost in translation.

The plot picks up approximately two hundred years after “Alien 3”. The reincarnation of Ripley was made possible by blood samples taken just before her death by military scientists (headed by General Perez, played by Dan Hedaya) aboard the vessel USM Auriga. As one might remember, Ripley had a nasty little alien embryo growing inside her at the time of death; and the scientists (one of them played by the illusive Brad Dourif) are able to successfully remove it. However, Ripley will never be the same again. She’s somewhat of a human-alien hybrid now; with a different set of skills and an even closer/deeper connection to the extraterrestrial beasts that not once, but thrice now have killed off everyone relatively close to her. 

The scientists have kidnapped several human beings who were in stasis to be body hosts for the eggs of the facehuggers. They want to conduct an experiment; grow a few Xenomorphs of their own to try and train and stuff. Ripley assures them that this won’t be possible and that her concerns about how they might react to such attempts could prove fatal are more or less irrational. After all, the ship is filled with varied talents; such as mercenaries Call (Winona Ryder) and Johner (Ron Perlman) and the disabled mechanic played by Jeunet-regular Dominique Pinon. But we know better to assume that the Xenomorphs will take kindly to staying locked up inside a glass cage for too long. Remember; the bastards have got acid blood.

And that’s where “Resurrection” becomes yet another mindless by-the-numbers slasher pic set in space. It’s not really that much different from “Alien 3”. It annoys me in a variety of different ways; although both films annoyed me immensely nonetheless. The problem I have with “Resurrection” can be traced back to my absolute adoration for Jeunet’s work that came before and followed, respectively. He’s made some wonderful, fairy-tale like films and I’ll say the same of him as I did of Fincher; if the studio had given both men the freedom to do so, they could have done something interesting with this material. It seems as if the studio let Jeunet have more control over his project than they ever let Fincher have, but his style simply does not work here. He creates a few stunning images, collects the paycheck, and then just gets up and leaves; no shits given.

This is too good looking a film to dismiss entirely. In some areas, it’s significantly less “dull” per se than “Alien 3”; and there are a few stellar sequences, like the underwater one. But for every good thing about “Alien: Resurrection”, there’s at least a dozen that are absolute shit. Jeunet’s visual style feels over-indulgent and excessive, the CGI effects are TERRIBLE, the new characters are all disposable stereotypes, the attempts at humor are for the most part pretty damn horrid, the acting is even worse, and the whole thing just feels like it was fucked over by the studio. I like some of the gore, I like the make-up job on the “Newborn” alien that is introduced towards the end, and it’s nicely shot, but otherwise there’s no tension whatsoever, and I was struggling to find out what tone the film was aiming for. There are a lot of talented people present; just another one of them who has gone unmentioned thus far being Joss Whedon. But his screenplay went through too many re-writes, and in the end it was just another thing that the studio took and rooted up the ass. I’m just glad that Ripley’s “epic” saga didn’t continue after this installment. See, sometimes we can have good things.

The Cabin in the Woods

Marty brings with him, to the cabin, a bong that doubles as a thermos. He also utilizes it as a weapon later on in the film.

**** out of ****

As a horror fan, I’m often asked by those not-so familiar with the genre why I find such entertainment value in the often very dark and macabre subject matter usually at hand. I give them a similar answer each time, although it’s not so easy to just pin it all down at once. I love horror films for the unique stories that can be told exclusively within the genre boundaries, I love them for the fact that they can be acceptably unconventional and strange (well, in comparison to most movies). It’s not that simple, to be completely honest; but we well-versed horror fans know why we adore the genre and those who don’t may never understand it. Those who truly love horror movies feel an almost spiritual and very emotional connection with those types of movies, or at least the good ones; it can run genuinely deep at times. I know it certainly does for me.

I don’t think any film has ever came as close as “The Cabin in the Woods” does to defining why I am such a big horror fanatic. Without spoiling too much, I’ll just say that it’s a horror movie essentially all about horror movies; the mechanics behind their making and the ideology that we bring into the theater or whatnot with us when we go to see/watch them. In that sense, it’s a bold and brilliant film meant to appeal almost exclusively to those with the aforementioned “genre connection”. If you lack it, you will not like this movie; but if you do, you’ll most likely love it. I personally believe it will – in due time – go down as a modern horror classic, because we don’t see something this unusually resonant that often.

Five college kids head off to a cabin in the woods. There’s the virgin (Kristin Konnolly), the jock (Chris Hemsworth), the whore (Anna Hutchison), the “nice guy” (Jesse Williams), and then there’s the stoner (Fran Kranz). On the way, they run into a creepy gas station owner. Upon arriving, they hit the lake and then drift head-first into a night of partying. While playing truth or dare, and after one of the two girls in the group has been dared and succeeded in making out with a stuffed wolf head mounted on the cabin wall, they venture into the basement after the cellar door is blasted right open a la “The Evil Dead”. It’s there that they discover mysterious items, one of them being an old diary of sorts that tells the horrific and grisly tale of a family that had lived and died on those very grounds. There are Latin words inscribed at the end of the diary, and you can imagine what happens when they are read.

(You might want to stop reading here, even though I won’t be spoiling too, too much.) As the film’s tagline indicates, you think you know the story. You think you’ve seen this movie many times before; perhaps too many times, but boy are you in for a hell of a surprise. The first scene in the film actually has nothing to do with the kids; but rather a pair of technicians – Gary (Richard Jenkins) and Steve (Bradley Whitford) – who seem to work for an organization that is more or less watching over the group via security cameras and deciding their fate. It appears to be a part of some sort of ancient ceremony, but that’s as far as I’ll go with plot details. The narrative is constantly shifting between office and cabin grounds, until a killer third act that evokes religion and Lovecraftian themes brings it all together quite nicely (and chaotically).

Everything involving the college kids and the back-from-the-dead previous occupants of the cabin is pretty run-of-the-mill, albeit intentionally. However, if this was a stand-alone slasher picture, it would STILL be better than most of the others. Thank God it’s a lot more than just that. “The Cabin in the Woods” is an accurate, relevant critique of the horror genre as a whole. The script by Joss Whedon (“The Avengers”, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) and Drew Goddard (who also directs) was supposedly written in just three days (an act per day, as they said); which really does surprise me given that it’s probably the most innovative and clever I’ve seen this year. I think the film qualifies as a potential classic not only for its twisty, surrealistic, all-over-the-place style; but also for the many quotable lines (we can thank Fran Kranz’s Marty, who by the way is the best of his kind since James Franco’s Sal in “Pineapple Express”, for most of those). 

On one level, the film is making fun of the horror genre and on another it’s clearly very affectionate of it. The script and direction certainly seem like they are the love child of two men who have a very obvious love for horror movies; and so it shows. “The Cabin in the Woods” is hilarious and unconventional; fun and classic in just about every way. Those who wanted a conventional cabin-in-the-woods horror movie will be sorely disappointed; those who actually looked at the damn poster and kind of knew what they were getting themselves into will be pleasantly surprised. I adored every second of it and it will easily go down as one of my Top Ten favorites of 2012. No, it is not a “scary” horror film; but it was not meant to be. It was meant to entertain those who understand what makes the genre tick for them personally. The joy of making and watching a horror movie is all here; all the sex, gore, and CGI monstrosities. It’s an astonishing and exciting sight to see. Now, I’m going to go read a book with pictures.

Lovely Molly

*** out of ****

The secret to enjoying at least 75% of the smaller, independent horror films released today lies in the ability to suspend disbelief and forgive a lack of true solution. I feel that’s what makes a lot of films – both horror and not – fascinating in the sense that they don’t provide us with all the answers and essentially force us to think for ourselves (gasp). Is it such a crime that a filmmaker aside from David Lynch (who’s famous for doing this) to ask us to play detective for a few hours? I don’t think so. If you’ve been following Eduardo Sanchez since the beginning, you’ll know that he’s no newbie to ambiguous horror that is open to a number of different interpretations. “Lovely Molly” keeps the tradition going with plenty of pizazz and intrigue. I’ll admit that it’s more of a while-it-lasts type experience than a film that delivers substantial payoff, but it hits you and it hits you hard.

The titular Molly (Gretchen Lodge) is a newlywed who is just settling down in her parent’s house, the same house where she grew up as a kid, with her husband Tim (Johnny Lewis). Molly is a recovering drug addict with a sister named Hannah (Alexandra Holden) who also lives nearby. The film begins with the triggering of a downstairs security alarm in the middle of the night that could not have possibly been triggered, since Tim is so sure he locked it before the couple went to bed. By day, he’s not around and neither is Molly since she has found work at a local superstore (with Hannah). Sometimes he must go off on business for a few days, leaving Molly all alone. Business unfortunately lands on Molly’s birthday, and beyond.

Molly begins having strange experiences around the house. Child-like voices are heard coming from the closet, unseen forces are communicating directly with her, and she’s starting to pick up her old habits (drug abuse) yet again. When not high on the drugs, Molly is almost psycho-sexual and obsessive. Her behavior bothers Tim, provoking him to call in the local priest (Field Blauvelt), and we all know how reliable he will be. It seems that Molly might be possessed by something. Footage taken from her handheld video camera indicates that the house might have a dark past hidden somewhere in the cellar, although nothing is said for sure. This is another one of those downwards spiral horror films; although by now you should be aware of what I sucker I am for those.

Sanchez doesn’t bring anything particularly “new” to the multiple genres he’s tackling; we’ve seen this all before and indeed it’s been done both better and worse. But once again, I succumb to the fact that he’s able to successfully do so many things at once. It proves that he possesses (no pun intended) a natural talent for merging drama with horror. While it’s not as much an emotional knock-out as it is an exhausting genre exercise; “Lovely Molly” still packs more of a sucker punch to the gut than most horror films I’ve seen of recent. Some scenes, like one involving Molly discovering drugs and the tools that one would use to utilize them hidden inside a teddy bear from her childhood in the attic, are absolutely ominous. I might like it even more than I did Sanchez’s “Altered”, which I gave the same rating. They exist on somewhat different grounds but share similar traits nonetheless. 

But “Lovely Molly” harkens back to the film that made Sanchez a filmmaker to watch; “The Blair Witch Project”. That’s a film that I love no matter what the naysayers might say, and while I feel it will always be his baby, “Lovely Molly” utilizes similar slow-rising tension with effective bursts of absolutely animalistic terror. To tell the truth, I thought this movie was disturbing. Not just in what it shows, but what it implies and expects us to create within our minds. I dug the elaborate visual style, the spooky sound design, the themes (I like the aspect of the men who surround Molly in life), and the overall mood of the picture. I believe it will go on to be one of this year’s most prized genre possessions, since there don’t seem to be THAT many other worthy contenders. This is thoughtful, entertaining genre filmmaking. It’s not the best for its kind, and again I will say that it’s going to upset those who want straight endings and answers; although I’d rather something choose to be ambiguous and engaging rather than conventional. “Lovely Molly” says no to the easy way out; which is precisely why it lingers for so long afterwards and is more experience than narrative.