Hot Pursuit

DISCLAIMER: EVERYTHING FROM HERE ON BELOW IS AT MINIMUM 6 YEARS OLD AND OUT OF DATE! BUT….POSTERITY?

Horror is created with minimal effects, and suspense trumps all in David Robert Mitchell’s (writer/director) stylish film It Follows.(2014)

Oh sweet, sweet nostalgia

Oh sweet, sweet nostalgia

Right from the film’s opening sequence (a bewildered young girl flees from something invisible), It Follows has a retro vibe. It’s closed in suburb streets evoke Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street and a host of others. The eerie synth pop and heart pounding booms of music lend well to this vintage feel. In fact, the entire film is set in some alternate, unknown era with minimal technology and heavy floral patterns. This inexplicably dated timelessness works. It has the viewer feeling like something is familiar. ….but just a little off.

It Follows is the story of a curse, transmitted by sex, that leaves it’s victims with far worse than a course of antibiotics and an embarrassing itch. This curse unleashes ‘It’. It can take the form of any human. And it’s scary power? Walking purposefully towards you.

Doesn’t sound scary, I know, but within minutes after our heroine Jay (Maika Monroe) is infected, she is being pursued by It. It looks perfectly human, except for that dead eyed stare that penetrates your very soul. Can anyone relate to that feeling of wanting to lean away from the TV when the ghost/killer/demon approaches it?? Yeah, that’s this whole movie.

Jay learns from her (now ex) boyfriend that she must stay away, she must evade this thing, and she must pass it on. And that next victim must live and pay it forward, because it keeps coming back. If the next person dies, it comes for her again. Not so subtle subtext about thinking before you get busy, yes? The consequences could be dire, could be lurking, searching for you, waiting to end it all. Life changing repercussions, indeed.

Jay, with the help of a crew of fairly typical teens, manages to evade It over and over, all the while convincing the others that it is real. Did I mention that you can only see it if you are infected?? Enter the ‘everyone thinks I’m crazy’ subplot.

This film manages to create a very viable sense of doom and dread and, admittedly some pulse pounding scares. What makes it innovative is that it does this on the strength of tone and suspense alone. It doesn’t rely on cgi nor on gore and shock value. Though there is a scene in which It makes invisible (laughable) cgi contact with a victim, the moment serves more to convince Jays friends of its seriousness than the viewer. Somehow, right from its first shadowy stroll towards Jay, staring purposefully into her eyes, we are convinced. We know this isn’t something you want catching up with you, and we don’t need to figure out exactly why to turn and run.

That feeling of being followed, pursued, by something relentless (not to mention shape-shifting into some fairly disconcerting individuals ) is what drives this film. It cuts to the core of fear, it feels like a recurring nightmare and it is shockingly effective.

Monroe, as our lead actress, is adept, and the best of the bunch. Her counterparts tend to feel a little wooden and weak. Character development, for that matter is virtually non existent, and is something that could’ve been improved, but doesn’t detract significantly.

The set design is clever, and lends to that unsettling tone, as each room and home feels somehow frozen in an unidentifiable time. The film seems to be set in Detroit (though it’s not directly expressed) and the city’s abandoned streets and homes feel lonesome and menacing, hopeless and insidious. The setting feels almost like a character in itself, this bleak and unsafe land that surrounds the group. The kids discuss being taught the safe zones of the suburbs, the volatile sense of the city. It looms over them, offering no solace.

It Follows is a film that feels like the sort they just don’t make anymore. It scares, for real, with an unexplored monster, a slow and plodding thing that has you in its sights. And it follows.

The horror hating husband watched this one with me, and later expressed that we have too many windows in our house, thank you very much.

Life lessons (I’ve been slipping, I know)
1. I can’t say this enough, keep it in your pants!! This is the ultimate ‘never have sex’ horror-rule movie.
2. I don’t care how much you disrespect your mother, you wake that bitch up and you get her involved.
3. Never take running shoes for granted.
4. Know your exits.
5. Watch your back. Always watch your back.

No matter what, it follows.

 

Mommie Dearest

There are real monsters,  and then,  there are REAL monsters.

Jennifer Kent’s haunting and poignant The Babadook (2014) dresses up in  a cookie cutter costume. It sets up to be a boogeyman tale, spooks in the closet, a young boy terrified of monsters we cannot see. But in his world, living a broken life with his widowed mother (Essie Davis) clearly at the end of her rope, Samuel (Noah Wiseman ) has the ultimate villain to face.

Mom Amelia’s husband died in a car accident on the very day Sam was born.  Amelia struggles to make ends meet and keep life together amidst her obvious grief and depression. Sam is a troubled boy, prone to tantrums and outbursts,  serving to further alienate this family from others. The pair lose increasingly more sleep as Sam’s anxiety mounts, and he invades mom’s space and privacy endlessly.

Then a storybook appears as if from nowhere. A nightmare tome called The Babadook. Eerie monochromatic pictures illustrate a violent tale in which a looming figure seeps into your home, into your life, and into yourself. ‘You can’t get rid of the babadook’.

Sam freaks out, and his terror takes over the duos lives, isolating them even further.

But strange noises,  peculiar dreams, hallucinations of a haunting creature, clothed in black mount, and before long, the babadook is something that even Amelia can’t ignore.

The Babadook, though rife with metaphor, gives viewers a ‘real’ monster to fear, one looming in the shadows in menacing wait. The classic and valuable horror elements; gloomy tone,  suspense,  dark corners and heart pounding music. There IS a typical storyline here, but what makes it so unusual is the way in which fantasy and reality are entwined,  making you wonder was it ever a fantasy at all?

The real monsters? Grief and fear, anxiety and desperation.  A broken woman trying to raise a child while drowning in her own pain and inevitably dragging her son down with her.  A mother out of options, struggling to maintain some semblance of a life. But anger and resentment begin to build, to grow,  to evolve. These emotions overtake her, they become something more, something much more sinister.

Horror fans have grown comfortable with seeing a parent turn on a child, but commonly, we see fathers inhabited by demons, Jack Torrance parading after his family with an axe.

But mother is so often our sanctuary. She is the safe zone, t he voice of reason,  the ultimate good.

Perhaps this is what makes The Babadook a film that will get under your skin on more levels than one.

Rife with symbolism, beautiful set design and excellent acting, The Babadook is a horror like nothing we’ve seen in recent years. It has heart and horror,  and an evil we can all relate to.

After all, we all have demons, but for the most part  they’re ‘quiet today’.

 

The Darling Buds of May

Director Lucky McKee pieces together a macabre, but somehow sweet story of isolation and friendship with his 2002 film May.

Angela Bettis stars as title character, May,  a young woman living with the struggle of a troubled (though largely implied ) past. May lives alone,  her best friend, a creepy porcelain doll locked in a box, Susie, silently overseeing her every move. May is a mousey, immature, withdrawn creature, with no apparent friends or family,  except perhaps her sexually aggressive Co worker  (Ana Faris). But May met a boy. ….

May pursues Adam (Jeremy Sisto) in the only ways she knows how, by following him, peeking at him from around corners, getting in his personal space while he’s asleep. Lucky for May, Adam takes the bait. But, don’t you think I’m weird? She ponders.

I like weird, he assures her.

Spoiler alert: May isn’t exactly adorkable weird. She isn’t ‘thick glasses and knee socks’ weird. She’s not cute, mainstream, rom-com weird.

May is disconcerting.

And she just cannot seem to find a friend.

This film, despite its darkness and eventual gore, is poignant and lovely, a times. May is somehow relatable,  even amidst this atmosphere of doom. She is desperate and lonely,  and her need for companionship isn’t such a far stretch for the average viewer.  She’s in turns horrifying and endearing, and we cannot help but silently root for her. 

There is a fairy tale quality about this film, a whimsical account of one girls attempt to fit into a world she was never prepared for. As she seeks to find a friend in her life,  May begins to learn a number of things, one of the most apparent lessons being that there’s something good in all of us, but it may not, exactly make up a whole.

Tender and gruesome,  May is artsy and cool, and maybe just a tiny bit pretentious. It has heart and horror, and it is worth your time.

Life Lessons:
1. Sewing can be a useful skill
2. Weird isn’t always cute. We can’t all be Zoey Deschanel
3. If you can be your own worst enemy, why not your own best friend?
4. Girl on girl workplace harassment is a thing
5. It is easy to f*@k up your children

 

Flu Season

The time has come for coughs and colds, sniffles and sneezes, flu shots and vigorous handwashing. For the record, I work in a kindergarten. Flu Season is disgusting, a nightmare of biblical boogery proportions.

I’m by no means a germaphobe, but the contagion aspect, the spreading, the brush fire of disease that ripples through the crowd gets my back up.

Contracted (2013) isn’t exactly a handwashing issue, but boy, it’s got the gross en Pointe.

Hey can I borrow your chapstick?

Hey can I borrow your chapstick?

Written and directed by Eric England, the film opens with the subtlest scene of necrophilia that could ever be possible (don’t get me wrong, it’s disturbing and gross, and immediately sets a tone of heinousness ).

Next thing you know, we meet a girl named Sam. She is a recovered addict. She has a girlfriend who keeps blowing her off. She has a lot of dirt bag friends and one clean cut admirer.

Sam gets shit faced, presumably drugged by a fuzzy blonde stranger and hooks up with him in his car.

Cut to the not so slow decline of Sam’s health, starting from the hemorrhaging nether regions, working up to strange ‘pink eye’, massive hair loss, vomiting blood and the occasional pest control problem.

The acting is decent in this film, with Najarra Townsend at the forefront as Sam. The bad news is that the characters are largely vapid imbeciles who incessantly make idiotic choices. Sam’s mother allows her to profusely vomit blood all over the house without intervening or calling 911 because she might be on drugs again. Seems legit.

Sam’s boss witnesses her disgusting decline and only sends her home from work when she begins to shed fingernails.

Sam’s friends pretend, in turns that they can’t see the disease ravaging her face, and then proclaim how terrible age looks. But never do they call for help.

Sam’s doctor suspects she has a cold and a rash, and upon later inspection that she shouldn’t touch anyone. But go ahead, go home, we trust you. It’s not like we have a facility that’s equipped for a quarantine or anything.

The gruesome deterioration of this pretty young girl into a veritable zombie ghoul is compelling, though disgusting. The effects are through and believable, t he gore factor is solid.

But the shallow twats featured as characters are distractingly terrible. Perhaps the director intended to portray these young people as utter morons. If so, success achieved my friend.

I would have liked just a bit more in the way of science and stoet. Just a tad. Presumably, Sam’s disease bag one night stand defiled a body and passed some mysterious death virus onto the living? Somehow the cops are looking for this weirdo, indication they know about his exploits? Curious. There’s room for more here.

Is it unnerving, yes. Gross? Absolutely. Scary? It has its moments, based largely on the gross, I admit, maybe on the fallible nature of our selves, and our bodies, if you want to dig deeper.

Just know that you may find yourself wanting to punch each and every character. But maybe wear a hazmat suit.

Life lessons
1. Keep it in your pants.
2. Don’t take drinks from strangers dummy.
3. Buddy system, somebody better stay sober.
4 . If it looks like it’s infected, if it smells like it’s infected, don’t make out with it.
5. Go to the hospital, you big spazz.

 

Sentimental Scares

Do you, like myself,  have fond memories of terrifying yourself as a child with G rated horror programs like Are You Afraid of the Dark and Goosebumps? Or,  maybe you thought you were a tough guy and you watched Tales From the Crypt. I recall fixating on AYAOTD episodes, relishing the eerie opening sequence, that creepy attic clown, the creaking boat that rocks in the solitary night……the inevitable storyline that centered on eleven year olds and always resolved itself with the appearance of a parent. After all, the most unnerving part of these tales was the way mom and dad never seemed to appear until after the kids had resolved the terror on their own.

In that very same vein,  I give you The Hole (2009), a glorified feature length episode of hocus pocus-esque scares.
Director Joe Dante has a history of kid friendly scares that like to slip into the horror genre, but more rightfully belong on ABC family in October.

Upon moving into a new house, two brothers (played forgettably by Chris Massoglia and Nathan Gamble ) discover that, in their basement,  lies a peculiar unending vortex below a trapdoor. What’s down there? Where does it lead?? To your nightmares,  predictably.

No photo ever more accurately summarized the tone of a film than this

The Hole seems to be a vessel for some type of evil that manifests into your deepest fears, and once you’ve peered inside, it can send those terrors out to find you.

Older brother uses his hormonal instincts to rope his hot neighbour into the fear circle.

Lights proceed to flicker, kids make silly choices,  some type of mysterious mad scientist offers his less than helpful commentary.

Ten year old you will see where this is all headed and won’t be afraid, but maybe, just maybe, will enjoy the sense of nostalgia that The Hole offers. As a horror film, it’s cute and sentimental,  and adorably innocent. It is most definitely not going to inspire in you any nightmares,  dread or, likely,  anything more than a knowing chuckle, as you wait for all the youths to learn an important lesson just in time for mom to come home and make dinner.

Life lessons:
1. Stop trying to be cool and grown up, no one is buying it anyway
2. Get a job, ya lazy bums!
3. If the creepy neighbour kids invite you over to check out a hole… tell them you’re washing your hair.

 

What’s in the BOX?!

The Possession  (2012) is stylish, well acted and oozes with dramatic, booming score. The film seems to have the required components to make a solid and memorable film,  but somehow,  it feels subdued, slow and underwhelming. Have we been saturated with possession tales??

The story centers on a broken family.  Mom (Kyra Sedgwick ) and dad (Jeffrey Dean Morgan ) share custody of their two girls amidst the inevitable bitterness of divorce.  It’s no wonder little Emily is acting strangely.

Or, maybe it’s that bizarre wooden box she picked up at an evil yard sale. The one with the ancient hebrew scrawled on it. You know, the one that contains a pile of knick knacks that combine Pandora’s box with Boo Radley’s tree treasures.

You guessed it, the box contains a demon. In this case, a Dybbuk (an ancient Jewish box demon that looks like a second cousin of the Fiji mermaid.) The snippets of lore, myth and religion that filter into this fairly run of the mill tale are pretty much the only thing that sets this film apart.

Otherwise,  we get rolling eyes, inexplicable gagging, swarms of bugs, pale kids in nightgowns contorting themselves. We’ve seen it before, and while The Possession doesn’t resort to cheap jump scares, it just doesn’t have anything terribly memorable to offer.

Director Ole Bornedal makes a solid effort,  and combined with an uncomfortable score manages to project a fairly chilling image. Young girl being tortured and twisted,  downright infested by demon? Creepy shit. But it’s not new. Perhaps the lore of the Dybbuk was a tempting story to tell, but our director fell flat by pouring it directly into the old familiar mould.

What's in the booox? Oh. Evil.

Think outside the box, next time.

Ha!

Life lessons:
1. One man’s trash isn’t always another man’s treasure.
2. Stay together for the kids!
3. Turn on some lights once in a while, why don’t cha?
4. You’d probably feel better if you just stopped giving a shit.
5. A boat’s just a boat,  but the mystery box can be anything! ! Even a boat!

 

Slice and Dice

Color me cliche,  but Netflix runs my life, and it informs me the series Scream commences now. I am forfeiting nap time to watch what I fear will be a ridiculous abomination instead of a solid horror movie.

Mistake?Am I sacrificing day one of horror marathon? Perhaps, but I’m a sucker and I can’t resist.

Initial thoughts: most of these teens are thirty, and I can barely tell them apart.

Let the slashing begin.