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!

 

Zombie Strikes Again

In the interest of the holiday, I find myself compelled to watch Halloween in some way, shape or form. It seems a necessary tradition as Hallow’s Eve looms large. This year, I’ve opted for Rob Zombie’s re-telling from 2007.

I  cannot decide if it’s terrible or if it’s bad enough to be good. Zombie has a penchant for all things trashy and irritating, as evidenced by the characters he creates, and the grating, mindless dialogue he favors in his films. In Halloween, we are introduced to Michael Myers, a young emotionally disturbed boy living a less than promising life with his stripper mother, deadbeat stepfather (of sorts) , his whorish older sister and baby makes five. Mikey has been caught killing cats, much to his mother’s stupid response of ‘so he found a dead cat, big deal’. He rapidly escalates one Halloween night, and proceeds to violently slaughter his ‘dad’, sister and her boyfriend. All this violence is cut to Zombie’s favorite image, his wife (Sherri Moon Zombie, who’s ‘acting’ I HATE. I am thrilled whenever she’s not on screen). Ma’s striptease is splashed throughout Mike’s night of blood, until she returns home to find her little masked boy on the step with baby.

The film proceeds to follow Michael through his adolescent years in an institution, which proves to be fairly pointless and really hurts the pace. The film tries to convey, repeatedly, that Myers is a soulless monster, after having spent a great deal of time showing us that he is merely a traumatized child who has spiraled into madness.  Eventually, after some fairly unnecessary time spent with the hospital’s trashy redneck staff (note: the trashy theme returns), adult Michael ( who has had an outrageous growth spurt) busts out and seeks out his baby sister. Typical Halloween-ness ensues, complete with heroine Laurie and her trashy friends, who’s dialogue seems to be Zombie’s fantasy of how high school girls talk, rather than any I’ve ever met. At this point, nothing new is offered.

Now, this review sounds all bad, doesn’t it? What do I appreciate? The scene in which young Michael bludgeons his sisters boyfriend with a baseball bat got under my skin. it is chilling and feels infused with genuine rage, despite the fact that the actual contact is off screen and we are only privy to an essential ‘after’ shot. Zombie retains the bare bones of the booming score from the original, complete with thudding tension and that infamous killer on the loose track. The music has been tweaked and updated in a successful way that still manages to evoke that feeling of wanting to look over your shoulder. That being said, Zombie tends to have a knack for soundtracks (1000 corpses and The Devil’s rejects relied heavily on musical mood), but he doesn’t employ that talent here, borrowing a lacklustre 70’s jam. I appreciate the slicing and dicing, the impact of gore and admittedly, this film fulfills some sort of morbid slasher need that the original, in all it’s classic glory, doesn’t manage to provide.

The acting is mostly passable, though Scout Taylor-Compton makes little impact as Laurie. Zombie finds moments for all of his horror buddies to make an appearance, which tends to seem a little forced. As noted before, Sherri Moon Zombie is a soulless monster of an actress, and I couldn’t wait for her to die off, which took much too long. Malcolm McDowell is a competent actor, admittedly the only one who surfaces here, but the dialogue he’s got to work with is often moronic and nonsensical, so while I wanted to like him, I couldn’t help but feel he only gave half an effort for half a movie. I cannot complain about the lighting, the cinematography, the framing, any of that technical stuff, but neither can I say it moved me to rave. Perhaps the flaws in this film are all so glaringly clear that the positives are buried deep.

As I conclude this review, it’s clear to me that, by and large, I don’t think this is a very good movie. I don’t put a lot of stock in Zombie’s directing career, though I find myself always wanting to root for him. He offers some great gritty elements in his pictures, but gets caught up in awful dialogue and maddeningly dumb characters. He tries so hard to be hardcore and zany and awful and manages to succeed mostly at the awful part. Why do I own so many of his movies? Must be subliminal messaging.