When You’re Strange

Some very bleak moments having little to do with the supernatural are what remain after Deliver Us From Evil wraps up, whether that is what director Scott Derrickson intended or not. Otherwise, this cop-horror-thriller-supernatural-jambalaya is nothing to write home about.

Centered on Sergeant Ralph Sarchie, played skilfully by Eric Bana (who knows better, really), the film leads us into the heart of darkness that is police work. Sarchie works the beat in New York, with his partner, played by Joel McHale (yes, of Community, and yes, it feels odd to have him in this role. I suspect he was cast based on arm circumference.) After a blip of a scene featuring soldiers in Iraq stalking into a cave and presumably uncovering some unspeakable evil (not so much is said, but does it have to be?), the film connects with Sarchie as he holds a dead baby found in a dumpster. Yikes. Sarchie tries to disconnect from his job, often overcome with anger and emotion. The entire film works to convince us of this fact, though this opening sequence does the trick without any dialogue, making some of the drama feel a little redundant.

Sarchie walks us through a day in the life, dumpster babies, domestic disputes, whackos running around the zoo, insect riddled corpses in possessed basements…..crucified cats. Something spooky is afoot, though Sergeant Scully doubts anything amiss beyond the evil of the people. The connection between all the craziness is a photo of three soldiers in Iraq. Familiar? They’ve all been dishonorably discharged for attacking a priest. What did they uncover far off in the sandy depths of darkness? (The Exorcist, anyone?).

In the role of rough around the edges Father Karras is Edgra Ramirez as Father Mendoza, a character with a deadpan attitude towards all things eveil, or perhaps it’s just Ramirez himself, trying to disconnect from this film. Mendoza stumbles into Sarchie’s path in an effort to help one of his whackos (a highly unnecessary character named Jane who serves mostly to stare buggy eyed at the camera and creep and crawl about in the shadows). The man of God meets the man without faith. Ah, the staht of a beautiful friendship (does my New Yawk accent translate?).

The pair, accompanied by McHale, who, at one point, gets held up on the stairs behind a stuck piano or something (what kind of gimmick is that?) investigate the soldiers and their craziness. This tale is spliced in with some cheap tricks of Sarchie’s family and the desperate creep out scenes of toys moving of their own accord and scratching sounds in his little girl’s bedroom. Wife Olivia Munn is projects her own anxieties and is certain that lil Susie is just expressing her need for her Daddy to come home, no help there. Poor gal is stuck in her haunted bedroom waiting for the film’s finale.

And it comes with a tired exorcism scene that offers little that we haven’t seen before. The power of Christ compels you, spooky overlapping voices, Latin, yaddah yaddah. Toss in the constantly flickering lights, because, of course, lights don’t work in the presence of evil, and you’ve got a nice little cliche stew.

So, to summarize, a trio of soldiers uncover SOMETHING, bring it home to New York, pass it on to a handful of people, inspire weird scratching fits, Latin graffiti, poltergeist like toy animation, and bone smashing suicides. Why? Who knows? By what exactly? Who knows? How does Sarchie seem to have this ‘radar’ for evil? Pfft, no answers on that one. The film stirs up a story that might have a few creepy images (yes, Jane crawling towards the screen spattered with blood and the sudden, jarring jump scares that pop up from time to time are unnerving) but falls flat with shockingly little depth. In the grand scheme of maniacal goings on in New York on a day to day basis, this small handful of weirdos seems to be pretty minor. I mean, for god’s sake, we’ve already found a baby in a dumpster and heard the tale of a child molester and killer who dumps a little girl in a garbage can. These stories might linger, but the possession tale feels less than original, and the junction with the haunted kid feels like a far reach to try and incorporate the kind of cheap horror tricks that sell a film in the previews.

Life Lessons:
1. Get an office job, police work seems less than fun.
2. Buy LED lightbulbs.
3. Do not buy into ‘based on a true story’. Do your own research.
4. Don’t marry a cop. He’ll be out all night, leaving your house susceptible to spookiness.
5. People are strange.

 

Take Me Back to the 90’s- a review of VHS (2012)

Take me back to the 90’s, the days of VHS tapes, the days of static at the end of a movie, the days of skipping film and scratchy picture. Ah, yes, the glorious days of the nineties….

I know that this movie isn’t new, and a sequel has since been released, but I’ll offer up my view on V/H/S, unpopular though it may make me.

 VHS (2012) is a ‘found footage anthology’. Yeah, more ‘found footage’, cause we don’t have enough nauseatingly shaky camera work in horror films yet. I’m not opposed to ‘found footage’, hand held recording with an attempt at a reality feel, but when fifty percent of your entire film is intentional screen glitches and cameramen who are flailing the recorder around like a kite, it gets old awfully fast.

This films centers around a group of delinquents who film basically their every movements, their various exploits of vandalism and sexual assault. These weirdos are being hired to break into someone’s house to retrieve a VHS tape. I don’t have to give you any more than that, because in the course of this ‘film’ we are made to watch five more entire short horror recordings, and if I give any more away, I’ve basically told an entire story.

So, we’ve got the base story, which is sliced up into pieces framing the other films. It’s characters are all terribly unlikeable, and I don’t mean unrelatable, hard to connect with in 20minutes, I mean downright grating. Come to think of it, many of the characters are just awful, and I found myself rooting for their demise. Anyway, the base story is basically just a lot of wandering around with the occasional hint at some type of scare lurking in the dark, it doesn’t really move forward throughout the film so much as occasionally stuff happens, and then stuff doesn’t happen.

I do not get the hype behind this film. Maybe these stories are just not solid enough to be told in such a short time. The first tape we watch is sort of an attempt at a sex tape gone wrong, and it did have it’s moments of gore and ‘what the FUCK’ am I seeing?’, and maybe this is they way all the stories should be, short, sweet, and in need of no explanation. Trying to cram too many elements in a ten to twenty minute skit is asking too much.

The second story, the ‘road trip’ tale, just felt a little boring to me. The third was sort of a twist on the classic kids-in-the-woods horror cliche, and though it was unusual, it was pretty nonsensical and somehow, for such a short story, the pacing was way off, and I sure didn’t get the motives of the most important characters.  The fourth,  I admit I was unnerved by from time to time, particularly by the webcam aspect, where the scares that make you jump are solid. Sadly, the pay off is lacking and the characters seem really idiotic, but I felt this one had some potential. The fifth, a Halloween haunted house feature had a few really eerie moments that had me smirking and expecting a huge scare as those corner of your eye figures appear. The characters in this picture were the least moronic, which I give some credit to. Much of this tale made absolutely no sense to me, but it had a few pretty cool effects that I though were kind of neat.

Essentially, I don’t think this film is worth all the hype that is coming along with it. The stories were all just too short to be fleshed out, or otherwise just didn’t have the potential to carry an audience anyway.  I did get bored from time to time, any footage that doesn’t propel the story forward certainly seems useless in a film like this, where every moment counts to try and pack a punch. It just didn’t do much for me, and I am not entirely certain it deserves all the acclaim I’ve been reading. I can appreciate a bad film, but not an annoying one, which is what the bulk of VHS was to me. Maybe if I liked boobs more I would have appreciated VHS, cause what it lacks in scares, it makes up for in boobs. But, boobs, who needs ’em when you get to see them every day.

 

Mama’s Gonna Buy You a Mockingbird

Mama (2013)

I don’t think I’d like to spend a lot of time wandering around in Guillermo Del Toro’s subconscious, or Andres Muschietti’s, for that matter.

Mama is a dark look at the power of a mother’s love and the dangerous territoriality of motherhood. The film is directed by  Andrés Muschietti, though it is ‘Presented’ by Guillermo Del Toro, who’s influence seems pretty strong to me. We follow two young girls, Victoria and Lily, as they are abandoned (in a sense) by their less than stable father in the a rickety cabin in the woods. The girls survive, seemingly on their own, and are discovered by a ramshackle search party years later (search efforts are funded by the somehow made of money Uncle Luke).  The girls have been coasting along in the forest, living on cherries and moths for 5 years. Yum! I can only imagine the writing round table when the idea of the children chomping down on powdery moths, streaks of the insects dusty wings lingering on their cheeks, was proposed.

Victoria and Lily have been reduced to scuttling, feral creatures, lurking in the shadows and mumbling about Mama.

The girls are sent to live with Uncle Lucas and punk rock girlfriend Annabelle ( played deftly by Jessica Chastain, though admittedly this is not her most valuable role). Does it make a whole lot of sense that a child psychologist would send such high needs cases to unprepared non-parents? No, not exactly, but while this film is rife with eerie visions, spectral images, wispy creatures, rapidly spreading wall stains that seem to be alive with menace, it’s attempting to carry too much story, Muschietti seems to be trying to weave a fairy tale, some sort of dark and ominous folklore, but it tries at too much complexity.

Despite this, Mama does have an eerie air of menace, adept directing and some fairly solid acting.   Lucas and Annabelle (whom has a great distaste for parenting) care for the odd little girls, reflecting on how they managed to survive. The girls continue to reference Mama. Mama took care of them, fed them, taught them how to live.

But who is Mama?

And who do the girls seem to be looking at, talking to, listening to, hiding in the closet?  And what’s up with that creepy, smoky, wispy blob of terror that seems to be rattling around in the distant corners of every room?

I’m not gonna give you more than that, you can probably fill in some of the blanks yourself. It’s not a perfect film, it attempts to construct more of a story than is really necessary in a film that essentially needs to be a vehicle for a catalog of nightmare images.

It gets the job done if you’re looking for some jump scares and effective booms of music, but there seems to be so much that is reminiscent of other films, snips and slivers taken from previous scares and churned together here, perhaps in homage. Sadly, it makes this film feel a little like something we’ve seen before, the scares are all too familiar, and if you’re as familiar (read: dedicated) to horror movies as I, you’ll see most of them coming.

There are some interesting ideas to explore, however, such as the concept of the two girls being cared for by a terrifying specter, forming a bond and attachment, and how one of the girls finds herself pushing away from the being while the other embraces their relationship.  Essentially, this film is smattering of Japanese horror, a swirl of CGI, a pinch of Grimm’s fairy tales and a heaping dollop of Del Toro. Ten years ago, it would have stuck in your memory, but now, dark and creepy and slithery though the images may be, it all feels like it’s been done before.

Personal side note, anyone else ever see the crusty old Canadian gem from 1977, Cathy’s Curse? The opening scene involving Daddy angrily scooping his daughters into the car brought it all back to me.