The Visit

I had very mixed feelings about even going to see this movie.  M. Night Shyamalan has tricked me (and so many others) into seeing quite a few bad films.  I was 14 when The Village came out, and I was so excited to see it.  But the ending was so drab.  After that his films just seemed to plummet further.  And then we have this.

This is a campy self-aware faux horror documentary from the perspective of teenagers.  Also (see above) they case actual teenagers, which does wonders for the film.  It's the sort of weird, funny little film I'd expect to see to a newcomer to the genre.  It's the sort of film you see and think "it has it's issues, but I feel like this director has promise".  Which makes the fact that it was made by a big budget, almost universally panned director confusing.

It's a surprisingly ballsy film.  It's a slow burn, taking advantage of "old people are just weird" for as long as possible.  It's filled with weird half-explanations that would genuinely be believable to the teenage main characters.  And it has a twist that I at least did not see coming (I knew there would be a twist of course, but I didn't think it would be what it was).

It struck me as honest in a way I rarely see.  The main characters are irritating and lovable, and really work as actual teenagers.  The older daughter sees herself as very grown up and cultured, she wants to make this a poignant documentary about the family she's never known, tying it into her mother's past and her present in a way that creates meaning for herself and her whole family.  But of course, she's a teenager, so she's often really bad at it (though she is treated to a few touching scenes).  She's a very believable 17 year old girl.

The brother, 13, is a tiny puffed up cultural appropriating, misogynistic little asshole.  But it's completely obvious that he is the way he is because he's trying to compensate for his father's disappearance, for his scrawny frame, for his awkwardness.  He's lovable because he has absolutely no idea what he's doing.  He's probably the most believable teenage boy I've seen in a movie in years.

And the core family: brother, sister & mother... they really love each other.  They fight and make mistakes just like normal people, but they're a good, loving family.  The sister calls the brother out on his misogynistic bullshit, the brother gets the sister to take him more seriously, and the mother is hopelessly confused by the world that is adulthood but loves & protects her children as best she can.  It's a shockingly positive depiction of a single-parent family.

When we get to the meat of the movie it's uneven.  There are both laughs & jump scares.  But I'd say it's closer to a comedy than a horror film.  The self-awareness helps a lot to mitigate this though.  It's solid entertainment, with interesting "villians" and a commitment to the realism of it's heroes (though significantly less commitment to the realism of Nana and Pop Pop).

Were this a movie by a director new to the scene, it would be easier to praise it, to call it daring and funny, to give it a B+.  But while Shyamalan has made a significantly better film here than he has in more than a decade, I still don't think he deserves a newbie bonus. 

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Entertaining 4/5        Intelligent 2/5        Unsettling 3.5/5
 
 Scary 3/5        Gory 1/5        Funny 5/5         Artistic 2/5
  

Representation of Minorities 0/5        Representation of Women 4/5
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Housebound

I feel like I've been waiting for this movie a long time.  Not only in the sense that I missed it when it came (very briefly) through my local movie theater, but also in the sense that it's a horror film which manages to be genuinely scary and genuinely funny.

The main character, Kylie, starts off the movie with a botched attempt to rob an ATM.  It's the kind of everything-goes-wrong crime that'd get you put in prison in the United States for 5-10 years, but thankfully this movie is from New Zealand, so Kylie gets put under house arrest instead.  She's a total brat, and acts just like a teenage girl who hates her parents and has been literally locked in with them.  Which is to say she's not a terribly likeable character initially.

Kylie's mum thinks the house is haunted, something the young criminal initially scoffs at.  However, she quickly changes her tune when creepy things start happening around the house.  This, of course, leads to shenanigans involving the security guy who is assigned to Kylie's ankle bracelet.

I don't want to spoil the film, so I won't go too much further into it, but you'll scream, you'll laugh, you'll cower behind the covers.  It's that sort of movie.  It's full of unexpected plot twists and has about an equal number of surprise laughs as surprise screams.

It's important to note that none of these laughs are unintentional, or the result of plotholes or poor movie making.  A lot of the humor surrounds the tensions between mother & daughter, and through the film both of them grow on you.

The film passes the betchel test with flying colors, with two of the three main characters being women.  We have one main character who is a person of color (and is in many ways more a main character than the mother) which is nice.  There are no romantic plotlines of any nature, which I appreciated.  And best of all it's just a genuinely good horror-comedy.

5/5

I love this film.

Sleepaway Camp

What a fucking disappointment.  I've heard a LOT about this movie.  I had heard it would "blow my mind" and had "awesome gender bending".  But I don't do well with transphobia, and that's what I saw here.  In fact, here's a phenomenal article on transphobia in horror.  Go read it.  This review is optional, reading that article is mandatory.

 This is Angela and her cousin Ricky.  She's severely disturbed, having seen her parents die in a boating accident.  Ricky is highly protective (with good reason) of his cousin.  They're going to camp.

They have a creepy guardian who constantly praises herself for being "so nice" for doing things like packing lunch for the children she is presumably parenting.  

Angela doesn't speak and is harassed by everyone except a young love interest named Paul.  Their courtship is awkward, and involves a scene where he tries to take her top off at the beach and she becomes very upset.  That made me pretty uncomfortable.

Oh, and people are dying!  I'm being flip about the campiness in this movie for a reason which will become obvious in a minute.  Above we have the camp cook, a pedophile who makes lewd comments about the young women who come into camp and who attacks Angela (and seems like he does that sort of thing a lot).  He dies literally right after attacking her.  And don't get me wrong, I definitely cheered.

But, like so many revenge films, we hit a problem.  You see, EVERYONE who is mean to Angela dies immediately afterwards.  It's not a subtle movie.  There's some question about whether the killer is Angela or Ricky, but I was always pretty sure it wasn't Ricky.  Angela's the disturbed, tormented one after all.  And this would be okay, if all the people she killed seemed to "deserve it" (in the horror movie sense of course, I don't support the death penalty). 

This is the scene where the movie gets really awful.  You see, the murders get more and more horrific and are for more and more petty offenses.  A girl kisses Paul (the love interest), calls Angela a prude and then throws her into a lake.  Absolutely dreadful bullying, yes.  But she's raped to death with a curling iron.  And that's where the murders become indefensible, getting rid of any concept of mercy for the killer (who we've all figured out is Angela).

So here's the problem.  The movie isn't over.  We know who the killer is.  There is no one running from the killer we're rooting for.  And we know there's no defending what she did.  So what on earth is the climax?  What's the reveal?

Angela has killed Paul, and is standing naked making a gutteral screaming noise on the beach.  Also she has a penis.  The big reveal is that Martha (the creepy caretaker from the beginning) was demented and forced a boy to live as his dead sister and that's what made him crazy.  The "most shocking ending in horror history" is not who the killer is, it's that the killer has a penis.  Also did I mention Peter/Angela had gay dads?  We're not meant to sympathise with this child or condone the killings.  We're meant to be horrified by the fact that who was presented as a girl has a penis.

This fucking movie, man.  After YEARS of hype this is what I get.  Now, if you didn't already, go read that article on why this is fucked up and why specifically it is transphobic (since the main character was forced to be a girl against his will he is not actually transgender).

The House of the Devil

Whoa.  Have you seen every horror film made in the 80s and wish you could get just one more?  If so, this is the movie for you.  I found myself checking wikipedia just 10 minutes into the film to make sure it was really from 2009, 'cause it feels like it was made in it's period.  

Honest to goddess, that's the title screen.  I love that the creators decided to go full-force with this as a period piece.  It's not just set in the 80s, it oozes the 80s.  They even took care to use special effects available at the time.  That's right, this is a CGI-free horror film.  We can all breathe a sigh of relief.

In spite of it's cheesy 80s premise, this is a very solid film.  The main character manages to be interesting even while being naive.  Everyone in the film acts oddly creepy to her (with the exception of her friend) so it's difficult at first to see where the horror will be coming from.  She's trying to afford a crappy, run-down apartment to escape her messy, constantly-boning roommate.  This pushes her into a realistic desperation that gives cause for her questionable decisions.

Much of the first half of the film centers around the main character and her best friend, a loud-mouthed rich girl who's utterly loveable as she licks admittedly disgusting pepperoni grease off her fingers.  She is the voice of reason in the film, but ultimately also the voice of privilege.  She can always call her father for money, which means she doesn't have the same financial pressures as the lead.  I enjoy the interplay between them a lot, and this film passes the Bechtel test immediately and over and over again, which is nice to see.  There's also no romantic plotline, just the interplay between the lead and a friend, which is once again refreshing.

The lead, desperate for money, takes a babysitting job from an odd old man after she finds his fliers around campus.  His phone voice and general demeanor are obvious red flags, but our lead is desperate and just plows through.  While she, like all horror victims/heroes, ignores these signs, she is no airhead.  Just desperate and about to make enough money to pay her rent for the apartment in a single night.

In her defense, SHE doesn't know this is a horror film and that walking into a house that looks like that with a strange man is going to lead to trouble.  It's a babysitting gig, right?  Right?  Someone has to live out in those creepy old buildings?

Once she takes the job, we are treated to some hilarious scenes of her in the house.  It makes you feel connected to her, awkwardly wandering around a strange old house in the middle of the night.  She's dorky and clumsy and funny, ordering pizza and dancing around with her headphones on (during which the audience is pounded with an all-80s-party soundtrack).

Slowly, of course, our heroine starts hearing strange noises and getting paranoid.  She almost calls the police, but decides she's being silly.  Classic scared-babysitter stuff.  The tension builds slow and smooth, relying on fear of the unknown rather than lots of big scares.  The soundtrack, however, is typical for the 80s, a screeching orchestral mess, if you're into that sort of thing.

By the time the crux of the film comes around, the part alluded to in the intro's statistics on "Satanic Panic", our heroine proves far more resilient and intelligent than most heroines of the time.  Which is in the end what I loved about the film.  It's not about a hot girl with no clothes acting stupid and dying.  It's about a smart young woman in hard circumstances fighting for her life. 

It did, of course, have it's issues.  A complete and total lack of people of color being the big one.  It's "true to the era" of film of course, but that's not an excuse, even given the small cast of characters.  In spite of that, it's one of the cleanest horror films I've seen in a while, which is very impressive given it's insane 80s premise.