Haunt - 7/31 Days of Halloween

This is a fairly standard new family + haunted house movie.  It is bookended by a cinematic style similar to a crime TV show, complete with voice over.  The overall cinematography uses lots of double exposure flashes to other times.  This is interesting initially but quickly becomes dull.  It also centers on a romantic plotline with the girl next door, who ends up living in the house with them.

I do have to give this movie it’s due praises for its depiction of a functional modern family.  This is so rare in film, especially horror.  The parents are kind and liberal.  They don’t immediately freak out when their eldest son has a girl over for the night.  They greet her warmly and have a positive discussion with their son about being careful getting so quickly into a new relationship, as well as gently talking to her about her sudden new place in their lives.   There is genuine concern & compassion in these parental figures. 

 The overall premise & twist isn’t bad, and there is decent chemistry between our romantic leads, but in the end it doesn’t all fit together very well.  A combination of choppy scare scene graphics along with heavy-handed flashbacks allow the audience to clearly see what happened without giving that relief to the characters.  The romantic leads are occasionally annoying, but only because they act like real teenagers (and real teenagers aren’t actually super bright or witty).

There were also a few interesting plot points that were dropped off entirely, heavy-handed plot & foreshadowing that leads to absolutely nothing in the end.  Lots of creepy characters and situations that were meaningless or have no conclusion.  All this adds up to characters I found interesting, a plot & twist that were not the most original, but were definitely workable, and a combination that just didn’t quite hit the mark.

 

If you don't mind a somewhat lazy spook, this isn’t a terrible choice.

The Cottage (2012) - 6/31 Days of Halloween

Whoops!  I did watch this movie yesterday, but didn't have time to write a review until today.  This movie was significantly better than I expected.  It really freaked me out.  The Cottage basically could've been called "The NiceGuy™"

The movie is about a typical, dysfunctional upper-middle class family who has a guest cottage behind their house to rent out.  The father is a piano teacher (and apparently a really good one, judging by the size of the property they own) and the step-mother is a former student who is loathed by the children.  When their renter falls through, the family is in a rush to get a new person into their back cottage.  And well, Robert seems like a nice guy (cause come on, it's David Arquette).

 

He's sensitive and quiet, he writes romance novels because he wants to give women a beautiful escape from their lives.  he comes off as charming and harmless.  But of course he's not.  He's every guy your female friend has ever says she just feels uncomfortable around.  He's pushy in the faux-friendly NiceGuy™ way.  His carefully calculated pushes into your personal space are something you wanted.  He's just trying to be friendly.

The step-mom quickly figures this out about him, and to his credit the father trusts her, and says they'll kick him out if he makes her uncomfortable.  And he does.  Swimming naked in the pool, staring at the teenage girls in the house far too long, making comments on their clothing choices, touching the family baby without permission... he obviously lacks respect for women.

I don't want to give away the twist of the movie, but lets just say that vulnerable young girls, especially those who have experienced trauma and have difficult home lives, can become attracted to the dark charisma of sociopaths.

 While at times the film is formulaic, and the ending is uneven, I still appreciated it's exploration of the dangers of the charismatic pushy handsome stranger.

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Entertaining 3/5        Intelligent 3/5        Unsettling 3/5

  Scary 2/5        Gory 1/5        Funny 0/5         Artistic 2/5
 
Representation of Minorities 0/5        Representation of Women 3/5
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Exeter - 4/31 Days of Halloween

Oh jeez.  If you want to save your time, I just really didn't like this movie.

Ten minutes in this movie was laden with toxic masculinity misogynistic bullshit.  The intro scene is a highly sexualized suicide, followed by our classic "nice guy" main character volunteering with his church to clean up an old spooky abandoned asylum.  He's meant to be loveable because he makes half-assed attempts to imply he's not okay with the destructive, sexist and cruel ways of his friends.  But in the end it's just hand-waving.  He says "come on man" when his friends talk about women as objects and cares about his church... though not enough to call the police when thousands of people show up to trash their renovation project.

Then a girl bets they can then summon dark forces by playing light as a feather, stiff as a board (if she loses the bet her boyfriend get to have anal sex with her).  It's one of the more inane premises I've ever seen.  Also, when the demonic possession occurs, the cheese factor is way to high, especially for a movie which was obviously not intended to be cheesy and is modern-made.

The rest of the movie is boring idiotic teenagers and lots more toxic macho bull.  Plenty of rape threats & jokes, etc.  All of this adds up to me not caring a whole lot about who lives and who dies.  The characters all range from mildly shitty to incredibly loathesome.  Also, no matter how bad things get they won't call the cops (in spite of the fact that we're shown over and over their cell phones are functional and connected).  I feel like at some point jail sounds less bad than gruesomely being murdered by/murdering your friends?

There's also just tons of plot holes.  Like being able to make holy water out of windex through the power of drunken wishful thinking (priest not required!).  Also implying demonic possession is caused by Wicca because the moon... or something?  And so many more.  Just overall a really crass, poorly executed and ultimately not particularly scary movie.

In the end, the twist was pretty okay, and there was some well-done gore.  The sets were also very pretty, if you're into abandoned asylums (and who isn't?) But it could've been done so very much better.

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Entertaining 1/5        Intelligent 0/5        Unsettling 1/5

  Scary 1/5        Gory 2.5/5        Funny 1/5         Artistic 0/5

  

Representation of Minorities 0/5        Representation of Women 0/5

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When Animals Dream - 3/31 Days of Halloween

I really feel like I hit the jackpot with this movie.  It's a feminist dream, really (plus the cinematography is great).  It's only major shortcoming is that (yet again) it focuses on a small rural white town, and thus includes no POC.  But in the end it's still a beautiful film that I recommend entirely.  Much like the famous Ginger Snaps (another favorite of mine that one of these days I need to review), this Danish film uses lycanthropy as an analogy to puberty.  But it takes it so much further that Ginger Snaps dared to go. 

Our antihero is Marie, a quiet young woman.  Her life is divided up simply.  She cares of her ailing mother, who has an unspecified disease that makes her helpless and silent.  She quietly butts heads with her father.  And she begins work deboning fish at a local factory where men outnumber women 10 to 1.  She also has a rash on her chest, and in our opening scene she is being uncomfortably prodded by a male doctor who makes a second appointment for her without even asking.

That is her life in her sleepy little town.  At least until she begins to have desires and to ask questions.  She wants to know what disease her mother has, and what drugs they inject her with.  Why is she placid, unmoving and unable to speak?  Why won't the doctor tell her about her own rash, which is now growing hair?  She meets a boy at work that she is attracted to, and suddenly lets out a coy side no one has ever seen before.  She begins to have confidence.

And this scares the shit out of most of the men around her.  That's the crux of this movie.  Marie represents the greatest fears of the patriarchy.  A fear of allowing a woman her agency.  A fear that if you let the hair & blood of puberty, along with it's sexual desire & defiance, go un-punished, she will turn on you.  The fear that a freed woman will fight back.  That she will kill her assaulters & abusers alongside those who watched her abuse and did nothing.  A fear that she will fight back and be too powerful for men to overcome.

The things for which she cannot be forgiven are showing her body as it bleeds, proudly displaying her hair (depicted gracefully down her back, along her neck and across her bosom), and disobeying her fathers orders to cover herself.  For holding power and being strong.  She is punished for these.  There is an intense desire by both the father who loves her and the co-workers who fear her to pacify her by any means necessary.  This includes women who are comfortable with their place in the patriarchal system and resent her for challenging it.  And it does not seem to include her lover, the man who tells her she is beautiful as he gently runs his fingers down the hair on her back.

 

The thing I really love about this film is that, unlike it's predecessor Ginger Snaps,  Marie isn't repulsed by her transformation.  She's nervous that the men she desires won't accept it.  She's afraid that people will harm her for it.  But the process itself she seems to enjoy, in all it's beautiful terror.  Her new power and changing body embolden her and turn her on.  Her defiance is mostly quiet, calculated, and intentional.  She revels in her new self.

It really is such a stunning allegory.  A beautiful portrait of a woman coming into herself, and refusing to take crap from anyone who gets in her way.  And I'm behind that all the way.

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Entertaining 5/5        Intelligent 5/5        Unsettling 4/5
  Scary 2/5        Gory 2/5        Funny 0/5         Artistic 5/5
  

Representation of Minorities 0/5        Representation of Women 5/5
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The Burbs - 2/31 Days of Halloween

Woohoo!  Here we are in day two!  Another horror comedy for you here, though this one comes straight from the '80s.

So, so eighties.  Really though, this movie is comedy gold.  I'm shocked I'd never seen it.  The movie starts with Ray & Carol (Tom Hanks & Carrie Fisher) as a delightfully stereotypical arguing suburban couple.   They're fighting about how to use their vacation, with Ray insisting he'll do great if he just rests at home.  Quickly we're introduced to the rest of the neighbors on their cul-du-sac.  The angry veteran and his wife (who enjoys showing off her ass to the raunchy teen next door), the overly chummy guy next door, and the old man who lets his dog poop everywhere.  They're the weirdest "normal" people you'll ever see.

The talk of the neighborhood quickly becomes the new neighbors, who've moved into a decrepit lot next door to our main character.  Their house is the epitome of a spooky horror movie house, situated smack in the middle of their green little suburb.  All the neighbors are wondering if the new folks will finally clean the place up.  Instead, strange lights & sounds come from the house (especially the basement) all through the night.

The people who live inside are generically foreign (probably Eastern European) and everyone on the block is frightened of them and their weird, quiet ways.  So of course all the bored white men in the neighborhood start stalking the new neighbors.  The new neighbors are quickly accused of being satanists, body snatchers, vampires, and all sorts of unsavory supernatural creatures.

While the wives encourage the men to stop harassing the neighbors, we get the bulk of the movie: a wacky bad-ideas teen comedy... except with grown men.  I didn't say the messaging of this movie was good, I said it was funny.  It's typical in every possible way, but so much so that it quickly becomes an intentional caricature of itself.

It's a classic cold-war paranoia film about the way we perceive difference as threatening to our way of life.  This makes looking at the movie from a moral point of view sticky in a way I can't really get into without spoiling things.  But from a pure what-the-hell eighties-camp point of view, it really is hilarious.

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Entertaining 5/5        Intelligent 2/5        Unsettling 1/5
 
Scary 1/5        Gory 0/5        Funny 5/5         Artistic 2/5
  

Representation of Minorities 0.5/5        Representation of Women 2/5
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Burying the Ex - 1/31 Days of Halloween

Hello again!  I am participating in the 31 Days of Halloween Challenge, except I'm making it extra hard on myself by abiding by two additional rules.

#1 I'm only watching horror films I have never seen before
#2 I'm reviewing all of them here.

I'm aware this is absolutely nuts.  But last night I kicked it off by watching the camp horror-comedy Burying the Ex!

The movie has a simple but ridiculous premise: a dude's controlling girlfriend dies before he has a chance to break up with her, and when he finally starts to move on she zombies back into his life.  I have a few issues with the way they chose to portray the controlling girlfriend.  She's a yuppie vegan who works for a Green Life Blog and bullies him into making his life more sustainable.  Not all of her claims are unreasonable (ex: stop letting your brother use your living room for weird sex parties when I'm staying over at your place... it makes me really uncomfortable). but the way she communicates is vicious, manipulative and ultimately abusive.

After a horrifying display of jealous outrage from his girlfriend, our main character decides to break up with her.  Except she dies first.  This leads to a lot of feelings of guilt from our main character.  This is the film at it's most poignant.  How do you react to your abusive partner, who you did love, dying?

Eventually, he starts to move on, with a more laid-back girl who shares all of his interests.  She's a little on the manic pixie dream girl side, but I also kind of love her.  Also, wherever it is in Hollywood these characters live, I want to go there.  Because it their community supports not only a year-round horror store, but a horror-themed ice creamery.  Best neighborhood ever!

Right as our main character starts to move on, his never-quite-became-ex comes back from the dead, rotting and zombified and ready to be together FOREVER.  This is a great allegory.  What do you do when you escape a bad relationship and then your abuser suddenly shows back up at your house?  When time and space have made them repulsive to you, but you're still too terrified to resist their advances?  When (due to size or strength or crazy zombie powers) you know they could kill you if you don't do exactly what they want?

What I love most about this film is that becoming a zombie isn't what makes our antagonist horrifying.  She was horrifying before.  Now she just has super strength and has become physically repulsive to the hero (which is a common feeling for some survivors).  I really wasn't expecting this movie to mirror abuse in relationships as much as it did, and the more I think about it the more I really respect that about the film.

So what does our lead do?  How does he deal with the abuser who used to be so enticing now that the spell is broken (or cast, in this case)?  What do you do when "letting someone down easy" is both impossible and a genuine risk to your physical safety?  When you are finally aware that there's better relationships out there but getting involved with someone involves risking both of your lives because your ex is murderously jealous?

Well, in real life it works a little differently than in the movies.  But this one is worth seeing.  It's campy, has some fanservice bra scenes, and relies on a cast of lily-white California hotties, so it's not super exciting in that way.  But look a little deeper and for a camp horror comedy there's surprising depth. 

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Entertaining 4/5        Intelligent 2.5/5        Unsettling 1/5
 
Scary 2/5        Gory 2/5        Funny 4/5         Artistic 2/5
  

Representation of Minorities 0/5        Representation of Women 2/5
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Things Withered by Susie Moloney

Okay, seems like about that time again... time for another book review!  I read this little piece for the Nightmare Factory Book Club, which is hosted every month at BookPeople here in Austin.  If you're in the area, I highly recommend it.  This review is definitely informed by the wonderful conversations I had with my fellow book club members, so I wanted to be sure to give a shout out.

This book contains several short stories focusing on the horrors of suburbia, all written by Susie Moloney.  Honestly, that's probably it's greatest weakness.  With a single author and a tightly constrained concept, it's hard to maintain stories that feel original back-to-back with one another.  I feel like she either needed to make a general horror compilation of her writing or have this specific suburban theme mettered out through a few different authors.  As it was it got a little repetitive for my taste.

However, I think a lot of the stories still had great merit.  None of them really scared me, but some did disturb or horrify me.  More than a few made me laugh a little.  And all of them had heavy-handed messages about what femininity, masculinity and conformity mean within a suburban setting.  I couldn't help but picturing all of the stories as being set in the 50s or 60s (in spite of Beiber references and other obviously modern moments).  I couldn't shake that dated feeling from it.  At book club we talked about how revolutionary this book would have felt if it had come out in 1965.  But it didn't.

It's clearly a second wave feminist piece, and thus gets boring for the modern reader.  These are mostly stories about a specific kind of woman - mostly middle-class, by definition suburban, in a long-term relationship with a man.  These are mixed in with stories about men suffering from acute toxic masculinity and old ladies struggling to adjust to their surroundings.  It gives the book as a whole a sort of flat, stereotypical feeling.

There are a few stories, however, that really seemed to shine.  For me, the standouts were as follows:

The Windemere: a slowly creepy story about an aging real estate agent who needs a stroke of luck.

Truckdriver: the slow decent of a man who defines hinself by his new truck, his physical manifestation of toxic masculinity, which he allows to define himself by sexualization of young girls, fantasies of violence and a the idea of strength.

The Last Living Summer: a surprisingly realistic post-apocalyptic tale about a little old lady on the beach.

The Audit: a classically creepy tale, about everyone's greatest adult fear: the IRS.

The others aren't bad, but if you want to just skip around, I'd say those are the strongest.  The Human Society is actually a phenomenal story as well, but I'd call it a tragedy, not a horror story.  I suppose it is horrific, but it didn't make me scared, just really sad.

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Entertaining 2/5        Intelligent 3/5        Unsettling 4/5

  Scary 2/5        Gory 1/5        Funny 1/5         Artistic 3/5
  

Representation of Minorities 1/5        Representation of Women 3.5/5
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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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Dark Summer

I liked this film both more and less than I expected to.  I went in with low expectations, fueled by an abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score & Netflix' prediction that I'd give it 2.5 stars.  But the actor who plays the main character caught my attention as the scrawny love interest in It Follows, so I decided to take a chance on the film.

It wasn't a total waste of my time.  The movie is about a young cyberstalker sentenced to house arrest for his crime.  He's obviously mentally unstable and still dangerously obsessed with the object of his affections.  He's been strictly prohibited from any contact with her, but the first thing he does when he's alone at his house is stare longingly at her icloud login screen wishing he could figure out the password.  Creepy.

He's quickly joined by two friends who visit him during his arrest, somehow effortlessly sneaking past the guards (he's not allowed visitors).  Also his mother is out of town, and seems totally fine leaving her ankle-braclet-guarded-stalker-creep-son alone in the house.  The friends are Blatantly In Love With Main Boy and Oh Look A Black Friend!  They have little to no character development.  The girl exists to pine after the main character and the friend exists to say "ghosts aren't real" and then hint that girl is pining after the main character.

The movie is basically entirely about these three people, only one of whom has anything resembling a character (the protagonist/antihero).  This causes some serious issues with the film, 'cause it's hard to care about any of them.  In any case, the main character experiences some trauma and starts to see scary shit around the house.  Bumps, cracked glass, weird dreams, standard spooky stuff.  His friends don't believe him of course.  This is a strong point in the film, when it's just the main character, dutifully taking his psych meds and still seeing terrifying things.

When the whats-what gets revealed, there's a lull.  And a lonely seeming montage.  This does not work to the films advantage.  What is supposed to come off as a spooky interlude falls flat, and ends up seeming like the world's most boring filler music video.  There is lots of typing on computers and scrolling.  It's a big yawn.

But I'm glad I decided to finish the movie, because the twist was quite clever.  I really didn't see it coming.  And the ending was decent, especially considering the slow middle section.  This movie didn't scare me really, but it had enough intriguing moments to offset the dull sections.  It's not something you must see, but if you're bored one afternoon it's not a total waste of your time.

The Den

I was not expecting to be freaked out by this movie.  I heard from a friend that they found it scary, but they thought it was mostly because they work on webcams.  I do not work via webcam.  But I found this pretty freaky anyway.

 First off, this is a found-footage film (ish).  But it's done in a surprisingly refreshing way.  The entire film is viewed through webcams (primarily on computers & cell phones).  This was a surprisingly refreshing twist on the found-footage genre.  It follows a young graduate student who is doing her thesis on the way people interact with strangers on the internet.  She does this primarily using the ominously named "The Den" (which is really just an amalgamation of Skype, Chatroulette & Omegle).  This gives a lovely excuse for her to film herself 24/7, but also to film her interactions with random strangers.  We also get to see her chat logs/emails/youtube videos, because it's primarily oriented as a "screen capture".  We see what she sees.

At first it's mostly normal internet stuff.  Some of it is even quite funny.  She's trying to figure out why people do the things they do online, and keeps hilariously simple notes including "exposed penis for entire length of "conversation".  But she also has a few good conversations with normal seeming, interesting people.

Then she starts to encounter things that are... darker in content.  Some of them are obviously hoaxes, jump scares and the like.  Some of them, however, might not be.  But because of the high prevalence of trolling, police don't take her seriously when she thinks she sees a real threat.

What I found really drew me in was a really effective portrayal of gaslighting via a technologic medium.  Stalkers do sometimes hack into people's computers and use that access to make the computer owner feel like they're going crazy.  Files being deleted, webcams turned on and off, and secret recordings being made and downloaded are all totally possible.  While I'm not convinced there's actually people out there killing strangers on camera for fun, there are real people who exhibit a lot of the early behaviors shown in this film.  And that's what makes it downright terrifying.

There's really not much more I can say (or show) without giving something away.  But I'd say if you want a good creep-out I can recommend this.  And for being about webcams the nudity & sexual content was kept to what I found to be a very reasonable minimum.  There's a lot of graphic violence (some meant to be fake, some meant to be real) but not any particularly sexual violence, which was refreshing.

If you would like further evidence that I found this film genuinely spooky, let me present some photographic evidence.  (the photo below is from my life, not the movie)

This is a photograph of my computer 10 minutes after watching The Den

I watched the film on my TV, not my computer, or it probably would've been sooner.  As you can see I have used a chip clip & a sock to cover my webcam (I made sure the clip's edges aren't touching the lens, so don't panic!).    I'm not sure I can give a lot better review for a horror film than that.