"The Woman in Black" (2012)

I find it interesting that Daniel Radcliffe, an "actor" of such international fame, chose this movie to make his post-Potter debut. I put actor in quotes not because I don't think that Radcliffe has the ability or that he did a poor job in the movie, I just mean that I don't count Harry Potter as real acting since he got into the role at 12 and rode it for 8 years.

I think that "The Woman in Black" is a pretty good film and Radcliffe, who plays the main character Arthur Kipps, does a decent job as the lead. A friend that I saw it with commented that it was as if the films creators saw "Insidious" and "The Orphanage" and made this movie. I understand that it is based on a book, but I can't help agreeing with that assessment since my first thought was, this is the back story of the old woman in "Insidious".

I was actually impressed with the suspense the film was able to build at times and thought that the idea was solid, a wronged woman is seeking vengeance upon the town where her son was killed by killing children any time she is seen. The unique thing is that she doesn't kill the children herself or make someone else kill them, she makes the children kill themselves. The opening was good with the little girls jumping out of the window and I liked that there was the small glimpse of the woman's veil and the use of sound in this secen and throughout the movie was really good.

If this film did one thing well, it was the way the used sound. There was a lot of silence and a lot of small, creepy house noises. The one problem that I has was the use of loud jump-scares. If you are going to use silence and house sounds to build suspsense, I think it really weakens the film to continue to break this tension and suspense by having a sink loudly spit water or a crow fly out of the chimeny. By then end, I was cringing when things would get silent and still, not because I though something scary was going to happen, but because I was anticipating another loud, irrelevent "scare".  Also, it works well to have glimpses of her dress and veil sliding by in mirrors when Kipps is first in the house and unsure if he is actually seeing anything, but it gets old when the movie goes on and it has been shown that the woman is real and that Kipps is seeing her.

The main flaw with the film was its overuse of themes/images/motifs. The loud jump scares, the small glimpses of the woman's dress, the fact that we verball and visually establish that the woman is making these children kill themselves on more than one occasion. I just felt like they were not giving the viewer any benefit of the doubt in terms of being able to follow the plot which does not bode well for teh quality of what the people making the film are putting out.

Two good scenes with the woman in them were the small moment when she appeared in the window beside Kipps as he was looking out. It was startling and terrifying because, although he obviously "felt" something beside him, she was gone when he looked. Also, near then end when Kipps is enticing the woman to her sons room where his newly found body lays, I liked that as she was coming down the hall blowing out the candles, there was a brief glimpse of her face in the gloom and then she was suddenly in the corner. It worked very well.

The scene that I thought could have made this movie a lot better if it had been done differently was the scene when Kipps falls asleep and the woman starts to creep up behind him. The filmmakers chose to show this scene from the woman's point of view, something I think was a terrible decision. It would have been so much better to have watched her slowly, creepily approach before Kipps was woken up by the barking dog. After this scene, the tension and scariness of the movie was really kicked up a notch. I think this scene could have been a great spring board for the second half of the movie and made things even better.

Overall, decent movie with a good job by Radcliffe in his first post-Potter role. I am excited to see this at home, away from the annoying people in the theater and the over-loud jump scares.

"Children of the Corn" (1984)

Movies from the '80s that spawned a terrible amount of sequels are not uncommon, but looking at franchises like Halloween and Friday the 13th, the first often merits viewing and praise. My hope was that the same would be true of Children of the Corn, a series that has a sequel with the subtitle "Urban Harvest".

Overall, I liked the movie, although it was frsutratingly stereotypical for a horror movie. I don't know how stereotypical it was at the time it came out, but the late '70s and early '80s produced a glut of horror movies with similar themes and motifs.

I enjoyed the beginning a lot. The violence was unexpected and intense and very '80s in the way that all the viewer saw was the movement of a blade across a throat or in a slashing or stabbing motion without any actual violence and only a faint trace of blood left. I loved how there was just a glance exchanged between Issac and Malachai and suddenly all of the kids had weapons and were killing all of the adults.

In many ways, the idea of a small town in which the children follow a crazy religious-zealot-kid in killing all of the adults is intriguing. Could it really work? Could a town be small enough that no one would notice or acknowledge the abscense of the adults? They had control of the gas station attendant and had made the town extremely hard to find by putting up contradictory road signs and growing the expansive fields of corn, so I think that it would be possible to hide this small town in the middle of nowhere. The presence of the "blue man" was problematic for me. His finding the town and trying to intervene there is realistic and helps so that the town is not wholly undiscovered, but the fact that they kids killed him and that brought no other police presence is a little too unrealistic.

My least favorite part of the movie was the douchey male lead. He smoked the kid with the car, found the suitcase with the blood still fresh and was insistant upon going to Gatlin when there is another, much more populated town only 20 or so miles away. Once the corn maze kept leading me away from the town and eventually back to where I started, I would have moved on, but especially once I got through the deserted town unscathed. He just had to stop at that last house and fuck it up for him and the girlfriend.

I liked the two kids who weren't a part of the cult. It was cool that the little girl could draw the future and I liked that they were resisting Issac by playing Monopoly and listening to music.

Also, it was cool to see that "He Who Walked Behind the Rows" was real. I am still not sure exactly what "He" was, but I liked the ground moving like something was currowing underneath it and I loved that the corn both moved to show the douche the way and also tried to smother him and take him into the cornfield. Also, the craziness with the sky was cool, even with the '80s-tastic special effects. Also, I liked that after Issac was rocketed into the air as a sacrifice, he came back and killed Malachai, who deserved it.

I was glad to see the kids and the couple escape to safety, something that I feel is rare in most horror movies. Especially since the girl attacked him at the end, which I thought was going to surprise kill him for sure. I loved that the girlfriend slammed the acr door into her head and they all just walked away as "The End" appeared on the screen.

Good to have this one under my belt. Looking forward to potentially check out some of the sequels.

"Diary of the Dead" (2007)

Zombies seem to be everywhere in the past 5 or 6 years in movies and with the emergence of the Walking Dead comics and T.V. show, they have really taken off. In horror, the "found footage"/ first person camera genre has also really become prominent. "Diary of the Dead" is a combination of these two horror elements.

Basic premise is that there is a group of film students shooting a horror movie when the zombie epidemic hits. They all hop in an RV and head for their homes which are scattered throughout Pennsylvania. The "director" of the movie keeps his camera with them and on at all times and is hell bent on filming everything so they can "show people the truth". This is all taking place with the frame narrative that the girlfriend of the director is editing the "movie" they shot and we are watching that movie, which is called The Death of Death.

As I am writing this, I feel like it sounds a little stupid, but I don't know how else to describe the movie except to say that it felt like a movie. Obviously, it is a movie and the fact that they are shooting a movie comolicates that, but none of it felt authentic. The characters were extremely over-acted, especially the douche and the girl from Texas. I understand having the stereotypical, archetype characters, but these were just poorly done. I can also understand the stress of something as huge as the Zombie apocalypse driving a film student to cling to the one thing he is comfortable with, that is still tangible for him, but Jason, the film guy, isn't frantic or fanatic, he is just annoying. His girlfriend begins to challenge him "if it didn't happen on camera, then it's like it didn't happen". This seems like a premise that the movie ascribes to, but they have some stretches to make it happen, like the warehouse they go to having secutiry cameras that are hooked up to some high-tech wifi so that they can immediately rip the video of their RV enetering the warehouse for the movie.

The only moment where I really believed Jason and his fanaticism was his death scene. Their friend has been turned and he is attacking Jason. Jason is on the ground and he has been bitten, but rather than trying to get away or killing his zombie friend, he is crawling to try to retrieve the camera he has dropped so he can record his own death. That is the level of breakdown that they seem to be saying he has had throughout the movie, how much he is relying on the filming, but this is the only moment where I really believed it.

I had two favorite scenes which are both tied to my favorite kills, in my opinion a must for a zombie movie review. The first of these scenes is when they are at Debra, Jason's girlfriend's, house. Her family is supposed to be there, but no one sees them upon arrival. They are searching the house and find the family car in the garage, but still no people. Upon re-entering the house, Debra's zombiefied little brother jumps on her back and attacks her. She doesn't get bitten and the professor with them shoots the brother in the head with an arrow, pinning him to the wall, which was a pretty awesome kill.

My second favorite scene contained my two favorite kills and probably my favorite character, Samuel the deaf Amish guy. The first kill was with the dynamite. It was so unexpected for him to run into his barn and come out with a lit stick of dynamite to throw at the zombies who were promptly blown to pieces. Later in the scene, after helping out the group, Samuel is attacked. He has a scythe and, after being bitten from behind, he puts the scythe through his head and the head of the zombie behind him. It was a great kill and really the only self-less/brave/smart thing that anyone did throughout the entire movie.

Honestly, I was a little disappointed in this movie, but it had some good moments. If you like zombie movies and have an hour and a half to kill, check this one out.

"Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" (1973)

After a crazy semester and an even crazier Christmas season, things in my life have settled down enough that I am going to give Bleak House another shot. I guess it is a New Year's Resolution of sorts. So, to start things off, I have a post about two movies. The 2010 Guillermo del Toro and the 1973 versions of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.

Unfortunately, like in all other movie genres, remakes and adaptations are prevalent in the horror genre and Guillermo del Toro's remake of Don't Be Afraid  is evidence of this. So, after seeing the Guillermo version a I got the original version for Christmas watched it within the last few days.

Although this will be more of a comparison between the two films, I haven't seen Guillermo's versions since it opened in theaters so I am a little fuzzy on some of the more particular details, but I think the comparison will still do well. To start with the remake, I liked it. Once you got past the crappy advertising (most of the tags called it "Guillermo del Toro's scariest film yet/ever", which it wasn't), it was a cool, fun, movie that I would categorize more as an adult fairy tale like Pan's Labyrinth. The creatures are pretty wicked, the voices and their appearance are pretty great, but nothing less is expected when Guillermo is behind the movie. I was surprised with how early, often and fully they showed the creatures, but I liked that they weren't something kept solely in the dark until some final reveal. In the original, there is the same concept of the creepy house that these creatures live in, trapped in a fireplace in a barricaded room. In the original, Sally is an adult woman and she and her husband move into the house that her grandmother has left them. In del Toro's version, Sally is a little girl, a change that I understand. At times in the original, it was frustrating to see the lack of belief that Sally's husband and friends had for her, a grown woman who had never shown any signs of psychosis. When Sally is a 8-9 year old, it is almost expected that the adults in her life aren't going to believe her when she says she is seeing little creatures throughout the house.

Although I loved the creatures in del Toro's version, and I think the edition of the Emerson Blackwood back story allowed for the arts department to really show off their work with the creatures, there was something about the fact that these creatures were entirely CGI that made me like them less than the ones in the original. Part of what makes Guillermo's creatures his, what makes them so great is the fact that a lot of it is actual make-up with actors, particularly Doug Jones, playing the creature. In the original, three "little people" played the creatures. The were much more human looking which played a part in making them scary and the fact that they built replica sets to make them look the tiny size that they are supposed to be was surprising to me and made things seem more real.

Now, to the ending. Sally and Sally have mirrored each other throughout the film, but there were some elements that Katie Holmes' character played in Guillermo's version that adult Sally shared with her. Most of these involved adult Sally's interaction with her husband, but in the end, they share the same role as the woman who is pulled down by the creatures. I liked the Guillermo ending for its violence (I defy anyone to say that the leg break didn't make them cringe), but also because it showed her getting pulled in. In the original, Sally screams but the audience does not see her go down at all. Her husband looks into the fireplace but sees nothing and the movie ends there.

The one element of Guillermo's that I really didn't like was Katie Holmes becoming "one" of the creatures and talking with them about waiting for someone new to come. I just didn't like the idea of her actually becoming one of them, but it is in the original with Sally talking with the creatures, so I understand why he did it.

Overall, there are elements of both movies that I love. If you can get over the early '70s make up and technology of the creatures and some spotty dialogue, the original is a good film and if you like Guillermo or a good creature movie then the remake will be right up your alley.

"Incident On and Off A Mountain Road"

It has been far too long since I have reviewed anything for Bleak House, but with school starting and working two jobs, I haven't had the horror movie time that I crave, so I was chomping at the bit to get back here and since "Incident On and Off A Mountain Road" has been in my Netflix instant queue for months and it is less than an hour long, I figured it was a good place to start.

Overall, I thought that this movie was really good.

The intro to the Masters of Horror was pretty good, especially the drips of blood that were punctuated by the piano notes. I also liked the opening credits of the movie. They were very ominous and slow, which is something that I think a lot of horror movies don't handle all that well. Obviously things aren't going to go well, we as viewers know that we are in for a horror movie, but I liked the subtlety of Ellen driving past the "No Gas or Service for 75 miles" sign. The whole beginning of the movie, leading up to the accident, is also very slow and peaceful. It does well to make the accident, which in itself is not all that violent or destructive, all the more jarring as it comes very abruptly out of the peaceful serenity of the drive so far. I do wish that Ellen hadn't reached for the radio though, as that was a clear indication that something was going to happen, but I was expecting Moonface or a person to be in the road, so the accident was still good.

I also liked the use of the flashbacks with the boyfriend/husband throughout the movie. The initial one was a little confusing because it wasn't clear that it was a flashback until she woke up in the car after the accident, and I also was surprised that they made a point to say that this was the first date and then have them up at the cabin. Seems a little trusting, especially since they aren't going to his apartment in the city, but a cabin in the remote woods. I also liked the abrupt transition between the flashback and Ellen waking up at the wheel of the car. I especially liked that they used them before the scenes when she was setting the boody traps. She was very resourceful: the bent back branch with the scissors, using the hole as a deadfall and making the nail file sling shot with the panty elastic and her dress. Even from when she gets out of the car and initially sees Moonface, she dives over the guard rail and immediatley begins running through the forest.

The chase scene in the forest may have been my favorite scene in the whole movie. I thought that it was really well done with the lightning flashes punctuating things and I liked that they didn't rely too heavily on suspenseful music to keep the suspense up throughout the scene. The moonlight provided good lighting between the lightning strikes too. It showed good subtlety by the director when Ellen crawled under the log and the chase continued there. Obviously the speed element is eliminated from the chase, so here the music comes into the forefront to add to the suspense. Well done.

I also thought that they did a good job with Moonface. He was very reminiscent of the main hill freak from "The Hills Have Eyes" remake, but the metal teeth were a nice touch. In the beginning, especially when the chase was going on, he did a lot of grunting and growling which made him seem a little more primitive than he actually was, but I loved the shushing that he did. I also liked the psychology behind his digging out the eyes of his victims, that the eyes saw everything but often lied. The scene with the eye gouging machine was pretty wicked, especially since it was mostly sound and the visual of the bloody drill. It still made me cringe. I realize that every killer has to have a weakness, none are going to keep coming through all attacks, but Moonface seemed to get taken down and slowed down for pretty significant periods by pretty much anything that Ellen did to him. He even gets taken down by getting hit in the face with a baby skeleton.

I absolutely loved Buddy. I am honestly still not quite sure what he was doing there since he didn't seem to actually be restrained but also didn't seem like he was Moonface's father or anything like that. Buddy was funny and fun and he actually provided a lot of valuable information such as some of the eye lore and by giving the stats that 1 in 10 cars don't make the turn and at least one car drives the road most nights. I think that, even more than the number of bodies that we are shown, indicated how many people Moonface has really killed.

There was a nice fake out when Ellen left the cabin where she heard the owl and turned around. I was fully expecting Moonface to be standing there dripping wet, but I was glad that he wasn't because that would have been much to predictable.

What was not predictable, however, was Bruce's body being in the trunk. The flashback of the abuse and rape makes it okay that she killed him, but the fact that she took him back to Moonface's house and drilled out his eyes showed that the encounter with Moonface had pushed her over the edge into insanity that her life with Bruce had driven her to the brink of.

I thought the end gave the movie a wonderful cyclical quality. She sets off driving with the same song on the radio like nothing, not the ordeal with Moonface or the eye gouging of Bruce has affected her at all.

This was a great movie that didn't disappoint, especially for being less than an hour long. If you get a chance, check it out.

"Heart Shaped Box"

Being the fan of Stephen King's that I am, I was very interested to learn that his son, Joe, is not only an author, but chose to follow his father's footsteps in terms of the genre of the fiction he writes.

"Heart Shaped Box" is Joe Hill's debut novel, although he has one of his own out and has the 4th coming out in a series that he co-writes, so I was optimistic that there could be something good here.

Strictly speaking, "Heart Shaped Box" is a ghost story, but I think the thing that I loved most about it was the way that Hill chose to describe the ghosts. In the book, the ghosts' eyes are blacked over with moving lines. Writing that here doesn't seem too impressive, and honestly, pulling a passage from the novel really doesn't do it justice to the effect that the novel makes when you read the whole thing and have the character and plot built around the first description. I think that part of what is so unnerving about it is that the first time the description is given it is from the perspective of a 12 year old girl. The two main characters each have separate occasions where they describe it too and it becomes increasingly unnerving. The ghost, who was a renowned psychic and hypnotists when he was alive, is able to takeover the T.V. and radio and also controls the characters, making them come close to killing themselves and each other multiple times.

Honestly, in many ways this redefined what I think of when ghost comes to mind, at least for the time being, and it kept me unnerved, especially working the night shift at the hotel, until I finished the book.

The book is also just really well written. I can relate enough to the main character that I forget he is a mid fifties rock legend who I really have very little in common with. Hill made me care about the characters more than most authors are able to and he handled the ending a lot better than I expected him to, giving the best of both worlds and having a nice sort of wrap up.

If you're looking for a good, fast-paced read, from a promising your writer that handles the ghost theme in a unique way, then check out "Heart Shaped Box".

Stephen King review/rant #2

So, on the item on my Stephen King plate right now is a book called Duma Key. I didn't really have any particular expectations when I started reading, I mean I expected it to be up to King quality standards, but I wasn't even really sure what the book was about. In a nutshell, the book is about Edgar, a man who loses and arm, a marriage and almost his life in a construction accident. He moves to a remote Key off the Florida coast and begins drawing and painting. As his skills progress, he is able to paint sort of telepathically using some phantom limb connections. That is a really rough sketch of what is going on in the book and I am speaking being only 347 pages into the 611 page novel. The style is really good. Edgar dealt with some memory loss and messed up head stuff after his accident. King expresses this really well in the way he writes and when the story is told from Edgar's point of view. A lot of the King that I have read has made me feel uneasy at points, especially Pet Sematary, but even though that was a book that I had to stop reading before bed, it never really kept me from sleeping.

Last night, Duma Key scared me to the the point that I could not get to sleep. The thing that scared me was not necessarily something that came out of the novel and scared me, but was, I guess, the shared fear that Edgar was experiencing. He sees the ghosts of two little girls and they slowly climb the stairs toward him. He is so frightened that he faints and when he finally comes back to consciousness he is scared to open his eyes once he goes to bed, thinking they will be standing on either side of his bed if he looks. I went to bed and closed my eyes the second the light was off and didn't open them again. Even then, it was like I could feel the girls standing there beside the bed. With my eyes closed, it still took me 20 or 30 minutes to fall asleep. Honestly, I am still feeling uneasy writing about this and thinking about it right now.

Moments like these are what make King's work so impressive to me. I am a horror veteran, I have seen hundreds or horror movies and read a lot of horror fiction. I like to think that it takes a lot to really scare me, to stick with me outside of the movie or the book. King is really the only creator of horror who can do this to me consistently. All the book gave was a few vague descriptions and the fact that Edgar was genuinely terrified that the girls would be there and I couldn't sleep. If you're looking for this feeling or something like it, I can tell you that Pet Sematary, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Shining, Bag of Bones and Duma Key have all done this for me so you may want to check them out.

I'm sure I will have more to say as I finish the book over the next few days and look forward to starting the next King novel. As always, suggestions are welcome.