Paranormal Entity/8213 Gacy House

So today I watched a pair of "found footage" films that seem best reviewed together.  I have mixed feelings about these found footage movies.  In some situations they work to develop fear and a connection to the "filming character".  In other situations they seem to rely of jerky camera work and a lot of screaming and/or panting.  Sometimes the jerky camera work and panting works - see "Blair Witch Project" for an example (though still not my favorite of this genre - the film style actually makes me a bit motion sick).  Sometimes the jerky camera work and panting does not work - see "8213 Gacy House" as an example of what not to do.  So much time is spent running and scanning rooms and "seeing" ghosts that I simply couldn't ever find (honestly I ran the film back at least ten times to try to see the shadow/ghost image everyone freaked out about in the bedroom... I never did see it) that I never really established any relationship with the characters at all.

And characterization is what, in my opinion, makes these movies sink or swim.  The movie that all "found footage" films seem to be trying desperately to emulate is "Paranormal Activity".  The reason that movie worked for me was that I truly felt like I got to know the characters.  To this day I still can feel my annoyance (I didn't say you had to like them, you just had to KNOW them) at Micah when he decides it's a great idea to start whacking around with a ouija board.  Note to people who think they may live in a haunted house, or may be possessed by an angry demon (or hey, maybe the demon doesn't even have to be angry... it IS a demon afterall) - DON'T play with ouija boards.  Did "The Exorcist" not teach you anything??  Anyways, characterization is very important and that's where "Paranormal Entity" and "8213 Gacy House" veer off in very different directions.  In "Paranormal Entity"  (or "PE" for short) there were a total of three characters - Thomas (the lead guy who carried the camera for most of the camera scenes), Samantha (the victim) and Ellen (Thomas and Samantha's mother).  The characters were simple to keep track of and I actually liked them all.  Again, not a prerequisite for a movie, but in this case I found myself rooting for the ill-fated characters all the way through.  In "8213" there were a bunch of 20-30 somethings.  For awhilPe I wasn't sure who all the guys were but here's how I broke them down - there's Franklin - the older professor guy who seems to call the shots, Mike - the annoying main guy (I think) who keeps telling everyone to stay in the house even when it becomes pretty freaking obvious they should get the fuck out of there, Robbie - the guy who looks a lot like Mike but is doing Lena (one of the three blond chicks in the movie), Gary - the slightly geeky guy who is a prerequisite character in any haunted house type movie with more than five characters.  Now for the girls.  There are three blond girls - one with straight hair named Lena who screams a lot and fucks Robbie, a curly haired girl named Janina who is some type of psychic or something (it's never really explained what the hell she's doing except maybe pissing off spirits who would be better left alone -- see "ouija board" for more information) and another blond curly haired girl named Tessa who seems to be nothing more than a filler for another body.

The camera work is another major part of these types of films and, again, "PE" does a much better job with it.  It's easier to see what is going on, there are more still scenes and there is really only one cameraman.  In "8213" there are at least four cameramen/women and it's very hard to see much of anything.  It's not scary it's just spastic.

In the end, I really enjoyed "Paranormal Entity".  I found it to be enjoyable and while not jump out of your seat scary, it was still spooky and suspenseful.  I especially liked the scenes with the bells.  "8213 Gacy House" was anything but scary.  It was a chaotic mess of a movie and I seriously didn't understand or care what actually happened.  Here's to hoping there are more movies like "Paranormal Entity" and a lot fewer "8213 Gacy House" in the future.

Paranormal Entity

8213 Gacy House

"Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer"

            About ten minutes into this ghastly film, I turned to my wife and asked “I wonder if all the dead women will be listed in the credits.”  The only reason I kept watching the movie was to find out, and to save you from having to repeat my sorry example, permit me to assure you that yes, the dead women are listed in the credits.  There’s the “Murdered Family,” the “Murdered Woman”, the “Floating Woman,” the “Strangulated Woman”, the “Dead Hooker #1”, the “Dead Hooker #2” and so forth.  The movie is desperately short on speaking parts – I can only think of seven.

            Three are played by Henry, Otis and Otis’s sister, whose name I don’t recall.  Henry is a psychopath, Otis is a leering, drug-dealing, vile, incestuous, easily-led buffoon.  The sister at first seems sympathetic and likable, but when you remember that she abandoned her kids and ran away from home, well, it strikes you that she’s only sympathetic and likable because she’s surrounded by people so incredibly vile they make Doctor Mengele seem suitable for a guest appearance on Captain Kangaroo.  They’re all knuckleheads.  When Henry says “I don’t know,” you believe him because he doesn’t, in fact, know anything at all.  Ditto for Otis, who is, if anything, even viler than Henry.  At least Henry didn’t rape his own sister.  Yes, it’s that kind of movie, a movie so full of such wretched people that we are forced to judge them on the basis of whether or not they’ve raped their own family members.

            The movie is flat, direct and unemotional.  The most horrendous things possible are depicted with the kind of flat, detached style one expects from a documentary.  It’s as though This Old House directed the movie, not John McNaughton.  "Now, what we're doing here, Bob, is strangulating some people, and after that, we're going to nail up the wainscoting in the dining room."  It isn’t really that gory, at least not compared to sanguinary geysers like Death Spa, promoed on the same tape, but it isn't exactly Spongebob Squarepants either.  I think it’s the sheer coldness of it all that got to me.  People, mostly women, are tortured and murdered in various ways and the tone from the movie is quite neutral, as though people kill women all the time and it isn’t anything special.  I guess the sad news is that people really do kill women all the time, but the real horror is that John McNaughton can make a movie about it without managing to interpose any sense of outrage or horror.  If he were making a movie about people mowing a lawn, this detachment might be appropriate.  He didn’t, however.  He made a movie about people being brutally murdered, where such detachment is either a sign of a deep-rooted sexual dysfunction or nothing more than artistic posing.  I suspect a little of both.

            The high point of the movie is when Henry finally kills Otis.  But just as you cheer this delicious relief from Otis, Henry then kills the halfway likeable sister, so you don't know what to think any more.  I kept waiting for Henry to be killed, but it never happened. 

            Henry isn’t the worst movie ever made.  There are worse things out there, but just because Henry isn’t the worst movie ever made is no reason to actually go out and watch it. 

1 Skull.  Read it and weep.

"Jacob's Ladder"

                I notice that I have a tendency to spend a little more time than I would like poking fun at bad movies (where "bad" is defined as "I didn't like it").  Sometimes, though, it's just so easy:  you sit through something like Jason X and what else can you do but snark?

                But I wouldn't want it to be said that all I do is carp.  So with the intention of showing that I'm not just a cultural vandal (or, perhaps, not always a cultural vandal) permit me to talk about Jacob's Ladder, a vintage movie from 1990 that remains to this day one of my favorite horror movies.  Scary?  Check.  Emotionally exhausting?  Check.  Food for thought?  Check.

                I'm not sure how to go about producing a synopsis of the plot, so I won't.  Suffice it to say that the movie flits from one apparent reality to another, to the point that you aren't quite sure what's real and what isn't.  And neither does the protagonist, Jacob Singer, played admirably by Tim Robbins.  And though it isn't particularly horrific in the usual sense, it's still nightmarish as hell.  To this day, that frantic high-speed head-wobbling of people in the background gives me the willies, and the whole sequence where Robbins is wheeled through the derelict hospital on an old gurney and has his conversation with the surgeon is perhaps the most chilling vision of the fear of personal dissolution I've ever seen.

                To say nothing at all of the party scene, where Robbins begins to hallucinate wildly about Elizabeth Pena and that strange reptilian tail.  Or is he really hallucinating?  And somehow the notion that Tim Robbins receives the vital piece of wisdom he needs from Meister Eckhart by way of his chiropractor (!) seems both risible and entirely appropriate. 

                I know people who just loathe this movie on the grounds that it "doesn't make sense."  It's true, it doesn't have a linear plot, and most of the time the viewer isn't entirely sure just what the hell is going on.  At times, it isn't even clear what kind of movie it is.  It could be a horror movie, a conspiracy movie, a movie about war and PTSD; who can say?  But if you pay attention to what the chiropractor says to Jacob, the whole movie comes into focus, and reveals itself as a superbly written, superbly acted, and satisfyingly disturbing movie experience.

Five Skulls

"Event Horizon"

            Event Horizon represents an odd subspecies of horror movies - namely, movies that seem to straddle the line between science fiction and horror.  You can view it as a science fiction movie with elements of horror, or as a horror movie with the trappings of science fiction.  Another example of this sort of movie is Pandorum, though I think that movie is more strongly rooted in science fiction than horror.  I think that on principle I'm going to stay away from movies of the Pandorum ilk, but Event Horizon is just sufficiently recognizable as a horror movie to make the cut.

            So.  An experimental spacecraft named Event Horizon vanishes without trace sometime in mid 21st Century.  About seven years later it reappears, and a search-and-rescue crew is duly dispatched to render what aid they can, taking along with them the nerdy egghead who designed the spacecraft in the first place (played by Sam Neill).  Turns out that the spacecraft used a new and hitherto untested kind of "gravity drive".  The idea is that it is supposed to open trans-dimensional pathways to other stars, but instead it opened a trans-dimensional pathway to Hell (or a reasonable facsimile thereof).  Nearly every member of the crew dies horribly in this dimension before going on to suffer unspeakably in the next dimension, with lots of flash-cut images of barbed wire and insect larvae.  One imagines the engineer clapping his hand to forehead and saying whoops, guys, sorry about that!  My bad!  Guess I should have tested that thing first…

            The movie frankly doesn’t make much sense.  I could not, for example, figure out who the woman with no eyes was, or what she had to do with anything.  Nor could I readily discern why Sam Neill spent so much time flipping back and forth between nerdy egghead engineer and Maximally Bad Spirit From Hell.  And the movie’s cynical ending makes one wonder if the movie even had a stinking point at all.  I conclude that, in fact, the movie had no point whatsoever.  It was stupid, gratuitous, gory, pointless and dumb, an apparently conscious remake of Hellraiser that stopped just short of bringing in Cenobites and puzzle boxes.

             But for some strange reason I like this movie.  This movie is, for me at least, very much like a banana split – it isn’t good for me at all, but I still like it.  As long as you recognize that it's full of empty calories and won't provide you with any essential nutrients, it's harmless fun. 

3 Skulls

"Elsewhere"

Almost more of a cautionary tale of internet stalking, "Elsewhere" is a movie that seemed 60% Lifetime movie and 40% suspense thriller.  While the first 30 minutes of the film seemed slow and felt more like a "very special episode" of a 1980's sitcom -- the tale of two friends and the one friend's dangerous foray into internet voyeurism -- once the "wild" friend disappears the movie begins to feel more like the suspense thriller it is billed as.

Anna Kendrick is excellent as the lead character, Sarah.  She plays the role as one part good girl and one part crazy loyal friend willing to do whatever it takes to find her missing best friend.  I liked her.  And I especially liked her friend Jasper, played by Chuck Carter.  I don't know that I've ever seen Chuck Carter in any other movies, but I quite liked him and his character in "Elsewhere".   Sarah's friend, Jillian, is tragic even before she winds up missing.   Though she's less of a fully fleshed out character, I think a lot of that is due to the fact that for about 70% of the film she's missing.  The other characters, mousy Darla and asshole Billy are    done as well as peripheral characters in a film like this can be.  Paul Wesley, late of "Vampire Diaries" is especially fun as Billy and I found him comical (hopefully purposely funny) in the scene with Jasper and the paintball gun.

With very little blood or violence, this is a suspense (in the last half, anyways) movie and not so much a horror flick.  That being said, I enjoyed it and give it a solid three skulls.

"Spliced"

Recently, I watched "Spliced" aka "The Wisher", a 2002 horror movie that seems to want to be far better than it actually is.  The best part of the movie was the fact that Ron Silver was in it.  The worst part of  the movie was that Ron Silver wasn't in ALL of the scenes.  The movie is basically about a teenage girl who watches a lot of horror movies (hmm... sounds like a movie about my teen years... I'm incensed and vaguely flattered that someone wrote an unauthorized biography about me) who begins thinking that the killer from a BAD slasher movie is following her around.  The stalker/killer reminded me WAY too much of "Scream" and I always got the feeling that "Spliced" really, desperately wanted to be "Scream".  It felt a bit like the dorky little sister who keeps trying to be just like her prom queen sister.  She tries but she fails.  That's what happens in "Spliced".  Ultimately, "Spliced" becomes the gawky, unfunny version of big sister "Scream".  It's not funny, it's not scary, it just sort of there - trying too hard with its braces and zits as it tries to steal the crown from big sister's well coiffed head.  Was "Scream" the best horror movie ever?  No.  But was it better than "Spliced"?  Oh hell, yes.

I really wanted to like this movie because I have always liked Ron Silver and it feels almost unfaithful to dislike it.  Maybe if he'd been in more scenes, as opposed to the annoying and far too old to be playing a high school student, Drew Lachey (whom I now think of as the less talented Lachey brother, and my isn't that a shallow well of talent in the Lachey gene pool?), the movie would have been better.  But alas, Mr. Silver was relegated to playing a... hmmm... what was he exactly?  Counselor?  Therapist?  Teacher?  School principal?  I honestly have no idea.  But what it was it was the only truly bright spot in a rather abysmal movie.

1 skull

"House of 1000 Corpses"

            From the moment one first claps eyes on Captain Spaulding, one has the feeling that this isn’t going to be your standard slasher movie.  Oh, sure, it’s got most of the classic slasher themes in it – the house in the middle of nowhere; the fatal curiosity in a dark local folk legend that proves to be all too real; the psycho in the back seat of the car.  But there’s more and still more, the movie revealing Rob Zombie’s arresting if somewhat grim vision a little at a time.  Just when you think you’ve peeled off one layer of traditional slasher horror, a new layer presents itself, as horrific as the last but weirder, until one arrives at the final horror, the Borg-like, Cenobite-like, and totally whacked out Doctor Satan himself.  It’s kind of like Friday the 13^th, only there’s more Jasons, they show up sooner in the movie, and they’re a lot more interesting.

            So what’s the plot?  The movie starts with Captain Spaulding squaring off with a couple of inept armed robbers.  There’s the first layer of horror:  rural fruitcakes in the manner of Deliverance.  But then four kids stop in at Cap’n Spaulding’s joint and take the dime tour.  They hear about the legend of Doctor Satan, who performed unauthorized brain surgery on inmates at the mental hospital.  Seems Dr. Satan M.D. was hanged by the locals, only his body was never found and the folk legend is that he’s out there running around doing horrible misdeeds.  The kids (some of them) decide to find out and end up having dinner with a houseful of more or less totally insane people.  Okay, fair enough, there’s the second layer of horror:  psychopaths in the grand tradition of The Hills Have Eyes or Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

            The kids are now, in Captain Spaulding’s words, fucked.  But in the scheme of things, there is screwed and then there is royally screwed.  Two are just screwed, but two are royally screwed, in that they graduate to the third layer of horror, Doctor Satan himself, who struck me as part Borg, part Cenobite, and part something else altogether.  The scene of Jerry buying the farm beneath Doctor Satan’s brain surgery made my toes curl.

            But the plot of the movie isn’t really the point of the movie.  The plot is really not all that different from a thousand other slasher movies; it’s what Rob Zombie does with the standard fare that makes this movie unusual.  I’d like to explore some of the things Rob did.

            1.  It’s not all that gory.  There are scenes of gore, but in general, the movie’s not a bloodbath, certainly nothing approaching Peter Jackson’s Dead-Alive.  High-intensity gore serves as the staple in horror movies because it saves the director from having to create truly horrific visions.  “Just throw a bunch of blood and guts around and it’ll be okay” is the horror-movie mantra.  But Zombie was discreet with the gore.  There’s blood, to be sure, and stabbing, and lots of other stuff, but really not all that much.  What the film did have, however, was something approaching true horror.  The movie didn’t scare me, but it horrified me.  They’re different things. 

            2.  The characters aren’t as stereotypical as they seem.  Captain Spaulding, for example, was immense fun to watch.  He’s as coarse as burlap underwear, but I loved watching him.  I replayed the top menu on the DVD over and over just to hear him say “We-e-e-lll, shit the bed!”  Spaulding (and many of the other characters) curse like longshoreman, but it’s not just cursing.  Zombie has a good ear for cursing and in the hands of Captain Spaulding, cursing turned into something approaching an art form.  Baby was another very interesting character, a nightmarish combination of eroticism and evil.  In most slasher movies, the femme fatales are dark, icy, cool and almost detached and unemotional, but Baby is anything but.  She loves what she does (chiefly, stab people) and Zombie allows the character to enjoy it fully. The scene of her licking the knife after she stabs what’s-her-name was a great touch; the notion of total surrender to whim and impulse, and the delight in that surrender, was extremely well done.  Then there’s Karen Black as the dissipated mature strumpet, but that’s not all she is.  And you start to think that the Edgar Winter wannabe is the chief bad guy, and you realize he’s far from being the chief bad guy; he’s just a fruitcake who did too much LSD and blabbers Dennis Hopper-like absurdities while the real horror goes on elsewhere.

            3.  The inclusion of stray, seemingly extraneous bits of video gave the movie a weird, staccato, hallucination-like quality.  And yes, I have hallucinated, and I know what it’s like.  My hallucinations were brought on chiefly by intense chemotherapy, and I suffered a vivid and fairly long-lasting series of disconnected images and moods (including, among other things, the chilling notion that my skin had come loose and would fall off if I moved).  In the movie, the snippets of TV, the “Our Next Feature” bit, all of the odd, seemingly irrelevant bits of film gave the movie the same disquieting feel.  This can be overdone.  I’ve seen movies so awash in extraneous film they were essentially nothing but extraneous film, but I thought Zombie hit just the right balance.

            So what do we make of this movie?  I have no idea, I confess.  I can’t really say it was good, because good implies a lot of things.  It implies that the good guys win, that Godliness prevails, that evil is defeated, that the innocent are spared.  Well, let’s see.  The good guys didn’t win.  Godliness didn’t prevail.  Evil won in a big way.  And the innocent were bled and slaughtered like farm animals.  So in conventional terms, it’s not a good movie.  But it’s a cool movie nevertheless.  It’s nightmarish, disturbing, at times even shocking, and always idiosyncratic and full of unexpected little touches and oddly turned phrases that stick with one (“I don’t like chicken, and I hate clowns!” comes to mind, as does the memorable “Well, it is now official, you have wasted most of my goddamned day.”)

            There are scarier movies out there.  Alien struck me as particularly frightening, at least before Aliens revised the aliens into just bugs.  And there are gorier movies out there.  But I’ve only seen one other movie that rivaled this movie’s ability to create a sense of grim horror, and that was the heroically unwatchable King of the Dead, a German movie that was about 40% autopsy film and included what is perhaps the most horrendous thing I’ve ever seen in a movie.  I won't even write about it - suffice it to say that as River Phoenix says in 8mm, there are some things you just can’t un-see.

            So.  Good writing, eerie and arresting scenes, excellent characters (especially the Bad Folk) are on the good side.  What’s on the bad side?  Well, I didn’t like the kids very much.  Maybe that’s good, since none of them survived.  Other than that, I’d say the movie did pretty much what it set out to do.

            But I do have one complaint.  I think there was way more than a thousand corpses around the house.

3 Skulls

"The Hazing"

"The Hazing", aka "Dead Scared" is a 2004 horror movie about a bunch of good looking (of course) college students who are pledging into a sorority/fraternity.  As part of the hazing ritual, the students have to spend a night in a spooky mansion where a bunch of people were killed.  It's a pretty standard premise - one that has been well utilized in such gems as "The Haunting" (the original is WAY better than the remake) and the gory, but still fun "Legend of Hell House".  Sadly, "The Hazing" doesn't live up to it's premise.  Instead of being truly scary, the movie devolves into a campy frolic with one of the strangest sex scenes I have ever seen in a B grade horror film.  And that's truly saying something.  The movie is chock-full of the typical horror movie stereotypes - the smart girl, the hot bimbo, the jerk, the nerdy guy, and the athlete/hot guy.  While it's a pretty standard character mix, there are a couple of surprises but nothing earth shattering.  The special effects are kind of cheesy - especially the scenes where the "gate" opens and when the professor takes over the body of the "smart girl".  The makeup effects are humorous and scene stealing.  All in all "The Hazing" is a campy horror/comedy that seems to be funny in that "wink wink nudge nudge" kind of inside joke way.  Like it knows that any true horror fan is going to get the jokes and that, in the end, is what makes it the most fun.  Is it a great movie?  No, but it is a fun tongue-in-cheek way to spend 90 minutes or so.  

1.5 out of 5 Skulls