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Transmissions to Earth: BAD DREAMS (1988)

Posted in 1980s Movies, 2013, 80s Horror, Cult Leaders, Evil Doctors!, Ghosts!, Horror, LL Soares Reviews, Madness, Religious Cults, Slasher Movies, Trasmissions to Earth with tags andrew fleming, bad dreams, bruce abbott, jennifer rubin, Richard Lynch on May 2, 2013 by knifefighter

TRANSMISSIONS TO EARTH presents:

BAD DREAMS (1988)
Movie review by L.L. Soares

Like a lot of horror films from the 1980s, 1988’s BAD DREAMS feels like a missed opportunity. The first film by director Andrew Fleming (who went on to give us THE CRAFT, 1996, the Steve Coogan vehicle HAMLET 2, 2008, and episodes of TV shows like ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT and FRANKLIN & BASH), it’s kind of a take on cults like the Manson Family and Jonestown. You would think with a name like BAD DREAMS it might venture a bit into Freddy Krueger territory, especially since Wes Craven’s A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) had been a horror movie hit just a few years before and was still fresh on everyone’s minds. But strangely, the title is misleading, since the killer here does not kill people in their dreams.

The leader of this particular cult is simply called Harris, and is played by the great Richard Lynch, who was in tons of movies since the 1970s, including such memorable ones as SCARECROW (1973), Larry Cohen’s classic GOD TOLD ME TO (1976), and his last appearance, in a small flashback as Reverend Hawthorne in Rob Zombie’s latest film THE LORDS OF SALEM (2013). (Sadly, Mr. Lynch died in 2012.)

We see Harris gathering his faithful in an old house on a hill, baptizing each member with gasoline before setting the house on fire. This is kind of (painfully) ironic, since actor Lynch really had set himself on fire in Central Park in 1967 during a bad LSD trip, and, after he became scarred during the accident, he was many directors’ go-to-guy to play various villains in horror films and in TV shows.

But back to the movie. Everyone in the cult dies in the fire, except for Cynthia (Jennifer Rubin, the striking actress who was also Edie Segewick in Oliver Stone’s THE DOORS, 1991, and whose first movie was A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS, 1987, strangely enough) who gets saved from the flaming house, but spends the next 13 years in a coma. When she wakes up, it’s a media circus. Not only is it a big deal she woke up after such a long time, but everyone wants to know what happened inside the cult house the night it exploded in flames. Unfortunately, poor Cynthia doesn’t remember anything about that night.

Her doctor, Dr. Berrisford (character actor Harris Yulin, who has been in over 100 movies including SCARFACE, 1983 and TRAINING DAY, 2001), tells Cynthia that she should see a psychitatrist, because after such a long coma, not only does she need physical therapy to get her motor skills back, she also needs to “heal her mind” and learn how to cope with life 13 years later (she was just a teenager when that fateful fire happened). So Cynthia is turned over to Dr.Berrisford’s assistant, Dr. Alex Karmen (Bruce Abbott, who you might remember as Dan in the Stuart Gordon classic RE-ANIMATOR, 1985), and becomes part of his group therapy sessions. Of course, this being the 80s, the therapy group is made up of various quirky oddballs, some of which are clearly meant to be funny – and aren’t. These include wisecracking Ralph (Dean Cameron, also in SUMMER SCHOOL, 1987, ROCKULA, 1990, where he also played a character named Ralph, and lots of TV shows, including ALF, 1989 – 1990); shy Lana (Elizabeth Daily, who was also in THE DEVIL’S REJECTS, 2005 and has done tons of voices for cartoons); a tough-talking lady reporter who’s always smoking; a middle-aged couple that is obviously having an affair; and an annoying teenage black girl named Gilda (Damita Jo Freeman) who keeps saying cryptic things that make you wonder if she has a direct line to Harris. Sometimes, these people seem a little too over-the-top (it’s not like this movie was striving for realism, sadly).

At first, Cynthia only remembers the peace and love platitudes that cult leader Harris laid on them back in the day, but then she slowly remembers how the man eventually lost his mind and set fire to all his followers, and suddenly, she’s traumatized all over again. Even more traumatic is the fact that Harris keeps popping up when Cynthia least expects it (as she remembers him, and later as a burned-up version), first showing up in a crowded elevator (this makes her go bonkers), and then slowly killing off every member of the therapy group (by drowning, tossing one person out of a window, and throwing the middle-aged lovebirds into a giant fan). Cynthia tries to tell Dr. Karmen and anyone else who will listen that Harris is doing all these things, but no one believes her. There’s also a cop, Detective Wasserman (Sy Richardson, who might be best known as Lite in the cult classic, REPO MAN, 1984) who is very suspicious of Cynthia’s cult member past and is sure she is somehow responsible for the deaths.

Cult leader Harris appears to Cynthia both as she remembered him alive, and as this burned up version post-fire.

The twist ending in this one is very disappointing, and doesn’t make a lot of sense, considering past events. But hell, at least it doesn’t end with Cynthia waking up from her coma at the end, and it being all a “bad dream” – which I was dreading from the get-go, considering the title. When we do get to the surprise revelation (which I won’t spoil here), we find out that this is a movie is kind of a letdown. If only they had just delved more into Harris and his cult, and given it more resonance, this could have been the beginning of a franchise of its own. But no such luck. Instead, things get wrapped up in a tidy (and completely underwhelming) bow by the end.

Rubin is good here as Cynthia. Abbott is a little stilted sometimes, but has a few good scenes as Dr. Karmen (especially a great scene where he imagines running over Dr. Berrisford with his car!) and Lynch is perfectly cast as the Jim Jones/Manson-esque Harris (but he needed more screen time!). The direction by first timer Fleming is okay, but nothing amazing, and the screenplay by Fleming and Steve E. de Souza (based on a story by Fleming, Michael Dick, P.J. Pettiette and Yuri Zeltser) has some good ideas, but never fully delivers on them (and imagine, it took all those guys to come up with this one!)

Not one of the 80s best horror films by any stretch, BAD DREAMS at least has some good moments. But man, it could have been so much better!

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CRITERION AFTER DARK: THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY (1961)

Posted in 2013, 60s Movies, Art Movies, Classic Films, Criterion After Dark, Enigmatic Films, Family Secrets, Foreign Films, Garrett Cook Articles, Lovecraftian Horror, Madness with tags Criterion Collection, Elder Gods, Harriet Andersson, Incest, Ingmar Bergman, King in Yellow, Lovecraft, Madness, Robert W. Chambers, Through a Glass Darkly on April 24, 2013 by knifefighter

CRITERION AFTER DARK
THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY: ELDER GODS WHERE YOU LEAST EXPECT THEM
By Garrett Cook

It’s been forever since I’ve written one of these columns. People and cities and ideas and lives change and mine did in several big ways in the last year. I missed writing for Cinema Knife Fight, and now I’m gonna do it again. I thought maybe I would start by finding a weird, shocking, filthy, perverse Criterion film. Something that would blow your mind and take you to the very edge of perception. And I did. Did I ever.

Cronenberg? Bunuel? Malle? Nope. Asian horror? Nope. Some kind of Swedish erotic art film? A little warmer. Imagine if Tennessee Williams and H.P. Lovecraft collaborated on a family drama set on an isolated island, a place tinged with madness, with the stench of malevolent cosmology hanging in the air. And there’s sin and sexual dysfunction and a sinister play with a dark truth at its core. So let’s add a little Robert “The King in Yellow” Chambers to the mix. Moody black and white cosmic horror. Yeah, that’s the stuff. So, who pray tell is the twisted mind behind this?

The man whose work inspired Wes Craven’s THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972) and who had a knight in plague-stricken medieval Europe confront the grim reaper himself. A true master of the horror genre. Who knows terror like…Ingmar Bergman? That can’t be right. But it is. Bergman is the genius behind THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960), which was later remade (reimagined?) as THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, and pitted a knight in a chess game against death in THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957). His film THE MAGICIAN (1958) had all of the elements of one of Val Lewton’s classics of psychological horror: from a man terrorized by doubts in his psyche to a murder that may or may not have been in the province of the supernatural. THE MAGICIAN is, as well as being a period piece and an excellent story about the power of art, a masterpiece of quiet horror.

And so is THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY (1961).

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY is one of those movies that defines in people’s mind what an art film is, or what a drama is. It looks on the surface to just be a story about a disintegrating family. The setup is not particularly horrific: a novelist takes his son, his daughter and her husband on vacation. His daughter is schizophrenic. She finds out his novel is about her and gets upset. Why is this of interest to a column on horror culture and filth in the Criterion Collection?

Because as I said, there are traces of cosmic horror and weird fiction here that are hard to ignore, but enjoyable to savor, as they seem to be in the wrong place. Near the beginning of the film, the son puts on a play starring the daughter, involving a knight’s strange relationship with a ghost. It’s cool that it calls back to the questing knight facing death in THE SEVENTH SEAL, but fans of vintage weird fiction might see another connection, another great “Death and the Maiden” play, embedded in a narrative: Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow centers around an ominous play where the heroine’s sad song freezes the heart of the viewer. This play hints at love and death interweaving on a cosmic level, and at there being something deeply wrong in this family and on this island. The King in Yellow terrorizes you with evil in the walls of a metanarrative, and THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY does the same. Something is wrong with this play. Something is wrong with reality. Something is loose in the theater.

Karin comes to a realization in Bergman's THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY.

Karin (Harriet Andersson) comes to a realization in Ingmar Bergman’s THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY.

Although her father feels Karin is incurable, Karin’s husband is trying to remain optimistic. He does not believe her condition will have to eat away her life. And it doesn’t seem to, until Karin finds her father’s manuscript. In her father’s manuscript, the heroine is an incurable schizophrenic, in her father’s manuscript, Karin his hopeless. When Karin reads this, she is naturally upset, but it seems to go beyond that and once again into the realm of weird fiction and magic. The fictional Karin is sick, so the real Karin becomes sick. The fictional Karin is too crazy to heal, so the real one must be as well. It works like a voodoo doll and warps the world like the sinister play in Chambers’ story. It has even, in some ways, turned into a grimoire like the Necronomicon from Lovecraft’s books.

Karin begins describing her hallucinations about people behind the walls watching her, judging her. She seems to have a strange sixth sense that she’s not just the protagonist of a novel, but that of a movie as well. She seems to see the framework and that there’s no difference between life and art and reality and fantasy. She faces the realization of the protagonist of Lovecraft’s story Pickman’s Model, who discovers that the hideous paintings of his friend Pickman were modeled after a photograph from life. So the movie returns to the Pickman’s Model/King in Yellow delusion, the stuff that Lucio Fulci’s A CAT IN THE BRAIN (1990) and John Carpenter’s IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (1994) deal with, along with Stephen King’s THE DARK HALF (made into a film by George Romero in 1993). The reality-warping power of madness shines in Karin’s dialogue, because Bergman has isolated the movie from the rest of reality. On this little island, all we have are people’s opinions on Karin’s madness, and Karin’s madness itself. Like Shakespeare’s power to conjure images, Karin’s makes things happen in your head, turning words into imagery, and therefore turning her words into reality.

Karin succumbs not just to insanity, but to her worst urges, performing an act of incest. Her behavior has gone from simply crazy to truly aberrant, committing on of the worst sins imaginable. This is a pretty sordid world Bergman has created, one without hope or moral high ground or a chance to gain rectitude, a world ruled over by a force that is less than benevolent. Without a single tentacle, we have the feelings Lovecraft sought to convey of smallness, depravity, insanity and isolation. And the feeling that Karin’s visions are right. There are people outside the screen watching and judging her and waiting for her to fall apart on both sides of these realities. And she is under the power of a man behind a camera who is frankly not going to be very nice to her.

As Karin finally cracks, she does so in fine Lovecraftian form, terrified by confronting the image of God. Creatures like Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu appear before the eyes of Lovecraft’s heroes to shatter their minds or prove that the minds of the hero have been shattered.

“God is a spider,” Karin says.

And while Bergman does not show the spider, we have now gotten the idea in our imagination that Karin has seen some dark god. Does it matter that she is crazy? Has this god driven her crazy? We can’t say definitively that Lovecraft’s protagonists have seen the Elder Gods, and we can’t say with any certainty that Karin doesn’t know something in this Swedish art-house gothic that shows no monster at all, THROUGH THE GLASS DARKLY has as much in common with Val Lewton’s deep psychological thrillers for RKO in the 40s, in fact sharing a lot of themes with CAT PEOPLE (1942), THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943),. and other films of their ilk. And all leave you with the same horrendous impression that something is out there and that mad and malformed as the human mind can get, there is a grain of truth to all of the hallucinations and all of the cosmic horror.

The discriminating viewer is not just one who finds meaning in the depraved and the weird and the horrific, but also one who finds the depraved, the weird and the horrific in the things that academics and squares and stuffed shirts say are meaningful and THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY has that stuff in spades. So, if you like Lovecraft, Hitchcock or Lewton—or just an uncomfortable chill and a lump in your throat—Ingmar Bergman might be the scare you need.

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Transmissions to Earth Intercepts THE LAST BROADCAST (1998)

Posted in 1990s Horror, 2013, ESP, Faux Documentaries, Horror, Indie Horror, LL Soares Reviews, Madness, Murder!, Mystery, Plot Twists, Secrets, Trasmissions to Earth with tags Blair Witch, Found Footage, Indie Horror, Jersey Devil, Lance Weiler, Last Broadcast, Pine Barrens, Stefan Avalos on February 21, 2013 by knifefighter

Transmissions to Earth:

THE LAST BROADCAST (1998)

Review by L.L. Soares

With the recent boom of fake documentaries (otherwise known as “found footage” movies), especially in the horror genre (the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY movies, CLOVERFIELD, THE LAST EXORCISM, etc.), THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) constantly pops up in conversation as the influential flick that started this all. And it deserves the attention. The flurry of excitement that surrounded BLAIR WITCH when it first came out was sure to inspire a lot of would-be filmmakers. But a year before BLAIR WITCH, we got THE LAST BROADCAST (1998), which dabbled in this style first, and also shares a lot of similarities with a certain Blair Witch.

Directed and written by Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler, THE LAST BROADCAST begins with filmmaker David Leigh (David Beard) introducing himself and his movie, which is made up of footage from several sources, starting with a cable access show called “Fact or Fiction,” starring Steven Avkast (Stefan Avalos), who also goes by “Johnny,” and Locus Wheeler (Lance Weiler). Their show explores paranormal phenomenon, but it didn’t really get much in the way of viewers until they decided to hook up a voice response system to their computer, so people could type questions and the voice would speak them aloud on the show. This little bit of audience response is enhanced by the fact that the computerized voice that reads the questions sounds rather spooky. One of the viewers, through this system, suggests they investigate the legend of the Jersey Devil.

Steven and Locus get the idea to film a live show in the middle of the New Jersey Pine Barrens; their plan being to exploit the Jersey Devil legend for big ratings that will maybe get the show out of cable access and into the big time. To help them out on their little camping trip into the middle of nowhere, the hosts bring along sound man Rein (pronounced “Ryan”) Clackin (Rein Clabbers), and a “psychic” that Rein knows named Jim Suerd (Jim Seward), who is sensitive to the “spirits” of the woods.

We learn early on that Jim Suerd has recently died in prison when THE LAST BROADCAST begins, where he was serving two life sentences for murder. We also learn that he was a bit of a loner who was obsessed with the Internet and magic tricks. The implication being that his “psychic” powers were fake, perpetrated by someone with a rudimentary knowledge of magic, and that Suerd was a bit unbalanced to begin with.

Fake “psychic” Jim Suerd. Did he commit the murders in the woods?

Suerd finds the other guys the “right spot” in the middle of the barrens, and they set up camp. There’s a disagreement at one point, when Rein is picking on Jim about his “psychic powers,” which turns into a shoving match (which becomes important later). Then the guys broadcast their show from deep in the woods.

But something goes wrong. Rein and Locus are murdered. Steven Avkast disappears (but they find his hat and a lot of his blood), and Jim Suerd calls the police (his 9-1-1 call begins the movie) to report that something has gone horribly wrong in the woods.

A year or so after the events in the woods, and right after Jim Suerd has died in prison under mysterious circumstances, David Leigh receives a strange package in the mail. Inside is a mostly destroyed VHS cassette, and a lot of loose tape. Leigh brings it to a data retrieval expert , Michelle Monarch (Michele Pulaski) to analyze. Through painstaking work on her computer, Michelle is able to isolate sections of the tape and recover the images, which turns out to be previously lost footage of Steven and Locus’s final broadcast in the woods. The more she deciphers, the closer she gets to revealing the true identity of the murderer.

Things go bad int he barrens in THE LAST BROADCAST.

With the concept of a group of people in the woods, filming themselves, and the exploration of a local legend, you can see the parallels between this movie and THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. And THE LAST BROADCAST is just as compelling. In fact, I found myself getting pretty engrossed in the story, wanting to know more as it went along. The acting here is all believable (and I wonder how many cast members were actually professional actors), and the central mystery is very compelling. I really liked the cast of this one, which includes a bunch of other “talking heads,” people who knew the film crew, including the psychologist who met with Jim Suerd as a child (Dale Worstall), a film editor for the prosecution in Suerd’s trial (Mark Rublee) and a director who was hired by the “Fact or Fiction” team, who formerly directed soap operas and who looks a lot like Phil Spector, named Sam Woods (Sam Wells). All of the “witnesses” who talk on camera are interesting and help move the story toward its creepy conclusion.

In a time when the Internet’s domination of us all wasn’t as profound, THE LAST BROADCAST is notable for having both the Internet and videotaped footage play major roles in the film. For the most part, the videotaped footage works very well.

My only complaint is that there’s a coda at the end of the film that feels tacked on. For the most part, the points of view in the film make sense, and are believable. The movie should have ended at a scene where two characters come “face to face” (if you see the movie, you’ll understand what I mean). But instead, there’s a last segment that suddenly breaks the rules of the “point of view” format that was used up to this point, and this final part almost ruined the movie for me. Almost. It’s not completely disastrous, but I found it unnecessary (and who is filming it?) In trying to creep the audience out, it goes a little too far to explain everything (instead of trusting the audience to “get it” at the scene where I think it should have ended).

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT might get all the credit for starting the “found footage” genre, but THE LAST BROADCAST, a film that isn’t as well known, clearly got there first. In a lot of ways (especially because of its amazing marketing campaign at the time), BLAIR WITCH is the more memorable movie, the one that influenced so many other filmmakers to follow in its footsteps, but THE LAST BROADCAST is just as effective, and deserves more credit than it gets.

Also, at several points, when the “Fact or Fiction” guys discussed tracking down the Jersey Devil, I kept wondering, “Why don’t they explain what the legend of the Jersey Devil is all about.” Well, this is not addressed in detail in the movie, but after the end credits, there is a short, related film that does just that – explaining the Jersey Devil myth pretty well.

I liked this movie a lot, and recommend it to anyone who is a fan of the “found footage” genre.

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THE COLLECTION (2012)

Posted in 2012, Cinema Knife Fights, Disturbing Cinema, Elaborate Murders, Extreme Movies, Gore!, Killers, LL Soares Reviews, Madness, Medical Experiments!, Mutilation, Psychos, Sequels, Torture with tags Collection, Collector, Emma Fitzpatrick, gore, Hotel of Horrors, Josh Stewart, lee tergeson, Marcus Dunstan, Sequels, torture porn on December 10, 2012 by knifefighter

CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT Presents:
THE COLLECTION (2012)
Review by L.L. Soares

(THE SCENE: an abandoned hotel full of cobwebs. L.L. SOARES is climbing the stairs using a flashlight)

LS: I’m starting to think MICHAEL ARRUDA isn’t here at all. I’m sure this is all a prank.

(His cell phone rings, playing Bernard Herrmann’s music from the shower scene of PSYCHO)

LS: Hello?

MA: LL, is that you? I’ve been waiting for an hour now.

LS: What are you talking about? I’m here now, at the Argento Hotel, just like you told me. I can’t find you anywhere.

MA: Oops, I meant the Argento Steak House. My bad.

LS: That explains a lot.

MA: Well, while I have you on the phone, how was that new movie, THE COLLECTION?

LS: I was just going to start the review. I guess I have to do this one solo.

(SWITCH to Michael Arruda in a restaurant. A waiter brings a delicious meal to his table)

MA (making noises with his mouth): Oh no, I’m having phone problems. LL are you there? I can’t hear you?

LS: Yes, I’m still here.

MA (makes more noises): Oh no, you’re breaking up. I’m going to lose you. (MA shuts off his phone)

LS: Dammit! I hate bad connections. And it always happens when I’m in spooky places like this.

So where was I? Oh yes, I was going to review the new movie THE COLLECTION. I guess I’ve got nothing better to do.

(LS sits down on a comfy chair in the hallway of the old hotel. He brings the flashlight up to his face, turning it on, making himself look spooky)

LS: Gather round the fire, kiddies, and I’ll tell you the spooky story of THE COLLECTION. First off, it’s the sequel to the 2009 movie THE COLLECTOR, which was also directed by Marcus Dunstan. He also co-wrote the screenplays for SAW IV (2007), SAW V (2008) , SAW VI (2009) and SAW 3D: THE FINAL CHAPTER (2010) as well as FEAST (2005) and its sequels, with his writing partner, Patrick Melton. This is a busy guy.

Anyway, in case you didn’t see the first one, it was a about a thief named Arkin (Josh Stewart) who breaks into a house to steal some money and valuables, and instead finds a house of horrors. Someone else has gotten there first, and has turned it into a booby-trapped filled torture chamber, and the family (who was supposed to be on vacation) suffers horribly at the hands of a masked murderer known only as The Collector. They call him that because, whenever he attacks someplace, he kills everyone except one person, who he kidnaps for his “collection.”

The first movie ended on a suspenseful note, as Arkin was captured by the Collector, and then the end credits rolled.

The new movie, THE COLLECTION, continues where the last one left off. Sort of. This time around, we find out that the Collector has been up to lots of mischief since the last time we saw him. Not only is he making random home invasions, now the number of people he’s killed is off the charts, and the police have no clue how to stop him. The city is in a panic. So what does teenager Elena (Emma Fitzpatrick) do? She goes to a rave of course, in an abandoned building that no adults know about. When she finds out that her boyfriend is cheating on her, she runs away from the dance floor to an empty room, with a trunk in the middle of it. She’s crying when suddenly the trunk moves and starts to make noise! There’s someone inside it. As we know from the previous movie, this is the Collector’s calling card, and if you open a trunk, it puts all kinds of horrible things in motion. So of course, she opens it, letting out Arkin (Josh Stewart again), our hero from the first movie. Only this time he is bloody from having been tortured for weeks.

His being set free sets all kinds of weird traps and pullies in motion, and a giant wheat shredding blade descends on the partiers, chopping them all to mulch. Another group of people, including Elena’s friend, Missy (Johanna Braddy) get locked up in a cage where the ceiling is crushing down on them.

Somehow Arkin escapes, and Elena gets nabbed by the Collector before he can save her. She is the only survivor of the massacre, and, as we know, the Collector always takes one victim away from the crime scene alive.

(LS gets up from the chair, just as a huge metal spike drops down from the ceiling and stabs where he was just sitting)

LS: Arkin wakes up in the hospital, where he is interrogated by a guy named Lucello (Lee Tergesen), who appears to be a cop, but isn’t. He works for Elena’s rich father (Christopher McDonald) and will stop at nothing to find Elena and bring her back to her father. Even if that means forcing Arkin to retrace his steps to find where Elena is being held (he has marks carved in his arm to determine where he was taken to last time).

Lucello and his team of Black Ops agents then invade the Hotel Argento (get the funny homage to horror director Dario Argento?) where the Collector rules over victims driven insane by their horrible treatment and who have been turned into crazed zombie-like creatures. Oh, and there are tons of booby traps and mazes and bear traps and time bombs. Let’s just say that Lucello has no idea what he’s in for, and poor Arkin is forced to go along for the ride, even though he’s endured these particular horrors before.

There are also lots of “collections” throughout the hotel. From the usual butterflies and insects in frames, to giant tanks full of bizarre sculptures made from human body parts.

There are bizarre sculptures made from human body parts throughout the hotel, like this one.

(LS continues walking down the hallway. Hatchets are hurled at him and keep missing him.)

LS: THE COLLECTION is in limited release and its official release date was December 1^st, except that week it was only playing in obscure movie theaters out in the ‘burbs, so I couldn’t see it. This weekend, it got a slightly wider release and made its way into the city. Because I enjoyed the first movie, I was looking forward to seeing this one, so I made sure to check it out before it disappeared.

Let me state something for the record. I like “torture porn.” That might be the first time you have ever seen a critic say this out loud in public, but the truth is, when the genre is done right, it can be pretty compelling. I think the first two HOSTEL movies, for example, are terrific. I was less-than-enthusiastic about all the SAW movies, because I had a problem with the Jigsaw character.

You see, our old friend Jigsaw had this agenda where his elaborate murder scenarios were meant to give the bad people who survived them a second chance. He was trying to change their lives. He was trying to redeem them, by making them thankful to be alive. This was all a bit hard to swallow, and I’m sure you found this all to be as much bullshit as I did. Also, Jigsaw didn’t like to get his hands dirty and watched the violence from a control room. His “victims” had to make decisions about which door to open, or which lever to pull, while he watched from safety.

The Collector isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. He is more than happy to resort to hand-to-hand combat when his more elaborate methods don’t finish everyone off. He’s a skilled fighter, knows his way around a knife fight, and is lethal as hell. And there’s no pontificating about changing people’s lives. The Collector simply thirsts for blood and uses his weird, elaborate killing methods to quench that thirst. Plus, he wears a cool, black Mexican wrestler’s mask to keep his identity a secret. Let’s just say that the Collector would kick Jigsaw’s ass in a fight.

THE COLLECTION is gory as hell. It pushes its R-rating to the limit. And it’s very suspenseful. You never know what is going to happen next, and who will die. Which is just the way a good horror movie should be. Sure, not all of it makes sense, and you really start to wonder how anyone can set up as many crazy booby traps as this guy does throughout the hotel—it just doesn’t seem possible—and then you realize, “hell, it’s just a movie.” And there are lots of blockbuster action movies that make even less sense.

And the cast is top-rate for this kind of thing. Josh Stewart, who was so good in the first movie, does an equally good job here, reprising his role as petty thief and “Collector expert” Arkin. Emma Fitzpatrick is tough and unflinching as Elena (she reminded me a bit of Natalie Portman). Lee Tergeson (who you might remember as Beecher from the HBO series OZ) is solid here as Lucello, and his team of mercenaries includes Andre Royo, who was so great as the homeless guy Bubbles on another excellent HBO series, THE WIRE (it seems like more great actors have come out of OZ and THE WIRE than any other TV shows put together). Believe me, the actors involved are above-average for this kind of thing.

And the ending is actually pretty satisfying this time around. So make sure you stay in your seat until those end credits roll, because there’s a kick-ass epilogue to the story.

(LS stops in front of a doorway, and a pie hurtles at him, hitting him in the face)

Beware! The Collector wants to add you to his COLLECTION.

Beware! The Collector just might want to add you to his COLLECTION.

LS (wipes cream off his face and licks): Mmmm, banana cream!

Sure there’s horrible violence. Sure, people get tortured. There’s blood and body parts galore. But it works. There’s this incredibly sadistic bastard trying to kill as many people as possible, and a group of people trying their best to stop him. If it’s “torture porn,” and it certainly fits the bill, then it’s one of the better examples of the genre. Unfortunately, the genre itself is in decline, no doubt thanks to all of those SAW movies that amounted to a great big example of overkill. They milked that cash cow as long as they could. So there’s a good chance THE COLLECTION might be the end of this particular franchise.

I am not expecting THE COLLECTION to be a big hit. In fact, I’m sure it won’t do very well at all, especially since it’s in such limited release. But I’m telling you, if you’re not squeamish about this kind of stuff, you might just enjoy the hell out of it. I know I did.

I give THE COLLECTION ~ four bloody knives.

(LS dials his cell phone, and Michael Arruda picks up on the other end, enjoying his steak dinner)

MA: Hello?

LS: I know you gave me the wrong info on purpose. I hope you’re enjoying your dinner.

MA: Er…I am.

LS: And I hope you enjoyed the ground up glass in the mashed potatoes.

MA (touches his mouth and coughs up blood): NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

LS: What? I can’t hear you. We have a bad connection.

(FADE TO BLACK)

LL Soares gives THE COLLECTION ~ four knives!

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LOVELY MOLLY (2011)

Posted in 2012, Enigmatic Films, Horror, Madness, Paul McMahon Columns, Possession, Supernatural, Suspense with tags Alexandra Holden, Blair Witch, Eduardo Sanchez, Gretchen Lodge, Johnny Lewis, Lovely Molly, Suspense on November 14, 2012 by knifefighter

LOVELY MOLLY (2011)
Movie Review by Paul McMahon– The Distracted Critic

Eduardo Sanchez, co-director of the THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) and writer/director of ALTERED (2006), has a new film out called LOVELY MOLLY (2011). It’s an interesting Frankenstein’s monster, incorporating both the hand-held camera work used in BLAIR WITCH and the traditional narrative film style used in ALTERED. The film opens, in fact, with an extreme close-up of Molly, which echoes Heather’s now iconic videotaped confession in BLAIR WITCH.

Molly looks panicked and strung out, or panicked and exhausted, and she says: “Whatever happened, it wasn’t me.” She holds a knife to her own throat for a few tense seconds, before bringing it down and saying “It won’t let me do it.”

Now we’re at Molly and Tim’s wedding, another hand-held shot, and the camera picks up a young boy who looks stuffed into a suit. He walks directly at the camera with a smile completely juxtaposed after the clip we just saw, and as the camera zooms in on the kid’s mouth he whispers “I’m hungry.” We watch snippets of a wedding, picking up little bits here and there. Tim is dissed by one of Molly’s young relatives. One of Molly’s uncles offers a toast to his brother Ben and and his wife Tammy (Molly’s parents): “Who I know are looking down on us right now, and watching their little girl start her new life with her new husband.” You also see the maid of honor giving a tearful apology for any times she let the bride down, while Molly dismisses her apology with a smile and a shake of her head. This last is such a quick exchange you just know it’s going to be important later.

After the credits roll, we put the hand-held away. It’s late at night and shadows are used very well to portray a house in isolation, surrounded by forest without a streetlight to be seen. The security alarm goes off. Molly and Tim jolt out of bed. Tim fiddles with the alarm and it takes him a few tries to get the thing to shut off. There’s a problem at the kitchen door. They creep out to the head of the stairs, hearing something bumping around downstairs. They freak and bolt themselves in their bedroom to await the cops. After a walk through reveals nothing, we rejoin them the next morning, Molly’s birthday. Tim, who drives a truck, is leaving on a job. He’ll be back in a few days. Molly is not at all happy about this. We watch her locking up the house that night, and when she reaches the kitchen door that set the alarm off, it crashes in its frame as if it’s been kicked by a horse. Molly calls the police again and is assured that the house had been vacant long enough that kids must be using the property as a place to hang out. “They’ll stop coming around after a while,” is the most comfort he offers her.

The next night, sounds of a crying child come from inside the house. Molly searches, finally opening the closet in a spare bedroom. She stares. Smiles. Reaches inside.

Next morning, Tim returns. It’s daylight. He calls, and Molly doesn’t answer. He searches the house, and is shocked to find her sitting in the spare room, facing the closet, absolutely naked. He talks to her as he creeps closer and finally sits beside her, and she seems oblivious to his presence, until finally her eyes focus and she turns to him.

“He’s alive,” she says.

Not at all the ‘Welcome home!”Tim was expecting.

LOVELY MOLLY is a horror movie of the “Is she crazy, is she possessed, or is she truly haunted?” trope. There are a lot of possible answers presented here. Molly has a history of mental illness and drug use. She’s spending much of her time alone in the house she grew up in; a house where horrible things happened to her. There are images of horses, and at one point you can hear horse hooves clopping outside the bedroom door late at night. There’s a co-worker of Molly’s who lives with her two small children in a house through the woods, and Molly occasionally sneaks over to film them on her hand-held video camera—that is, when she’s not using the camera to film empty corners as she screams for something, or someone, to show itself. There are hints that she’s possessed by an evil spirit. Through it all, you wonder how all these strands will tie together into a cohesive whole.

Eduardo Sanchez has a firm grasp of what keeps viewers on the edge of their seats. He uses our fears of the dark, of death, of solitude, of other people, to masterful effect here. Most importantly, he capitalizes on what Stephen King calls our natural “fear FOR someone else” because Molly is truly likeable. Newcomer Gretchen Lodge puts forth a tremendous performance here, inhabiting Molly completely in all her permutations of emotion. If the right Hollywood people see this film, we’ll be seeing a lot more of Gretchen in years to come.

Gretchen Lodge as LOVELY MOLLY.

In fact, all the performers have come with their A-games. Alexandra Holden (Maggie in 2006′s SPECIAL) plays Molly’s sister, Hannah. From her tearful confession in the wedding video at the start of the film, you can see Hannah’s concern grow even as she becomes more and more concerned for her own safety. Field Blauvelt (THE INVASION, 2007) plays Pastor Bobby perfectly, nailing that character with every move, every smile, every downcast eye.

The late Johnny Lewis (“Half Sack” in SONS OF ANARCHY) shines as Tim, deeply in love with Molly but without a clue as to how to help her. It’s mentioned that they don’t have the health insurance to get her the attention she really needs. I wish I was comfortable saying this is the reason he and Hannah make such piss-poor decisions, but honestly it felt like the decisions they made were the ones the writers needed them to make to have the story move the way they wanted.

The late Johnny Lewis (“Half Sack” on SONS OF ANARCHY) plays Tim in LOVELY MOLLY.

There are simply too many questions brought up during the course of the movie to answer all of them in a way that feels satisfying. It felt like Eduardo Sanchez and Jamie Nash wrote the screenplay while keeping their shooting budget in the forefront of their minds. It seemed like any aspect that threatened to exceed what they could pay for was dropped without another glance. The movie could’ve used a far less restrictive writing process. I think it would’ve been better for them to just cut loose and write whatever the story dictated, and then edit it down to meet the budget later. There are a couple of instances where the plot felt out-of-control, as if even the director didn’t understand why things were happening.

These drawbacks were relatively small, though. In all, LOVELY MOLLY is a very tense film that keeps you guessing throughout. It’s the kind of movie you don’t finish and forget about. This one will keep you thinking long after your media center powers down. It may even draw you back to watch it again.

I give it three stars with two time-outs.

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The Reassessment Files: MALEVOLENCE (2004)

Posted in 2012, Indie Horror, Killers, Madness, Paul McMahon Columns, Psychos, Reassessment Files, Serial Killer flicks with tags Bereavement, Malevolence, Psychos, R. Brandon Johnson, Serial Killer Movies, Stevan Mena on October 17, 2012 by knifefighter

The Reassessment Files:
MALEVOLENCE (2004)
Paul McMahon – The Distracted Critic

To be perfectly transparent, the first time I saw MALEVOLENCE was at the premiere in Worcester Mass, at the Bijou theater. Today, the Bijou exists as a deep pit of rubble right in the heart of New England’s second-largest city. I miss the hell out of that theater. Anyway, that night was great fun. I went alone, as I often do when attending horror-themed events, and the place was packed with horror freaks. I felt so at home. I arrived early and was met at the door by R. Brandon Johnson, who plays Julien in the movie. He was a great guy and obviously as excited to be there as everyone else. He introduced me to Stevan Mena, who wrote and directed MALEVOLENCE, who in turn introduced me to Gunnar Hanson (the original Leatherface in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, 1974), who wasn’t in the movie but came to draw fans.

I admit that the venue might have had something to do with me granting the movie three enthusiastic stars at the time. I’ve been told that rating was a result of my being caught up in the excitement. There are elements of the film, however, that have stuck with me long enough that I don’t believe all my love for it was tied up in the experience of that night.

The first thing we see on screen is a title card of missing children statistics. Next we get: “In 1989, Martin Bristol disappeared while playing on his backyard swing in Minersville, Pennsylvania. He was six years old.” We then see a girl hanging by her wrists in a dark cellar while a shadowy figure carries in a burlap sack, which he opens to free a young boy– Martin Bristol. It’s the same opening as in the film BEREAVEMENT (2010) (see my previous review), only shot with different actors. The action plays out the same way, and then we’re treated to a scene card that says: “September, 1999.” Martin is now sixteen.

Link to Paul’s review of BEREAVEMENT.

We look up a hill in a beautiful cemetery, a great cinematic view, while two shady-looking characters meet at the top. They talk in riddles for a few moments, giving us a clear idea that they’re planning some kind of heist and will meet up afterward at a house that’s been “vacant for years.” Max, an evil-looking character with a mean facial scar, promises Kurt, a mullet-wearing, goofy-grinning, itchy-way-down-deep-in-his-pants type, that there’ll be “no loose ends.” If you’ve seen more than one movie featuring a crime, you know what that means.

Now we meet two more characters, Marylin and Julien. Marylin is Max’s baby sister. Julien is her boyfriend and he doesn’t want to go along with this, but they owe money to “those people” and he really doesn’t see another option. “I’m not spending the rest of my life scratching off lottery tickets hoping for a miracle,” Marylin says.

We cut to a girl’s softball game. A blonde, skinny mother watches the game excitedly, waving to the pitcher. The pitcher’s name is Courtney. The mother’s is Samantha.

There’s a bank robbery. Max, Marylin and Julien arrive. Max gives Julien a gun. Julien doesn’t want it, but is forced to pocket it anyway. They don Halloween masks. Kurt must have missed that memo because he shows up wearing a pillowcase with eye slits cut in it. The bank robbery goes badly, and Max is shot. Kurt runs with two bags of money down one alley. Marylin and Julien return to their car, stuff a bloody Max into the back seat, and drive away.

Kurt lost his Frankenstein mask, so he improvised with stolen motel pillowcase. He’s such a criminal.

By now, Courtney’s team has lost the ball game. Courtney feels it’s her fault. Samantha, being one of the world’s greatest Moms, pulls into a gas station for a curative highly processed ice cream snack. Courtney digs around behind the seat for her mitt.

Meanwhile, Kurt celebrates getting away and has a blowout. He grabs the money and the mask and abandons his car, running across a field to a highway, where he finds a gas station and an apparently vacant minivan, still running. Kurt leaps in, surprising Courtney and then overpowering her. With his mask back in place and his gun to the girl’s head, he makes Samantha drive them to the house in the middle of nowhere. The one that’s been “vacant for years.”

Once there, Courtney escapes and runs through the forest to a nearby abandoned meat packing plant. At that point, things start to go really wrong for everyone.

Samantha (Samantha Dark) and Julien (R. Brandon Johnson) search an abandoned house for the explanation to everything.

There are enough parts to the story that it stays interesting throughout. It’s the first full-length effort of Stevan Mena, but his being an amateur isn’t apparent. MALEVOLENCE was shot on a miniscule budget, and that much is apparent here and there. Even so, Mena’s found a foreboding and formidable location to shoot the movie. The natural growth of the forest gives the same hide-and-seek shadow trickery that is a staple of the FRIDAY THE 13TH franchise, and the deserted abattoir is rife with creepy, dirty hallways sporting jagged shadows from the junk piled everywhere.

There are no well-known actors involved. R. Brandon Johnson, who played Julien, has appeared in the soap opera ONE LIFE TO LIVE and, more recently, in the TV series SHAKE IT UP! Samantha Dark, who plays Samantha, does some pretty convincing work here. She’s appeared in ULTRACHRIST (2003) and Mena’s horror-comedy BRUTAL MASSACRE (2007). A shout out should go to John Richard Ingram, who played Sheriff Riley here and then reprised his role in BEREAVEMENT.

Watching the movie again, I came away with the same sense of satisfaction that I had the last time. There are definite glimpses of a director who knows how to tell an effective story, and who is only going to get better. My rating for the film fell, but only from “three enthusiastic stars” to a simpler “three stars.”

First viewing: 3!!! out of 5 stars
Reassessment: 3 out of 5 stars

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The Distracted Critic: BEREAVEMENT (2010)

Posted in 2012, Indie Horror, Killers, Madness, Murder!, Paul McMahon Columns, Psycho killer, Psychos, Serial Killer flicks, The Distracted Critic with tags Bereavement, John Savage, Malevolence, Michael Biehn, Psychos, Serial Killer, Stevan Mena on October 10, 2012 by knifefighter

BEREAVEMENT (2010)
Review by Paul McMahon– The Distracted Critic

Rarely do I watch a movie in one sitting anymore. Too often my interest wanes and I find myself wandering away to do something else. In addition to doling out movie ratings, I’ll also tell you how many times a movie lost my interest during its running time. –The Distracted Critic

I’m finding that there are two halves to my psychology when it comes to rating movies. First, it’s pretty easy to tell what a film is intended to be. Based on that, it’s easy to tell whether it surpassed its goal, achieved it, fell short, or failed miserably. Second, no matter how hard I try to go in with an open mind, I always have an expectation of how a movie’s going to affect me, be it based on a trailer, on overheard comments, or on what I hope to experience based on my mood that day. Critique germinates in the gap between expectation and experience.

In the case of BEREAVEMENT (2010), I remembered being impressed with director Stevan Mena’s style and workmanship on his first feature, MALEVOLENCE (2004), and I expected to be wowed again. I was. To a point.

BEREAVEMENT is a prequel to MALEVOLENCE. It starts creepily enough, with six-year-old Martin Bristol playing on his backyard swing, when a rusty old truck pulls to a stop in front of him. His mother, meanwhile, is explaining to a potential aide that her son has CIP, a rare condition that prevents him from recognizing pain. When next she looks outside, the boy is gone.

We see a girl chained to the ceiling in a dark basement. She’s obviously been there a while. A figure lugs in a burlap sack, puts it down and opens the top. Inside, Martin blinks and looks around, seemingly unafraid. The dark figure cuts Martin deeply along one cheek to show him that knives don’t hurt, and then begins stabbing the dangling girl while she screams. Martin runs, and is caught.

Five years later.

A waitress from a local diner is abducted and chained up by her wrists in the same dark cellar as before. On the other side of a makeshift wall, another girl hangs, insisting that there’s no escape and they will be killed.

A man in a pick-up truck, Michael Beihn (ALIENS, 1986 and GRINDHOUSE: PLANET TERROR, 2007) picks up a gorgeous girl in the middle of nowhere. We learn this is his niece, Allison (Alexandra Daddario, who plays Annabeth Chase in the PERCY JACKSON movie series, both THE LIGHTNING THIEF in 2010 and the upcoming SEA OF MONSTERS due in 2013), and she’s coming to live with his family. She’s a long distance runner from Chicago, shunted to the middle of nowhere, and the school doesn’t have a girl’s track team. She goes for a run, passes a creepy abandoned building and sees the scarred Martin Bristol in a window. He bolts. A little further on, she’s almost run over by a truck. She’s helped up and cared for by William (Nolan Gerard Funk, HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET, 2012), a local boy her own age that you just know is going to be loathed by her uncle. We learn that Allison’s parents were killed when an SUV blew a stop sign.

“It’s funny how everything can change in an instant,” she tells William at one point, summing up the gist of the film. “A stranger can come along and in the blink of an eye just destroy everything.”

Meanwhile, Martin Bristol is still refusing to help his captor and even unties the girl from the diner at one point to watch her run about, looking for an escape.

Because this movie is a prequel, it’s pretty obvious where it’s heading. It’s a grim tale, brutal throughout. In other words, it’s not called BEREAVEMENT for nothing.

Like in MALEVOLENCE, Mena’s use of the camera, or more importantly his use of light and shadow to create atmosphere, is impressive. He balances the story elements well, interspersing scenes of violence with clashes of will between Allison and Uncle John. There’s a cameo appearance by the great John Savage (THE DEER HUNTER, 1978; HAIR, 1979 and according to IMDB he has worked on 17 projects for 2012 &13).

Martin Bristol’s kidnapper is revealed a little ways into the movie. A small man named Graham Sutter, sporting wild hair and crazy eyes who looks fragile as a baby bird; he’s played by Brett Rickaby (THE CRAZIES, 2010), with a lunatic intensity that frankly seems over-the-top.

Graham Sutter dares you to trespass on his property. He won’t beat you with that shovel. He’ll use it to bury your corpse.

BEREAVEMENT wants to fit on the top shelf of brutal killer movies. It’s got tones of BORDERLAND (2007), THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974), WOLF CREEK (2005), and many other vicious “torture-porn” films. But as Graham Sutter’s one-sided dialogues with the skulls of steer increase in frequency and insanity, his effectiveness as a person to be feared fades away. There’s a fine line between “insane” and “loopy.” Leatherface wouldn’t have been as effective if he’d talked in a high falsetto, and Mick Taylor of WOLF CREEK wouldn’t have been as formidable had he held conversations with a sock puppet. Graham’s lunatic quirk detracts from the grief-stricken tone of the film, and for me personally it broke the spell of the movie. Once that happened, the questions started coming.

What does this guy eat? How do other people react when he walks into a store? Does he pay his electric bill by check? Drawn from what bank? How does he make money to live if the abattoir he owns has been closed so long? How does he care for a six year old with such a serious medical condition? How has Martin Bristol survived in that deathtrap for five years without a single injury or infection? With the frequency that Graham kidnaps girls in town, how is he never investigated, let alone besieged by townsfolk brandishing torches and pitchforks?

I’ll stop there. You get the idea.

Here’s where we turn off Insane Boulevard to make a detour onto Loopy Lane.

In all, it’s a well-made movie, very effective in places, and it held my attention until Graham went cukoo toward the end. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did MALEVOLENCE, which made me want to go back and reassess that one.

I think I will do just that. Stay tuned.

BEREAVEMENT: Two stars, with a single time out.

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HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET (2012)

Posted in 2012, Barry Dejasu Columns, Evil Kids!, Family Secrets, Horror, Madness, Murder! with tags Elizabeth Shue, End of Street, family secret, Horror Movie, House, Jennifer Lawrence, Max Thieriot on September 26, 2012 by knifefighter

HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET (2012)
Movie Review by Barry Lee Dejasu

The Premise
Late one night, a very disturbed girl savagely offs her mother and father before running off into the woods.

Several years later, a mother named Sarah (Elizabeth Shue) and her teenage daughter Elissa (Jennifer Lawrence), move into the neighborhood. All seems well, even idyllic, until one night, when Sarah notices that the lights are on in the otherwise-allegedly-vacant house next door. Now, Sarah had gotten a deal on her own house because of the murders; however, it also turns out that the murder house still has one resident, and that’s the teen son of the dead couple, Ryan (Max Thieriot).

Ryan is very shy, but friendly, and Elissa makes friends with him after he picks her up on a rainy night after she’d walked out on a drunken party with some of her schoolmates. Soon, the two form an offbeat friendship, hinting at romance.

Elissa (Jennifer Lawrence) and Ryan (Max Thieriot) strike up a friendship in HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET.

Meanwhile, there are rumors abound in the town, with some of Elissa’s peers snickering about Carrie-Anne, Ryan’s missing murderous sister, still living in the woods. These rumors are enough for Sarah to want to keep her daughter away from trouble—and thus, away from Ryan. Elissa won’t hear of this, however, and finds ways to continue to see him.

The events of the past are not quite over, however…and Ryan may know more about them than he’s been letting on.

The Reaction
Not long after our introduction to Ryan, he is shown preparing a canned-noodle dinner and bringing it down to the basement of his house…where a hidden trapdoor leads to a secret hallway…at the end of which is a locked door…and inside, Carrie-Anne is very much alive, and every bit as crazy as the murderous rage at the beginning had hinted at.

When I saw this, I felt like the film was showing all its cards far too soon; I found myself cringing like a parent watching their kid saying the wrong line in a stage play. So many movies have the audience gasp at the Big Reveal of a villain, only…none of the protagonists in the movie get to know this until later on, and so by the time they find out, we’re way ahead of them. This kind of too-much-too-soon formula can really hurt a plot, especially if it’s a suspense tale.

And yet, in this case, I think it worked, for the most part.

Jennifer Lawrence singing.

For one thing, without this and related scenes, more time would be spent in the “calmer side” of the film, with the drama of Sarah and Elissa and Ryan taking up most of the plot, and only a couple of key scenes would bring Carrie-Anne into the filmic conversation, making Ryan very quickly seem suspicious of knowing more about her than he’s saying. Instead, the film presents this hidden plot right from the get-go, so we, the audience, have nothing left to suspect—and thus, we have no idea of just where the plot is headed. It also helps set up for those later Carrie-Anne sequences—we know what she’s capable of, and so we’re doubly-alert to how much tension could be created if and when she’s pitted against the protagonists, rather than if she’d just appeared out of nowhere (and again, in a more predictable setup).

And there’s something else that worked really well (for a while, at least) with showing Ryan’s relationship to Carrie-Anne: he still cares for her. He has to restrain her (asking her why she has to have such a frenzied reaction every time he opens the door), and he’s feeding her, and doing his best to keep her well…but she’s clearly a very disturbed person. This scene brings an unexpected slice of drama and characterization to an otherwise straight-horror movie, and I found it to be really a rather effective.

This surprisingly emotional element continues directly with Ryan’s interactions with Elissa, as he slowly opens up to about his life, and his sister (and just what made her so crazy). It’s clear that he never has anybody to talk to about this, due to the rumor-driven estrangement he gets from the locals and his own quiet nature, and it made his and her characters far more sympathetic than they otherwise could have been.

From a filmmaking perspective, the movie is full of strong personnel both in front of and behind the camera, with the three leads turning in equally effective performances. Jennifer Lawrence continues to show solid acting chops (although this was actually filmed before THE HUNGER GAMES), and also gets a couple of scenes in which she shows some promise as a singer. Elizabeth Shue is particularly welcome here, turning what could have been (but unfortunately, at times still was) a doting, overprotective mother into someone with charm and likeability. Max Theiriot has been a slow burn in movies, but he’s a good actor, and always gives each performance 100%, and for his role as Ryan, he does very well.

The tension builds in the final third.

In addition to more typical cinematic photography, this film has a number of scenes awash in hallucinogenic, disorienting photography, especially in Carrie-Anne’s scenes. The musical score, by Theo Green (who also worked on the film’s special visual effects), was particularly noteworthy, staying constantly in the background as an ever-changing, amorphous pulse of sounds both orchestrated and electronic, making for some truly engaging moments during some of the more emotional, as well as suspenseful, scenes. And with Mark Tonderai’s (HUSH, 2008) tight and intimate (and at times claustrophobic), direction, HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET was very atmospheric as well as tense. (And to its credit, it wasn’t even filmed nor post-converted into 3D!)

With all of these strengths at work, I found myself sitting up in my seat near the middle of the movie, thinking to myself, “This is different. This is not at all like what the previews make it out to be.” And for the most part, I was right.

What left me less-than-wowed were the events that unfolded in the final third of the film. Without giving away details, I’ll just say that a couple of background characters very randomly perform some heavy-handed behavior, which leads to a rushed scene of exposition and somewhat out-of-character nosiness. Further (and even more abrupt) changes in character behavior occur, and as a result, the movie was very quickly layered with cliché upon predictable-horror-movie cliché, which was really unfortunate, given the otherwise fairly strong buildup. (The final note of the movie is also particularly ill-advised, and comes across as a rather cheap rip-off of…well, if you see it, you’ll know exactly what I’m getting at.)

Yes, this movie had its share of problems, but did I hate it? Not at all. In fact, I can’t blame the movie for its faults, for as I was watching these problems unfold, I thought to myself, “It’s like someone else took over the script halfway through the production!” As it turns out, that is almost exactly what had happened.

A Back Story
As far back as 2003, Jonathan Mostow(BREAKDOWN, U-571) had been working on the script for HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET along with Richard Kelly (DONNIE DARKO), taking some inspiration taken from a 1973 film starring Bette Davis called SCREAM, PRETTY PEGGY.

Before production began, the studio, Relativity Media, wished for a rewrite of Mostow’s script, and they hired David Loucka for the task. Loucka ultimately received the writing credit, with only a nod to Mostow for the “story.” (Interestingly enough, Loucka had also been hired to rewrite Jim Sheridan’s script for the 2011 film DREAM HOUSE, which was ultimately a critical and box-office failure.)

Looking back, it was easy to see how HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET was so uneven. This isn’t to say it was bad, either—rather, so many of its better elements managed to make the final cut, resulting in two-thirds of a solid film.

Final Thoughts
The problems with this movie are not its own, but rather, that of the studio. The actors gave their all, making for some genuinely effective performances. Mark Tonderai, Theo Green and everyone else in the production took what they were given and made the best of it. And ultimately, we wind up with two-thirds of a solid film. One can only hope that someday, some kind of director’s cut may surface.

Barry Lee Dejasu gives HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET~ two and a half knives (out of 5).

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The David Lynch Chronicles – Volume 2: BLUE VELVET (1986)

Posted in 2012, Classic Films, Crime Films, David Lynch, Intense Movies, Madness, Mystery, Nick Cato Reviews, Pabst Blue Ribbon!, Sheri Sebastian-Gabriel Columns, Suspense, The David Lynch Chronicles with tags blue velvet, Classic Cinema, David Lynch, dennis hopper, frank booth, Intense Films, Isabella Rosselini, Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern on June 19, 2012 by knifefighter

(WARNING: The David Lynch Chronicles is an in-depth analysis of the films of David Lynch, and therefore contains spoilers. You have been warned…And now, on with the show!)

***

THE DAVID LYNCH CHRONILES: VOLUME II
The Plain Weirdness of BLUE VELVET (1986)
By Nick Cato and Sheri Sebastian-Gabriel

Nick Cato: Of all the films David Lynch has unleashed on the world, 1986’s BLUE VELVET is perhaps his most “normal.” It plays out like a straight murder mystery and there are hardly any head-scratching clues or off-the-wall things happening in the background. Everything is pretty much up front. But what sets the film apart from your standard Hollywood fare are the characters. While it’s set in present day, most of the cast seem to have a 1950s-retro vibe going on, especially Sandy Williams (played by Lynch regular Laura Dern) and night club crooner Dorothy Vallens (Lynch’s other favorite regular, Isabella Rossellini, in a ground-breaking performance). The film’s protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) has an innocent, curious boyish charm, but doesn’t hesitate to take advantage of dangerous opportunities. And unless you’ve been living on another planet these past 26 years, Dennis Hopper’s role as iconic bad guy Frank Booth is simultaneously terrifying and comical, threatening yet cool, a force of nature a hurricane wouldn’t want to mess with. Lynch uses his cast here to their full potential before pulling out a few cameos to add just a bit of weirdness to the proceedings.

Jeffrey returns to his small home town to visit his ailing father in the hospital. During his walk home through a wooded area, he happens to see something in the grass and discovers it’s a human ear. He brings the ear to the police but is unsatisfied with their actions. Eventually he gets info from Sandy, the police chief’s daughter, who points him to a seedy underworld Jeffrey never knew existed in his quiet home town.

Sheri Sebastian-Gabriel: BLUE VELVET might be “normal” by Lynch standards, but I’d hardly call it a “normal” film. Lynch blends in some themes that are rather typical of his work. His characters live in the land of white picket fences, warm apple pies cooling on window sills, and cute girls with ponytails next door. This idyllic wonderland is juxtaposed against a dark place that threatens to rip apart the innocence. The thing that makes Lynch’s work truly magical is that he makes us question our own realities. Are we part of the half that’s good or the half that’s bad? Or is anyone truly immune from those dark places we try to pretend away?

Jeffery Beaumont lives in this 50s-esque landscape populated by Bermuda shorts-wearing folks who walk down the street without concerning themselves with drug lords or murderers or other unpleasantness. When Jeffrey discovers an ear bereft of its owner in an overgrown lot, his world is turned upside down. He also discovers a side of himself that he didn’t know existed. Jeffrey, an innocent college guy who initially tries to help imperiled songstress Dorothy Vallens, eventually finds himself treating her the way bad guy Frank Booth does. It’s a study in the wickedness inside all of us, even the pure and innocent.

Nick Cato: And it’s Sandy who tells Jeffrey that her father has been looking into Dorothy Vallens’s background, inspiring him to do his own investigating. Jeffrey goes to see her at a night club (where we learn he’s a big fan of Heineken beer) and then follows her home. He hatches a plan to sneak inside her apartment to spy on her and see if she may somehow be connected to his gruesome discovery. Sandy reluctantly agrees to help him get in, and as soon as he does, BLUE VELVET begins an almost non-stop barrage of neo-noir suspense that lasts until the final reel.

While hiding in Dorothy’s closet, he watches her undress and is eventually discovered. To his surprise, she doesn’t call the cops or throw him out, but insists he remove his clothes. As soon as Dorothy begins to seduce Jeffrey, someone arrives home. Dorothy tells Jeffrey to get back in the closet. This is when we’re introduced to one of the most menacing villains ever to appear on film. We learn Frank Booth (played with total anarchic chaos by Dennis Hopper) is holding Dorothy’s husband and young son prisoner somewhere, their safety depending on her bowing to Frank’s sexually psychotic demands. As Jeffrey looks on, Booth forces Dorothy to pretend to be his mother as he inhales ether from a face mask he keeps stashed in his jacket. It’s one of Lynch’s most disturbing scenes, and also one of his most fascinating. Within seconds we understand Frank Booth can go in 100 different directions at once, we see Dorothy as both strong and submissive, and Jeffrey’s clean-cut image continues to crumble.

When Booth finally leaves, Dorothy tries once again to seduce Jeffrey…but when he refuses to hit her, she asks him to leave. Again, within seconds, we see even more sides to these complex characters that drag us deeper into Lynch’s mystery. We think that, for a second, Jeffrey is having some kind of sexual awakening, but his old self puts things on hold.

Sheri Sebastian-Gabriel: Lynch does a great job of developing Jeffrey’s good-guy image in the beginning. He befriends the police chief’s daughter to discover more about that peculiar ear he found. There’s obviously a romantic attraction between them, but Sandy has a boyfriend and, by golly, Jeffrey is such a gentleman that he does his best not to cross any lines. When Dorothy has a brutal sexual encounter with the terrifying Frank Booth (who could be the most terrifying villain of all time), he tries to soothe her. It seems like he wants to make love to her, but she wants him to be violent with her. He can’t bring himself to do it, and he leaves.

I think it’s an interesting dichotomy between the sweet, gentlemanly Jeffrey and the brutal, violent Frank. Even near the beginning, however, we get a glimpse of a yin-yang quality to Frank, which we’ll eventually see in Jeffrey as well. From time to time, Frank Booth, criminal, sadist, and drug addict, switches from being controlling and violent to babyish and submissive. He frequently refers to Dorothy as “Mommy,” and there are few hints that he and his cronies have brainwashed Dorothy’s kidnapped son into believing that his mother no longer wants him. Frank is now her baby. We often hear her on the phone, presumably with her child, reassuring him that he is her baby.

Nick Cato: After finding out Sandy has a boyfriend, Jeffrey attends another one of Dorothy’s gigs and sees Frank Booth watching the performance right near the stage. He’s playing with a piece of blue velvet he had ripped off her robe, while drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon (in contrast to Jeffrey’s beverage of preference, Heineken). Lynch uses tiny details like this to begin building more tension between the two (who at this point in the film have yet to meet). Jeffrey decides to spy on Frank, and over a couple of days discovers a pair of shady guys doing business with him. When Jeffrey reveals this information to Sandy, they share a brief kiss, but Sandy feels too connected to her boyfriend and stops. In turn, Jeffrey pays Dorothy another visit, although this time he knocks on the door first. To his surprise, Dorothy claims she has been thinking of him and they indulge in sex. She even convinces him to hit her, and while she enjoys it, we see Jeffrey is still uncomfortable with causing any more pain in her life.

When Jeffrey goes to leave, Frank comes down the hallway with his cronies and BLUE VELVET takes a rocket-leap forward in the suspense department. The first time I saw this I was on the edge of my seat, and after a current theatrical viewing, I still had the same butterflies in my stomach despite knowing what was to come.

Sheri Sebastian-Gabriel: Now the suspense begins to build. While spying on Frank Booth, Jeffrey discovers that some shady dealings are going down between Frank and some guy in a yellow sports coat, one that makes him look alarmingly like a Century 21 Realtor. Another gent with a mustache also appears to be doing some less-than-savory dealings in Frank’s neck of the woods.

Not long after, Jeffrey returns to Dorothy’s place. When he tries to leave, Frank and his cronies meet him in the hallway and kidnap him in one of the most terrifying rides you’re likely to see. After intimidating Jeffrey, Frank and the gang decide to pay their friend Ben a visit. Ben (portrayed by Dean Stockwell, in what could be the creepiest role of his career) is holding Dorothy’s son and husband hostage. Frank tells him to play Roy Orbison’s song “In Dreams,” at which point a spotlighted Ben lip syncs along in a scene that will ruin the song and your dreams forever. Frank gets angry at the song after a few minutes and screams at Ben to turn it off. Meanwhile, Dorothy is allowed to see her son, who is being kept in a back room. We continue to hear her reassure the child that she loves him and that he is still her baby. It occurs to me that perhaps this reassurance is what sets Frank off. He goes from being a menacing monster, scaring Jeffrey and intimidating Dorothy, to a weeping baby. Maybe he’s upset that his role as baby has been usurped or perhaps Dorothy’s love for her child reaches some emotion inside this evil man.

Once they leave, however, Frank goes back to being a professional bad guy. As they drive along, he starts sexually abusing Dorothy. Jeffrey, who is being held in the backseat by Frank’s henchmen, can’t handle this and tells Frank to leave her alone. Frank expresses his anger at being told not to get too hands-on with his woman, and Jeffrey gets beaten to a bloody pulp.

Nick Cato: WOAH! WOAH! WOAH!—let’s back up just a second here: BEFORE Booth takes Jeffrey, Dorothy, and his cronies to Ben’s den of freaks, BLUE VELVET’s most iconic moment goes down: Booth stops at a local bar, and before they enter he asks Jeffrey what his favorite beer is, to which Jeffrey answers, “Heineken.” Now despite the over-played response that comes from Frank Booth (it’s been plastered on t-shirts and even beer ads over the years), this is arguably the key moment where the audience understands what a true, uncompromising psychopath Booth is. He tells the poor kid, “Heineken? F**k that s**t! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”

Having watched and meditated over this brief piece of dialogue for the past 26 years, the line manages to simultaneously crack me up and creep me out. Booth’s comment sounds like a combination of an abusive father and a Marine drill Sergeant. It tells Jeffrey his own personal choices are wrong and no longer matter because after all, he’s now a part of Booth’s world.

Its little sequences like this that set a David Lynch film apart from your regular, mundane Hollywood fare. What could have been a simple, throw-away line has become a legendary comment that brings more meaning and menace to our villain the more you allow it to seep in.

In the middle of the party at Ben’s house, Booth becomes impatient waiting for the Pabst to be served … and it MUST be served in traditional beer glasses or YOU’D BETTER BELIEVE someone will pay for it. Only Dennis Hopper could’ve made the relaxing act of sipping a beer take on a completely sinister dimension.

Sheri Sebastian-Gabriel: All right, all right. The Pabst versus Heineken debate is an interesting point. You’ve got the good guy drinking his imported froufrou beer, and big, bad Frank Booth slugging down the workin’ man’s suds.

We know Frank Booth is the ultimate bad guy, not only because he demands that his brewski be served in the proper glass, but also because he drives the baddest car in the whole town. I assume no car in BLUE VELVET was built after 1970. Jeffrey drives the 1950s land yacht, like the good boy that he is. Frank Booth, on the other hand, has a Dodge Charger that burns up the city streets of quiet, idyllic Lumberton. It’s the classic good versus bad dynamic, but I think the two lines blur. Jeffrey discovers that he has a dark side. Frank is, in some ways, like the petulant toddler who must have his way or else he breaks down. Granted, this petulance is taken to the extreme, but he has a childish side to him.

Since we’re backtracking, let’s talk about the robins. When meeting up to discuss what each of them has discovered about Dorothy Vallens and Frank Booth, Sandy tells Jeffrey that she had a dream that the world was in disarray and everything was dark. A huge flock of robins brings in the light and makes everything okay. At the end, a robin is outside of the window, eating a bug. The good has crushed the bad. This aspect of the film made me happy. BLUE VELVET has its very dark moments, but in the end, love saves the day.

Nick Cato: And according to one of the extras on the BLUE VELVET DVD, they couldn’t get a real robin to perform properly, so a fake one was created just for that final sequence. I have to say it looked pretty good, even on the big screen.

But back to the story: after a wild night of drinking and speeding down the highway with Frank and company, Jeffrey has his butt kicked and wakes up right where they left him. After walking all the way home, he decides to pay a visit to Sandy’s father at the police station, only to find that her father’s partner is one of the shady men he had spied on while staking out Frank Booth. And here BLUE VELVET gets a classic noir-type twist, adding even more of an old-school feel to the proceedings. Sandy’s father listens to Jeffrey’s story, but asks him to stay away as to not spoil a proper police investigation he’s currently heading.

Then Lynch shifts into some classic Lynchian weirdness: Jeffrey and Sandy attend a dance, and are followed home. But it’s not Frank Booth looking for more trouble: it’s Sandy’s boyfriend wanting to know what’s going on. But before fists can fly, Dorothy shows up seemingly out of nowhere—filthy and stark naked—and looks to Jeffrey for comfort, mumbling something about them being secret lovers.

Sheri Sebastian-Gabriel: There’s nothing quite like a disheveled, abused, naked lady to really break up a fight. It also draws us into some serious histrionics from Sandy. Jeffrey pulls the nude Dorothy into his home along with Sandy. During his attempts to comfort Dorothy and hide her nudity, he lets it slip that his interest in Dorothy has been sexual. The expression on Sandy’s face is over-the-top. She’s so horrified that she can’t speak. Sandy lives in a world where premarital sex is a serious taboo, and the knowledge that the guy she has a crush on has been doing the mattress tango with this mysterious chanteuse is simply too much to handle. She eventually gets over it, though, and the two decide to work together to bust Frank and reunite Dorothy with her son and husband.

Speaking of mysterious folks, we learn that the guy in the Century 21 jacket that has been doing underhanded dealings with Frank Booth is actually a cop. Lynch did such an amazing job of keeping this fact hidden that it elicited gasps from people in the audience at a recent big-screen showing. This is when it gets really weird. Jeffrey puts two and two together about the strange mustachioed fellow he’d seen around Frank’s building, giving a briefcase to Century 21 guy. He rushes to Dorothy’s place to warn her that the guy was none other than Frank himself, only to be followed by Frank in the wig and mustache.

Nick Cato: The next-to-final scene at Dorothy’s apartment is a real pressure cooker. Jeffrey finds Dorothy’s husband dead with a hole in his temple and (MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!) his ear missing. He also finds one of Booth’s cronies in the apartment, standing in a sort-of daze, as if he has been zombified by some unknown means. When Jeffrey goes to leave, he sees the man who has been following him coming up the stairs but realizes too late it’s been Frank Booth in disguise. Jeffrey contacts Sandy’s father over the zombified crony’s walkie talkie, and lies about where he is in the apartment. Frank Booth enters, having heard this on his own radio, and begins to call Jeffrey an idiot for giving away his location. Jeffrey manages to hide in the same closet he had spied on Dorothy earlier in the film as Frank makes his way to the bedroom, where he hears Jeffrey’s walkie make noise. Pissed off when he discovers Jeffrey’s not there, he comes out and fires his pistol sporadically, killing his zombified crony in the process.

Booth slowly approaches the only place Jeffrey can be—the closet—and as soon as he opens it, Jeffrey fires at point blank range with a gun he had taken off the crony, causing Booth’s brains to fly out the back of his head. The grim image of Booth laying in his own cranium sauce looked doubly-demented on the big screen, and even as he lays dead, looking up to the ceiling, the man causes the viewer to be nervous.

BLUE VELVET then goes from sheer brutality to one of Lynch’s most charming conclusions.

Sheri Sebastian-Gabriel: It’s amazing to me how the film ends on such a positive note. Everyone is happy, the robins are eating bugs, and Jeffrey and Sandy presumably live happily ever after in suburbia.

I read in an interview that Mr. Lynch grew up in this sort of tranquil wonderland but discovered horror when he learned that there were ants feeding on the pitch oozing from the cherry tree. That sums up BLUE VELVET pretty well.

BLUE VELVET is a ride through a clean-cut young man’s oedipal nightmare. We catch a glimpse at the very end of Dorothy playing in a park with her son. The cute guy gets the swell girl, and all is right with the world again. And isn’t that the fairy tale ending we all want?

Nick Cato: Believe it or not, I’ve always found this happy-happy, flowers and birds ending more disturbing than what precedes it. Jeffrey and Sandy seem amazed that a robin has landed on the window sill, munching on a bug. Is this a sign that good has conquered evil in their small town? Or does it mean even the pretty things have dark secrets that the other person has to accept? Despite how happy our couple looks, as well as Dorothy now being reunited with her son, Lynch manages to give even this bright, sunny conclusion a latent sense of unease.

If you’ve never experienced a David Lynch film before, BLUE VELVET is perhaps the best place to start: your mind won’t be too fried by the ending, and your appetite for his darker, more obscure works just may be kindled.

Sheri Sebastian-Gabriel: Even in a Lynch film, a happy ending leaves the viewer wondering when the other shoe will fall. We don’t know what’s going to happen after the credits roll, but we assume that the characters’ lives, at least the ones who make it to the end, go on in some manner even after we leave the theater and move on to other pursuits. Maybe that’s a sign of good filmmaking.

Perhaps the happy ending sticks out because it’s one of the few Lynch films that end on a positive note. Those who are familiar with the awesomeness that is David Lynch come to expect some warped, bizarre, or otherwise dark ending. If you’re expecting your protagonist to wake up only to discover he’s really a serial killer keeping a basketful of ears as souvenirs after living in a delusional world where he’s a good guy, it’s a little disorienting to find that everything wraps up in a nice little package at the end. There’s a clearer division between good and evil here than in many Lynch films. Good and evil blur in films like LOST HIGHWAY (1997) and MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001). There’s a merging of the two even in BLUE VELVET, but it’s more subtle.

Although most of Lynch’s work appeals to those with a thirst for the strange, BLUE VELVET would be appropriate for anyone who likes a good mystery told in a unique way.

-END-

Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) intimidates Jeffrey (he’s in the back seat of Booth’s car) as Dorothy (Isabella Rossolini) looks on in terror from the front seat.

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Pickin’ the Carcass: THE CALLER (2011)

Posted in 2012, Madness, Michael Arruda Reviews, Murder!, Pickin' the Carcass, Time Travel with tags Ed Quinn, Matthew Parkhill, Rachelle Lefevre, Rotary Phones, Stephen Moyer, The Caller, Time Travel on May 30, 2012 by knifefighter

PICKIN’ THE CARCASS: THE CALLER (2011)
By Michael Arruda

In THE CALLER (2011), a recently divorced woman is terrorized by strange phone calls. No, it’s not a telemarketer on the line. It’s a crazed woman who’s somehow calling from a different decade.

Upon the heels of a messy divorce, Mary Kee (Rachelle Lefevre) moves into a new apartment where she receives a phone call from a woman asking to speak to a man who supposedly lives there. Mary assumes it’s the wrong number, but when the woman, who says her name is Rose, identifies the number and the address of the apartment, Mary tells her that obviously the guy has moved out. The woman insists however that she’s right, that she just saw the man there that very day. At this point, Mary figures the woman is crazy and hangs up.

But the woman continues to call. For a while, Mary is sympathetic towards her, as Rose is sad and depressed, because the man she claims lives in the apartment had promised to marry her. But when she says she’s living in 1979, Mary again figures the woman has flipped her lid.

But then strange things begin to happen. Things Rose does in the past begin to affect things in the present, and it reaches the point where Mary can’t ignore the possibility that something bizarre is going on. She turns to her boyfriend John (Stephen Moyer) for help, and he thinks it might be her creepy ex-husband Steven (Ed Quinn) playing tricks on her, and Steven is creepy, and then some. He’s a big-time jerk and a creep who regularly ignores the restraining order against him and taunts and threatens Mary at his leisure.

Sure, it could be Steven, but when Rose goes “psycho” on Mary and threatens Mary’s friends, carrying out these threats in 1979, it changes Mary’s present. Mary realizes Rose and her threats are the real deal and suddenly she finds herself fighting for her life.

Yep, it’s SINGLE WHITE FEMALE (1992) meets THE TIME MACHINE (1960), and sadly, it sounds much better than it actually is, because in reality, THE CALLER isn’t a very good movie.

I had trouble with THE CALLER from the get-go. Its initial image is that of a big, black rotary phone, which in itself is a good thing because it immediately brought to mind Alfred Hitchcock’s DIAL M FOR MURDER (1954). When the movie opens and Mary has an old-fashioned rotary phone in her apartment, I’m thinking, this is a period piece, but it’s not. It takes place in the present. I found this strange, and I couldn’t get past the fact that in this story, Mary hardly uses her cell phone, which raises several interesting questions.

For example, when things start to go wrong with Rose, why doesn’t Mary just disconnect her phone? She has a cell phone! Use it! Why doesn’t she use the cell phone when she’s in her apartment? We see her use it elsewhere. And who uses rotary phones anymore? Even if you have a land line, it’s not a rotary phone with a dial, but the one in this movie is, and there’s no mention that it’s some neat antique. It’s just there, in the apartment. This bugged me throughout the whole movie.

Also, even if Mary wanted to keep a land line, why doesn’t she just change her phone number? Or, here’s a concept: call the police!! Mary does none of these things, which seems like just an excuse to keep the story going. There were plenty of ways Mary could have gotten rid of Rose before all the SINGLE WHITE FEMALE psycho stuff started happening. There was some lazy writing in this one.

At first, I was intrigued by the concept of Mary receiving phone calls from someone living in 1979. I was eager to learn where this was going to go.

However, as the movie moves along, the explanations falter because there are a lot of holes in the plot. When Rose takes action in 1979, it affects Mary in 2011, but these actions and results don’t always make sense. If Rose were to murder someone in 1979, someone who Mary had already met in 2011, would they suddenly be dead in 2011 after Rose murdered them? I’m not sure if that’s how it would work, and this happens several times. It’s all so neat and convenient, it didn’t really ring true for me.

Plus, how is it that Rose can find these people who Mary knows now in 2011 so easily back in 1979? They’re still all living in the same area? Really?

Also, Rose’s voice on the phone sounds like she’s an old lady, like someone in her 70s. She’s supposed to be 41. This would make sense if Mary is speaking to Rose in 2011 because that’s the age she would be now, but initially, Rose says it’s 1979. Why would Rose lie? Again, lazy writing. I mean, at times, THE CALLER is on the verge of being a very clever movie, but each chance it gets at accomplishing this feat, it drops the ball.

The cast isn’t bad. I enjoyed Rachelle Lefevre in the lead role as Mary Kee. She had a very likeable personality, and she’s good-looking to boot! She would have been good enough to carry this movie had the story been better. One drawback to her performance is, for someone who’s being threatened, she makes Mary awfully passive.

The same can be said for the whole movie. There’s something very passive about it. It definitely lacks intensity.

Stephen Moyer is okay as John, Mary’s boyfriend, but he’s another passive, rather dull character. Ed Quinn does a nice job making Mary’s ex-husband Steven a complete creep and a jerk, but ultimately he’s stuck in a wasted subplot. Lorna Raver plays Rose, and we don’t get to see her until the end of the movie. She’s okay, but she’s certainly not a good enough villainess to carry this movie, so ultimately, she’s a disappointment.

The same can be said for both the directing and writing for this one. THE CALLER was directed by Matthew Parkhill, and although there are some nicely shot scenes, the movie as a whole lacks pacing and urgency. For a thriller, it’s awfully mild.

The screenplay by Sergio Casci has a lot of problems, mostly associated with its time shift/alternate universe plot, which really needs to make more sense. The threat against Mary also needs to be greater and more detailed. The story and the writing as a whole need to be much tighter.

I was interested in the premise of THE CALLER, and for most of the first half of this movie I was into it, but I expected better explanations and resolutions, and some thrills and chills along the way would have been most welcome. The ending is also a disappointment, as things wrap up way too easily.

As it stands, THE CALLER is a mediocre thriller that never gets into a groove or hits its stride. This is one call you’d best hang up on.

—END—

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Archive for the Madness Category

Transmissions to Earth: BAD DREAMS (1988)

CRITERION AFTER DARK: THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY (1961)

Transmissions to Earth Intercepts THE LAST BROADCAST (1998)

THE COLLECTION (2012)

LOVELY MOLLY (2011)

The Reassessment Files: MALEVOLENCE (2004)

The Distracted Critic: BEREAVEMENT (2010)

HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET (2012)

The David Lynch Chronicles – Volume 2: BLUE VELVET (1986)

Pickin’ the Carcass: THE CALLER (2011)

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