Alucarda

A young woman, sent to a convent by her father, is roomed with the mysterious, free-spirited Alucarda. Unfortunately, Alucarda is maybe a little too free-spirited and adventurous, and soon the girls are all caught up in a world of satanic rituals, orgies, torture, vampires, and gratuitous nudity.

Alucarda aims to be, I think, a sort of surreal, over-the-top, possibly intentionally campy expression of religious and sexual hysteria. The dream-like opening scenes, where the girls meet some weird hairy man in the woods and follow him to a castle no questions asked, showed a lot of promise as oddball entertainment. It keeps this weird tone going through the whole film, but that doesn't really prove to be enough. At some point, it just seems like, as ridiculous as the whole film is, it really needs to cut loose and bust out a crazy blood bath or something. Instead, it mostly feels like a film full of half measures; everything is all weird and tawdry, sure, with the sex and the torture and beheadings and stuff, but nothing crazy enough ever happens, and never for a sustained period of time. I guess shit does finally hit the fan at the very end, but by that point it was too little, too late. For such a strange, sleazy film, it could have benefited from a little less restraint.

Grade: C

Eyes Without a Face

A wealthy, amoral surgeon and his loyal assistant begin abducting young women, with plans to use them as donors for his disfigured daughter's face transplant.

I had sort of wanted to try to make Eyes Without a Face my last movie of October, since I started the month with Jesus Franco's crappy ripoff Faceless. But I have tentative plans on the 31st, and I was worried I'd accidentally blow it and not fit this one in in time.

Of course, if you haven't seen this one, it's a real classic. It's a creepy but classy affair, icky and surprisingly violent for its time, but with a strange elegance and beauty to it. The doctor's daughter, Christiane, is one of the real accomplishments in horror cinema. She has a horribly disfigured face (which we never see, except in one purposefully out of focus shot) and is made to wear an unnerving, white, expressionless mask. By all appearances, Christiane is the film's monster, but she's a complex, conflicted character, and the one the audience ends up most empathizing with.

I had not seen this in several years, and the thing I forgot about it that is really cool is that the first 20 minutes or so play as kind of a mystery. The film opens with the doctor's assistant dumping a corpse in a river, so we know something terrible is going on, but for a while we are lead to believe that the corpse is that of Christiane, and the doctor's actual involvement in what is going on is unclear.

This leads to a great scene that plays very differently the second time you see the film, where the doctor runs in to the father of the young woman he has murdered. The doctor has falsely identified her body as Christiane's, and when the man tries to open to the doctor about his concern for his missing daughter, the doctor chastises him, saying something like "It's funny I should have to console you, when you still have some hope left." That shit is chilling on so many levels.

Grade: B+

American Horror Story (Episode4 "Halloween Part I")

Okay, the last American Horror Story of October and... I don't really have a lot to say. This was a major improvement over last week's silly episode, but doesn't show enough of the promise that I felt episode 2 displayed. There's enough crazy stuff going on by the "cliffhanger" endings that I'm curious to see part 2, which means I'm hanging around at least one more week. Yet it suffered from the same lack of focus as last week's episode and the pilot, and mostly just felt like an hour of setup for what I'm hoping is going to be a cool payoff in part 2.

The biggest development was the death of Addie, and since she died before her body could be put on the property, it looks like she won't be coming back as a ghost. Which is a damn shame, because Addie was (by default) the closest thing the show had to a likable character. They spent a lot of time setting things up for her character over the past 4 episodes that I'm kinda stunned to see her go so soon, so maybe she will (somehow?) be back. I hope so, because the Harmon family and everyone else on this damn show are so mopey that even when they get to go over the top (like this week when the dad punted Burn Face's candy basket across the lawn) it still feels pretty dour.

Grade: C+

Attack the Block

A gang of teenagers in London find themselves doing battle with some nasty, hairy aliens with glow in the dark teeth.

This is a classic case of a movie getting overhyped before I saw it. It's funny and cute and I liked it, but when people start invoking the name of John Carpenter in their reviews I'm sort of expecting something a little more accomplished than this. Attack the Block has a great cast (this ought to be a starmaker for the kid who plays Moses, the hero) and a nice look, but its pace is rushed and uneven. I can appreciate that the filmmakers may have wanted to get right to the action and keep the momentum going, but if that was the case they should have streamlined the story more. Even coming in under 90 minutes it still has too many damn subplots and characters padding things out.

I'd say it's all more clever than successful. It has a fun screenplay with some good ideas for some cool action and suspense sequences (especially one where the kids get lost and disoriented in a smoke-filled hallway) but director Joe Cornish doesn't really have the chops to pull it off. As fun as it is to watch punk kids fight evil space monsters, the action is all kind of choppy and otherwise unremarkable in its execution.

I don't want to pile on this one too much, so I'll stop here. I still did quite enjoy it, I just wish my expectations had been set a little lower. I'd say it's more of a slight but genuine pleasure, rather than the new classic some folks have painted it as.

Grade: B-

The Silent House

A young woman and her father are staying at a creepy old house, which they have been hired to fix up. Her father goes to investigate some strange noises, and she hears what sounds like a struggle. Is she trapped in the house with a killer?

The gimmick of The Silent House is that it was designed to look like it was filmed all in one shot. In fact, I've read many claims online that it was done in one shot, but I'm positive I saw several masked edits. I love checking out stuff like this, but I also have to admit that it's kind of pointless. There's rarely a valid artistic reason for attempting this kind of thing, it's usually just a gimmick slapped on the cover up how unremarkable the rest of the film. Sometimes you get a nice fit of style and material, like the similarly gimmicked Rope, but not everyone has Hitchcock's technical chops or his gift for showmanship.

The Silent House is actually pretty good for a while. The house is a great location, with great set design, and that's important because 80% of this film is just a girl walking around a dark house with a lantern looking at things. The setup is suspenseful, and despite the fact that the one-shot style must have limited the filmmakers' options in terms of lighting, framing, etc, it has a little bit of atmosphere going for it, too.

I think the main thing that gets in its way is the underwhelming story, which ends up limiting the film's possibilities rather than expanding them. I would have been perfectly happy if it was just a girl in a house with a killer, with quiet scenes of her exploring the house looking for an escape route punctuated by an attack every 10 or 15 minutes. Instead, the movie runs out of steam probably not much past the half way mark, as details of what is happening are left vague because, sigh, there's a SPOILERS really predictable twist ending coming. The kind I really hate, where it pretty much negates everything that came before it. That's annoying under normal circumstances, but it's even worse here because it seems to violate the entire point of the one-shot gimmick. Presumably everything we're seeing is happening in "real time," but the ending makes it clear that much of what we were seeing wasn't happening at all.


Grade: C+

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

I think the title says it all.

For years, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has been a film I very much liked but never really loved the way a horror fan is supposed to love it. It's an undisputed classic, yet as much as I liked it I never thought it stood up to any of the other classics from its era. Why was I reluctant to embrace it fully? Was it because it's not as suspense driven as my favorites tend to be? Was it because of the unlikable lead characters? Was it because of it's more rough hewn look, when I typically prefer something a little more elegant?

All true, but I think I need to finally just say "uncle" and admit what this is. It will probably never mean as much to me as Halloween or Deep Red or Dawn of the Dead, but who said this had to be a horse race? It's a masterpiece of grimy, gritty atmosphere. There are countless strikingly framed shots. The set design is awesome. The lead actors all kind of suck, but the actors playing the killers are creepy as hell. There are more than a handful of all-time classic horror movie scenes, most notably the first appearance of Leatherface, which has to be in the top 10. It's not as scary as my other favorites are, but it's strange and wildly entertaining, and a lot more darkly funny than I think it gets credit for. So I hereby shed off any hesitation I had about calling this a great horror movie. It's a great horror movie.

Grade: A-

The Abandoned

A woman travels to Russia to trace her family history, and ends up at their old farmhouse where she meets her long lost twin. Only some spooky shit is going down there, and soon enough she's facing off against a sinister force.

I watched two of Nacho Cerda's short films earlier in the month, and though neither was exactly a home run, they both showed enough potential that I knew I wanted to check out The Abandoned, apparently his only feature. And I'm glad I did. This is a weird, spooky film, heavy on atmosphere and with a nice dash of suspense. At heart I suppose it is a haunted house story, but one with some odd and unique ideas, enough so that you're not really sure where it's going at any given moment. And I'm not even sure I could totally explain what was supposed to have happened, but sometimes I like it like that. It has ghosts and ghouls and time loops and man-eating warthogs, really going out there with a crazy story and yet maintaining an eerie tone that keeps it from getting silly.

Though not completely without dialogue as his short films were, Cerda is good a crafting long stretches of film without any talking, focusing more on mood and suspense and doing a pretty good job of it. Good chunks of the movie are just the protagonist walking around witnessing spooky things happening, which can be tedious in some films, but I'd say the mix of creepy ideas and atmosphere is potent enough to keep the viewer engaged throughout.

Grade: B

Anthropophagus

A bunch of obnoxious assholes take a trip to a little island town, only the town appears to be inexplicably deserted. Before you know it, they're all being picked off by some sort of invincible (?) cannibal dude, who apparently has already murdered literally everyone in town.

Andy pretty much insisted I watch this one, so I obliged. But I don't think he wanted me to watch it because he thought I would like it, so much as he bought it blind, didn't like it, but wanted it to get some use so it didn't feel like a complete waste of money.

Anyways, it's a lousy movie: ugly, boring and artless. And I'm still not sure I understand the story. So, like, the cannibal guy managed to wipe out the entire town, including all law enforcement, without anyone realizing (?) even though he's just one dude. So I think they explain at one point, when the protagonists find a journal that details what happened, that the guy is unkillable. Except at the end they totally kill him in a normal, straight forward way. So if he wasn't invincible, how the hell did he not get killed by the cops or something?

Whatever. The only remotely good thing about the movie is the killer, who looks genuinely creepy and, if I recall, has a cool introduction where he steps out of the shadows and there's lightning and stuff. Otherwise, this is just dull eurosleaze best suited for the lowest common denominator gorehound.

Grade: D

God Told Me To

After a string of random, seemingly unrelated murders by ordinary people, a detective finds that the perpetrators keep giving the same reason for their acts. And guess what that is?

Larry Cohen is something of a master of conceptual horror, by which I mean he has great ideas for horror movies, and his films rely more on those concepts and exploring them then they often do on, say, crafting tight set pieces or building atmosphere or what have you. And this has got to be one of his best ideas. It raises so many provocative questions about the nature of religion and faith in such a cool, creepy-ass way that of course the movie isn't really going to be able to live up to it, and the explanation and conclusion is going to be a bit of a letdown. That's just how Cohen usually rolls, and I think it's best to just accept the great ideas then nitpick how it could have been better.

Grade: B-

Paranormal Activity 3

In this prequel, we find out how Katie and Kristi first experienced the supernatural, as children. And fortunately for us, their mom's boyfriend videotaped the whole thing, so the movie conveniently doesn't have to change format from the series' found footage gimmick.

I didn't really care for either of the first two Paranormal Activity movies, but the thing that the original understood that the sequel didn't seem to get is that fear in movies is all about anticipation. It's not so much about the scary thing as it is about waiting for the scary thing to happen. Anyone can say "boo!", but getting someone to dread a hypothetical future boo is the real skill set.

Part 3 understands this, and in fact I thought it was the best of the series so far. It was directed by the guys who did Catfish, the much talked about documentary that's not really talked about because of its merits or flaws so much as because everyone wants to know if it was bullshit. Whether or not Paranormal Activity 3 is their first fake-umentary or their second, both films are somewhat adroit at milking the audience's anticipation of what is going to happen next for tension.

Though the story is just another rehash of the events of the original (with, granted, a bit of a twist at the end this time) complete with an abrupt anticlimax, this one is probably the most clever of the three. The film's masterstroke is to have one of the cameras mounted on an oscillating fan, slowly panning between the kitchen and the living room and creating a nice tension between what's in frame and what's out. This leads to some fun scenes where objects ominously disappear, or mysterious figures appear, as the camera pans back and forth.

There's not a lot of what I look for in horror films going on here. There's little to no atmosphere, not much going on that's conceptually scary or disturbing, the story is neither original nor a clever twist on the old. All it really has is the suspense factor, and it's not scary enough to me to sustain feature length. (It probably didn't help that I saw this the morning after watching Halloween and The House of the Devil, which is sort of like taking a master class in suspense). Yet there was at least a little tension here and there, and I caught myself having fun watching this one in a way that I didn't with the previous installments. All in all, not bad.

Grade: C+

The House of the Devil

Despite her friend's warnings, a college student takes a babysitting gig under shady circumstances because she's hard up for cash. Between the odd behavior of the family, and a shadowy figure lurking around outside, something is going on, but what?

Ti West's The House of the Devil, from 2009, has fast become one of my favorite horror movies. It's like some sort of perfect distillation of everything I love about the genre. It's focused on suspense rather than shock (but it knows how to shock when necessary). It is deliberately paced, yet the story is streamlined to its essentials. It's richly atmospheric without being distractingly stylized. It knows how to use violence effectively without relying on it to provide all the entertainment.

And, maybe most importantly, it's legitimately scary, but in a fun way. These days, if a horror movie is scary it tends to have to be disturbing or completely downbeat, or if it's fun then it's a horror/comedy. It's such a rare treat to find a movie that understands how fear and fun don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Grade: A

Halloween

If you seriously don't know what this movie is about, then congratulations, you're just like our downstairs neighbors/friends were Saturday before we forced them to watch this. John Carpenter's Halloween is one of my all-time favorite movies, period, but I go back and forth on whether or not it's my favorite horror movie. I go mostly back and forth between this and Carpenter's The Thing (meaning I do feel comfortable calling him my favorite horror movie director, and maybe just flat out favorite director), although catch me on the right day and I might argue for Aliens, or Deep Red, or Dawn of the Dead.

I'm not going to write any more about this, because I might be using Halloween for the kick-off post for a horror movie themed blog project I've been considering. So, we'll see if that happens.

Grade: A+

The Guardian

A young couple, new parents, discover the shocking truth about their new live-in nanny. No, it's not a Hand That Rocks The Cradle situation, actually she just worships some sort of tree-god to which she intends to sacrifice their baby.

A killer tree seems kind of a silly thing to base a horror movie around. And, you know, it is. I mean, even considering that this tree is pretty tough, able to rip off people' limbs and eat them and cause them to spontaneously combust; even considering that it has a loyal pack of ferocious wolves to do its bidding; even though it has a sexy, baby-stealing nanny doing its dirty work... just, like, don't go into the woods. End of movie.

Still, The Guardian is actually a lot of fun. It doesn't really have a good screenplay, or good acting, or anything like that, but it's actually quite well shot, atmospheric, entertainingly violent, with a few solid set pieces to round it out. And that's because this silly little horror movie was directed by none other than the great William Friedkin. This was 1990, when Friedkin's stock wasn't as high as was in the 70's, so this is a lot less ambitious and artsy than his classics; I wouldn't be surprised if this was just a work for hire. It lacks the spooky ambiguity and strong central performances of his best films, but it just goes to show you how a director can craft weak material into something worthwhile if they have the technical chops for it.

Grade: B-

Kuroneko

The ghosts of two women who were raped and murdered by a group of samurai get their revenge by luring samurai wandering through the woods back to their home to murder them. A young warrior is sent to do battle with the spirits, and discovers that they are in fact his wife and mother.

I was taken aback for a moment when the translated title of Kuroneko came up on the screen as Black Cat. This couldn't possibly be another adaptation of the Poe story, right? And luckily it wasn't, although I guess resetting a Poe story in Feudal Japan would be novel.

Last year I watched Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba for my October festivities, and it was an offbeat, moody drama/horror that I very much admired. Made by Shindo just a few years later, Kuroneko shares more than a few similarities with the other film, and in fact sometimes feel like a more elaborate (bigger budgeted?) rehash. This one has a great first act and final act, but I thought it floundered too much in the middle, with a little too much focus on melodrama and not as much on the horror and the atmosphere. So I didn't enjoy it as much as Onibaba, but it's still an interesting, sometimes pretty eerie supernatural horror movie with a little bit of revenge drama thrown in for good measure.

Grade: B

American Horror Story (Episode 3 "Murder House")

Well, that sucked. Right off the bat, the episode disappointed, opening with a pointless flashback to events we've already heard about and then segueing into more boring family melodrama before the opening credits. I had been hoping that, as per the first two episodes, American Horror Story was going to start every week with a cold open that was essentially a short story unto itself. Instead, it was just a bunch of development of the still uninteresting, unfocused master plot(s?), and the rest of the episode followed suit. Like the pilot, this didn't really have a strong central story, it was more a bunch of shit that happened that wouldn't even really feel related if it weren't all happening in the same episode. Unlike the pilot, however, none of this was campy or crazy or over-the-top enough to hold my interest. The story in the middle of the episode about the previous owners was okay, and the abrupt murder at the end at least made me laugh, but that was about it for entertainment value.

Also, the dude with the burned face... he's got to be in the father's imagination, right? Otherwise, how did he know all that info about the lover, and why was he there to kill her just at the perfect moment? So I'm guessing that the father is insane and is eventually going to try to murder his family a la his imaginary friend's backstory, only then ol' Burn Face asks him for $1,000. Not sure why a fake personaily would need cash. Hmm.

Grade: C-