Copkiller (aka Cop Killers, aka Corrupt, aka Corrupt Lieutenant, aka Order of Death)

A dirty cop (Harvey Keitel) is living it up in his swanky, illegally bankrolled downtown apartment when he's paid an unexpected visit by a weirdo (John "ny Rotten" Lydon) who claims that he's the serial killer targeting cops that everyone has been searching for. So Keitel does the logical thing and beats the shit out of him, ties him up and keeps him prisoner in his bathroom.

Overlong and kinda awkward, but not without its merits, Copkiller is sort of psychological thriller dressed up in crime movie clothes. There's a bunch of lip service paid to the investigation and to Keitel trying to cover up his misdeeds, but mostly the film is about the weird relationship that he and Lydon form. We've all seen a million movies about cops and criminals sharing deep bonds, being two sides of the same coin, etc., but Copkiller adds a subterranean sexual element that makes it feel, if not fresh, then certainly not a big fat cliche.

Keitel is good, as always, but you've seen him play this kind of role in other, better movies. The real surprise here is Lydon, in one of his only acting roles. He's kinda perfect in the role. He's got that sneering swagger that makes him seem dangerous (even though he's not a physical threat). But he's also a little soft and mincing (maybe it's the accent), so you can also believe he might just be some twerp who likes to confess to other peoples' crimes. Doesn't look like Lydon had another film role this large, and that might be for the best. I'm not so sure he's a gifted actor so much as his Johnny Rotten public persona fits this role particularly well.

Rating: B-

The Graves

The Grave sisters go on one last road trip together before one of the two moves away. While traveling, they decide to check out a spooky ghost town. Of course, this is a horror movie, so the town isn't quite as abandoned as it originally appears to be...

Look, any movie that features Tony Todd as a crazy preacher, and Bill Mosely running around with a sickle while wearing a pig nose can't be all bad. I know when I'm being pandered to, and that's some solid pandering right there.

But it's also emblematic of what's wrong with The Graves. The movie is really just a bunch of nerdy, fanboy wish fulfillment crap and not actually a well put together horror movie. This begins, but does not end, with the fact the the Grave sisters are unbelievably sexy, cool, hard partying comic book aficionados. Because you run into those all the time.

Let's just say I wasn't surprised to find out afterward that the director is also a comic book writer.

Rating: C-

Vampyres

In this erotic horror film, two bisexual vampiresses pretend to be hitchhikers, lure the men who pick them up back to the abandoned estate where they live, have sex with them, and kill them. That is, until one day one of the lady vampires opts not to kill her victim, but instead keep him around as her boy toy.

One of the least eventful horror films I have ever seen, Vampyres nonetheless succeeds due to its offbeat atmosphere, its implacable weirdness, its weird sexual imagery, and its genuine eroticism. This is a seriously sexy soft core porn/horror film, sexy enough that I felt uncomfortable watching it with my little brother. Bad idea.

The events of Vampyres barely count as "plot"; my description above pretty much covers 90% of the movie. It feels directionless at times, and what little story there is doesn't make much sense (the vampires' plot involves making their victims' deaths look like car accidents, but they seem to crash them in the same spot every time and the authorities never catch on). Never you mind that, because the film is all about oddball tone and hot sex scenes. It's well made and effective, a perfect mix of tawdry and classy.

With its focus on vampires, eroticism, lavish settings and its dream-like tone, Vampyres sometimes feels like the film Jean Rollin was always trying to make but never had the talent to pull off. I'm not sure I've ever seen a successful mix of artsy horror and porn before this.

Rating: B

Messages Deleted

A screenwriting professor (Matthew Lillard) begins receiving terrifying voicemails from strangers who are apparently about to be murdered. It turns out there is a killer on the loose, using his unproduced screenplay as a template for a murder spree.

Written by Larry Cohen, I suspect that due to the answering machine gimmick of Message Deleted, the film might be intended as the finale of his "phone trilogy," along with Phone Booth and Cellular. Really, though, this is more of a silly meta-commentary on thriller cliches, like an even more on-the-nose version of Scream. Or, as my brother called it, "stupid meta." It's a bunch of silly nonsense, where the killer is obsessed with making the murders seem like the plot of a movie, while Lillard tries to use his knowledge of screenwriting to outguess the killer.

It's goofy and disposable, but I still had a little bit of fun with it. By trying so hard to mess with audience expectations, it becomes weirdly predictable in the way it tries to subvert the cliches, but its enjoyable trying (and mostly succeeding) to outguess where the movie is going.

Rating: C+

Sinister

A one-hit-wonder true crime novelist (Ethan Hawke) tries to revive his flailing career by investigating the unsolved murder of a small town family and the disappearance of their daughter. The catch? He's moved himself, his wife, and their two children into the house of the murdered family. Because that's always a great idea.

It's so refreshing to see mainstream horror movie that gets it, that isn't some slickly polished studio turd, but rather a film that understands the importance of atmosphere and suspense, but also has the resources to hire a major actor and give him a meaty role. This is the kind of film that studio horror should aspire to be.

One interesting touch is that the film has a found footage element to it: Hawke finds copies of the killer's "home movies" in the attic and studies them. They turn out to be footage of the killer's gruesome murders. Even though this footage makes up all of 10 or 15 minutes of the film, tops, it qualifies as the best use of the style in recent years. I think part of what works better about Ethan Hawke watching eerie super 8 footage of murders, compared to shaky cam footage of a bunch of drunk loudmouths getting killed, is the powerless-ness. Most "found footage" movies try to put you in the moment, but Sinister uses it to show you what's already happened, so you know there is nothing you can do to stop it.

The first half is suspenseful and fun enough that the second half can't help but suffer in comparison. We can only watch Ethan Hawke slowly walk down unlit hallways for so long before the audience expects to get some answers, and the answers are never as good as the questions. But even it never lives up to its initial promise, Sinister remains highly watchable and well-made.

Rating: B

The Innkeepers

On the last weekend that it wil be open, the two remaining employees of the Yankee Pedlar Hotel (Sara Paxton and Pat Healy) decide to see if they can find any proof of the ghost that supposedly haunts its halls.

You can read my more detailed thoughts on The Innkeepers here, but I would like to say that this is a film that has improved on my second viewing. I love Ti West's House of the Devil dearly, but I need to get off my high horse and admit that although his follow up film may night quite be as great, it's still great in it's own right. No, it's not scary in the same sense that House of the Devil was, but it is richly atmospheric, funny, beautifully shot, and thematically more resonant  Although it doesn't hold the same place in my heart, it is in many ways the more accomplished film.

I think what I really appreciated this time was, despite how funny the film can be, there is a potent sense of melancholy in the film that sticks with you. It's about two lovable but flawed people stuck in a dead end job in a dead end town who reflect on their regrets. And somehow this parlays itself into a deeper story of spiritual unrest, and builds up to an appropriately muted but sad ending that you don't really see coming.

Rating: A-

The Hidden Face

A conductor, whose long term girlfriends has vanished after leaving a cryptic video telling him she was leaving him, decides to get back on the horse after 2 months of trying to find her. He falls for a local bartender, and she eventually moves into his large estate. Only, the woman begins noticing strange things when she's alone... the water in the sink vibrates, she hears weird noises in the drains, and the shower randomly changes temperature. Could the house be haunted?

The Hidden Face is a devious, twisty-turny thriller than only slowly reveals itself as such. Although it creates a palpable sense of mystery, for a while it seems as if the film isn't a thriller at all. It slows down, becomes a romance, goes on an extended flashback to show us the conductor's previous relationship. When the other shoes drops and we finally discover what's actually been going on the whole time, it's a pretty ingenious bit of misdirection that ups the stakes. The rest of the film becomes increasingly intense, constantly toying with your emotions and keeping you guessing how everything is going to turn out.

I'm being vague, and that's because it's best not to know too much. The film is slightly Almodvarian in its willingness to take some abrupt left turns, and in its use of extended flashback, although it is far more straightforward than any of Almodovar's films. This is an accomplished and exciting thriller, and I'm looking forward to more from director Andres Baiz.

Rating: B+

Tombs of the Blind Dead

The old ruins of a castle hold a terrible secret: blind, undead Templar knights that rise from their graves to feast on the blood of those who trespass. And they ride horses. Zombies on horses.

I first saw Tombs of the Blind Dead I think 5 years ago, at an all-day Halloween horror movie marathon and party. We drank zombies all day and watched horror movies. I got so plastered I chased one party goer around the apartment with a knife as a "joke" that I'm pretty sure terrified the poor guy. It was a great day, but my memories of the movies are fuzzy, and I seem to recall not liking this one very much.

Well, turns out Tombs of the Blind Dead is better than I remembered. But not much. It's a mostly uneventful film with a handful of memorable sequences sporadically doled out. It's the kind of film that really requires on atmosphere to carry it, but the atmosphere (while not negligible) is just not thick enough. I will say, the very ending is kinda good: the heroine escapes the knights and gets on a train passing by. Only, instead of her getting away safely, the knights show up and kill everyone on board, and then ride the train into town, presumably to kill more. Pretty funny.

Anyways, this is the first in a four part series, and I will definitely watch part 2 at least.

Rating: C

Stigmata

A young woman with a ridiculous wardrobe (Patricia Arquette) is being tortured by some unseen force, giving her the wounds of Christ. The Catholic church sends in their top hoax debunking priest (Gabrielle Byrne) to see if what's happening is the real deal.

Not having been raised Catholic (or with any religion, for that matter), I just never got the obsession with Catholic-themed supernatural horror movies. I guess I'm just not steeped enough in Catholic mythology to enjoy whatever deeper themes these kinds of movies are trying to evoke. But even someone into these types of films will be disappointed that Stigmata ditches any of its more compelling implications (like, the idea that maybe what's happening to Arquette is something divine, since she is receiving Christ's wounds) in order to be just another of the umpteen million Exorcist ripoffs. That it's all done in that best forgotten late 90's music video, rapid editing, wooshy camera, crossfading nonsense style just makes it all the worse.

Apparently Billy Corgan cowrote the score. That seems like a great idea, but the score turned out to be mostly forgettable.

Also, seriously, you won't believe the outfits Arquette wears in this movie. I don't think anyone in the 90's ever dressed that ridiculously.

Rating: D

Shutter

A Thai photographer begins finding inexplicable images in his photos, following a hit and run incident he and his girlfriend were involved in. Could the ghost of the young woman they hit be haunting him?

I had my fingers crossed that, as far as Asian horror goes, Shutter would be more Kiyoshi Kurosawa than Pang Brothers. Turns out it's something of an odd mix, but heavily leaning Pang: slow, quiet buildups to ridiculously overwrought, hyperactively edited, booming soundtrack, cinematic blunt force trauma payoffs. That kind of crap can sometimes be fun, but it gets old fast.

Shutter is particularly dull and generic, stringing together a bunch of Asian ghost movie cliches (including the pale female ghost with long black hair) as it unravels a particularly uninteresting "mystery." The film becomes increasingly silly as it goes along (despite becoming ever more self-serious), to the point where I was just kinda staring at the screen by the end, mouth agape, hardly believing what I was watching. I mean, I guess this is a first, but I've never seen one of these movies end where it turns out SPOILERS that the ghost has been sitting on the main character's shoulders for the whole movie and I guess it gives him back problems or something and he ends up in a mental hospital, mournfully sitting hunched over in bed with a ghost on his back. Just, wow.

Rating: D

Frightmare

A young British woman is keeping a secret from her bloodthristy little half-sister: their father and 'lil sis's psychotic birth mother have just gotten out of the mental asylum. Big sis and dad are trying to take care of mom, but she may be slipping back to her old ways: cannibalism!

Frightmare is a twisted little oddity, a darkly humorous and character driven horror film that builds up to some agreeably effed up shit. Part of the fun is that, although the story isn't very complex, it's structured as almost a mystery; we're not sure at first how these characters are relate to each other and where exactly the story is heading. The film has a crafty narrative strategy of deliberately withholding information from the audience so it can lead them along by slowly doling it out. The story is surprisingly compelling considering all it comes down to is that a crazy old cannibal lady likes drilling holes in people's heads.

The one weird thing I noticed was the film's anti-psychiatry message. The film begins with the old couple being sentenced to go to a mental institution, and not to be released until they are definitively deemed safe to return to society. Cut to 15 years later, they are getting out, no more sane than when they went in: the system has failed. One of the main characters turns out to be a psychiatrist, and the character is shown to be a fatuous know it all, one who completely misreads the situation and stupidly puts himself into a dangerous situation. So fine, the filmmakers don't like shrinks (maybe they are Scientologists?), but then the movie doesn't seem to offer any alternate solution. If modern psychology can't help these nutcases, then what should have been done instead?

Rating: B-

Hitch-Hike

An obnoxious alcoholic and his long-suffering wife pick up a hitchhiker while driving through the middle of nowhere. Naturally, the hitchhiker turns out to be a bankrobber on the lam, who takes them hostage, forces them to drive him to Mexico, and is making bedroom eyes at the wife.

Hitch-Hike starts with a standard issue premise, but throws in enough unique wrinkles that you're never quite sure where it's going. It's a nice mix of crime, thriller and horror, with maybe a dash of western thrown in for good measure. I tend to prefer my Italian thrillers to be a little more stylish than this, which tries to go for a more gritty feel. There's 0% giallo in this one's DNA, so don't go in expecting anything too strange.

The performances are solid, and the story takes a few unexpected twists. At least one major character is dead much earlier than you'd expect. The final act veers into a completely new direction, with a dark ending. It's a little jarring at first, until you think back to the beginning of the film and realized it had been well set-up.

It's a solid little thriller for a low budget Italian movie pretending to be American, light on logic but helped by clever ideas and good lead performances.

Rating: B-

The Hunger

An ancient but beautiful vampire (Catherine Deneuve) begins seducing her new lover/companion/familiar (Susan Sarandon), after her former one (David Bowie) rapidly ages and is no longer of use to her.

The Hunger, despite having vampires and ghouls and violence and special effects, barely seems to qualify as a horror film for most of its length. Instead, it's more of a dreamy, pseudo-arthouse oddity, unfortunately directed by a man (Tony Scott) whose gifts were better suited to the blockbuster. It has effective scenes (notably the sex scene between Sarandon and Deneuve, and the nightmarish finale which is the only part that feels at all horror-ish), but most of it is slow and unstructured, skipping around between shots and scenes willy nilly, not really building up any steam as it goes along.

Thematically, the film is a mess, too. The first half of the film is about Bowie growing old and being discarded by Deneuve (she locks her former lovers in caskets, for some reason, instead of letting them die, where I guess they live forever in agony), and the focus seems to be on their twisted love story. The second half, about the seduction of Sarandon, suddenly seems to shift into an addiction story, with vampirism being a metaphor for the addiction, and I guess Deneuve being the pusher and Sarandon the junkie. Eventually the two halves come together, but not in any meaningful way, and the ending does not feel like it is adequately set up by what came before.

The Hunger is moderately interesting for its oddness, but it's atmosphere isn't strong enough to overcome the turgid, unfocused story. Scott is too much of a showoff to convey this kind of eerie melancholy, and the end result is mostly limp.

Rating: C

Red Lights

Two hotshot college professors (Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy) are the go-to debunkers of bogus supernatural phenomenon. When not teaching what appears to be an awesome class on the subject, they spend their time going around exposing charlatans; you know, phony psychics and people pretending their house is haunted and the such. One day, a former celebrity psychic (Robert DeNiro) whose supposed powers were never disproven comes out of retirement . Can our intrepid heroes take him down a notch? Could he be the real deal? What's up with all this strange, unexplainable shit suddenly happen to our heroes? And why does Weaver seem so reluctant to take on DeNiro?

I'm not going to lie, this movie catered to some of my interests, so I was on board right away. The first act or so is basically just mind porn for atheists and skeptics: Weaver and Murphy go around exposing frauds, explaining their tricks, and authoritatively asserting the fact that all this supernatural mumbo jumbo is a bunch of horseshit. I could have watched a whole movie about that. Hell, I could watch a TV series about these characters. So score another point for Rodrigo Cortes, who also directed the awesome Ryan-Reynolds-in-a-coffin movie Buried.

I suspect that Red Lights might seem slow to some audiences. Although the stakes do get raised significantly as the movie goes along, many folks might not see why it's such a big deal they disprove this psychic. Religious and superstitious folks might even take offense at the attitudes and actions of Weaver and Murphy's characters. Personally, I was emotionally invested, not just because of my own biases, but because of the strength of the performances, and the way the characters are developed to explain why this conflict becomes so important.

Which isn't to say that this movie is all talking and character development and no action. There is danger, a little bit of violence, death, intrigue, unexplainable phenomena and horror movie imagery. It's just that more of the entertainment comes from exploring the tension between the rational and irrational. The profs explaining how con men do their tricks. The weird things that start happening to Murphy (like birds flying into windows right at him) and whether or not that have a logical explanation. A viruoso sequence, presented as a documentary, where scientists examine DeNiro's supposed abilities.

The thing about a lot of these horror movies where a skeptic tries to disprove some sort of supernatural event is that the skeptic is almost always wrong. The ghosts will turn out to be real, or best case scenario the movie leaves it ambiguous, because who really knows the truth, right? (Ugh). Movies are so shy about ever coming down on the side of the skeptics; it never turns out that it was just a con all along. I don't want to spoil Red Lights, but it's one of the few movies I've seen that really, seriously weighs the skeptical argument and gets you on their side. As you watch it, you will actually believe that there is a good chance that DeNiro will turn out to be a phony.

Of course, you realize then that the movie can only end one of two ways: either DeNiro is a fake and psychics don't exist, or he is the real deal and they do. If he's for real, then that's kind of a disappointing because the heroes were wrong the whole time. If he's not, that's cool but it's not much of a surprise and might feel a little anticlimactic. Amazingly, Red Lights manages to find a third option that I never considered, one which blew my mind a little. Not everyone is going to like it, but if you're willing to follow this movie where it goes, it's an enormously surprising and satisfying ending that, I think, plays fair by its own rules.

Rating: B+

Quick Note

To those of you who watched Blood and Donuts with me earlier this week, I'm not blogging about it. Why? Because I don't remember a damn thing about it. Sorry.