Horror Month: Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

                          Wow, what an intense movie. I was expecting this to be scary,  but I didn't think it was going to be THAT bad. I'll definitely be keeping my distance from rednecks in the future, that's for damn sure. Aside from just being scary though, Texas Chainsaw Massacre really is a good film in many ways. It's very well acted, and shot with a technical competency that makes it extremely effective at everything it does. Despite the fact that I'm too scared to leave my room right now (which is going to be a problem very soon because I've drank a lot of Dr. Pepper over the course of this evening), I really liked Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I definitely want to see it again.

                          This film follows a fairly conventional story. Five young adults head into the back roads of Texas to investigate a graveyard that has been reportedly robbed of corpses. On their way they encounter a strange hitchhiker who cuts himself, and then one of the guys with a straight razor, jumps out of the van and then draws a weird symbol on the vehicle in his own blood.  After checking the graveyard out and finding nothing, they head to an old house which used to be the summer home of one of the kids to stay for a while and relax. But as soon as they get settled in, they run afoul of a seriously mentally ill family of cannibalistic murderers, including the maniac they encountered in the van before. One of these psychos is the killer Leatherface, who is the subject of subsequent movies in this franchise. He does all the killing, luring three of the victims into his house and butchering them with a chainsaw. The other two go searching for the others, and Leatherface kills another while our final heroine temporarily escapes, only to be captured again and tied to a chair for a strange dinner with Leatherface and his family. When they cut her free to finally kill her, she escapes, jumping onto the back of a pickup truck with Leatherface hot in pursuit. 

                         At first I noticed a funny, but probably unintentional comparison to Scooby-Doo in this movie. A bunch of young adults driving around in a big van wearing bell-bottoms trying to solve a mystery.The mystery subplot of the graveyard turns out to be relatively unimportant to the plot however, and only really serves to get the characters out into the country to set up the story. I probably only noticed this connection because I was watching Scooby-Doo on TV the other day anyway, funny how your brain connects stuff like that. Anyways, Texas Chainsaw massacre has a running motif of animal slaughter throughout the film. The characters disgustedly smell a slaughterhouse near the beginning of the film, and talk about past and present methods of killing cows. Apparently it was formerly done by smashing the animal in the head with a sledgehammer, but now it is done more humanely by using compressed air to fire a steel rod into the animal's skull, killing them quickly and painlessly. When our protagonists pick up the insane hitchhiker at the beginning of the film, he talks about how much he prefers the old method, and that his brother and grandfather used to work in the slaughterhouse killing animals. This foreshadows events to come, because when Leatherface (later revealed to be the hitchhiker's brother) finds his first few victims, he incapacitates them by hitting them in the head with a sledgehammer, just like he used to do at the slaughterhouse. This allows Texas Chainsaw Massacre to be seen as a vegetarian or animal rights themed film. It begs the question: does killing animals make us comfortable with murder? Can repeatedly slaughtering cows or other animals make us develop a taste for human murder? Where do we draw the line, what animals are acceptable to kill and eat and which aren't? Obviously cannibalism is unethical, but this family of killers seems to see people just as other animals that they can kill and have their way with. It's really disturbing to think about.

              Another great aspect of this movie is the set design, and the atmosphere it evokes. The houses are derelict and lifeless. The place that the killers live is disgusting. One particularly horrifying scene has one of the characters stumble into a room filled with symbols of death. There's furniture made of human bones, animal skulls, corpses and remains, and the floor is covered in feathers and skins. The sets have a very cluttered feeling about them, which makes them more scary because when you see them you're trying to look at everything and you don't have time to process all the objects onscreen, so sometimes when the camera cuts away you're jarred into a new shot because your mind is still processing the previous one. This made the movie scarier for me, adding a new dimension of unpredictability. In terms of acting, everyone in this film gives very convincing performances, especially the actor who plays the hitchhiker at the beginning. His character was so frighteningly realistic I had to wonder for a second if they had actually recruited a crazy person to play that role.

             It's also worth noting that even though at the beginning of the film it says that this is based on true events, it actually isn't and that message is just meant  to scare people into believing that this actually happened and Leatherface is still out there somewhere. Could have fooled me.

                          

Horror Month: Ghostbusters (1984)

                           I had to put this on the list. It's not really a horror movie, comedy more than anything else. I was looking at the remaining movies I have to watch last night and noticed that most of them are really heavy. So Ghostbusters it was, that hilarious comedy starring my spirit guide/role model Bill "Groundhog Day, Ghostbusting Ass" Murray. It's ridiculously entertaining, and gave me a much needed break before moving on to some really scary films.

                           Ghostbusters is the story of-oh wait, damn. Really? Wednesday already? I guess that means I have a midterm tomorrow. Well, that'll do it for this post.

Horror Month: The Devil's Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)

                       This movie defied all my expectations. All I knew about this film when I started watching is that there's a ghost in it and it's directed by Guillermo del Toro. I thought it was going to be a somewhat conventional ghost story. Instead of that, what I got was a fantastic humanist story which wasn't particularly scary in any conventional sense, but did in fact have a creepy ghost in it. 

                      The Devil's Backbone is about a young boy named Carlos who is without warning left by his jerk of a tutor at an orphanage in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The orphanage is hiding gold for one of the armies in the war, and the caretaker has been trying to steal it for some time. During his time at the orphanage Carlos repeatedly encounters the ghost of a young boy, who is later revealed to be a child who was at the orphanage until the caretaker murdered him. As events transpire, the caretaker takes over the orphanage and nearly blows the entire place up, killing the good people who take care of the orphans in his search for the gold. It turns out that in the end the ghost of the dead child is not really evil as you sort of assume from the start, all he wants is justice for himself against the caretaker. Which in the end he gets, with help from Carlos and the other boys. 

                     As I said before, I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. Instead of the ghost being the story's antagonist, it is the caretaker of the orphanage who is the bad one. The ghost serves to remind us that the evil things we do by no means stay buried, and old acts of evil can come back to haunt us, though not usually in such a literal sense. Del Toro did a magnificent job developing the villain of the movie, making the audience absolutely loathe him. The mere prospect of the caretaker getting away with all the horrendous crimes he committed was appalling to me. And that makes the ending that much more powerful, though the orphans' future is uncertain they have triumphed over evil. I also noticed some similarities between this and Del Toro's other masterpiece, Pan's Labyrinth. Both take place during times of political or civil unrest, and both are told from the perspective of a child and involve their escapism from a harsh reality. Del Toro must have the mind of a child, to be able to recreate the innocence and curiosity of a child so well.

                    Great movie.

Horror Month: Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

                             Gotta have some Hitchcock in Horror Month. There are a number of his films I could have chosen, but I went with Psycho because it's really unsettling and one of his best. Psycho is another movie that I watched fairly young and it scared the hell out of me the first time. As with many who have seen this film, I was pretty scared to take a shower after watching it. Seriously, I bet when this came out Alfred Hitchcock was solely and directly responsible for a huge decline in personal hygiene. I'm glad I wasn't around in 1960 to witness the hordes of filthy people that were a result of the irrational shower phobias that Hitchcock created. Aside from that iconic and influential shower scene, Psycho is from start to finish a compelling mystery that ends in a skin-crawling conclusion that leaves it open for several sequels (none of which I have seen).

                           Everyone knows the story, so I won't really summarize it. If you're reading this (lol, no one reads this blog anyway) and you haven't seen Psycho, watch it right now. This time around watching it, I noticed several interesting connections and motifs I hadn't observed before, mainly because in previous viewings I wasn't looking for that sort of thing. I liked Hitchcock's use of lighting, especially in regards to our psychotic killer Norman. He is often lit from the side, which evenly splits the light down his face, casting one half in darkness while the other is brightly lit. This can be seen as Hitchcock hinting at Norman's duality, and the fact that both Norman and his dead mother now inhabit the same brain. The mystery around Norman's mother is very intriguing as well. Halfway through the film the investigating characters discover than Norman's mother has been dead for a decade, which leads us to wonder who the shadow of the woman was that was seen in the window. Hitchcock's movies tend to be rooted in realism and plausibility for the most part, and it's rather unlike him to delve into the supernatural, especially with something like the living dead. Given this fact we can fairly safely draw the conclusion at this point that Norman's mother is in fact dead, and the shadows and voices seen in the film are someone else. This makes Norman even more unsettling, because we have no idea what he's up to, and exactly who killed the original victim Marion. At the end it is finally revealed that Norman is essentially gone and the psyche of his mother has completely taken him over. He is still physically Norman, but he believes that he is his mother. It's really scary to think about someone who has been dead for an entire decade remaining alive in some fashion in the mind of another. Another interesting connection I noticed was that of Norman's obsession with taxidermy. He has a room full of stuffed birds that he preserved himself, and in his house lies his ultimate achievement in preservation: his mother. He's kept her body in the best condition possible considering how long she has been dead, and her memory and personality are very much alive in Norman.

                       
                           

Horror Month: Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)

                      I don't watch many slasher movies. They just don't interest me that much. I prefer psychological horror, movies that build tension and use more than just blood and gore to scare their viewers. Despite this, I tried my best to watch Halloween with an open mind, and it turns out I really enjoyed it. It's relatively conventional in some ways, but it really is the ultimate slasher film, the one that set the standard and invented the tropes that are used in countless subsequent films. It's scary, and well acted, paced and directed.

                    The first in the long series of Halloween movies, this one follows the story of killer Michael Myers. At the age of six, he murdered his sister in cold blood on Halloween with a huge knife. After spending fifteen years in a mental hospital, he escapes and returns to his hometown to kill again. The plot of the movie involves him stalking and killing several teenagers, while his former psychiatrist and a reluctant, skeptical police officer search for him. It's not particularly innovative in any way, but it's still scary on several levels. Most importantly of all, it's plausible. Psychotic killers who slaughter innocent people indiscriminately actually exist. Michael Myers is a person that could very possibly be real, and that fact makes this movie much scarier. Another thing that makes Halloween scary is the design of Michael himself. He is huge, very imposing, and wears a white mask, which I found out later is actually a stretched out William Shatner mask. Myers' physical strength allows him to break through doors and windows easily, and throw around his victims like rag dolls. This makes him much more intimidating because no matter where you hide he can likely busy through to door and find you. The mask itself works to dehumanize Myers and strengthen his image as a cold, ruthless, unrepentant killer.

                  I also liked how this first Halloween movie abstains from excessive blood and gore. Most of the horror of the film lies in uncertainty. There are a lot of scenes where Myers is standing somewhere staring at a prospective victim, and then he just completely disappears. It's something that you see in movies like this all the time, but it's freaky because it makes you wonder where he went, and where he is now. Myers is pretty sneaky, and many of the scares in the movie involve him appearing, disappearing, and coming back after he is believed to be dead. He has a feel of immortality about him, because he takes several bullets, a knife wound and a knitting needle to the neck at the end and still survives and disappears somehow, living to kill another day. An interesting easter egg I noticed is that some of the characters watch an old version of the movie The Thing on Halloween, a movie that director John Carpenter would adapt into a hugely successful horror film a few years later.

               All in all, Halloween delivers, even if you're not a fan of the genre it's very successful at what it does.

Horror Month: The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan,1999)

                    Oh, M. Night Shyamalan. What happened to you? How did things get to where they are now? You had so much potential, many even thought you could become the second coming of Hitchcock. And where are you now? I don't even know because I'm not paying attention anymore because you've been consistently awful for the last 7-8 years. You let me down, man. I had high hopes. We all did. The Sixth Sense is a fantastic film, and one of the best psychological thrillers to come out in a very long time. The story is imaginative and terrifying, and it's shot with well above average technical competency. This is definitely the peak of Shyamalan's work, both a blessing and a curse to his career. On one hand, it won him widespread critical acclaim and mainstream exposure, and on the other it set the bar VERY high for his future works, a bar that is yet to be passed by Shyamalan. His next effort Unbreakable was also excellent, Signs was good but not particularly remarkable, and after that it's just been a mess of forgettable movies which look pretty but are horrendously written and acted. I mean c'mon, The Happening? What was that? I think his early success caused him to develop a massive ego that led to a huge decrease in quality over the years. It's one thing to be really cocky but still make excellent films (like Quentin Tarantino, dude's insufferable but extremely talented), but it's another to think you're so good that you're incapable of making a bad movie. Oh well, it happens. In the future he'll hopefully be remembered for his excellent early films anyways.

                  The first time I watched The Sixth Sense I was eleven years old, and it scared the crap out of me. It wasn't the ghosts itself that make the film scary, it's the concept that Shyamalan created, that there are spirits of the dead all around us, and some people can see them. Cole, the young boy in the movie, is one of those people, and is constantly assailed by ghosts who terrify him. It makes him a really sympathetic character, he's a very kind, compassionate smart child who is regarded as a freak because of this condition. It's not bad enough that he has to see walking corpses on a minute-to-minute basis, he needs to take abuse from other kids too? Saddening. It's really scary to think about being this kid, seeing all this horrible things that only you can see, and no one else can help or make them go away. That's the most horrifying part of The Sixth Sense, the feeling of isolation and helplessness. Having this kind of disorder puts you in your own personal hell that no one else can enter, and Cole knows how alone he is. 

                 In regards to the twist ending, Shyamalan handles it brilliantly. There are extremely subtle clues in the plot that may give the ending away early to an extremely perceptive person, but for the most part the moment of realization is exactly where Shyamalan intends it to be. It's one of those movies that you need to watch again after seeing the twist, just to appreciate the subtle things that Shyamalan does to hint towards the ending. I wish I could watch this movie for the first time again, because the first time you see it the ending is straight up mind-blowing. 

Horror Month: Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006)

                  Every time I watch Inland Empire, it makes a little bit more sense. Unfortunately for me however, all that sense added together still doesn't really amount to much. I've watched some pretty weird stuff in my time studying film, but this is definitely one of the strangest movies I've ever seen. Even by David Lynch standards it's pretty out there. I won't even try to summarize the plot because about an hour into the movie the main character basically has a psychotic break and the rest of it as a whole is nonsensical and incredibly messed up. There are some things that make sense, some motifs that are seen throughout the movie and a few somewhat cohesive subplots but for the majority of the movie the audience is completely confused. Riveted by the masterful and imaginative filmmaking and blown away by Laura Dern's unrelentingly brilliant performance, but still, confused. 

                 I don't even know if this is a horror movie. I have no clue because it's impossible to tell what Lynch is trying to say here, and to be honest it doesn't really matter. Inland Empire is scary so that makes it worthy of Horror Month. The main element of this film that makes is scary is the fact that it's completely and utterly unpredictable. It's literally impossible to figure out what's going to happen next, because when you're watching this movie you are inside David Lynch's messed up (but oh so brilliant) brain. Tension is built up for nothing to happen, or not built up and then something happens. People say totally unexpected or nonsensical things. A lot of sequences have this low droning sound in the background, kind of like being in a sealed place like an airplane or car. It's deeply unsettling, and it works well with the cinematography to keep you on the edge of your seat the whole time. Lynch uses a ton of extreme closeups on faces, it's so warped because you never know if they're going to abruptly start screaming or whatever. There's a lot of camera filters and tricks he uses as well, one of the most impressive of which is his use of focus, bringing things into clear focus at just the right time or blurring certain screen elements out. There's all kinds of insane lighting too, strobes are used quite a bit and bright spotlights as well. It's just incredibly creative technically, Lynch's experimental and straight up crazy plot works well with his unconventional lighting and camerawork. I mean, just LOOK at this (or don't, I wouldn't if I were you) or even more messed up, THIS (for the love of God don't watch that clip). Crazy. No wonder Lynch hasn't made any movies since this came out, I don't know if it even gets more insane than Inland Empire.

                 It's a masterpiece though, and one of the most original movies I've ever seen.

                 

Horror Month: The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

                  This movie is creepy, man. I don't consider myself very well versed in classic horror movies so I figured that I had better add the original version of The Thing to my list of films to watch this month. I didn't think it would be really scary due to its age and the fact that most of its scares rely on special effects, but I was pretty wrong. The special effects are realistic enough to still be scary thirty years later and it turns out there are aspects of this film that are far more horrifying than the monster itself.

                  John Carpenter's The Thing is about an alien spaceship that lands in Antarctica. It and its contents freeze solid for an unknown amount of time until it is uncovered by a Norwegian science team. The thing that is The Thing is brought to their laboratory and thawed out. And that's where the figurative excrement collides with the oscillating cooling device. The Thing kills everyone there except for two survivors, takes the form of a dog, and flees to a nearby American science base. None of this is really shown onscreen except the dog running from the two survivors who are trying to kill it in a helicopter at the beginning of the movie. Long story short, The Thing eventually reveals itself, possessing/imitating the men at the American base one by one and forcing them to kill each other. 

                   I like the mystery revolving around The Thing itself. All we really know at first is that it's from space and that it can perfectly imitate any living organism. Once it is imitating someone it's very difficult to tell which people are being possessed, which adds a whole new dimension to the horror. Most of the people in the film are opposed to indiscriminate killing, so they must be absolutely sure one of their comrades is being imitated before killing them. And if they're wrong and kill someone who is actually himself, they just killed a friend and potential ally (or enemy). At first our victims have no clue how to tell if someone is possessed, but eventually develop a test to figure it out. The Thing appears to react very negatively to fire, therefore igniting a sample of each person's blood in turn will reveal which people are not themselves. The whole mystery of who is The Thing and who isn't is one of the most intriguing aspects of the movie, and I found it fairly difficult to guess which characters were infected. And the whole concept of human imitation is really scary as well. The Thing is so naturally good at what it does that for all I know my whole family could be terrifying aliens that want to kill me. Better torch them all, just to be sure. In addition to this, the desolate setting of the movie also adds to the terror. There's pretty much no one in Antarctica, and close to the beginning of the movie our protagonists lose their radio communications. So they're basically thousands of miles from civilization with no way to call for aid. There's no possible way they're going to escape, so their only option is to fight. And as far as the action sequences go, they're very good. The special effects really are remarkable in The Thing. Everything looks incredibly real, the creatures are meticulously constructed and look quite lifelike. Even thirty years later, when computers can create monsters that look almost entirely real, the creatures in The Thing still look awesome. 

                No nightmares were had from this one, but from now on I'll be more cautious of people because of that insanely ambiguous ending. The Thing is probably still out there.

   

Horror Month: Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004)

                   What would Horror Month be without a zombie movie or two? Well yeah, I guess it would still be Horror Month, but there are so many zombie films out there I had to put one or two on the list. Overpopulated as this subgenre of horror is, Zack Snyder's remake of George A. Romero's is a standout zombie movie and one of the best ones to come out in the last decade. It's not overly complex or anything, but it is what it is. And what it is is a mindless but extremely entertaining popcorn film.

                  Meh, Zack Snyder. I can take him or leave him really. His adaptation of 300 was visually gorgeous but kinda dumb, Sucker Punch was visually gorgeous but REALLY dumb and his take of Superman was decent but not really remarkable in any way. As far as the extremely divisive Watchmen goes, I actually enjoyed the movie. I hadn't read the book at the time, and even after reading it twice and watching Snyder's imagining a few more times I still like the movie a lot. It seems to me that Snyder has a fair amount of technical ability, but as a screenwriter he has a long way to go. Still, his movies are entertaining and have been pretty successful financially, and I'd say Dawn of the Dead is one of his best. The opening credits of this movie are really great, one of the highlights of the whole thing. They show red letters evaporating into blood, interspersed with news footage of the zombie outbreak while Johnny Cash's song "When the Man Comes Around" plays. The song is about the end of the world (more specifically the rapture), and fits well with the theme of the movie. It's a really good way to start off a plot that is pretty basic of the genre: zombie plague erupts unexpectedly and a group of people need to survive. Common plot devices are also used, someone in the group gets bitten as always and there's that argument about whether they should just shoot them or wait and let them turn or hope there's a cure. Although this is a remake it really doesn't have that much in common with the original. The only thing that's very similar is that they both take place in a shopping mall. Other than that, it's almost completely different. 

                   Another interesting difference between this and  the original Dawn of the Dead is the zombies. In the original the mall was full of them, but they were very slow and could only shuffle around. In the remake the zombies sprint at any living person they see right away, and the main goal of the characters is to keep them out of the mall altogether. This fits the tone of the films as well, the original is fairly slow paced like its zombies, while Snyder's remake is more action-packed, fast paced and explosive. There's certainly a lot more violence, which is fine because the blood and makeup effects look really good. There's a ton of blood, but it's not excessive enough that it looks campy or unrealistic. There's enough gore to make this not a film for the squeamish. It's quite graphic, which is the way movies like this should be. As far as acting goes, Dawn of the Dead is average. Ving Rhames is really good as Marsellus Wallace a cop who is by far the toughest and coolest guy in the group. And in this viewing I noticed for the first time that there are cameos by a few of the actors that were in the original. Pretty cool.

               I had fun watching Dawn of the Dead again. It's a satisfying film that is exactly what you expect it to be: violent, intense, and exhilarating.

Horror Month: Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)

                   I was not prepared for this movie. Rosemary's Baby is the first movie that I've watched for Horror Month that actually gave me nightmares, which is something it should be applauded for I suppose. It's atmospheric, creepy, semi-realistic, and extremely suspenseful. I really liked it. Rosemary's Baby is about a couple who move into a new apartment, next to an older couple. From the start of the movie the neighbors appear to be slightly "off" and take a somewhat intrusive interest into their lives. Rosemary and her husband Guy are planning to have a child, and when she finally gets pregnant things take a turn for the demonic. The night her baby is conceived, Rosemary has a very vivid dream where she is surrounded by chanting people while a monster (later revealed to be Satan himself) rapes her. Everyone around her tells her that this vision wasn't real, so she puts it out of her mind. Later on, she is assailed by unending pain for months. Her doctor, who the old couple next door insisted she see, tells her that it's normal, and to keep taking the strange medicine the woman next door is making for her. Rosemary eventually figures out that something is wrong and she tries to escape and consult a different doctor, but she is only kidnapped by her husband, the crazy old couple and her doctor, and confined in her apartment until she gives birth. After waking up, she is told that the child died after being born, but she hears the sound of a baby crying through the wall. Rosemary finds a secret passage to the next apartment hidden in a closet, and then confronts a large group of people including the old people next door and her own husband. It is revealed that they are a satanic witch coven and they used her to birth a spawn of Satan, a child that will wreak havoc on the Earth.

                  Rosemary's Baby isn't a very conventional horror film. It is very slow and deliberately paced, but masterful in its execution and exposition of the plot. I found it to be riveting because for the majority of the movie, you are kept in the dark and constantly trying to figure out what's happening. It's not until the very end that you really find out who these old people truly are, and for much of the movie it is a definite possibility that Rosemary is quite simply insane. I found Rosemary to be very believable and easy to like as well, Mia Farrow's performance is remarkable and consistent. The hallucinatory sequence where Rosemary is raped by Satan is very well shot and quite disturbing, even if at first you don't believe that it's really happening. Another thing I really liked about this movie is how little gore it had. Watching a movie like this, you kind of expect to see a lot of blood and guts, and Rosemary's Baby has very little of that. It's horrifying in concept, and doesn't need to be explicit to get its scares across. It's scary because the fact of the matter is, people have been practicing witchcraft for centuries and some still do to this day. You know this in the back of your mind when watching the film, and although summoning Satan to spawn a child in a woman may be unrealistic, it's still scary and believable because it's the type of thing that witches might do if they could. The ending is scary in itself because at the end of the film, Rosemary and Satan's child is still alive. The bad guys win in this movie, and that demonic baby is allowed to live. It's even scarier 40 years later because that baby would be grown up by now, and who knows where he is or what he's capable of.  It's this kind of lingering thought that makes Rosemary's Baby a successful horror film, and one I definitely plan to watch again.

Horror Month: Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983)

                I love Videodrome. It's one of those movies that I can watch again and again, and never get bored of. It's one of my favourite horror movies, and one of the best films by David Cronenberg, who is a personal idol of mine. Videodrome follows the story of Max Renn, a TV producer for a sleazy channel in Toronto that mostly airs porn and violent shows. His search for provocative new material leads him to a mysterious show of unknown origin called Videodrome, which contains realistic torture and murder. His investigation into the origin of this program leads him on a hallucinatory journey through a world of deceit and violence.

               One of the coolest things about Videodrome is its special effects. This film looks so amazingly real. Even though it's over thirty years old the special effects look realistic and appealing to this day. This is one of Cronenberg's "body horror" movies, which means it is a film that deals with the augmentation and deformation of the human body. Everything looks absolutely stunning (especially if you own the Criterion Blu-ray release like I do) and fits perfectly into the web of suspense that Cronenberg weaves. Videodrome is pretty insane as well, the last half of the movie is like a bad acid trip. Max Renn descends into madness over the course of the movie, and we see every frightening hallucination. It's very visceral, and compelling to witness. 

               DEATH TO VIDEODROME. LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH.

              Watch this movie.

Review: Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron, 2013)

                  Ever since I was a little kid, I've always been fascinated by space. That infinite void we're floating around in that's all around us, yet so mysterious. For the longest time I wanted to be an astronaut. It was a dream of mine, until I looked into all the education and insanely high test scores you need to even begin towards this unique career and realized that it probably wasn't feasible. Even today I still have a desire to go to space, and see what our planet really looks like from out there. So when I saw the trailers for Gravity, a realistic film about astronauts working on a space station, I was naturally excited. When I saw that it was directed by Alfonso Cuaron, the man who brought us the excellent 2006 sci-fi picture Children of Men, I was even more intrigued. The hype for this movie was pretty huge, and now that I have seen it I can safely and confidently say that Gravity delivers and makes good on all of its promises. It's not only a visual and technical masterpiece, but a well written, emotional story with intriguing characters and almost too much suspense to handle.

                Gravity almost exclusively takes place in space, as expected. It is the story of astronauts Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and their experience when their mission goes awry. Stone and Kowalski are working on the Hubble telescope, when ground control informs them that the Russians have performed an anti-satellite strike test that has inadvertently caused a chain reaction that may send debris their way. This "may" quickly turns into a "does" and our two protagonists are pummeled by satellite parts, sending Stone spinning off into space. Kowalski rescues her and tethers her to himself, as he is wearing a thruster pack that allows him to move freely. They return to their ship to find it almost completely obliterated by the debris, the rest of the crew dead or missing. Running low on fuel and air, Kowalski and Stone begin a tense journey to the International Space Station to retrieve an escape module and land on Earth. At this point it is revealed that Stone had previously had a daughter, who had died from a head injury. As they are approaching they realize that the one remaining pod's parachute has been accidentally deployed, making it useless for reaching Earth. However, Kowalski insists that it can still be used to reach a nearby Chinese station and acquire one of their escape modules. Landing on the ISS proves difficult, and ends in a heart-wrenching scene where Kowalski cuts himself loose and drifts into space to his death so that Stone can survive. After this Stone makes it into the ISS, detaches the pod by walking out into space to free its tangled cables, and points herself towards the Chinese station.....only to realize she's out of fuel. Here comes one of the most emotionally powerful scenes of the film. Just as Stone resigns herself to death, she hallucinates that Kowalski enters the pod. He tells her how to get a final boost of speed from the pod, convinces her to go on with her life, and then disappears. This motivates Stone to keep on living, and she eventually makes it to the Chinese ship, and lands one of their escape pods safely on Earth.

                 This is one of the most visually stunning films I have ever seen in a theater. In terms of both spectacle and subject matter, I can only compare it to (what else?) Stanley Kubrick's flawless masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I wasn't around to see that one on the big screen, but I imagine it would have felt something like this. Gravity is completely riveting from start to finish. The first shot alone lasts several minutes, and has the camera twisting and turning, ducking under appendages of the space station and rotating to give us a jaw-droppingly beautiful view of both our protagonists and the universe. I despise people that talk during movies, but there were several shots in this film that made me just gape in disbelief and say "wow" out loud. One particularly memorable shot is when Kowalski is pulling Stone to the International Space Station, you see them both head on with Earth in the background, and the sun is rising. It's so gorgeous. Another has the sun setting on one side of the planet, while we can see the Northern Lights forming on a whole other continent. Awe-inspiring. Cuaron uses the camera quite effectively to create or relieve tension, and to accentuate the beautiful view from up there. For a lot of the movie you can see Earth in the background, and this is comforting. The planet looms large for the majority of the story, and it sort of grounds us and keeps us mindful of where the action is taking place. The real terrifying scenes are the ones in space where you can't see Earth, and the universe is just a massive, endless expanse of stars. There are also several POV shots of Stone, which really emphasize her panic and how scary everything truly is for her.

                  But while this film is visually astounding, that's not all it is. Gravity has a very emotional and tense story which isn't entirely predictable, but packs a few surprises. The scenes where Stone is suffering, or trying desperately to reach anyone and communicate her situation, are totally heartbreaking. She's all alone up there, and the nearest people are six hundred kilometers below her. She's a very sympathetic character. It was also saddening to watch Kowalski die. He was a very likable character, and had he survived he would have been able to guide Stone to safety easily with his experience and expertise. Something I also noticed about Gravity was its symbols of infancy and rebirth. While working in space, the astronauts are always connected to the space station with cables that look very much like umbilical cords. There's one scene where Stone finally makes it onto the ISS and curls up into a fetal position in the tiny airlock, like a fetus in a womb. A Buddha statue is show on the Chinese station, which could be taken as a symbol of rebirth. When Stone lands on Earth she falls into a lake, and since she is unaccustomed to Earth's gravity she has to claw her way out of the water like some primordial being taking its first steps onto land. Gravity isn't a particularly thematically or philosophically complex film, but these motifs are interesting and definitely add to the experience.

                I loved Gravity. It gave me everything I wanted and more. It's an emotional, gorgeously shot, well scripted and acted film, and it deserves to be seen by everyone. It's best viewed in IMAX 3D, this format makes the massive depth of field in space seem even bigger. This is one of the very best films of the year.

Horror Month: Vampyr (1932)

                  This was a new one for me. I really don't watch enough old films like this. Vampyr is really, really good. It's a very well shot film with a tense, unnerving atmosphere and sublime use of shadows. I found the story as well as the visuals to be very engaging, the protagonist is a student of the supernatural named Allan Gray who travels to a small French village to study and is almost immediately assailed by all kinds of evil spirits and hallucinations. Death imagery runs rampant in the film, one of the very first shots is the picture above, an old man with a scythe. At one point Allan is led to a castle by disembodied shadows that appear to have no human origin, and upon entering he finds a doctor's office full of skulls and skeletons. The entire film has an eerie, almost dreamlike tone, and although this is a sound film there is very little talking. Much of the backstory is developed by Allan or another character reading a mysterious book that is left to Allan about demonic creatures called Vampyrs who feed on human blood and essentially serve Satan. It's quite a bit more dark than most vampire films, vampires are often referred to as demons but this movie deliberately portrays them as servants of the devil. The role of the vampyr in this particular story is to enslave the souls of the living, drain their life force and eventually compel them to commit suicide, delivering their souls to Satan. It's pretty heavy stuff, and the visual aspect of Vampyr reflects this as well. The whole movie just feels like one long nightmare. The tone is dark and intense right from the start, and it never lets up on the suspense until the very end. Many may not appreciate the technical elements that serve Vampyr so well as a horror film, but I would say that this is one of the best and most entertaining vampire movies ever made and anyone who is a fan of these mythical, horrifically evil creatures owes it to themselves to watch it. 

Horror Month: Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

            Note: For this post I watched the 2003 Director's Cut of the film. I have found that some of Ridley Scott's films in the past have been much improved by his creating his own version later on. Kingdom of Heaven's extended Director's Cut is a great example of  this, and is exponentially better than the theatrical version. 

             Alien is a fantastic horror film, and one that I've come to appreciate more and more with repeated viewings over the years. It offers a perfect mixture of science fiction and horror, with enough of each to more than satisfy fans of each genre. It truly is a classic of both science fiction and horror, and has been hugely influential in films of both genres in the past 30 years. 

            I watched Alien today for the first time in ages, and was instantly struck by the meticulous detail and eerie yet beautiful aestheticism of the sets. The vast majority of the film takes place on a spaceship, and the environments are futuristic looking yet practical and believable. Some of the hallways and rooms reminded me of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 masterpiece Solyaris and there were a few space shots of the ship that I found evocative of Kubrick's 2001. Everything is constructed in striking detail, and the special effects work well with the sets to create an unsettling environment. Strobe lights flash, steam rushes from burst pipes, and the whole ship seems to be a mess of machinery, a labyrinth of human ingenuity. I especially liked the special effects in regards to Ash, the android played by Ian Holm (who will always be Bilbo from the Lord of the Rings film trilogy in my eyes). It is very well hidden that he is not human, right up to the point where his true motives are revealed and he attacks Ripley. When he is killed we see white synthetic blood spray everywhere, and robotic veins and wires all over the place. It looks very real, and was likely horrifying in its time. I really like that this movie was made before CGI was really a thing, and to make something look realistic and believable the special effects team had to work very hard. And in Alien,everything looks spectacular, other than a few artificial-looking explosions. The blood and gore looks very real, and most importantly of all the alien looks very lifelike and menacing. The atmosphere is tense and suspenseful as well. This is another film that understands that the less you show of your monster the scarier it is. We do see the alien onscreen several times, but mostly it is hidden, and even though we can't see it, the audience and the characters know that it is out there just waiting for them to fall into its trap. Interestingly enough, we don't actually see the alien kill any of the crew members onscreen until closer to the end of the film. Until then, the death scenes consist of a character investigating a noise or roaming the ship, when they encounter the alien and the shot cuts away. This leaves the grisly details to our imagination for the most part, which is a smart directing choice by Scott. I also found it interesting that out of all the weapons they could have used, the crew members chose a flamethrower. Fire is one of mankind's oldest inventions, and they were using it to fight a monster that Ash claims is the absolute pinnacle of evolution. 

              I really like Alien. It's a visually appealing, entertaining film with excellent pacing and atmosphere. I could write a lot more about it, and the (mostly sexual) subtexts it presents, but it's three in the morning and I'm falling asleep as I write this. 

             

Horror Month: Shaun of the Dead (2004)

             

                     I wanted to watch something funny today because I was looking at the list of movies I plan to watch this month and there's a lot of really scary ones left. I suppose Shaun of the Dead isn't a complete horror film, the majority of it is way too funny to be scary in the slightest. And that's a great thing. This movie is wittily scripted,  well paced, and superbly acted with a fantastic cast. Nick Frost and Simon Pegg are both well known actors with a strong body of work of their own, but together they form a powerful comedy duo with incredible onscreen chemistry that they showcase again in the equally as excellent Hot Fuzz. 

                    Shaun of the Dead follows the story of average, mediocre Shaun (Pegg), his video game playing, pot smoking, unemployed best friend/roommate Ed (Frost) and various others, including Shaun's girlfriend and more than slightly oblivious mother. A zombie plague breaks out, as it is prone to do in films such as this, and the characters must find safety. As I mentioned before, this is first and foremost a comedy. The dialogue between all the characters is cleverly written and well delivered, with a plethora of English phrases and expressions that North American audiences will either be baffled by or find completely hilarious. But still, there is a horror element. In the scenes with zombies there is a lot of realistic gore. People get eaten and bitten very often, and blood always gushes from their wounds. It's excessive in some cases, but still believable. One scene has Shaun blow his own mother's head off after she is bitten and turns into a zombie. Another character (who is a total dick) gets ripped apart and disemboweled by a horde of undead. It's pretty jarring to see in a film that for the most part has the audience laughing, but still, it's a zombie outbreak. There's gotta be blood.

                There were some very clever scenes at the beginning that showed people sitting in buses, or waiting in line at the supermarket, just standing there oblivious to their surroundings like.....well, zombies. Shaun's world is so dull, monotonous and repetitive that even after the plague begins, it takes him a long time to even notice that something is wrong, just because things haven't changed for him that significantly. The events of the film are almost like a wake-up call for him, something to shake him out of his boring life and reignite the spark between him and his significant other, who spends the majority of the first few scenes lecturing him about how pointless his life is and how he needs to change. The apocalypse offers Shaun a chance to prove that he's capable of greater things, and he does this by taking leadership of the group, even though he indirectly leads most of them to their deaths. 

But hey, he tried.

Horror Month: The Blair Witch Project (1999)

                 I watched this one early on in Horror Month on purpose. The reason for this is that I wanted to get it out of the way because Blair Witch Project is horrifying, and one of the very, very few movies that continues to be scary after repeated viewings. I'm not really a fan of the "found footage" horror films that have become so popular over the last decade or so, they're pretty repetitive an uninspired (with a few exceptions of course). These types of movies certainly existed before Blair Witch, but this was the one masterfully made one that got very popular and influenced all the others. And since it came out, no found footage film and very few horror films in general have reached the levels of suspense, terror, and intensity that The Blair Witch Project achieves.

                I think that the extremely low budget of this film worked for it rather than against it. If the filmmakers had had a huge pile of cash to work with, they may have produced a more polished, technically intricate experience, maybe thrown in some expensive but unnecessary CGI or just thought too big in general. No, Blair Witch is brilliant in its simplicity, and that's one of the main reasons it's so great. The picture is grainy because it wasn't shot on professional cameras, there are no big name actors, and you literally see absolutely nothing of the film's eponymous monster in the entire movie. The two former work toward its staggeringly powerful realism and the latter is a main component of the scariness of Blair Witch. This film adheres to a rule that's simple in concept but can be very difficult to follow: The less you show of your monster, the scarier it becomes. And since you don't ever see the Blair Witch at all, she becomes absolutely horrifying. All of the scares in this movie come from your own imagination, when the characters are straining their eyes searching all around them for the source of the voices that torment them at night, you're transfixed on the screen, expecting to see a monster, a person, an animal, anything. But you don't. You're left confused, scared, and on the very edge of your seat. All we see of the Blair Witch is piles of rocks that appear around the students' tent at night, humanoid stick figures hanging from trees, strange symbols carved into the walls of that terrifying house they find at the end, and a bundle of sticks containing hair, skin and teeth of the first of her victim in the film (RIP Josh). It works so incredibly well because everything is in the viewer's imagination, and the more active that imagination is (mine works overtime 24 hours a day) the scarier it is. And above all, the way it's presented is just so....real. You feel like this really happened and the Blair Witch is really out there in the woods. 

                   That's a scary thought. 

Horror Month: Hausu (House, 1977)

           This is one of the weirdest films that I've ever seen. House is the almost nonsensical story of seven teenage girls who go to one of the girl's aunt's house for a summer of relaxing, only to be methodically  devoured and murdered by the house (or a demonic cat, or ghosts, it's really hard to tell sometimes). In terms of plot and characters, House is pretty conventional. This is basic 1970's horror movie stuff. The girls even have stupid names that correspond to their one-dimensional personalities. The main character/hot one is called Gorgeous, the tough, athletic one is named Kung Fu, the smart one that can't see anything without he glasses is Prof, and the girl who plays instruments and loves music is named Melody. Yeah, pretty lame. 

         But House's strengths aren't in it's plot or characters. Just judging it by those, it's a fairly lame movie. What makes this film remarkable and entertaining is it's ingenuity, both visually and in terms of editing. All of the sequences where the protagonists are attacked by the house are really, really strange. Most of them left me going "What the heck did I just watch?". I was especially confused after scenes where a character is quite literally eaten by a piano only to turn up later trapped in a grandfather clock that's oozing both blood and another unidentified green liquid, and another memorable one where another girl is attacked my mattresses. Mattresses. Pretty much anything in the house is apparently capable of killing people, near the end Kung Fu is eaten alive by a deranged light fixture. All of these scenes contain retro animation and ridiculously crude special effects, which are hilarious and very charming. Seeing the screen flicker different colours while a victim screams at the stump oozing cartoony animated blood where her hand used to be is really entertaining, and though they're not believable in the slightest the special effects are extremely creative. I won't soon forget the climactic scene near the end when a painting of a cat spews out blood until it fills up the entire room, or when one of the final survivors is pulled into this lake of blood by what appears to be a jar with teeth. It's just so over the top you can't help being entertained by it. And I definitely was.

Horror Month: Silence of the Lambs (1991)

               This is another fantastic horror film I've seen before. Silence of the Lambs is a brilliant thriller all around. Its deliberately slow pace in the beginning builds up into a stellar climax that leaves the viewer reeling afterwards. The performances are particularly remarkable, Jodie Foster is great as an FBI agent on the trail of a serial killer called Buffalo Bill, and Anthony Hopkins delivers arguably one of the most intense and memorable performances in modern film as charming, brilliant, but deeply disturbed killer/psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter. It's hard to think of him as a main character since he's only actually onscreen for 15-20 minutes of the whole film, but every scene he's in is deliciously tense, and his unpredictability makes him all the more enthralling. One of the best scenes in this movie is when he brutally murders two police officers and escapes from a maximum security facility by cutting one of his victim's faces off and putting it on his own, allowing him to escape in an ambulance. Hannibal's seems relatively passive and nonthreatening most times, but as soon as an opening appears for him he's all violent insanity.

             Another scene that I have come to appreciate after repeated viewings is the end of the film, where Jodie Foster's character is exploring the den of Buffalo Bill, trying to find and arrest him. The set design is perfect, creating an extremely sinister, foreboding atmosphere. Everything is filthy, the house is in a severe state of disrepair and the whole place just seems to be a labyrinth of doors and rooms, containing countless hiding places for the  fleeing killer. This leads to an incredibly suspenseful scene where the killer turns off the lights and approaches Foster with night vision goggles on. We see the entire encounter through his eyes, her groping around in the dark, oblivious to his presence while he slowly approaches her and readies his pistol. Although she eventually does kill Buffalo Bill and end his string of grisly murders, the ending of Silence of the Lambs is bittersweet, because while one killer is dead, a much more clever, cunning and brutal one has escaped. This sets the stage for the sequels nicely, but in my opinion none of them are near as good as this completely brilliant thriller.