Change of plans . . .

Instead of watching Lucio Fulci's The House by the Cemetery tomorrow (or today . . . depending on what time it is), I'll be watching Wake Wood (2011).

Day 28 - Altitude (2010)

I’ve been excited about this movie for a while now because the concept seemed like such a cool idea, but for some reason I kept putting it off, so I went into this movie with high expectations. While in retrospect I don’t think anything could have helped this movie, going in with expectations was certainly the worst thing I could have done.

Five friends set off flying across the country to see a concert, in a chartered plane piloted by one of the friends. When things begin to go wrong and the plane begins to ascend into a storm, tensions soar as a simple flight becomes a life and death situation. On top of the already eminent threat of death from just being in the plane, dumb dumb dumb, suddenly there are Lovecraftian monsters in the clouds.

It’s usually a bad sign when you find yourself rolling your eyes two minutes in to a movie. After the first ten minutes I had to give up rolling my eyes and resort to face palming through the rest of it. Everything about this movie sucks. The acting is poor the writing is terrible and the story is all situational – everything that could go wrong does go wrong, but it’s all so sudden and ridiculous that you just don’t care. One thing that annoyed me from the start of the film was the way the girl flying the plane had to announce every little thing she does with the controls and how every radio transmission has to be heard just to fill all the empty silences. Nothing fits together here. There's too much craziness going in too many directions, and a complete lack of quality to any of it. There are a thousand things I could complain about here but I’d rather not bother.

In short, there is nothing redeeming about this movie. Don’t waste your time.

For Day 29 I’ll be watching The House by the Cemetery (1981).

Day 27 - The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2009)

I do believe this mockumentary was one of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen – it’s certainly one of the most frightening I can remember seeing in a long time - simply because it has done its job so well. I really knew nothing about this movie going in. I hadn’t even heard about it besides the fact that the name seemed to get dropped on the horror subreddit enough that it peaked my curiosity. From the very little bit I had heard, I was under the impression that this was going to be one long, horrible torture porn movie that pretends to be a horror film – I can’t stand that crap – so I went in fully expecting to shut it off a few minutes in. On the contrary, a few minutes in and I was hooked.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes is a documentary following the career of, and hunt for, a serial killer who would come to be known as the Water Street Butcher. In the killer’s house, in a closet, thousands of videos tapes were found, made by the killer, documenting the kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder of all of his victims. This film cuts together a sort of highlight reel of the killers most notorious deeds, with interviews of investigators and affected family members, to create a timeline of the killer’s activity while simultaneously attempting to explore his methods and motives.

There are so many reasons that I loved this movie. For me the point of watching horror movies used to be for the scare, to feel that rush of fear and adrenaline. Watch enough horror movies though and it gets harder to find anything scary in them. This movie put the fear in me again in a way I hadn’t felt it in a long time. These filmmakers clearly understand what goes into the creation of a documentary, as this film does an exemplary job of mimicking one. Despite the unbelievably sadistic nature of this film, there is surprisingly little gore aside from a few quick moments, as most of the killings are off screen or implied. This is one of the things about this movie that I was really grateful for, as it would have been far too easy given the film’s style and subject matter to simply go for the over-the -top gore for effect, which would only have cheapened it. One scene in particular, my favorite, contained elements of Halloween and Psycho and had me on the edge of my seat, heart racing. I thought I was supposed to be desensitized to this stuff, that I wasn’t supposed to be shaken by movies anymore. But this did it. I literally had to get up and make sure the doors were locked when this was over.

Despite all my praise, this is far from a perfect movie, and I can easily understand most of the criticism it receives. While a lot of the acting here is outstanding there are a handful of off moments where a characters responses doesn’t seem to match the mood or just seems strangely out of character for whatever reason. On the other hand, some of the lower quality acting – of which there is little - can be attributed to the fact that this is a documentary, and we’ve all seen those boring, two dimensional people who drone on in real documentaries. Another complaint I’ve seen is that the murder/torture scenes seem too staged, too artificial. For me this flaw was solved by a quick clip of dialogue in which a profiler comments on the killer’s flair of theatrics. Problem solved. For those who whine that this isn't the first documentary-style serial killer film, yes, this is not the most original idea, it's been done before it'll be done again. There are no new ideas, get over it. The thing that really bothers me however, isn’t a problem with the movie itself, but the fact that I know this movie won’t have the same effect on me a second time around; unless maybe I wait a few years before watching it again.

It seems this movie is very hit or miss with people. This film won’t do for everyone what it did for me - it got under my skin and stayed there, pushing my paranoia button – but if it works for you, it works its magic well.

For Day 28 I’ll be reviewing Altitude (2010).

Tim Burton's Dark Shadows

I'm a huge fan of Gothic horror, and no one in film today seems to make better use of it than Tim Burton. Also, as a fan of this style, I recently came to the classic black and white TV show Dark Shadows. So imagine my excitement when it came about that Tim Burton was going to be doing a film adaptation of the show. With a screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith, author of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," the film stars Johnny Depp (no surprises there), Michelle Pfieffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green, Jackie Earle Haley, Johnny Lee Miller, and Chloe Moretz, among others.

While none of this information is all that new, I just wanted to express my excitement over it and to share a few of the photos that have been released so far. I know they aren't very clear reproduced here, so for a better image just click on the picture.



A few other photos can be found here.

Day 26 - Super 8 (2011)

So I just saw this for the second time in theaters yesterday, and while I know it isn't, strictly speaking, a horror movie, it seems to have one foot far enough across the genre line that I decided to count it. Super 8 is the combined effort of writer/director J.J. Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg - for whose work it's intended to be a kind of tribute - and this movie is certainly a credit to both their names.

Super 8 is the story of young Joe Lamb who, after recently having lost his mother, is helping his friends make a zombie movie for a film contest. After sneaking out one night to film a scene, the group of friends witnesses a horrific train crash caused intentionally by one of their teachers. Now, as the kids continue to make their movie and the military is stepping in to take over, something that escaped from the crash is working its way through the town snatching people, stealing odds and ends, and generally causing mayhem. Things really come to a head however, when Joe's crush is taken by the alien creature leaving he and the others to sneak back into the now evacuated town to rescue her.

This is an unbelievably beautiful movie, and it does just as it intended, recalling us to those great 80's classics such as The Goonies (from which its group of young protagonists is clearly based) and E.T. (the visual style of which is almost identical). Aside from Elle Fanning, I had never heard of any of these kids before, and yet I hope we see them again in the near future because the acting here was great. Between the story and the cinematography I was completely sucked in through both viewings, and I have the feeling that this is one of those films that can do that every time.

There are a few glitches here however, but they're fairly easy to overcome. The first time I saw Super 8, Abrams' overuse of the blue camera flare was driving me up the walls. This time, not so much. Yes, in small doses it adds to the tone and visual effect of the film, but in the quantities it's used here . . . that's just overkill. The only other real flaw here is in the story. Throughout the film we witness the creature terrorizing innocent people in a few frightening scenes, presumably killing at least a couple, but come the end of the movie, after all the devastation we've seen him cause, we're then supposed to feel bad for the alien. So long as you don't think about it, this works fine. But once the credits roll and you pull back from the story you're then going to realize that, however you might feel about the alien at the end, you still just watched him horrify a whole town (though the military did their fair share too). But like I said, these issues are fairly easy to get over in the big picture.

This is maybe one of my favorite movies of recent years, so, needless to say, I highly recommend it. Super 8 will be out on DVD and Blu-ray on November 22, but it's in dollar theaters now, and this is really one of those films that needs to be seen on the big screen.

For Day 27 I'll be watching The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2009).