I finally got around to watching Tesis, a Spanish horror/suspense movie by the director of Abre Los Ojos (remade as Vanilla Sky) and The Others.

It’s an early effort, and not at all as polished as his later work, but it’s very effective. It’s not a horror movie per se, but it’s definitely a suspense movie, to an extreme degree. It shouldn’t really work, using clichéd conceits like snuff movie production rings and multiple twists as to who our main suspects are, but it does. The twists come a little thick at the end, and it becomes a bit hard to believe, but in general, it’s very edge of your seat stuff.

Some nice touches, too. There are several nice reveals. When Angela, the protagonist, first gets her hands on a snuff tape, she’s uncertain what’s on it, but suspects that it’s something horrible. So she turns the brightness on her TV down as she’s starting to watch it, and all we get is the sound, screaming and begging. Later, when she’s showing it to her friend, he watches, but she can’t, and neither can the audience, until she finally peeks between her fingers, and we see what’s going on. It’s quite nice, by the time we see parts of the tape, the sound’s made us imagine far worse things than what we actually see.

There’s also a “trapped in the dark” sequence around the middle of the movie that’ll freak out anyone with claustrophobia, and Angela’s fear is often very believable and real.

On the negative side, there are a few very convenient turns and some hard to believe setups. The Chema character is kind of a stereotype, especially in the beginning, as a dorky, antisocial horror nerd. He gets a bit more depth later on, and becomes more likable, but he could still have done with at least a couple of personality traits that went against type.

Also, while the “message” of the movie, seeing snuff films as just an extreme version of commercial cinema’s “give the audience what they want” philosophy works, it’s not that hard to tell what the writer/director thinks of that particular attitude, and that makes it unsurprising when the college professor who espouses it turns out to be one of the snuff-producing bad guys. In the end, though, the movie redeems itself by saying, as it’s been hinting all along, that we are the consumers of this, our morbid curiosity is what drives it. It’s not particularly profound, but it’s well executed.

All in all, though, this is good suspense stuff, well worth watching if you like stuff like Silence of the Lambs.

I ran into Alex, the director of Bolas Chinas, at a cafe today. Apparently, he’d just finished the first cut a few days ago, and it clocked in at 2 hours and 20 minutes, which is of course ridiculous for a script that’s less than 60 pages. But I kind of expected it, Alex is so in love with all the takes that it would be hard for him to cut anything, at least for the first cut. Now, he just needs to cut, well, an hour or so. He promised us that we could see the final cut in a week, but I doubt it’ll be that fast. Still, he insisted it looked great, and other people told me the same thing, so it’s going to be interesting.

As for my script, it’s almost done. It needs an action scene in the second half of the second act, and while I know who it should involve and what the outcome should be, I’m having some problems maneuvering the characters into the right situation without changing earlier scenes that should ideally be left alone for purposes of characterization. But I’m sure I’ll figure it out within a few days. After that, it’s just polish and dialogue work, and then translation. I have to say I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

My writer’s block suddenly just… stopped on Thursday. I finished the long treatment, solving the problems with the end that I had, and then wrote 18 pages of screenplay, all in about 5 hours on Thursday night. Yesterday, I wrote 14 pages more, and also sent what I had off to Øyvind, to get a second opinion.

He basically said, it’s pretty good, and he liked it, but it had some problems. Which was basically what I expected. I’m going to write this more or less straight through to the end now, and then go back and revise. However, a very rough first draft should be done this coming week.

This is a semi-spec mexploitation direct to video script, semi-spec meaning that I’m not paid to write it, but the production people specifically asked me to write something, because they were interested in what I could do. So I have hopes. If nothing else, Øyvind and I agree that it’s a lot better than the script for Bolas Chinas.

Wish me luck, I’m going back to writing.

As I mentioned in my own birth of a horrorblogger post, one of the books I read at an early age was a Norwegian translation of Dean R. Koontz’ Phantoms. I’ve only later figured out that it was this book, since I only remembered fragments of it. But I remember it scaring me when I was around 12 or 13.

So the other day, I picked it up and re-read it. It was definitely the book I had read in my youth, but it was not very good. Not at all, actually. The idea and setup are quite good, and there’s a Lovecraftian atmosphere that works well, especially in the beginning. The problem is more than anything the writing.

Koontz’ prose is often compared to that of Stephen King, since both are considered no-nonsense craftsmen, with effective writing styles that have little pretense of being high art. This comparison is quite flawed, however. Stephen King is like that, Koontz is just… bad. There’s expository and repetitive dialogue, horrible logical mistakes that any decent editor should have caught, clumsy prose, idiotic similes, and cliché upon cliché.

I’d heard that this was turned into a very bad movie, and I thought it was the presence of Ben Affleck that did it, but it turns out it’s likely it was just because it was based on a bad book.

In addition to some good ideas and being a nostalgia trip for me, its only other redeeming feature is that science is actually used in an explanatory and documenting fashion here, much in the way I hoped for in my technology and horror post. Too bad it’s not better written, it could have become a prime example of that. As it is, it’s just bad.