I had heard good things about [•REC], the somewhat obnoxiously titled second horror feature from Catalonian director Jaume Balagueró. His first film was Darkness, from 2002, which I’ve mentioned on this site before as being generally boring and mediocre. The last 10 or 15 minutes were actually very good, however, (but couldn’t quite redeem the rest of the movie).

While Darkness was supernatural horror with devil worshippers, dark rituals, and opening the gates of hell, [•REC] (I get the feeling I’m going to get very tired of typing that before the end of this review) is a modern zombie movie in the style of 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake, with a touch of Blair Witch Project style “this is real footage from people who happened to be filming the event” pretenses.

In short, Barcelona local TV reporter Ángela (slightly annoyingly perky) and her camera man Pablo make a show called “While You Sleep“, basically feature reporting about what goes on in the city at night. This particular night they’re visiting a fire station, and goof around getting bored waiting for some sort of alarm so they can accompany the firemen and film some action.

Of course, that’s what they get, when they get called to an old apartment building whose inhabitants have been hearing screaming from the apartment of an elderly woman. When they break in to the apartment, accompanied by the police, the woman is bloody and behaves erratically, and then suddenly bites one of the police officers. A short time after, when attempting to get out of the building with the wounded guy, they discover that the local health authorities have sealed it off, posting armed guards outside and wrapping it in plastic.

You can probably see where this is going, and you’re right, there are handbaskets involved. It’s not horribly original, but it’s fairly realistic (especially the stuff at the beginning looks very much like what I’ve seen of unedited documentary footage), and while the start is maybe a little slow, it quickly picks up. The last 10-15 minutes in particular are extremely intense, to the point of giving me a good, solid adrenaline rush in the theatre. Also, the direction the plot takes at the end, where things get quiet and brooding and creepy, and you get a sort-of explanation of why all of this is happening (which mixes in just the right amount of supernatural horror and that particularly unsettling Catholic fanaticism), followed by one of the scariest movie monsters I’ve seen in a while, and a scene so tense I could hear people holding their breath in the theater), really, really works.

The whole “real footage” conceit is pretty good, but it fails in a couple of places. First, there’s a scene where Ángela demands that Pablo show her the footage he just shot, to make sure it’s on tape, and we actually see the rewind and then the footage play again, then cut back to “now”. I guess this could be explained that we’re not watching the footage, but the events as they unfold on the monitor of the camera, but it’s sort of unneccessary and weird.

The other thing, which is less of a problem, is that the movie has music. It’s fairly subtle, typical incidental music, but I noticed it a couple of times, and it does distract a little from the documentary feel of the whole thing. Also, if you’re really going to nitpick, people in the movie speak Castilian Spanish, while they’re in Catalan-speaking Barcelona (all signs, uniforms of the firemen, etc. on screen are in Catalan).

But these are minor problems. Once it gets going, [•REC] has you on the edge of your seat, adrenaline pumping, until the very (abrupt) end.

Neil Marshall’s a smart director, and he’s also very genre-aware. I liked his Dog Soldiers quite a bit, as a relatively fresh take on werewolves, which managed to do a lot with a small budget. I was less enthusiastic about The Descent, which I reviewed here back in 2005.

With Doomsday, he’s changed genres a bit. It’s certainly at least as gory as his earlier work, but this is a science fiction thriller in the vein of Escape from New York, which it obviously gets a lot of inspiration from (the heroine wears an eye patch for a bit, even). There are also bits clearly inspired by the Mad Max movies.

The plot isn’t particularly complicated, and it doesn’t matter that much either, to be honest. 20 years ago, in 2008, a virus broke out in Scotland, and the British government quarantined off all of it with a huge wall following the old path of Hadrian’s Wall. Now, the virus has broken out in London, and it turns out there are survivors in Scotland, who might hold the key to a cure. Badass paramilitary cop Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra), who barely escaped from Scotland as a child, leads a team of soldiers into the quarantine zone to find and bring back the cure.

That’s about it, really. As I said, the plot doesn’t really matter that much. Of course, the Scots have gone feral, divided into two camps, a Mad Max group of cannibalistic punk rockers (why is it that the fall of civilization equals mohawks and facial piercings?), and another group who have regressed to the middle ages, living in and around a castle, ruled over by a feudal lord. And obviously, the military mission goes pear-shaped really quickly, most of the soldiers are killed, and the few survivors need to resort to cunning and gory violence to survive and perhaps get what they came for.

This is not a perfect movie. The acting is ok, although Rhona Mitra has never been my idea of a great actress, but she’s good looking, and convincingly badass in this. The plot is simple and a bit thin. But the movie’s fun to watch, at times very much so, and it knows what it’s trying to do. As I mentioned, Marshall is genre aware, and this is at least as much a homage to his favourite movies as the Kill Bill movies were to Tarantino’s favourites. Hell, there’s even a synthesizer based score that sounds like anything John Carpenter did in the 80s.

In summary, recommended if you like Escape from New York, any of the Mad Max movies, and genera over the top action and gore. Not recommended if you don’t have a sense of humor, or can’t watch movies for pure entertainment, without taking them too seriously.

I wish I had the time to watch and blog about 100 movies in 100 days. Luckily, I don’t have to, since Scott Hamilton did it first. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, including many horror movies, and the reviews are well-written and witty. And it includes a review of a Korean war/horror movie called R-Point, which I really want to see.

A while ago, I finished Thomas Ligotti’s short story collection “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World“, and I’ve now read one and a half of the three “Tales of corporate horror” in the collection of novellas “My Work is not Yet Done“, and I’m starting to feel like I’m ready to say something on the subject.

Ligotti’s been called “philosophical horror”, and although the most obvious comparison is to Lovecraft, although there are apparently also comparisons to Borges, William S. Burroughs, and Kafka. That’s impressive praise, and since I deeply love both Lovecraft and Burroughs, and very much respect and enjoy both Borges and Kafka, I figured I would at least like Ligotti’s writing.

But I don’t. Not much, anyway. He has the occasional flash of an interesting idea, but this is basically a whole literary career built on social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder as the ultimate horror, and that’s honestly a bit laughable, and not at all scary. Most of the “horror” derives either from problems with relating to other people, or from badly defined feeling that there’s something wrong with the world.

The prose is not particularly good either, it’s exceptionally repetitive in a way that for some reason makes my entire body itch with impatience, the language in general is uninteresting, and it feels like it really wants to be good, without knowing how, like it’s written by a precocious 16-year-old with bad social skills and a badly-thought-through nihilistic worldview. If these stories were written by a 16-year-old, I’d be quite impressed, and expect the author to do something really good some day, but Ligotti’s born in 1953, so it’s probably hopeless to expect improvement now (although “My Work is not Yet Done” is newer, and noticably better, than most of the stories collected in “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World“).

There seems to be an elitism inherent in many reviews of Ligotti’s work. Lovecraft scholar T.S. Joshi seems to love him and consider him superior to most modern horror, for instance, and tends to blame the readers for preferring stuff like Stephen King and Anne Rice. Now, Stephen King is not a great author, he’s a craftsman with good horror ideas, and Anne Rice is fun when you’re 16, but I can’t see how Ligotti’s any better, he’s just more pretentious, and his writing is bad in a different (and, I suppose, artier) way. There’s a tendency to pedantry, with an accompanying overuse of pretentious vocabulary, for instance, in My Work is not Yet Done, the narrator berates another character for not pronouncing “lackadaisical” correctly, and the word is used at least six or seven times afterwards in the relatively short story.

Also, there’s the major problem of Ligotti’s writing not being particularly scary at all. There’s a moment or two when you think “well, that’s kind of a creepy idea, let’s see where it goes”, but the answer is invaribly nowhere. What horror there is is understated to the point of fading into the wallpaper, and, as I mentioned before, is generally based on things people with severe social anxieties feel are terrifying, such as being an outsider to etiquette and opaque codes of behaviour, be it in corporations (My Work is not Yet Done), queer little villages (The Last Feast of Harlequin), or in an art gallery (The Bungalow House). According to Wikipedia, Ligotti suffers from anxiety, so to him, this might be terrifying, I’m sure, but to the rest of us, it’s mostly tedious. The second major motif is a vaguely gnostic idea of the fundamental evilness of all of creation, which is hidden to most, but glimpsed by some, who invariably go slowly and boringly insane or indifferent to the world because of their knowledge. The characters so afflicted often end up joining Ligotti’s idea of horror in fading into the wallpaper as if they were never there.

As you can tell, I’m not liking this much. I think I’ll stop here, since I think it’s clear how profoundly unsatisfying I find Thomas Ligotti’s writings, both as horror fiction/weird tales, and as literature in general. I’ll just mention as a footnote that both Ligotti books are horribly, horribly ugly editions, no doubt at least partially a result of them being published by smaller publishers. The Shadow at the Bottom of the World in particular is horrid, seeminly set in Times New Roman and laid out in and old version of MS Word, the kerning all screwed up (or non-existent), tracking varying wildly, the margins tiny. In addition, there seems to be an annoying lack of proofreading, since typos abound. That, compared with my misgivings about the text itself, is enough to drive me up the wall.

In short, Thomas Ligotti makes me itch.

Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film is an academic work, but a very light one, in a good way. Noël Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror remains the definitive work in explaining and analyzing horror and its appeal, but Darryl Jones’ book is an excellent, more descriptive companion.

Breaking down themes in horror into chapters with names like “Hating others: Religion, nationhood and identity” and “Forbidden knowledge: Textuality, metafiction, and books”, Jones runs through an enormous corpus of works in a relatively compact volume. Each chapter starts out with the earliest literary examples of the themes, and usually ends up with modern horror movies that exemplify them, all the while running through possible symbolism and societal, political, and moral context for the themes. I don’t necessarily agree with every interpretation, but it’s still an excellent overview for people who are relatively new to the genre, and might think that horror is superficial and without deeper meaning.

Additionally, Jones has an entertaining writing style, full of dry wit, mixed with an obvious love of the horror genre. He repeatedly references the video nasties flap in his native UK, and lets no opportunity to dismiss this sort of hysteria pass him by. He’s no lover of just the “refined” in horror either, calling Abel Ferrara’s Basket Case “wonderfully grotty” in the chapter on body horror, as well as referring to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre his favourite horror film of all time. And then there are the repeated slams of Keanu Reeves…

All in all, highly recommended, both for the more academically minded, and for casual readers looking for an introduction to the themes and symbolism of horror. Personally, I’m passing this one on to my girlfriend, who’s had a somewhat negative opinion of horror, but was more interested once I started telling her about symbolism and horror as a representation of society’s fears.

The time has come for the sequel to the craptastic Vacaciones de terror, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago.

First of all, credit where credit’s due, I guess. This movie is a much more successful and pure horror movie than the first one, but it’s still utter shit.

Julio, the guy who made out with himself in the mirror for the longest time, and used the anti-demonic amulet he found as a rear view mirror decoration, in the first movie, is now older and wiser, and passes his time as a paranormal investigator or something. He also wears a long black trenchcoat and a horrible mullet. He’s played, like the last time, by Pedrito Fernández, pictured to the left. He’s a very, very wooden actor, although he has some agility for the action scenes, which is useful when you’re going to be dodging magically flying and on fire plastic carved pumpkins. See, this is a Halloween movie. Aren’t you glad you asked?

Pedro Fernández is joined by another Mexican singer, Tatiana, who was a pop singer back when this movie was made, but shortly after switched to making music for children. She’s pictured on the right, and plays a girl who’s a successful pop singer, and also the daughter of a famous movie producer. You know, the kind of movie producer the people who produced this movie will never, ever become. She also has a little sister, who’s annoying, and will become important to the “plot”.

After a brief intro sequence that serves to introduce our two main characters to each other, and for Tatiana to invite Pedrito to her sister’s birthday party, which is on Halloween, and is to be held at the movie studios where their father makes his movies. When Tatiana leaves in the car with her little sister, Pedrito notices that the sister has a diabolical doll similar to the one from the first movie, and becomes worried. However, before he can do anything about it, he must confront a raving mad old man who warns him about the dangers of the doll, gives him magical stone seals that will protect him from evil, tells him about an ancient tome that will give him vital information, and then promptly runs out into the street and gets killed. I guess they hired that actor for just one day of shooting.

Pedrito, determined to get to the bottom of this, goes to the library to read the book. And there, in a typical Mexican library with cheap 70s metal shelving and all sorts of boring non-fiction books, he finds the ancient, crumbling tome of demonology. I think it’s right next to some sort of engineering textbook.

Skipping ahead a bit, at the party, Tatiana performs, the little sister cuts herself stupidly when trying to cut her birthday cake, causing blood to drip onto a witch figure on her cake, which is then eaten by the demonic doll, which sits under the cake. The doll transforms into some sort of lizard monster, kills a studio technician, and everyone runs off, except Pedrito, who stays behind to check things out. Oh, and the father gives the birthday girl seven silver coins.

Later, in the girls’ home, the little girl remembers she left the coins at the studio, so she and her older sister go to get them. In the middle of the night, to the place where someone was horribly murdered by an unknown perpetrator. And they seem to think it’ll be a fun adventure.

Once there, they run into Pedrito, the little girl has another attack of near-fatal stupidity, and gets grabbed by the monster, the silver coins get stuck to a wall and electrified, Tatiana disappears, but is somehow transformed into a sugar figure on the birthday cake, and Pedrito saves her by jumping into the burning cake (yes, it’s on fire) and sliding across it in his black trenchcoat, getting covered by frosting, which is gone in the next shot. The sugar figure transforms back into Tatiana, and now it turns out they must rescue the little girl before sunrise, or she’ll be gone forever.

In the meantime, a guard at the studio calls the producer father because Tatiana’s car is outside, and then gets killed by the monster. Producer dad gets out his revolver and sawed off shotgun, puts on a denim jacket, and goes off to the studio. Everyone runs around a lot, the monster flings burning magically flying plastic carved pumpkins at Pedrito, the father shows up, shoots the monster in the head, which has little effect, suspects and tries to beat up Pedrito, then finally realizes they need to do something else. They get the electrified silver coins out of the wall by splashing them with holy water from the studio Virgin of Guadalupe shrine, melt them down to make a seal that can kill the monster, and somehow free the little girl.

However, Tatiana is stabbed in the stomach by some sort of wood rod, and dies. Pedrito must face the monster, and after a lot of rolling around on the ground, he throws the seal into its chest, shuriken-style, which makes it catch fire, and Tatiana come back to life. Everyone’s happy, and the movie ends with not one freeze frame, but two (first one of Pedrito, then one of Tatiana).

God, this movie is horrible. But if you want to see mariachi singers and children’s musicians battle lizard monster witches (for some reason, they call the monster a witch), then you don’t have that many options, and this movie is for you.

Bret Easton Ellis writing a horror novel is weird in itself. That it’s at the same time a postmodern rumination on his own life, featuring a first-person narrator with the same name and at least partially the same life as the author makes it stranger, but surprisingly, Lunar Park works quite well, both as postmodern novel and as horror.

The book’s Bret Easton Ellis has enjoyed a career as a celebrated novelist, but has also royally fucked up his life with drugs and meaningless relationships. One such relationship resulted in a child, and years later, he’s married the child’s mother to try to have a more normal life. Since, in the book’s world, the large cities are unlivable due to incessant terrorist attacks, Ellis and his new family relocate to the suburbs of New York City, where he tries to stay off drugs, and to connect with his sullen teenage son and his wife’s younger daughter by another man. Everyone’s on a cocktail of mood-altering drugs, even the six-year-old, and life in the suburbs is not really what Ellis is used to.

It starts getting strange and horrible, in a fashion very typical of Ellis, when things from his past seem to invade his present. Someone keeps showing up driving a car identical to that of his late father, the paint of his house, which is new and has never been painted another color, peels off to reveal the color of his father’s house, and so on. Add to this a classic demonic children’s toy, a serial killer reenacting murders from “American Psycho“, and boys his son’s age disappearing randomly from the neighbourhood, and some sort of vague form stalking the forest behind his house, and you have a very personal and postmodern horror novel. Essentially, Ellis is haunted by his past and the relationship with his father, but along the way, the book echoes both Stephen King and John Carpenter’s “The Thing”.

The ending is typical Ellis too, where things sort of resolve, but not in any neat and tidy way, and many parts of the story are left open to interpretation. I’m a longtime fan of Ellis, and this book is up there with his best, especially if you’re a horror fan too.

I just saw Guillermo del Toro’s latest, El Laberinto del Fauno (aka. Pan’s Labyrinth), and I’m pretty impressed. This is one of the best original works of speculative fiction in film in recent years, I think. Like most of del Toro’s movies, it teeters on the edge of being amazingly good, but then fails because of some hard to believe plot twist or dialogue. Guillermo del Toro is obviously an idea guy, and he has great ideas (all of his movies have the kind of stories that probably look amazing as treatments), but he’s not a great screenwriter. Still, this is probably his best movie to date, even better than Hellboy, which in itself was quite good.

This isn’t that easily identifiable as either horror or fantasy, but it has aspects of both, set against the in itself quite horrible reality of early Fascist Spain. A young girl, Ofelia, travels with her pregnant mother to rural northern Spain to meet her mother’s new husband, an army captain whose two principal interests are brutally defeating the remaining leftist guerrillas hiding in the mountains, and the impending birth of his son by Ofelia’s mother. He’s not particularly interested in Ofelia or her mother, which leaves Ofelia to wander about and soon find an ancient labyrinth whose central chamber is occupied by the titular faun, who tells her she might just be the lost princess of an underground kingdom.

That fantasy story, however, mostly takes the back seat to the fight between the captain and the guerrillas, punctuated by a couple of sequences of extremely brutal violence that made me flinch. The first one is very unexpected, and reminded me perhaps most of the murder in the first sequence in Irréversible, not at all as long-lasting, but much more jarring because of the surprise onset. During the movie, the captain is painted as so much of an asshole (but quite a believable one) that when he finally gets his dues, you wish he could suffer more.

In the meantime, Ofelia has to pass three tests given to her by the faun, to prove that’s she’s really the lost princess. In the first, she must confront a giant toad living under a dead tree, a challenge that, apart from the visceral special effects, is quite in keeping with the fairy-tale roots of the movie. The second, however, is when things veer deeply into horror territory. Simply drawing a doorway on her bedroom wall with a piece of chalk, Ofelia enters the gallery of The Pale Man, a monstrous humanoid thing with no eyes in its head, but with apparently removable eyes in the palms of its hands. The creepy alien weirdness of it reminds me of Lovecraft, which is obviously a general inspiration for del Toro (see Hellboy, and also del Toro is apparently doing an adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness). Now that I think about it, there’s also a visual parallel with Y’golonac, an extended Lovecraft mythos monster with mouths, not eyes, in the palms of its hands.

Sadly, it’s in this very creepy scene that the movie also offers its biggest letdown in terms of character motivation. Despite having been warned explicitly and urgently by the faun not to partake of the Pale Man’s buffet of delicious food (he sits motionless at the head of a large table filled to the brim with it), and despite the faeries who guide her trying to stop her, Ofelia decides to stop at the table and taste a couple of grapes. This piece of plain, unadulterated, and unmotivated idiocy wakes the Pale Man, from whom Ofelia barely escapes, and also causes the faun to declare her unable to pass the tests. It’s a plot contrivance to be able to wake the Pale Man, but it could easily have been handled in a myriad other ways that would not have caused the audience to view the main character as either terminally stupid or suffering from acute short-term memory loss.

Later on, the movie improves again, and the end is heart-wrenching and appropriately fairy-tale style tragic, although the “was she imagining it all, or was it real” touches of the ending, despite seeming to finally come down on the side of her experiences being real, weaken things a bit, and if one were to come to the conclusion that it was all fantasy, the moral would be that childhood fantasy is a dangerous thing which leads children to putting themselves and others in mortal peril for no good reason. I don’t think that’s the moral del Toro wants to promote, and that’s without even getting into the theme of someone being a lost princess whose very soul has qualities that makes her fit to rule, in a movie that’s otherwise doing a fine job of being anti-fascist.

But, quibbles aside, this is a very good movie in many ways. It’s a shame that del Toro, a Mexican, seems to be unable to make his movies in Mexico (only his first, Cronos, that of the interesting idea but fatally flawed and clichéd execution, was made in Mexico, subsequent ones have been made in Spain or the US), but even though his production is uneven, he always seems to dedicate himself 100% to the story of his movies, with little concern for anything else. That’s got to be worth something, and he seems to be getting better all the time.

For those of you who read Spanish, I can highly recommend Revista Cinefagia, a website (it’s called Cinephagia Magazine, but I don’t think they actually publish on paper) reviewing all sorts of movies, but mostly Spanish-language ones. I found them when looking for reviews of crappy Mexploitation horror movies (they review both Vacaciones de terror and another crappy 80s Mexican horror movie, Cementerio del terror), but they actually do a lot of different stuff, from international cult and horror cinema to mainstream Latin American movies, and they do it really well. The reviews that I’ve read are all smart, clever, and generally get the point.

Like many reviewers, they’re at their most entertaining when they really hate something (their review of Batalla en el Cielo is funny, for instance), but there’s plenty to read in their impressively long list of movie reviews. Oh, and they also review porn, including Eon McKai movies, something few critics are willing to do, but more should.

I’m tempted to send them a complimentary copy of Comando Zorras, now.

Wonderfully cheesy Mexican movie channel De Pelicula is running a Halloween horror movie marathon. All Mexican horror movies, all the time, this whole weekend. It’s not as bad as you think… it’s much, much worse.

I just watched Vacaciones de terror, a movie considered something of a classic by people I know (who never call it just by the name, but always say “Las vacaciones de terror, con Pedrito Fernández“). It’s directed by René Cardona III, grandson of legendary Cuban-born Mexploitation director René Cardona, who directed almost 150 movies, including several Santo movies, the Luchadora movies, and La horripilante bestia humana (aka. Night of the Bloody Apes), as well as acting in El Barón del Terror (aka. The Brainiac), amongst others. René Cardona Jr., father of the director of today’s movie, worked on more straight up trash cinema, including the entire series of La risa en vacaciones, one of the most successful lowbrow comedy series in the history of Mexican cinema. So René Cardona III is the last in a long line of schlockmeisters, as well as having some sort of family obligation to deal with vacations in his movies.

The story of the movie is fairly straightforward. A family gets a cheap fixer-upper summer house in the Mexican countryside, but all is not what it seems, as the youngest daughter finds a diabolical doll who takes control of her and supernaturally attempts to kill the rest of the family. The doll accomplishes this mostly by moving its eyes, which is always accompanied by a “scary” synth chord, and mostly makes furniture topple over slowly, or in some cases, cutlery fly about. The aunt falls mysteriously ill and has to go to the hospital, accompanied by the uncle, leaving the now demon-possessed kids in the hands of their niece and her eighties-haired boyfriend. The boyfriend has come upon the one thing that can stop the diabolical doll, namely a shiny medallion. Being Mexican, he’s done the obvious with the medallion: Hanging it from the rear view mirror of his crappy truck. This turns out to be fortuitous, since the doll remote controls his truck and tries to kill him with it, but the medallion stops it (after he stupidly tries to outrun the truck for a while). He then gets back into the truck and drives it through the wall of the house, which does no good at all, since he’s soon impaled by several pieces of levitating cutlery, and then sucked into a smoking mirror (well, he’s pressed against the mirror for a while, then disappears).

The girlfriend hangs around for a while screaming, the uncle tries to return from the hospital, but has diabolical car trouble, and then the idiot girlfriend remembers that the boyfriend said something about the medallion being their only hope, so she gets it and presses it against the doll, then throws the whole thing in the fireplace. This makes the house catch fire, and then explode several times, while everyone barely escapes alive. The final scene shows the house for sale, now in its original dilapidated but not burned down and blown up condition, and the diabolical doll reveals itself to another little girl.

This movie was incredibly horrible, like some sort of retarded, slow-moving version of The Evil Dead, without anyone being raped by trees. Lucky for me, there’s a sequel, which I might get to see some time, called Vacaciones de terror 2: Noche de brujas, and as a bonus, that one features children’s artist Tatiana. I can’t wait.