It’s not that often that I get to review a Norwegian movie, and especially not a Norwegian psycho-thriller with horror elements, reminiscent of Polanski and Lynch. Naboer is that film, which finally found its way to Mexican theaters, and surprisingly, it was a quite pleasant experience. By pleasant, I of course mean unpleasant, but in a good way.

The plot is rather simple: John lives alone after his girlfriend left him, and bumps into his next-door neighbours, two young women. They are acting… strangely, and seem to know things more about him than they should. Things go rapidly downhill from there. It’s not the sort of movie you can explain too much without giving it all away (although the truth wasn’t too hard to figure out about halfway through anyway).

It’s not particularly original, I have to say, and it’s very fair to compare it to and consider it inspired by movies like The Tenant, The Machinist, Spider, and Lost Highway, but it’s quite well done, and it works. Visually it’s also quite nice, all muted tones and old, worn-down Eastern Oslo apartment building interiors, second-hand sixties furniture, and a thin layer of grime on everything. I was also amazed by the incredibly fractured space in the movie, you literally don’t know how things in these big, old, cluttered apartments connect and relate to each other, and that’s kind of the point. It’s done subtly, though, not the jarring cuts that breaking basic rules of cinematography would imply, and it gives you a sense of being lost and paranoid, just like the lead character.

The acting’s a bit uneven, Kristoffer Joner, perhaps the finest actor in Norwegian cinema today, does a great job, while some of the others put in a somewhat less convincing performance. But none of it’s too bad, and if you don’t know Norwegian, and you watch the movie subtitled, it probably won’t bother you at all.

Oh, and there’s an amazing sex scene. I know people have reacted strongly to it, but I thought it was amazing, an incredibly visceral mix of sex, violence, blood, and base instinct, with a raw urgency and credibility to it. And so very sexy, the sort of thing you get excited by despite yourself, similar to some of the stuff in Crash. Actually, thinking about inspirations and influences for this movie, I think Sletaune is definitely in the same idea space as recent Cronenberg, the general concept reminded me of Spider, while the sex scene made me think of both Crash and A History of Violence.

If you like psycho-thrillers, violent sex and nice visuals, well tied together although perhaps not incredibly original, you should definitely take a look.

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.

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.

I was all settled in to watch Mario Bava’s La Maschera del demonio (aka. Black Sunday) last night, but I paused it to eat, and flipped through TV channels. On AXN, I came across a guy who looked familiar, being left in a darkened basement by a goth elevator operator. The guy was Bruce Davison, and the scene was instantly recognizable as horror. I decided to watch for a few minutes, and things started to look familiar.

Indeed, it was an episode of Kingdom Hospital much-vaunted Stephen King-scripted remake of Lars von Trier’s Riget. It was similar enough that it was recognizable to me within less than a minute, which I suppose is good, since I’m a huge fan of the original miniseries (and also, although slightly less, of the sequel). But then things started to go downhill.

I don’t think the concept of Riget is impossible to translate to a US setting, it’s pretty primal and international in itself. But Kingdom Hospital totally misunderstands what’s going on. The implicit (there are ghosts and spirits roaming the hospital) is made explicit (we spend a lot of time roaming around darkened corridors under the hospital, which are filled with spirits, and a guy who’s in a coma walks around there talking to them). The ghost of the mysterious young girl, Mary, which was rarely seen, enigmatic, and uncommunicative in the original, is now a cute waif with lots of dark eyeshadow, and she walks around and talks to the coma guy, explaining to him what’s going on. There’s a giant needle-toothed ant-eater spirit around too, whatever the hell that means, and there’s pop-punk music on part of the soundtrack.

It just doesn’t work. It feels like a mix between ER and one of those crappy horror/SF TV series like Supernatural or Stargate, complete with acceptable but annoying acting. In addition, the writing is full of Stephen King touches, from his most standard repertoire. I like Stephen King’s writing, but he’s prone to repeating himself, and repeating themes. Here, there’s a guy in a coma after being hit by a car, who King himself has apparently stated was directly based on his own much publicised accident. There’s also an old-fashioned, weird expression, “It’s called doing a solid”, repeated with mystical significance. There are self-consciously quirky characters, in contrast to the natural, charmingly quirky ones from the original. Etc., etc.

To add insult to injury, reportedly Sony Pictures wanted to shoot it on HD, but the director, Craig R. Baxley, whose most recognizable earlier effort was a few episodes of The A-Team, wanted to shoot on 35 mm, so Stephen King personally paid the difference in cost. That’s just silly for several reasons, the first being that the original was grainy and weird looking, because it had been shot on Super 16, edited on various video formats, and blown up to 35mm, on purpose. Also, insisting on 35mm instead of HD might make sense for something that’s going to be shown in theaters (possibly), but for something that’s primarily for TV, it’s just stupid. It stinks of hubris and pretentiousness, Stephen King and the director both wanting to make a “real movie”.

Avoid, avoid. I watched the majority of one episode only, but I can assure you I’m not watching any more. Stick with the original, which is available as a region-free DVD release (although with burnt-in subtitles, last I checked).

To top it off, I got annoyed and didn’t get around to watching my Italian horror movie.

Dario Argento is worshipped by horror fans, and largely unknown to everyone else. His Suspiria, a supernatural slasher, is still considered by many one of the best horror movies ever made. Visually, his movies are almost always stunning, although his scripts and directing of actors often leaves a lot to be desired.

And now he’s made an episode of Masters of Horror, with an annoyingly misspelt title. A policeman rescues a disfigured young girl from a crazed vagrant who’s trying to kill her, only to start an affair with her, ignoring her tendency to kill and eat small animals and children.

It’s… not great. The idea isn’t too bad, and fairly original, a sort of succubus myth with added gore and cannibalism. That specific touch makes me think that Argento’s incapable of considering horror that doesn’t have gore, which is a rather limited mindset.

Also, this has Dario Argento directing sex scenes, a thought that made me imagine a lot of things, none of them pleasant. In actuality, those scenes work fairly well, but the rest of the movie is illogical, shallow, predictable, and honestly a bit boring. You can guess where it’s going within the first 10 minutes, and sure enough, that’s where it goes. The makeup and effects on “Jenifer” are good, and the initial reveal of her face is creepy, similar to the initial reveal of the children in Cronenberg’s The Brood.

I’m not giving up Masters of Horror yet, though, but this episode is probably the weakest so far, and can safely be skipped.

Tobe Hooper‘s work has always been uneven. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is of course the original modern slasher movie (although the movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis in the 60s came first, they were not even close to as grueling). It’s no secret that I’m not a huge fan of slasher movies, but TCM has an intensity beneath the rough look and low production values that’s very real, and very unsettling even today. Poltergeist is one of my favorite horror crossover movies, although Hooper’s exact involvement with it is somewhat disputed. And, unlike some people, I liked The Toolbox Murders quite a bit, at least the supernatural non-slasher parts of it.

On the other hand, he’s also made some really bad movies, so I was uncertain what to expect of Dance of the Dead, the third installment in the Masters of Horror series. As it turns out, it’s not bad, although it has problems. In the near future, chemical warfare and terrorist chemical attacks have killed millions of people in the US, and disfigured and scarred many more. Society is falling apart, anarchy reigns, and as usual when anarchy reigns, there are seedy nightclubs, people in leather and latex sporting piercings, and a whole lot of drugs.

You may have heard that this is a zombie story, but that’s not really true. There are reanimated dead in it, but their reanimation is a side-effect of chemical agents, and they’re not aggressive or cannibalistic. Instead, it’s the story of an overprotective, secretly evil mother, and her daughter, who wants out, and falls in love with a young criminal. On the way, daughter discovers what really happened to her rebellious older sister, and mother’s dark secrets.

Apart from the fact that this is basically Cool as Ice in the post-apocalyptic future with zombies, it works fairly well. The mother overacts, people’s motivations aren’t always clear, and the inevitable twist isn’t so amazingly shocking as you’d like it to be, but in general it’s a decent story. There’s also a scene of the reanimated dead being coldly dispatched into a dumpster and set on fire, which is quite effective and concentration camp-like, but it would have been better if Hooper didn’t try to milk it for emotional effect quite so much. As it is, something that could have been chilling and uncomfortable becomes exploitative and a bit cheap. And speaking of exploitative and cheap, there’s an enormous amount of naked tits in this movie, both reanimated and otherwise, and I think Robert Englund gets a blowjob from a reanimated corpse at one point. Possibly a little excessive, I think.

But why is there a horrible visual effect, a sort of splitting of the image into several superimposed versions which then shake around for a second, accompanied by a screechy sound, that gets used all the time? It’s literally used at least once per minute, and it happens equally in a quiet dialogue scene as in the climactic scenes of the dead dancing. Did someone get a new Shake plugin to play with? I found myself shouting “Fucking stop it!” at the screen several times, through gritted teeth.

But all in all, I think this is the best Masters of Horror episode so far. The setting and concept are original and decently interesting, and it held my attention. It’s far from perfect, but it’s definitely watchable.

Stuart Gordon, along with longtime collaborator, producer and director Brian Yuzna is definitely the foremost adapter of H. P. Lovecraft’s work for the screen. The classic horror comedy Re-Animator is probably the best known example, but the recent Dagon is supposed to be quite good too. I admit I’ve never been a huge fan of Gordon’s work. It has the trappings of Lovecraft’s fiction, but none of the mood. The adaptations to modern times are often incongruent, especially given Lovecraft’s insistence on archaic vocabulary and a gothic mood. Also, there’s frequently both sex and comedy mixed in. Lovecraft himself probably never laughed in his life, and had little if any sex life to speak of. So the tone, for me, just doesn’t work, although I think Re-Animator is hilarious, of course.

Episode 2 of Masters of Horror is an adaptation of Dreams in the Witch-House, one of my personal favorite Lovecraft stories, along with The Rats in the Walls. Both of these stories prominently feature rats that are heard scurrying around inside the walls (which, in turn, makes me wonder how much of horror/comedy classic Of Unknown Origin was inspired by Lovecraft), but that’s not what I like or find scary about them. Unlike some people, I’m not particularly scared of rats. Indeed, the first year I was in Mexico, we trapped a rat by hand in the kitchen of our rented house, Hans Petter, in an act of physical elegance and swiftness I’d thought him incapable of, trapped the fleeing rat under the sole of his combat boot, holding it fast without killing it, and it fell upon me to bash its head in with a piece of pipe. I didn’t particularly enjoy that experience, and I was shaken by it, but it didn’t scare me.

What always scared me about Dreams in the Witch-House was the brooding, creeping menace of the setting. It’s told in retrospect, so there’s an inevitability of the goings-on, and, as in many other Lovecraft tales, the certainty that they can only end badly.

Stuart Gordon keeps a lot of the main threads of the story in his adaptation. Most of the characters are maintained, merely updated to the modern-day setting. There’s also little to no comedy elements, which seemed like a good idea to me. However, there are also large changes. Gordon’s Gilman character knows nothing of the house and its history when he moves in, which presses the plot into a standard complex discovery pattern. Also, Gordon introduces a love interest, a poor next-door neighbour with an infant child, and then uses a vision of her naked body in a gratuitous scene whose ending echoes the beauty-to-crone transformation in The Shining, but is much less effective.

The updating of the “science” is surprisingly effective. While Lovecraft’s original concept was based on (then very new) quantum physics and a somewhat twisted reading of non-euclidean geometry, Gordon updates it to involve superstring theory and brane cosmology, and doesn’t even screw up the terminology or the explanations too much. Within the setting of the story, it makes a lot of sense, even though our protagonist’s acceptance of the weird angles in his room being exactly like the ones he’s working on for his thesis is a bit convenient and hard to believe.

In what I think is the biggest problem, the Cthulhu mythos aspects of the story are replaced by a rather conventional setup involving a traditional witch, satan worship, and the blood sacrifice of infants. Instead of making the traditional witch folklore of New England a part of the greater cosmic horror of the mythos, with the witch sabbat Black Man being a form of Nyarlathotep, like Lovecraft does, Gordon takes the witch stories at face value, making the story much more small-scale. The love interest’s child is of course the one chosen for the blood sacrifice, and Gilman himself is compelled to perform the deed.

Also, Brown Jenkin, the rat-human hybrid familiar to the witch, is not at all as creepy and monstrous as in the story. It’s a human actor’s head pasted onto a rat’s body, and although the compositing effect isn’t bad, the result is more slightly comical than it is terrifying. And Brown Jenkin was scary as hell in the story, so that’s a bit of a disappointment for me.

It’s not particularly creepy or scary throughout, and it’s largely predictable, especially the parts that are different from the original story. What does work is the ending. Instead of shying away, Gordon forges ahead with a downer ending in which almost everything that can go wrong, does. People end up in insane asylums, commit suicide, are tunnelled through by rats, etc., and those final 5-10 minutes work well. The final shot of the “Room for Rent” sign outside of the witch-house is slightly reminiscent of 80s horror which always ended with a “get ready for the sequel” shot, but it works. If the tension and stakes had been higher throughout, and perhaps the special effects a bit more subtle, and more emphasis had been placed on the mood, this would have been great. As it is, it’s actually pretty good, definitely one of the better Lovecraft movie adaptations, and one of Stuart Gordon’s best works, too. Like the first episode of the series, it’s not particularly scary, but it is enjoyable.

Masters of Horror is definitely worth watching, and my respect for Stuart Gordon as a more serious horror movie director has increased. I’ll be on the lookout for Dagon now, I want to see if this is part of his development as a director, or just a fluke.

I’ve just started watching the Masters of Horror TV series. Episode one is Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, by Don Coscarelli, creator of the Phantasm and Beastmaster movies, as well as Bubba Ho-Tep. Like with Bubba Ho-Tep, Joe R. Lansdale had a hand in writing this episode.

It’s fairly straightforward slasher fare, really, with an above-average resourceful female protagonist. The serial killer is called “Moonface” (can we get a moratorium on -face serial killer names, please), and is big and ugly and mean and whatnot. He has a leatherface style cabin in the woods, surrounded by rotting corpses on stakes, and is quite unpleasant. The twist here is the female protagonist, who not only proves to be quite a match for Moonface, but also has some secrets of her own, revealed in flashbacks.

It’s not bad, but it’s not terribly exciting either. It’s competent enough, but I felt like I’d seen most of it before. And, like most slasher movies, at least to me, it’s not scary at all. There’s maybe a jump or two, but jumps don’t equal scares. The series introduction is actually scarier and moodier than the episode itself, which is not really a good sign.

The acting’s uneven, the protagonist is good enough, and Moonface is fine for what he is, but the protagonist’s wacko survivalist husband is not too great, and an old guy who’s trapped in Moonface’s cabin with our protagonist, well, he gets very annoying after two sentences, and he won’t shut up.

It also suffers from the curse of format. Everything has a format, if you want to make a feature film, it’s one and a half to two and a half hours, sometimes more. If you want to make a Masters of Horror episode, it’s one hour, and so on. This idea isn’t really complex enough for one hour, it’d be better as an half-hour movie. But, of course, there’s absolutely no market for half-hour short movies.

I’m hoping the later installments in the series will be better, it’s a promising start, after all. I hear good things about the Dario Argento (DARIO ARGENTO!) and Tobe Hooper episodes, so I’m looking forward to those. The John Carpenter one sounds interesting too.

I just saw King Kong today, and this isn’t so much a review as it is some general first impressions.

I used to be very skeptical about this project, when I first heard about Peter Jackson doing it, right after Lord of the Rings. I had seen the original once, and the 70s remake once, and I didn’t think of it as anything special. I didn’t think the story was good enough to work as a modern movie. But now that I’ve seen the remake, I have to say that there’s more than enough story there. And if this was the movie Peter Jackson saw in his head when he thought back to the original, I see why he liked it so much.

Just to get the complaints out of the way: It’s a tad too long. It could have been cut maybe 15 minutes in total, and it would have had better flow. Also, a few effects don’t look great, the compositing is a little lazy, and the perspective is a little wrong. But the vast majority of the effects look amazing, so all in all, I’m not going to complain too much about it.

Peter Jackson hasn’t forgotten his horror skills either. The second act is grueling, and it goes on and on. About midway into it, I was thinking “Peter Jackson should do a horror movie again, and make it this intense. It would be the scariest, most impacting thing in the world”. A while later, though, I was revising that thought. If this much intensity was put into a pure horror movie, of the kind I like, where there’s little humor to offset the grimness, it might well become totally unwatchable. At the very least, it would create reactions like the ones people had to The Exorcist when it was new; people in hysterics running from the theater, sobbing and screaming.

There’s hardly a phobia, at least not a phobia of mine, that this movie doesn’t poke at. There are confined spaces, wild animals, giant insects and spiders, heights, darkness, giant bats, and god knows what else. And the fucking centipedes. I hate centipedes, and I feel like this movie made everyone else in the audience understand me completely. Burroughs would know what I’m talking about. And giant fleas, and leeches, and spiders, and ants, and dinosaurs, and breakfast cereal, and I was pretty exhausted. But in a good way, like after a lot of good sex. But with giant leeches. You understand.

(Sean T. Collins seems to agree with a lot of the things I’m saying, only, as usual, he says them better. Check out his review.)

I’m not going to make a habit of posting reviews, I think, but I just watched a movie that I thought it’d be worth talking about a bit. It’s Neil Marshall’s The Descent, a British horror movie that’s been talked about and hyped quite a lot. Neil Marshall made Dog Soldiers in 2002, a movie I liked quite a bit. Dog Soldiers was a fairly basic, but solid and tense horror/action deal, using werewolves as monsters in a “group of soldiers isolated and fighting against overwhelming odds” story along the lines of Aliens and Zulu. I know people who hated it, but I thought it worked well, and was a good example of what could be done with a tight script and a small budget.

I had fairly high expectations about The Descent, since it seemed like a good concept, a group of female cavers get trapped in an uncharted cave system and are hunted by strange predators. There’s a huge list of phobias to exploit here, from fear of the dark, claustrophobia, fear of heights, etc., to the more mythological fears of monsters living on the bowels of the earth, places we never see, Lovecraft’s “Dark corners of the earth”.

I watched this with Øyvind, who’s a bit of a caver himself, and knows a bunch of people who basically dedicate their lives to it. As I expected, there were things in the movie that were unrealistic from a caver’s point of view, but maybe not as much as I had feared. The cavers in the movie wear too little clothing, they act foolishly at times, and one of the main turning points is sadly unrealistic, but apart from that, it’s not too bad.

What really doesn’t work is very simply the script. Characters lack motivation for the things they do, especially the Sarah character at the end is acting totally irrationally, and quite cruelly. Although that specific incident can be explained by her mental state, it totally robs us of any sympathy for the character, and we simply don’t care much if she lives or dies. The plot is extremely simple, and the characterization scenes in the first act, that are supposed to build the characters and make us care about them, are unfocused and generally fail completely.

The characters are hard to tell apart, with the exception of Sarah, since she’s surly and depressed, Juno, since she’s Asian and good looking, and Holly, since she’s, god help me, punk rock or something. It gets better once some of the characters are knocked off, as they always are in movies like these, and when they get split up, Marshall sees fit to give them different color lights, so it’s easier to know who we’re looking at. But still, it seems like a defeat to have to color-code your characters for your audience to be able to tell them apart.

The main problem is simple. We don’t really know much about these people, we don’t care too much about them, when they die, we’re not sure who died, and by the time the ending rolls around, we’re tired of it all.

There are some visually and stylistically nice touches in this movie, though. There’s a car crash in the first act that is very naturalistic and comes on in an unexpected way, but still manages to maintain the horror movie standard gore. Right after that, there’s a “lights go out sequentially in a corridor” scene which is also nice looking, even though we’ve seen that in The Matrix Reloaded already (in the trailer, even). Some of the monster effects are nice, they’re shot in that strobed fast exposure look that worked so well for 28 Days Later, making their movements all chaotic and hard to follow, and also freeze-framing arcs of brilliant crimson drops of blood in the air. Also, the required claustrophobia works fairly well, although Øyvind was slightly dismissive, he seemed to think that the tightest corridors people in the movie squeezed through were quite roomy and comfortable compared to some he’d seen.

In summary, it’s decent, but it’s it’s not good enough. It’s interesting to see that some of the user comments on IMDB are praising it for being a break from “the usual Hollywood fare”, when it’s actually an incredibly typical horror plot, and it also derives most of its scares (or rather, jumps) from monsters popping up after 20 seconds of characters looking around in the dark while the creepy music builds. It’ll make you jump, and it’s tense at times, but it’s not particularly scary. I’m convinced there are much better movies that can be made about horrors that lurk in the dark, forbidden corners of the earth.