“The Horror, The Horror” - Colonel Kurtz
Some Halloween viewing tips
Halloween has essentially taken over the month of October in North America and who am I to argue. I am not a huge horror fan but I dabble and today I am starting with a bonafide classic of the genre from mind of horror novelist Clive Baker who Stephen King called “the future of horror”.
Hellraiser (1987) 🦛🦛1/2 is a beloved horror classic and during the last act it becomes clear why but it takes a long time to get there. Right from the opening shot, a close-up of the most perfectly manicured dirty fingernails you’re ever likely to see, it is clear that at best this is going to be a B movie. It turns out to be more a C movie. The problems begin and end at the feet of writer/director Clive Barker. Barker is a popular horror writer and working from his own material but making a movie is not the same as writing a story and based on this he is not a very good filmmaker. The direction is poor. The script is muddled. The motivations of the characters are nonexistent. No logic is applied even in the face of death. Clichés abound: wicked stepmother, sex equals death, the heroine will make it out alive because she stays chaste. Worse is the dialogue. For the longest time I thought the acting was really bad but I came to see that it was primarily the material not the actors. It is quite a mess and until the last act the whole thing felt hopelessly aimless. So what does work? The horror. As much as Baker the filmmaker is the movies achilles heel Baker the horror auteur is the movies salvation. Even 35 years later the evil in this movie is memorable. You will not soon forget the main baddie Pinhead and his ilk. The movie is only sort of scary because the special effects are 35 years old but except for the awful fake blood the visuals do a good representing Bakers ideas which are genuinely horrifying. I did finally understand the plot in the final act. It involves a mystical puzzle box that raises hell so to speak. Prior to the working out of this revelation the movie looks to be about a dead guy rejuvenated by blood, and a sister-in-law willing to kill to raise him from the dead, weird and nonsensical. It made way more sense in retrospect. Beyond praising Barker for his truly creepy ideas and the special effects team for executing those ideas credit is due to Ashley Laurence who plays the protagonist. Laurence manages to give an engaging performance out of nothing. On paper she has little to do be be terrified, scream and make dumb decisions but somehow she makes it work. I am not a big horror fan, I watched it because of its classic status. Horror fans won’t want to miss this milestone but it is not good. That said it did grow on me and by the end I was enjoying the highs and in a bemused way forgiving the lows. Call it a guilty pleasure.
Stream on: Amazon Prime, AMC, Shudder
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Now The Happening 🦛 is a horrifying movie just not in the way the makers intended. I have seen some bad movies in my time. Distasteful, poorly made, boring, this is something else, a train wreck of a movie that I found impossible to look away from. The happening I kept wondering about was not the cataclysmic event of the title but what happened to writer/director M. Night Shyamalan’s talent? Previously Shyamalan blew my mind with The Sixth Sense. Followed up with the best secret comic book movie ever made Unbreakable. Made Signs an allegory of faith that might just be a masterpiece because of its flaws. The Village chilled and had a kick ass reveal even if by then the shine had worn off Shyamalan’s style. The reviews started to get bad and I lost interest so The Happening is the first Shamalyn movie I have seen in almost 20 years. I wish I hadn’t. Everything is wrong with this movie. It opens in Central Park on a sunny day where almost everyone suddenly stops moving. This, we discover later, is the first lapse in logic. The happening is in the air and effects everyone so having someone in the middle of a crowd not be effected breaks the movies own logic. We know something is wrong when the camera shows us a park full of people stop moving adding a single persons reaction is unnecessary and in this case poor filmmaking. Following this scene is an effective one at a construction site where the movie shows us that what comes next is mass suicide.
Cornell Womack as the main construction guy only has this one scene but he sells the chilling horror of the situation better than anyone else will manage. Events move to Philadelphia where we meet high school teacher Elliot (Mark Wahlberg). The news is reporting a possible terrorist attack in New York so everyone does what people do in a crisis in the movies, they flee the city. The script never notes the irony that in this circumstance cities are the safest place, at least in the terribly silly excuse for logic the movie has. The Happening is natures evolutionary reaction to humanity decimating the planet. Specifically the plants and trees have adjusted their chemical balance to disperse a chemical that flips humans self preservation instinct to self annihilation. The premise is absurd but I contend it could have been used effectively in a variety of ways with a better script. Here we get Wahlberg telling a group of survivors “let’s just stay ahead of the wind”. Wahlberg to his credit delivers the line so seriously I didn’t laugh I was simply aghast. Then I felt so bad for him. Based on the Shyamalan’s resume I understand why people signed on to this wacky script idea. He had pulled it off before. Wahlberg try’s but ultimately gives a bland performance. The usually bright charming Zoey Deschanel as Alma is awful here. Had I not seen her talents elsewhere I would have thought she couldn’t act instead I know she was woefully miscast as a possibly cheating spouse. The tension of did she didn’t she is a major plot line that ends in the revelation that Alma had desert with a guy from work. Only in her final scene do we see a glimpse of Deschanel’s usual charm. Every other character is completely pointless. The virtually silent daughter (Ashlyn Sanchez) of a friend that Alma and Elliot are saddled with for the entire movie adds nothing unless you count how shocking it is that no adult attempts to shield this eight year old from any horrifying details. Her father played by John Leguizamo is an equally purposeless character, who gets to go on an illogical mission that only pads the running time. The most inexplicable thing is that Shyamalan forgoes his usual visual subtly in favour of fairly graphic violence, including lions ripping a persons arms off, blood spurting out of a head wound and children being killed. The cheap and tasteless scenes are made worse by lousy special effects. The single effective use of violence after the initial suicides is the off screen sound of gunshots used to chilling affect. Frequent scenes of the blowing wind are ineffective once we know that’s what kills you because the idea that they are staying ahead of the wind is ludicrous. No more ludicrous then the ending when they take shelter in a building old enough to have been involved in the Underground Railroad, but closing the windows and doors is enough to save them, from the wind. Finally, mercifully the ending comes but because this script didn’t know when to stop, there are multiple places it could/should have stopped before the credits finally roll. The Happening looks and feels like the work of a student filmmaker not a veteran of multiple Hollywood thrillers. The good news is there are multiple other enjoyable viewing experiences from Shyamalan.
Stream on: Disney+
Recommended instead:
Signs 🦛🦛🦛1/2 For me a messy almost masterpiece it is tonally similar to The Happening and so much better.
Stream on: Disney+
Thoughts? Feel free to weigh in!
Last and most certainly not least is a personal favourite and the very definition of a cult classic. Evil Dead II 🦛🦛🦛1/2 is probably the funniest horror movie ever made, which does not keep it from being scary as Hell. The original Evil Dead was made on a shoestring budget and was by all accounts it was a brutal shoot so it probably surprised everyone that when it proved a smash hit creator Sam Rami took the studio money and freedom that often accompanies a box office windfall and essentially remade his own movie. I am curious if people looked at him funny when he said this is what he wanted to follow up with but it turned out to be a stroke of genius. Rami took the best parts of Evil Dead added comedy of all things, dropped the worst scene from the original and turned out a wickedly funny horror masterpiece. Like the original this is about innocent college kids finding the book of the dead in a deserted cabin in the woods and accidentally unleashing ferocious evil after reading it out loud. Ash (Bruce Campbell) the sole survivor of the original is back and clearly has no memory of the original movie. He and girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler) have come for a weekend in the woods at a ramshackle cabin. Things escalated instantly which is good because at eighty four minutes this movie does not have time to spare. It looks like it is going to be just Ash versus the evil in the woods when Linda Is quickly carted off and you wonder how that is going to work until Rami pulls out the comedy card. Evil Dead II becomes by turns scary and laugh out loud funny, often switching at a whip-snap pace. Rami looks like he is channeling his inner “Tex” Avery of Looney Tunes fame through a horror filter in a sequence where Ash battles his own hand. The slapstick of the Three Stooges is also a clear influence throughout. Campbell who is at his best when doing dry humour doesn’t do his best work here, that would come with later maturity but he does do some great physical comedy and facial antics. Rami looks to have spent his entire budget on special effects. The evil which takes the form of fog, trees and nasty looking corpses looks disgustingly great here and the blood letting comes in fire hose proportions. The brilliant dizzying, and terrifying camera work that made Evil Dead something special is on full display. It is worth noting that Rami does not care a whit about logic. One minute the evil can knock down doors, the next it can’t. In once scene a menace goes through an obstacle it could easily sidestep in order for the script to buy time for the intended victim. The movie is smart enough to not have any pretensions and all it asks of its audience is that they don’t either. More cannon fodder comes later in the picture when Annie (Sarah Berry) the daughter of the professor who found the book of the dead comes along with some missing pages and a few companions. The newcomers serve little purpose beyond providing new avenues for peril and I comfortably assumed they were not making it out alive but they effectively add opportunities for terror. Some might argue that if Rami was going to remake the original he could have cleaned it up a bit beyond just adding special effects. II looks just as made on a shoestring as the original and the gaps in logic suggest there might have been room for some serious script work. The acting is borderline bad. For me all these things are part of the genius. Yes it could have been more polished but the power of Evil Dead was its low budget raw originality. Physically Evil Dead II is a more developed movie, the addition of comedy is I think an expansion of the franchise and a measure of Rami’s willingness to try something new. The missing tree rape scene shows maturity. I think Evil Dead II is a great film. Is it kitschy, a little bit but I think it is what it set out to be. Boring movies are typically ones that fail to be true to themselves. Even if you hated this movie you could not possibly say you were bored. It is trashy but so much fun.
Stream on: ☹️ Rent on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Microsoft
Sadly no longer streaming but definitely worth the rental price.
There you have it a trio of movies to kick of the Halloween spirit. Next week I will be back with more horrifying picks to choose from. Until then happy viewing and do drop a line to let me know what you think of these picks and any suggestions for Halloween viewing!