DVD Review: Straw Dogs

Straw Dogs *** ½

Directed by: Rod Lurie.

Written by: Rod Lurie based on the screenplay and book.

Starring: James Marsden (David Sumner), Kate Bosworth (Amy Sumner), Alexander Skarsgård (Charlie), James Woods (Tom Heddon), Dominic Purcell (Jeremy Niles), Rhys Coiro (Norman), Billy Lush (Chris), Laz Alonso (John Burke), Willa Holland (Janice Heddon), Walton Goggins (Daniel Niles), Anson Mount (Coach Milkens), Drew Powell (Bic).

Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) is one of his best films. Most of Peckinpah’s films examine violence and masculinity, and that film is no exception. It has an intellectual (Dustin Hoffman) heading to the English countryside with his new wife (Susan George) who is from the area. Right away, Hoffman rubs the locals – in particular George’s ex-boyfriend and roughneck friends – the wrong way, and eventually, he’ll have to stand up and “be a man” to defend his home and his wife. It is one of the most disturbingly violent movies of the 1970s. The surprising thing about Rod Lurie’s remake is how closely he adheres to Peckinpah’s original. The film is still disturbing and violent. He makes some changes – setting in the Southern USA instead of England and turning the intellectual into a screenwriter, but other than that, the two films are very similar – and similarly effective. The difference is – and I think this is key – is that Lurie feels more sympathy with his “hero” than Peckinpah did (hence making him a screenwriter). Both movies have the power to shock and disturb.

This new version casts James Marsden as David Sumner, the screenwriter, who is coming back to his new wife Amy’s (Kate Bosworth) childhood home. Both her parents are dead, and the area was recently hit by a hurricane, leaving the barn in need of a new roof. David thinks that this peaceful hamlet will be the perfect place for him to be able to get some peace and quiet – and to finish the screenplay on Stalingrad he’s been working on. Amy, an actress, is now out of work because the TV show she and David worked on has been cancelled – plus she’s excited to go back home. They should have stayed away.

They are in town for just a few minutes, eating at the local burger joint when Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard) comes over to talk to them. Simply by the way he looks at Amy, and calls her “Amycakes”, it’s clear these two have a romantic past – something David confirms when he sees a picture of the two of them on the wall. There is something off putting about Charlie, but David ignores it. When Charlie mentions that he and “his crew” were among the people who placed a bid on fixing the barn, David hires him on the spot. This already uneasy scene becomes downright nasty when “Coach” Tom Heddon (James Woods), who was once the high school football coach, and is now little more than the town drunk, throws a fit when the bartender tries to cut him off. Welcome to Small Town USA! The story follows the original pretty closely – with Charlie and his crew making thinly veiled threats, disguised as “friendly, down home country advice” to David, who continues to try and make excuses for them and avoid conflict, while Amy becomes convinced they’re up to something much more sinister.

There are two key sequences in both versions of Straw Dogs – the disturbing rape scene in the middle of the film, and the violent home invasion climax. This time, Lurie makes the rape sequence a little less ambigious as Peckinpah did. I remember having an argument with a friend of mine after we first saw Straw Dogs where I thought the scene between the wife and her ex-boyfriend constituted rape, and he did not. This time, it’s more definitively rape – as Amy tries to push Charlie away multiple times, and says “No” repeatedly. And yet, Lurie lets at least a little ambiguity sneak in, as it certainly does appear that part way through the rape that Amy stops fighting it – and her body language does not make it clear if she simply gives up, or like my friend thought of Susan George in the original, she welcomes it. There is no ambiguity about what comes after Charlie is done with her however.

The violent home invasion that ends the movie is also handled well. Like the original, it involves Charlie and his friends outside the Sumner’s house trying to get in, and David having to fight them off. They have guns, David does not. But he does have smarts. The disturbingly violent climax involves hot oil, nail guns and a bear trap – just like the original. This is the sequence where David has to “man up” as it were, which Charlie and his friends think he is incapable of. But David is tougher than he looks.

As I mentioned off the top of this review, I think the difference between Lurie’s movie and Peckinpah’s is not in terms of story – they essentially tell the same one – but in terms of how David is portrayed. I think Peckinpah thought David was a weakling and a wimp, and like Charlie and his friends, doesn’t really respect him until he finally stands up for himself at the end. I think Lurie feels the opposite – that David is trying to handle things like an adult, and in doing what he does at the end of the movie, he loses something of himself. The finale isn’t a triumph this time.

I also have to mention the political bent to the film this time around; that I think was absent before. Lurie is a well known “Hollywood Liberal”, who previous films include The Contender, about a woman Vice Presidential candidate having to jump through hoops to be confirmed by Congress, and the underrated Nothing But the Truth, about a journalist who refuses to reveal her sources. By setting Straw Dogs in the heart of “Red State” America, and making his “hero” a definitive “Blue State” American, Lurie is underlining the deep divide in America right now. There is no room for compromise – you either with us or against us. I think that had Straw Dogs been more successful when it came out (it sadly died a quick death at the box office), it would have become a favorite target of Fox News – and not without reason. It certainly doesn’t paint Red State America as a place you’d want to visit.

Overall, I was fascinated by Straw Dogs, and drawn into its tangled moral web, just like I was with Peckinpah’s original. No, it doesn’t quite pack the same punch as Peckinpah’s did – not only did he get there first, but he is also a better director than Lurie, and as good as Marsden and Bosworth are in this film (and they both surprised me by just how good they were), they aren’t at the same level of Hoffman and George. Yet, it’s still a great little film in its own right – and the rare remake that I think is actually enhanced, and not diminished, by knowing the original film.

DVD Review: Fright Night

Fright Night ** ½

Directed by: Craig Gillespie.

Written by: Marti Noxon based on the film written by Tom Holland.

Starring: Anton Yelchin (Charley Brewster), Colin Farrell (Jerry), Toni Collette (Jane Brewster), David Tennant (Peter Vincent), Imogen Poots (Amy), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Ed).

I have to admit right off the top that I never saw the original Fright Night from 1985. While I love ‘70s horror films, I have found that many of the ones from the ‘80s are cheesy rather than scary, and don’t really do much for me, so right off, I think it’s fair to say I have nothing to compare this new version to.

This Fright Night is a passable horror film – and not much else. I like the idea of casting Anton Yelchin, who has more range than many actors his age do. Perhaps the filmmakers were inspired by what a great job Jesse Eisenberg did in Zombieland, mingling in humor with the horror, and Yelchin tries to bring the same thing to Fright Night (although the screenplay isn’t as good). Yelchin is Charlie, a high school nerd, who has moved up in social standing since landing the gorgeous Amy (Imogen Poots – who I’m still convinces is a Harry Potter character) as his girlfriend. This means he has essentially abandoned his old nerd friends – like Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). But Ed is concerned because his only remaining friend – and one time friend of Charley – has gone missing, along with his whole family. Ed is convinced that Charley’s new neighbour Jerry (Colin Farrell) is a vampire, and even Charley’s convincing argument that Jerry is a “horrible vampire name” doesn’t convince otherwise. But then Ed goes missing too, and Charley is starting to notice strange things about Jerry. Perhaps Ed was right. The only person Charley thinks may be able to help him is a Criss Angel type magician, obsessed with vampires named Peter Vincent (David Tennant) – but of course, his show is just an act. Or is it?

Fright Night is an enjoyable horror movie for the most part. It adds a few laughs to go along with the scares, and I for one am glad that the filmmakers didn’t neuter the film by trying to make it PG-13. This is a bloody, profane little film. Yelchin anchors the movie with his fine performance, and he is ably helped by Toni Collette as his mom, and Poots, who makes Amy not just an average high school beauty. As for Colin Farrell, I found his performance to be uneven. There are times when he seems to be relishing his vampire role – getting off on all the creepy stuff he gets to say, and glorying in looking evil. And then there are times when he seems to be going through the motions. From one scene to the next, I never knew what Farrell I was going to see.

The film was directed with efficiency by Craig Gillespie. He directed the fine indie comedy Lars and the Real Girl, where Ryan Gosling is in love with a blow-up sex doll. That was a surprising sweet film, dodging every trap you would think a movie about a man and a sex doll could possibly fall into. I guess however, we may have to add Gillespie to the list of indie filmmakers who go on to make Hollywood films and never look back. That’s a shame, because while Fright Night is well handled, it could have been directed by nearly anyone with the same results. Few could have made Lars and the Real Girl as well as he did.

I can’t say that Fright Night is a bad movie, because it isn’t. For horror fans, it is a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. No, it didn’t really scare me, but few films do. It is well made and for the most part well acted. But like Farrell’s performance, too often it just felt like it was going through the motions.

Movie Review: The Woman

The Woman **

Directed by: Lucky McKee.

Written by: Jack Ketchum & Lucky McKee.

Starring: Pollyanna McIntosh (The Woman), Sean Bridgers (Chris), Angela Bettis (Belle), Lauren Ashley Carter (Peggy), Zach Rand (Brian), Shyla Molhusen (Darlin’).

It may seem odd that I watched Lucky McKee’s The Woman less than a week after writing a post about how I don’t feel the urge to watch “extreme” movies any more. And if nothing else, Lucky McKee’s The Woman is extreme. But I did say in that post that if a movie interested me, I’d watch it. And since Lucky McKee made one of my favorite horror films in the last decade – the little seen, extremely creepy May – and his Masters of Horror entry, Sick Girl, was also wonderfully creepy, I consider myself a fan of his. So I watched The Woman, despite its “extreme” reputation, and the presence of writer Jack Ketchum – who some horror fans are huge devotees to, but I’m not one of them. The novels of his that I have read seem to replace suspense with violence that while disturbingly real, is also over the top if that makes sense. That pretty much sums up The Woman as well.

The movie is about a lawyer, Chris (Sean Bridgers) who appears outwardly normal. He lives with his family out in the middle of nowhere, and he enjoys hunting out in the woods that surround his home. One day, he spies what appears to be a “wild” woman, living alone in the woods, killing animals for food. Chris decides to catch her, which he does, and keep her chained in the family’s cellar. He doesn’t try to hide this from his family – in fact he shows the woman off to them all. He says that they need to help her – civilize her – and they are only doing what good Christians would do. His terrified wife Belle (Angela Bettis) says nothing, but clearly doesn’t like the idea. Their teenage daughter Peggy (Lauren Ashley Carter) spends most of her time crying. Their littlest daughter, Darlin’, sees nothing wrong with it, but she’s too young to really understand anything. Their son Brian (Zach Rand) though has the same sadistic glint in his eyes as his daddy does – despite the fact he can’t be much more than 14.

At Sundance, where the film premiered, there were apparently many walkouts, and people who were simply offended, calling the film misogynistic and disgusting. (One man even famously said the film should be banned, which is just silly). It certainly is disgusting – in fact disgusting is how you would describe the beginning of the movie, and it gets much, much worse before the end of the movie. The climax produces the type of images that I won’t be able to get out of my head no matter how much I try. I don’t want them there, but they’re there anyway. The charge of misogyny is less clear however. It is clear that Chris, and his son Brian, are misogynists – they view all women as objects, sexual playthings meant merely for their arousal and amusement. It doesn’t matter if it’s the wild woman, their wife, their daughter, their sister, their mother or their secretary. These two are irredeemably evil – even Brian, who is barely into puberty. And yet, it’s also clear that the movie abhors them, presents them as the villains of the movie, who we hope will get them comeuppance. And yet, the other way, the movie feels no sympathy for Belle either, clearly a battered woman, but when you watch what happens to her, it becomes clear that McKee and Ketchum don’t buy the “battered woman defense”.  I think in the end, whatever points the movie is trying to make about gender politics (and the ending makes it clear that the movie is an allegory with some point to make on the subject), it gets lost beneath all the brutality on display, and the films own politics, which appear to me to be muddled.

I can’t say I liked The Woman, because I didn’t. I can’t even say that had I known how extreme the film would be that I even would have watched it, because I probably would not have. What I can say, however, is that McKee remains a gifted director of horror. There are images here that stand out, not just because of their extreme nature, but because of the way McKee shoots them. That cellar is one of the most foreboding locations in recent memory. And the performances are pretty damn good. Pollyanna McIntosh gives an utterly fearless, somewhat mesmerizing performance as The Woman. Sean Bridgers makes for a truly repellant villain. Lauren Ashley Carter somehow finds some tenderness in her character. Less successful is Zach Rand, who like pretty much any 14 year I can think of, doesn’t quite have the chops to make his character as repellant as Bridgers. And Angela Bettis, so good in May and Sick Girl, is too one note here. I’m still waiting to see if she can play a somewhat normal character and not someone full of nervous ticks.

And I can also say that I think The Woman is precisely the film that McKee and Ketchum wanted to make. The two tried to collaborate on a 2008 film, Red, with Brian Cox, but a few weeks into filming McKee (along with Bettis) were fired and replaced (the end result was a film that was barely released, and remains unseen by me). There are horror fans out there who will claim that The Woman is a twisted masterpiece. You know who you are – and The Woman is a film for you. But not for anyone else.

Movie Review: The Thing

The Thing ** ½  

Directed by: Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.

Written by: Eric Heisserer based on the short story by John W. Campbell Jr.

Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Kate Lloyd), Joel Edgerton (Braxton Carter), Ulrich Thomsen (Dr. Sander Halvorson), Eric Christian Olsen (Adam Goodman), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Jameson), Paul Braunstein (Griggs), Trond Espen Seim (Edvard Wolner), Kim Bubbs (Juliette), Jørgen Langhelle (Lars), Jan Gunnar Røise (Olav), Stig Henrik Hoff (Peder), Kristofer Hivju (Jonas), Jo Adrian Haavind (Henrik), Carsten Bjørnlund (Karl), Jonathan Walker (Colin), Ole Martin Aune Nilsen (Matias).

It seems like every 30 years or so, someone decides to make their version of The Thing. This is the third such movie – following Howard Hawks’ 1952 version The Thing From Another World and John Carpenter’s 1981 film The Thing. It’s clear the filmmakers behind this latest version are big fans of the Carpenter film – saying this is a prequel to that film, because it was so perfect they didn’t want to remake it. Yet, (and a minor spoiler warning should go here for the next line or two) other than the fact that over the end credits the filmmakers recreate the opening scenes of the Carpenter film, this feels like a remake. Because they say it’s a prequel, it give them permission to pretty much rip off the original film, and its creature design. In the past 30 years, special effects have improved tremendously, but the creature here still looks and acts much like it did in the Carpenter film. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing. Good, because Carpenter’s creature was truly innovative at the time, and is still creeping and disgusting. Bad, because it brings to mind the Carpenter film a little too much, and invites comparisons to it. Carpenter’s The Thing was one of the best horror films of the 1980s. This prequel is little more than a serviceable horror film. Not really bad, but when you have Carpenter’s film already, and the two are similar, yet one clearly better, what’s really the point of this film?

The movie opens with a group of Norwegian scientists in Antarctica literally crashing into a huge discovery. They’re there to take core samples, and don’t know what they’re dealing with, so the leader calls his friend Dr. Sander Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen) to come investigate. He brings along his research assistant Adam (Eric Christian Olsen) as well as paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). All Sander will tell her is that it is a major find. When they get there, they discover it is in factor major. There is a massive spaceship under the ice, as well what appears to be an alien creature frozen not far away. While the spaceship is trapped, the creature isn’t. They cut it out, and leave it a giant block of ice. Of course, it doesn’t stay asleep, and has soon broken out, and is attacking everyone there. What’s worse is, that as Kate discovers, it can replicate its victims. So perhaps not everyone there is still human – some may be the creature hiding.

This is a classic setup, that allows not only for some truly gruesome scenes – the giant, crab like creatures shoots out its spear like tentacles to infect it prey, and can do other nasty things as well, but also breeds paranoia. Who can you trust when anyone could be infected? Kate thinks she can trust Carter (Joel Edgerton), the America pilot and former military man, who wants to destroy the creature. But Sander says, as scientists, they must protect their knowledge. But does he really believe that, or is he The Thing?

Directed by first timer Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., The Thing is effective as an exercise in style and special effects. It also effectively builds the paranoia of the movie, and offers a few nice scares. And the performances by Winstead, Edgerton and Thomsen are as good as can be expected, given what they had to work with. For people who have not seen the original The Thing, this may make for a decent night out if they just want a few scares. And yet, unlike the more successful horror remakes like Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, Alexandre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes or Rob Zombie’s Halloween, the filmmakers here bring nothing new to the table. So in a world where John Carpenter’s The Thing is still available for anyone who wants to see it, this version of The Thing, while not horrible by any means, still isn’t really necessary. Rent Carpenter’s version instead.

Movie Review: Red State

Red State ** ½

Directed by: Kevin Smith.

Written by: Kevin Smith.

Starring: Michael Parks (Abin Cooper), Melissa Leo (Sara), Michael Angarano (Travis), Nicholas Braun (Billy-Ray), Kyle Gallner (Jarod), John Goodman (Joseph Keenan), Stephen Root (Sherrif Wynan), Matt L. Jones (Deputy Pete), Alexa Nikolas (Jesse), Betty Aberlin (Abigail), Kerry Bishé (Cheyenne), Ralph Garman (Caleb), Molly Livingston (Fiona May), James Parks (Mordechai), Haley Ramm (Maggie), Jennifer Schwalbach Smith (Esther), Elizabeth Tripp (Melanie), Kevin Pollak (ASAC Brooks).

Up until Red State, Kevin Smith has only made comedies. But his new movie has been a long gestating horror project. It doesn’t come as much of a surprise that Smith would want to make a different type of movie after all these years – after all, it has been 17 years since Clerks came out, and there’s only so many dick and fart jokes you can make before you grow weary. What did surprise me is that Smith, who has always been a better writer than director, on this project is just the opposite. Red State has a nice visual look that harkens back to the horror films of the 1970s. But it is the writing that lets him down. This is a movie where you can tell that Smith is fed up with the stupidity he sees everywhere in American culture – and yet the movie feels rather toothless and obvious – and perhaps worse still, dated.

The movie is about three lunk headed teenage boys, somewhere in the Southern USA, who decide to go see a woman they’ve met online the next town over. She’s interested in having sex with all three of them – at the same time. On the way there though, they sideswipe a parked car, but decide to deal with that problem later, and continue onto their destination. When they get to the trailer, they discover that the woman they are to meet doesn’t exactly look like her picture, but is instead a little bit older, and rough around the edges. This is Sara (Melissa Leo), but the boys don’t much care. One woman is as good as any other when you’re horny, teenage virgin. What they discover though is that they have not been lured there for sex, but instead as human sacrifices.

The head of the Sara’s family is her father, Abin Cooper (Michael Parks), a fire and brimstone preacher who takes his small, but devout followers out to picket the funerals of gay men – just so that we, and their loved ones, know that they are rotting in eternal hellfire. But that is no longer enough for Cooper and his family. They have decided to take the next logical step – killing homosexuals themselves, just like they are sure God wants them to. The three teenage boys aren’t really gay, but they’re close enough. After all, the three of them were will to fornicate with a woman at the same time, which is close enough to gay for Cooper.

Law enforcement gets involved, when they notice the car that was supposedly in the accident earlier on Cooper’s property. It isn’t long before the ATF, led by Joseph Keenan (John Goodman) arrive on the scene, and on orders from higher ups, start to slaughter the family. These people are terrorists, and there are to be no survivors – not even the children on the compound.

My problem with Red State is that it all feels like something transported from the 1990s. Picketing gay funerals and Waco Texas style raids by the inept Federal government feel like something out of the past here. America has moved on, at least a little bit, and while there are still anti-gay bigots everywhere, it seems to me that Smith is making rather easy targets out of the Cooper family. If he really wanted to be provocative, he should have had the family killing Muslims instead. I don’t hear very much about Southern preachers picketing gay funerals anymore (although, I’m sure there are some nutcases who do), but I do hear about protests against Mosques being built, and an idiot preacher in Florida holding a Koran burning party.

The point of Red State is to show that everyone in the movie is stupid. The end credits split the actors into three segments – sex (represented by the three movies), religion (represented by the Cooper family) and politics (represented by the ATF agents). We expect horny, teenage boys to be stupid. Hell, it’s practically their responsibility to be stupid, and the three boys in this movie certainly qualify. But we should expect our religious and political leaders to be more intelligent – to appeal to us on a deeper level, and be of higher moral standing. Smith’s point is that we can’t. Everyone’s stupid.

He may well be right, but he has picked an overly obvious way to show this. As the movie progresses, it moves from teen sex farce, to horror into action, and the transitions don’t go quite as easily as we hope. Gallons upon gallons of blood are split during the course of the movie, but after a while (particularly in the firefight that takes up the last third of the movie at least), it all becomes repetitive. Yes, this could well be the best directed movie that Smith has ever made, but it rings hollow.

There are moments to love though. Michael Parks digs into Smith’s dialogue – especially in an early scene in his church, and holds the cameras and the audience’s attention as he spews out his absolute hatred towards the world. John Goodman is in fine form as the ATF agent, who knows what he has been asked to do, is wrong, but does it anyway. He doesn’t care about right or wrong – at least not at first – but on covering his own ass.

In general though, I hope to see more films like Red State coming from Kevin Smith. He does his thing in comedies, and its fine, but it is starting to wear a little thin. Red State shows he can do more than simply tell dick jokes. Now, he just has to figure out a better way to say it. Red State shows promise from Smith if he wants to continue down this path – and I kind of hope he does.

The Best Movies I Have Never Seen Before: The Thing From Another World (1951)

The Thing From Another World (1951) ****

Directed by: Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks (uncredited)

Written by: Charles Lederer based on the story by John W. Campbell Jr.

Starring: Kenneth Tobey (Captain Patrick Hendry), Margaret Sheridan ("Nikki" Nicholson), Robert Cornthwaite (Dr. Arthur Carrington), Douglas Spencer (Ned "Scotty" Scott), Dewey Martin (Bob-Crew Chief), James Arness ("The Thing"), Eduard Franz (Dr. Stern), David McMahon (Gen. Fogarty), James Young (Lt. Eddie Dykes), Robert Nichols (Lt. MacPherson ), Bill Self (Corporal Barnes), Sally Creighton (Mrs. Chapman), Nicholas Byron (Radioman Tex Richards).

The Thing From Another World is a reactionary, paranoid, anti-communist, anti-intellectual film disguises a B sci-fi film about an alien, who looks a little like Frankenstein, but is really a giant, bloody thirsty vegetable. And I loved every second of it. The was directed by Christian Nyby, and produced by Howard Hawks, but the actors have pretty confirmed by this point that Hawks did most of the directing himself. Nyby was his longtime editor, who wanted to direct, but apparently had some trouble on set – so Hawks helped out. Whether he directed much of the film or not, his fingerprints are all over it.

The film takes place in Alaska, where a report group of scientist have discovered something large and metal in the ice – and have asked for military assistance. So, out comes Captain Patrick Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) and his men to investigate. What they find really does look like a flying saucer – yet they end up destroying it by trying to get it out of the ice. However, they also discover the ships pilot, and are able to get him out – albeit inside a block of ice. When the ice melts back at base – accidentally – it is discovered that the creature is not actually dead. He takes off – kills the sled dogs, and loses an arm. Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) wants to reason with the creature, and learn from it – knowledge being the most important thing in the world. All Hendry wants to do is kill it before it can kill them.

The Thing From Another World is one of the classic 1950s sci-fi horror movies. It’s counterpoint is Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, released the same year. That film presented the aliens as peaceful – wanting the countries on Earth to get along, so as not to destroy themselves, and perhaps other worlds. The Thing From Another World on the other hand, suggests a war of the world’s scenario. Anything different cannot be trusted, and as such must be destroyed. Dr. Cornthwaite represents the intellectuals – the scientists meddling in things that are best left alone, and it is definitive moment when he is tossed aside by the The Thing, and the army men have to take the monster down. He is out to destroy the American way of life. Hawks had no patience for intellectuals (even dismissing more intellectual responses to his own films), preferring men of action to men of the mind.

In between action scenes, the film is full of snappy dialogue scenes. These are the best indication that Hawks had a hand in directing the film, because it features his classic, overlapping dialogue. It also features a classic Hawksian woman in Margaret Sheridan’s whip smart secretary, who although she is employed by the scientists, feels much more kinship to the soldiers – particularly Hendry, as the two flirt their way through the movie. The performances are amazingly good for a B movie, as is the dialogue.

In 1981, John Carpenter remade this movie as The Thing. That is one of Carpenter’s best movies, a triumph of style and gore, and more closely resembling the original short story, which had the alien being as a shape shifter rather than a giant carrot (the mind boggles). Both films have their merits, and I am hard pressed to classify one as better than the other. But that hardly matters. This version is a near perfect example of its genre.

DVD Review: The Ward

The Ward ** ½

Directed by: John Carpenter.

Written by: Michael Rasmussen & Shawn Rasmussen.

Starring: Amber Heard (Kristen), Mamie Gummer (Emily), Danielle Panabaker (Sarah), Laura-Leigh (Zoey), Lyndsy Fonseca (Iris), Jared Harris (Dr. Stringer), Sydney Sweeney (Young Alice), Mika Boorem (Alice), Susanna Burney (Nurse Lundt), Sean Cook (Jimmy).

John Carpenter was one of the few people involved with the short lived horror series “Masters of Horror” to truly earn that title. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Carpenter was responsible for some of the truly creepiest, scariest movies around with films like Halloween and The Thing. He even proved he can stretch beyond horror, into action and science fiction with equal skill. His films feel refreshingly old fashioned, even when they are set in the future – Westerns are an obvious favorite of his, even when set in modern day LA (Assault on Precinct 13) or Mars (his last theatrical film before this, a decade ago, Ghosts of Mars). Carpenter was a true horror auteur – you could always tell his films apart for his contemporaries, and his steadfast refusal to change could be the reason why aside from those two Master of Horror episodes he made, we have not really heard from him in 10 years. So, I think many horror fans like myself were eagerly anticipating his latest film The Ward. I have a feeling that like me, they will end up disappointed.

Set in the 1960s, The Ward is about a young woman, Kristen (Amber Heard), who we first see setting fire to a farmhouse while scantily clad, and then carted off to the most under populated mental ward in movie history. Here she meets here new ward mates – Emily (Mamie Gummer), who is clearly insane in some way, Sarah (Danielle Panabaker), who bats her eyes at every male orderly in sight, Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca), who draws everything and Zoey (Laura-Leigh) who acts like a little girl. They are overseen by a Nurse Ratched type, and a psychiatrist who we don’t really trust, since he is played by Jared Harris. He wants to cure Kristen, of what we’re not at first sure, but she only wants out. And soon, she wants to know who the ghost she keeps seeing around the ward is – especially when her ward mates start disappearing.

Before watching The Ward, I was hoping for an old fashioned horror movie from Carpenter. I am tired of the overly graphic, so called torture porn movies that aim to disgust viewers rather than scare them. These started with the Saw series, and continued to devolve into the Hostel films, and other horrid movies. American horror films are once again at a crossroads, because it seems like people are just as tired as I am with all these torture films, but nothing really has come into to replace them (but if we get more films like James Wan’s Insidious earlier this year, an example of how to do an old fashioned ghost story right, I’ll be happy). To be fair, I think Carpenter wants to do old fashioned horror, but for the first time, he seems to have relented a bit. I am tired of seeing pretty young girls strapped to gurneys and brutally murdered, and while Carpenter accomplishes this much more skill, and much less graphic bloodletting, than many contemporary filmmakers, I still had a hard time caring that much about it, and after a promising start got increasingly bored with The Ward as it went along.

It must be noted that the performances in the film are actually quite good – especially Heard who has skill to match her beauty, and seems comfortable in exploitation films like this – although she is much better in Drive Angry, one of my biggest guilty pleasures of this year. And Carpenter is still a striking visual filmmaking, so while the story creaks along to its inevitable conclusion (which really, you should seem coming way before the character do), the film is always interesting to look at. I’m not sure if The Ward is proof that Carpenter has finally lost his edge, or just evidence that someone needs to give him a better screenplay. Either way, The Ward ultimately, disappoints.

DVD Review: Vanishing on 7th Street

Vanishing on

7^th Street

**

Directed by: Brad Anderson.

Written by: Anthony Jaswinski.

Starring: Hayden Christensen (Luke), John Leguizamo (Paul), Thandie Newton (Rosemary), Jacob Latimore (James), Taylor Groothuis (Briana).

Pulling off good, low budget horror is a tricky proposition. You have to do what Hollywood filmmakers do with way less money, as you really cannot afford to make special effects laden movies, or have creatures with the same impact. Instead, you have to do everything with mood and atmosphere, and depend on your cast to generate that same level of terror. Brad Anderson proved he could that with his brilliant, underrated gem Session 9 a few years ago, and to a lesser extent with The Machinist (which wasn’t really horror, but had horror elements). But with Vanishing on 7^th Street, I don’t think he succeeded the way he wanted to. To be sure, he tries really hard, and the mood is just about right, but there is an air of phoniness around the film. I could never quite buy into it, and so it left me cold.

The film is about a blackout that hits the city of Detroit (and it appears much more). Anyone caught in the blackout is immediately vaporized, leaving behind just their clothes. But a few survivors are lucky enough to be spared. These are those rare people who had some sort of light on them when the blackout began – flashlights, candles, cigarette lighter. The days since the blackout more and more people keep dying, because they need to stay in the light, as while there are days that interrupt the total blackness of night, they are getting shorter, and soon will be gone altogether. Car batteries seem to have been killed by whatever caused the blackout as well, so in essence, the few survivors are stuck in Detroit, afraid of the dying of the light.

The one location that still has power is a bar called Sonny’s. It is operating on a generator, although how much longer that will last is not known. While they have plenty of gas, the generator seems to be winding down anyway. The bar is manned by James (Jacob Latimore), a young boy who was there with his mother, who left to try and find help, and has not returned. Slowly other survivors come across Sonny’s – Luke (Hayden Christensen), a selfish news reporter, Rosemary (Thandie Newton) a recovering addict, convinced her infant son is still alive somewhere, and Paul (John Leguizamo), a shy film projectionist. They are drawn to Sonny’s, but Luke knows they have to leave while they still can. If they wait much longer, it won’t be an option anymore.

In theory, Vanishing on 7^th Street has a perfect setup for a low budget horror film. Afterall, there is nothing scarier than what you can’t see – and the pervasive darkness of the film means you cannot see much. And also, darkness doesn’t cost anything to shoot, meaning you can (and they did) make the film for very little money.

And yet, the movie never really gave me goosebumps – never truly scared me. While Anderson gets the atmosphere right, he doesn’t really do anything with it once he has established it. There are moments that should generate almost unbearable tension that simply fall flat. It doesn’t help that it is impossible to care about any of the characters – Luke is a selfish prick, marred by the usual Christensen reluctance to express any emotion, Paul is so closed down it’s impossible to get a read on him, and this is further hampered by the fact he spends most of the movie lying on a pool table, and Rosemary is just over the top crazy at first, and then settles into a clichéd addict role that feels unnatural. True, you do feel for James, who has lost his mother, but he never really feels like a real character either.

In short, Vanishing on 7^th Street is a movie with a promising premise that fails to live up to it. Anderson is a talented director, and I’m sure he’ll do better in the future, but this time he failed to scare me – and for a horror film, that’s deadly.

DVD Review: Stake Land

Stake Land ***

Directed by: Jim Mickle.

Written by: Nick Damici & Jim Mickle.

Starring: Nick Damici (Mister), Connor Paolo (Martin), Michael Cerveris (Jebedia Loven), Danielle Harris (Belle), Sean Nelson (Willie), Kelly McGillis (Sister), Bonnie Dennison (Peggy).

No recent trend has annoyed me more than the one that tries to make vampires sexy and sympathetic. They aren’t. They are undead killing machines who feat on human blood. Falling in love with a vampire is one step away from necrophilia. The only movies that accomplished this feat successfully were the Swedish film Let the Right One In, and it’s American remake Let Me In, which made its young girl vampire sympathetic, but still made her a blood thirsty monster. I simply cannot wait for the Twilight series to end.

All of this may help to explain why I enjoyed the low budget horror film Stake Land. It takes place in an America that has become overrun by a vampire epidemic, and the small band of survivors who are trying to make their way to Canada, where they hear it is safe. They all know that this may turn out to be mere fantasy - after all, why would vampires obey international borders? - but it gives them something to hold onto. Martin (Connor Paolo) is a young teenage boy who sees his family slaughtered in front of him, but is rescued by the mysterious Mister (Nick Damici, who also co-wrote the screenplay). They are in the South, and so the Canadian border is a long way off. To make matters worse, they don’t just need to dea with the vampires, but also a roving religious group known as the Brotherhood, who has mixed white supremacy with fundamentalist Christianity, into a perverted mix. Their leader is Jebedia (Michael Cerveris), and he doesn’t much like Mister (who looks like he maybe part Native American or Mexican or something else that certainly does not meet Jebedia’s view of the perfect white race). And it certainly does not help that along the way, the pair pick up a Catholic nun (Kelly McGillis), a pregnant teenager (Danielle Harris) and a black man (Sean Nelson).

Stake Land loosely resembles Zombieland from a few years ago, that also featured a young man who teams up with an older, violent man and makes their way through a post apocalyptic American ruled by horror movie creatures. But that film was more comedic in tone, whereas Stake Land takes it much more seriously. There seems to be a myth that when things go to hell, humans will band together for the common good and try to rebuild society. But I think that Stake Land is a little more realistic. It depicts a world that is ruled by fear, where humans band together out of fear. They fear anything that is different, and not exactly like them - whether that’s vampires or other people who don’t think just like they do,

Stake Land was made on a shoestring budget, but that really doesn’t show. This is not a movie based on special effects, but the low tech effects they do use, are creepy and effective. Mainly, this is a movie about this small group of people, trying to live in a brave new world. The performances aid a great deal, as the entire cast feels natural - no one is pushing for effect here, but rather play everything with the right tone of sad weariness, that simply feels right. Even Ceveris, who has the flashiest role as the bad guy doesn’t go over the top. Yes, he is a religious fanatic, but he’s one that feels real. Damici strikes the right note as the man who kills vampires, and has a dark past that he simply will not reveal. He won’t even tell anyone his real name.

The film was directed by Jim Fickle, who finds the right tone for the movie. The film won the People’s Choice award for the Midnight Madness segment at last year’s TIFF. Genre fans are going to love the film, like they did then. The film is intelligent, well made and violent, It’s a horror fans dream.

DVD Review: I Saw the Devil

I Saw the Devil *** ½
Directed by: Jee-woon Kim.
Written by: Hoon-jung Park.
Starring: Byung-hun Lee (Kim Soo-hyeon), Min-sik Choi (Kyung-chul), Gook-hwan Jeon (Squad Chief Jang), Ho-jin Jeon (Section Chief Oh), San-ha Oh (Joo-yeon), Yoon-seo Kim (Se-yeon).

I’m not sure what the hell is wrong with Korea, but right now they are making some of the most extreme, violent films in the world right now. Chan-wook Park is the obvious poster boy for extreme Korean films – with his trilogy of movies Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, and the violent vampire flick Thrist, and Korea does have its share of more serious filmmakers as well (Lee-Chang Dong and Bong Joon-ho leading the way there). But most of the films we get see over here are like Jee-woon Kim’s I Saw the Devil, a graphically violent, disturbing in the extreme serial killer/horror film. Trust me, you won’t soon forget this one.

The movie opens with an extremely unsettling scene, as we see the beautiful Joo-yeon (San-ha Oh) on the phone with her Special agent fiancée, talking about how her car has broken down in the snow, and she’s waiting for a tow truck. It isn’t long before a strange man, in a school van, shows up to offer help, which she politely refuses. But no sooner has she hung with her fiancée, than the man in the van comes back – breaks her window, beats her to death, and drags her lifeless body across the snow in one of the most haunting shots in recent memory. He will take her back to his house where he will chop up her body and dispose of it. When it’s found, the fiancée, Kim Soo-hyeon (Byung-hun Lee) vows to track down the killer and have his revenge. It doesn’t take him long to discover that the killer is Kyung-chul (Min-sik Choi from Oldboy). But Kim is not interested in simply killing him – he wants to toy and with him for a while, and torture him so that he feels even more pain than his fiancée did. But of course, it isn’t quite as simple as that.

Watching I Saw the Devil, I couldn’t help but think of a movie like Taken from a few years ago. I disliked Taken immensely, but many other people loved it. It is kind of the cookie cutter version of the revenge story we see a lot. I thought of it, because Kim has some of the same very specific abilities that Liam Neesom had in that film – we see them early in the film when he’s trying to figure out who the killer is by torturing a few other candidates first. He is a man with “nothing to lose”, who can inflict pain with the best of them.

But I Saw the Devil is more complex than that. This isn’t just a story of a man seeking vengeance, and it isn’t quite as simple as the fact that the hero has to sink to the level of the killer to catch him. Those questions have been asked and answered in movie many times over, and although often times they can still work (like in No Country for Old Men and The Dark Knight), I Saw the Devil goes further. Kim really does sink to the level of the killer – his torture of him throughout the movie is brutal and unrelenting. The movie toys with our expectations – we saw what the killer did to his fiancé, so we want him to have his vengeance. The movie gives us that, and then goes further and further and further until we are sickened by what is on the screen. You want vengeance and blood – you got it, now deal with it.

One of things that I think works best about I Saw the Devil are the performances. Min-sik Choi truly is one of the most memorable serial killers in recent memory. Yes, to a certain extent, it is a rehash of other serial killers in the movies, but he seems even more remorseless than they do – and is not nearly as charming or intelligent. He kills because he enjoys killing people. No one will leave the theater smiling about him like they do with Hannibal Lector. But Byung-hun Lee is perhaps even better, even though he has the much less showy role. He seems emotionless as he is going about his work, and he doesn’t even seem to care too much that his way of torturing Kyung-chul (he tracks him down, breaks something, and then lets him go to track him down again and break something else), means that there are quite a few innocent people put in harm’s way for his vengeance. It isn’t until Kyung turns the tables that he starts to regret it – and even then, the emotions are not over the top – not even in his tragic final scene.

I have not seen any films by director Jee-woon Kim before – not even his highly regarded Western mash-up The Good, The Bad, The Weird – released here last year. On the basis on I Saw the Devil (and what I know about his previous film), he is obviously a movie brat – a Korean Quentin Tarantino as it were. He references many films here – Oldboy in the first scene (it is not a coincidence that Kyung’s weapon of choice there is a hammer) – but he plays with them a little bit. Watch the segment with the cannibal to see how he takes something out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and then twists it.

I Saw the Devil is certainly not a pleasant film to sit through. For genre fans however, it is a must. And what I appreciated about it is that even though it shows quite a bit of torture – of tough to take violence – it never devolves into the level of torture porn. There are real characters at the center of this film, and the violence flows from them. This isn’t a film where torture is shot for torture’s sake – where we see extreme violence simply because the director likes to revel in bloodlust. Instead, the violence in the movie, as strong and off putting as it is, is necessary to the movie. It is possible to make great movies with this level of violence – as this film proves.

Movie Review: Scream 4

Scream 4 ***
Directed by: Wes Craven.
Written by: Kevin Williamson.
Starring: Neve Campbell (Sidney Prescott), David Arquette (Dewey Riley), Courteney Cox (Gale Weathers-Riley), Hayden Panettiere (Kirby Reed), Emma Roberts (Jill Roberts), Marley Shelton (Deputy Judy Hicks), Erik Knudsen (Robbie Mercer), Rory Culkin (Charlie Walker), Nico Tortorella (Trevor Sheldon), Marielle Jaffe (Olivia Morris), Anthony Anderson (Deputy Perkins), Adam Brody (Detective Hoss), Alison Brie (Rebecca Walters), Mary McDonnell (Kate Roberts), Lucy Hale (Sherrie), Shenae Grimes (Trudie), Dane Farwell (Ghostface), Anna Paquin (Rachel), Kristen Bell (Chloe), Aimee Teegarden (Jenny Randall), Brittany Robertson (Marnie Cooper), Roger Jackson (The Voice).

I was 15 when the first Scream movie came out – and I loved it. At the time, I hadn’t even seen many of the movies they were referencing, but I had seen enough horror movies to get the clichés that Scream was poking fun at. This was a movie that managed to be funny and scary at the same time. As a genre, horror seems to be constantly going through phases, recycling itself over and over again. Scream started a brief period of self conscious and hip horror films – most of which were crap. Scream, and then Scream 2, which played on the idea of horror sequels, were really the only ones to do it that successfully. Even Scream 3, which tried to poke fun at “trilogies” didn’t really work. With that movies failure, the self conscious horror movie was pretty much over – and it wasn’t until Saw came around, and started the whole “torture porn” phase that we got into another cycle. Now that phase has pretty much died (thankfully), the horror genre in many ways has grown stagnate – simply remaking the hits from the past, and while some of these movies are good (Dawn of the Dead, The Hills Have Eyes), most of them suck. Scream 4 plays with the idea of remakes – it isn’t a remake, but of course so much time has passed, that Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) can no longer be the innocent teenager, so the film has the killer in the movie essentially remaking the first movie himself – with new victims, while drawing Sidney – along with Deputy, now Sheriff Dewey (David Arquette) and his wife Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) back into the fray. I wouldn’t argue that Scream 4 is a great movie – or that it does anything all that original given what this series has done in the past – but as a blast of ‘90s nostalgia (and it makes me feel old just typing that phrase), Scream 4 is extremely entertaining.

The film opens with Sidney coming back to Woodsboro for the first time in years. She has written a best seller about her decision to take her life back and stop being a victim, and Woodsboro is the final stop on her book tour. Before she even arrives though, two teenage girls are brutally murdered (in a clever opening sequence that plays with the audience repeatedly), and the whole cycle seems to beginning again. All Sidney wants to do is get out of town as quick as possible, but because some evidence has been found in the trunk of the rental car, they tell her she cannot leave (which is probably not the smartest decision in the world, but after all, this is a movie where Dewey is the Sheriff), so Sidney is stuck staying at her Aunt’s house. Sidney’s teenage cousin Jill (Emma Roberts) and her friends – Kirby (Hayden Panttiere), Olivia (Marielle Jaffe) and Trevor (Nico Tortorella), along with film geeks Robbie (Erik Knudsen) and Charlie (Rory Culkin) seem to be the teenagers at the center of these new crimes – as victims and potential suspects. The bodies start piling up fast and furious.

The film is fun in the way the first two Scream movies were fun. Writer Kevin Williamson (who wrote the first two films) and director Wes Craven (who made all three) are back, and they obviously like playing with our expectations, and throwing in twists and turns along the way. Craven, who in the past has fought his horror movie master status a little bit (he never planned on making a career at just horror films), now at 71 seems to have accepted it – and decides to go at it with gusto. This could easily be the bloodiest of the Scream movies, the deaths more violent than ever before, even as they play with the deaths from the first film. Campbell, like Jamie Lee Curtis before her, will always be associated with this franchise, and I think made the wise decision to simply embrace it. The role of Sidney fits her like a glove, and once again, she does a fine job with it – as do the other returning cast members Arquette, still a lovable doofus, and Cox, still a raging bitch. The new cast members – especially Panttiere, Roberts and Culkin – have fun in their roles as well – bringing Scream to a new generation.

As I mentioned off the top, Scream 4 doesn’t really add anything new to mix as to what this series has done in the past. But the decade between movies adds to the charm of this one. The film knows what is expected of it, and delivers in spades.

Note: One of the things that I, as a film buff, have always admired about the Scream movies is the references the movies throws in, as well as the trivia questions that the killer asks his victims over the phone. One caught my attention this time when Ghostface asked what film started the slasher movie trend – Friday the 13th, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Psycho. The would be victim answers Psycho, which is the generally accepted answer, only to have Ghostface tell her she’s wrong, that it was a trick question and the real answer was Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Technically, the killer is correct in that Peeping Tom was released in May 1960, and Psycho was released in June 1960. However, Peeping Tom, although considered a masterpiece today (and I would argue, is perhaps even a greater film than Psycho), was reviled when it was released in 1960 and was barely released, pretty much ruining the career of one of cinema’s greatest directors. The film didn’t start to gain any recognition – in fact was barely seen at all – until much later. So while Peeping Tom came out a month before Psycho, so like I said technically Ghostface is correct, I think the victim would have a very good case for arguing for Psycho actually starting it – as it is the film that I would think most of the directors who truly embraced the slasher genre, and starting making them in the 1970s (Craven, Carpenter, Hooper, etc) would have likely been inspired by. Unfortunately, of course, you cannot really file an appeal to a mad man with a knife.

Movie Review: Insidious

Insidious *** ½

Directed by: James Wan.

Written by: Leigh Whannell.

Starring: Patrick Wilson (Josh Lambert), Rose Byrne (Renai Lambert), Ty Simpkins (Dalton Lambert), Andrew Astor (Foster Lambert), Lin Shaye (Elise Rainier), Leigh Whannell (Specs), Angus Sampson (Tucker), Barbara Hershey (Lorraine Lambert).

It would be easy to laugh or at least poke fun of a movie like Insidious. It is, after all, a horror movie that really does not make any logical sense. But then again, many of the great horror movies don’t make a lot of sense. This is a movie about possession – out of body experiences, demons trying to take control of our bodies when we are outside of them. There is a lot of talk of astral projection in the film. If you wanted to, you could mock the movie. But it really is no less realistic than something like The Exorcist. And while Insidious does not reach the heights of that masterpiece, it is a genuinely frightening and unsettling horror movie. One that creeps up on you and gets under your skin if you let it. Director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell may be the team behind the original Saw, but they were smart enough to get out while the getting was good, and had virtually nothing to do with the creative process that gave us Saw’s six sequels – that devolved further and further into torture porn. In fact, Wan in particular has expressed his distaste with those types of movies. He is more of an old school horror filmmaker – and it’s easy to forget that the first Saw wasn’t all that violent. It was a mind fuck of a movie that played on our fears, more than drowning us in blood.

The movie opens, like so many horror movies do, with a seemingly perfect family moving into a new house. The husband, Josh (Patrick Wilson) is a teacher, and the wife Renai (Rose Bryne) is a songwriter, who stays at home to raise their three kids. It is, like all houses in horror movies, a big, old, gothic house, with creaky floorboards and a strange attic. One of their sons climbs up to the attic one night, thinks he sees something, and falls off a ladder. He appears fine, but the next day, he won’t wake up. They take him to a hospital, and they can find nothing medically wrong with him to explain why he is a coma. Eventually, he’ll come home with them, still in his coma, and that’s when strange things start happening. Renai starts freaking out about what she is seeing, and Josh avoids it all by staying late at work. And, in a novel twist for a haunted house movie, this family does actually move this time – but it doesn’t help. Eventually, they will hire a strange old woman medium (Lin Shaye) and her two bumbling assistants (Whannell and Angus Sampson) to try and figure out what is wrong. Oh, and Barbara Hershey shows up as Patrick Wilson’s mother, which is never a good sign that someone has had a normal childhood.

Insidious is a movie that plays with two different horror genres – the haunted house movie, and the demonic possession movie, and does both with style, wit and flair. If you wanted to, you could play a nice game of spot the references during Insidious – spotting moments that recall films like Kubrick’s The Shining, Wise’s The Haunting, Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street and a host of others. For me though, I was too caught up in the movie to do much of that. Wilson and Bryne give wonderful, lived in performances as the two parents, struggling with their own aging, and going slightly crazy trying to protect their kids. They sell their performances, no matter how outlandish things seem to get. They are aided a great deal by Lin Shaye as the creepy exorcist and Barbara Hershey, who seemingly does very little here, but her mere presence is unsettling. As the movie goes along, and the ghosts and demons start coming out of the woodwork, they may appear somewhat ridiculous in isolation, but in the context of the movie, they are terrifying. The extra creepy, constantly circling score helps a great deal, as does terrific art direction and sound design. Even something as routine in a movie like this as a séance is ratcheted up and intense.

Insidious is an excellent example of its genre, and exactly the type of horror movie I love. It is a movie with practically no blood, no gore that doesn’t get its kick by torturing people in front of us for our amusement. Instead, it builds its suspense slowly, than ratchets it up to almost unbearable degrees in the end. Yes, you could poke fun at Insidious if you really wanted to. But what would be the point of that? Few horror movies these days are this creepy and effective.

DVD Review: Resident Evil: Afterlife

Resident Evil: Afterlife *
Directed by: Paul W.S. Anderson.
Written By: Paul W.S. Anderson.
Starring: Milla Jovovich (Alice), Ali Larter (Claire Redfield), Kim Coates (Bennett), Shawn Roberts (Albert Wesker), Sergio Peris-Mencheta (Angel Ortiz), Spencer Locke (K-Mart), Boris Kodjoe (Luther West), Wentworth Miller (Chris Redfield), Sienna Guillory (Jill Valentine), Kacey Barnfield (Crystal), Norman Yeung (Kim Yong), Fulvio Cecere (Wendell), Ray Olubowale (Axeman).

I skipped Resident Evil: Afterlife when it came out in theaters last fall, and felt comfortable in that decision. I had seen the other three films, and really cannot say that there was anything that was left unanswered for me that required a fourth film. None of them have been very good, and to be honest they have started to blend together in my memory. In remembered the cool lasers that cut Michelle Rodriguez to pieces in the first film, and I’m pretty sure the third film was the one that was a Road Warrior clone, but I couldn’t tell you for sure. And without looking them up, I don’t think I could you what the title of the second and third movies were (I did look them up and the were Resident Evil: Apocalypse and Resident Evil: Extinction – I think I would have gotten the Extinction, but the other one no way). In short, I’ve never seen much need for this series, and was comfortable letting the fourth installment pass me by. But then, it had to and become the Porky’s for a new generation –by that I mean it beat the lowly teen comedy from the 1980s to become the highest grossing Canadian film of all time – and got nominated for five Genies as well, in addition to winning the Golden Reel award for highest grossing Canadian film of the year (only in Canada, where we are so insecure about our film industry do we give an award for having people see your damn movie). So I trudged off the video store to rent the latest Resident Evil film – and once again it has already started to blend in to the other films in the series in that hazy part of my memory that I rarely access.

The story this time involves our heroine Alice (Milla Jovovich), first attacking the evil Umbrella corporation, and then flying off to Alaska to try and find the supposed safe haven that is Arcadia. The Zombie epidemic still remains unabated, and Alice is still the most powerful human in the world, because she is the only one that Umbrella was able to successfully inject with the T-virus, and not turn into a brain hungry zombie. But soon she loses those powers – but she’s happy about that. She is human again.

Unfortunately, Alaska is a bust, except that she finds an old friend Claire (Ali Larter) there, although she has no memory of Alice. But they get back into Alice’s plane anyway, and fly south. They end up at a nearly abandoned prison, occupied by only a few humans. They discover that Arcadia is real after all – but it’s not a city, it’s a ship, and that ship is close by. But in order to get to it, they need to get past thousands of brain hungry, blood thirsty zombies. So they devise a plan.

Of course things go wrong, people start dying, someone will turn on them, and the supposedly evil guy will turn out to be good. And of course, Alice hasn’t seen the last of the Umbrella corporation – and since this movie was successful, I doubt that even at the end of the movie, we will never see Alice, the zombies and Umbrella again.

Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson with his typical lack of style (or over abundance of style if you want to see non-stop slow motion and bloody deaths as style), Resident Evil: Afterlife is a lazy action-horror movie. It was made to make money, and while the same can be said of pretty much every movie, in this case it seems even more cynical. There is no reason for this film to exist – so please someone remind me not to see the fifth Resident Evil movie, whenever that film comes out, which I’m sure it will.

DVD Review: 7 Days

7 Days ***
Directed by: Daniel Grou (Podz).
Writing By: Patrick Senécal based on his novel.
Starring: Claude Legault (Bruno Hamel), Rémy Girard (Hervé Mercure), Martin Dubreuil (Anthony Lemaire), Fanny Mallette (Sylvie Hamel), Rose-Marie Coallier (Jasmine Hamel), Alexandre Goyette (Boisevert).

I have always said that there is a difference between a movie that uses torture as part of its purpose, and the so called torture porn movies like Hostel, Saw and The Human Centipede. I have long since been a believer than pretty much any subject is worthy of exploration in a movie, as long as it done well, and with a purpose. That is what the so called torture porn films lack – a purpose. They do what they do, because they like to see people being tortured onscreen. Now comes a movie called 7 Days, from Quebec filmmaker Daniel Grou – who for some reason always bills himself as Podz – which puts those movies to shame. Yes, there is torture – violent, bloody torture – on display in 7 Days, but it isn’t done for giggles or shock value – but to explore the main character that is driven to do what he does.

Claude Legault stars as Bruno Hamel, a young doctor, husband and father to an 8 year old girl. He comes home from work one day tired, and just wants to go to bed. His daughter wants to drop off the invitations to her birthday party on her way to school that afternoon, but he doesn’t want to go with her – and lets her go by herself. It’s something she has done before, and he doesn’t think twice about it. This time though, his decision has tragic consequences, as his daughter is raped and murdered. It doesn’t take the police long to catch the suspect – a convicted sex offender, who will likely only get 15 to 25 years in jail for what he did. This doesn’t sit well with Bruno, who devises a scheme to break the killer out of jail, so he can dispense his own brand of justice on him. He does this with remarkable ease. The bulk of the movie is made up of the 7 days of the title – where Bruno has his man at remote house that the police cannot track down, as he slowly tortures the man who killed his daughter.

The scenes of torture in the movie are brief, but strong and bloody. Many audience members will likely have to turn away from the screen because of the harshness of the violence. But that isn’t really what Grou is interested in. What he wants to explore is what drives Bruno – a seemingly normal man - to do what he does – and the reaction of the police, the media, his wife and even the child killer. When one cop says that they shouldn’t try too hard to save the killer, after all his is pedophile, rapist and killer and is getting what he deserves, Remy Girard’s head cop says “It’s not him I’m trying to save”. The media eats this story up, as undoubtedly they would, and Bruno becomes somewhat of a hero to some, and a villain to others. His poor wife doesn’t know what to think. As the deadline nears, we wonder just how far Bruno is willing to go with his mission.

7 Days is a fascinating, slow burn of a movie. Perhaps it’s a little too slow in parts, as it seemingly tries to get all sides in at various times. I also think that Grou could have gone further in his exploration both of Bruno and the media reaction to him – the police procedural stuff is interesting, but nothing we haven’t seen before.

And yet, 7 Days is a film that haunts my memory days after seeing it, despite its flaws. It is a film that takes torture seriously, not as a joke, or a cheap way to generate thrills, but forces the audience to confront it. What the child killer did was horrible, but does that give Bruno the right to do what he does? The movie remains ambigious on the subject, right up to its brilliant final exchange between Bruno and a reporter. That is the movies strength – that it provides no easy answers, and lets the audience decide for itself.