Still, for horror fans looking for something out of the ordinary A Cure for Wellness was quite the experience on the big screen. Verbinksi and screenwriter Justin Haythe built a captivating world, and there are shades of Stanley Kubrick, Val Lewton, and Hammer horror as well as Davids Cronenberg, Fincher, and Lynch. The spa itself is incredible to look at, its maze of hallways leading constantly to unexpected new horrors. The performances are fine, but the real stars of the show here are the production design and the nightmarish imagery. The film’s length allows it time to play out at its own pace, and odd detours like a visit to the village bar give it even more of a feeling of a long dream. Anyone catching up with A Cure for Wellness at home is advised to do so on the largest screen possible. It’s doubtful that we’ll see this many resources devoted to a straight horror film ever again, but if Verbinski could knock one of these out every so often between massive blockbusters it would be fascinating to see what else he might do.
Cycle of Fear (2008)
Originally published on Film Monthly 18 December 2008
As filmmaking gets cheaper and more accessible, it only makes sense that more and more people would try their hand at it. And it only makes sense that many of these filmmakers would take their first stab at filmmaking at a proven genre: the horror film. There are tons of great low-budget horror films that have been made over the years, but it’s easy to forget that these are the exceptions. For every Evil Dead, there’s 1000 unwatchable films with the same budget. The numbers are getting ridiculous as distribution changes– you can now snag 10, 20, 50, or 100 movies in cheap boxed sets for less than $1 per film. And generally, you get what you pay for. It’s a rare occasion that something in the independent horror wasteland really sticks out.
Unfortunately, this fully applies to Cycle of Fear, a new independent horror film produced and directed by Manuel de Silva. The film falls into numerous traps that plague low-budget horror films, and doesn’t really do much to set itself apart from the horde of independent horror glutting the market. In such a market, a film has to be either really exceptional or truly awful to stand out, and Cycle of Fear, unfortunately, is just competent enough to slide under the radar.
The needlessly complicated storyline goes something like this: the witch Selena Sutton (Diana de Silva-Bowles) returns to the small community where she was put to death long ago in order to obtain a codex that will allow her to either a) cleanse her soul so she can gain entrance to Heaven or b) use its incredible power for her own purposes (what those purposes might be wasn’t really made clear). Also in the race for the codex is an ancient demon named Azeziel (Andrew Priestman), who wants it so he can damn all the souls in Purgatory to Hell. Or something like that. Honestly, the exposition flies so fast and thick in a few scenes I’m not entirely certain what was going on. Standing in the way of these supernatural forces are Tabetha (Valerie Morrissey), the only survivor of Selena Sutton’s killing spree the year before the film’s main action opens (did I forget to mention that?); Jay (Sean Kaufmann), her nurse at the insane asylum; and Samantha (Rachael Ancheril), Tabetha’s best friend who was also imprisoned by Selena and was presumed dead– but apparently she was working for Selena in the intervening time? This is what I mean by “needlessly complicated”: the basics are two supernatural entities are after a book with great power, and some normal people have to stop them. Everything else just pads out the running time.
Speaking of which, there’s also an angry police detective out for revenge, because his partner went missing investigating the Sutton case. And a priest sworn to secrecy about his basement’s floor plan. And the fact that Azeziel has taken the form of a young man who died in Iraq? Trying to keep track of all the characters and motivations that pile up throughout the film is exhausting. After a while I just gave up and let it wash over me as the supernatural antics played out and the blood splashed gleefully across the screen every so often.
Still, the film’s willingness to completely obscure its plot in needless contrivances is something to remember it by. Otherwise, it’s a completely mediocre supernatural thriller clearly made with half a shoestring budget– some of the sets look like they’re literally cardboard painted and set in front of other walls to disguise reused sets. Just because a film has a low budget doesn’t mean that it can’t be great, but to overcome such severe limitations requires a little more than technical competence. Cycle of Fear isn’t a bad first effort (especially on such a small budget), and I wouldn’t be surprised if de Silva has a good movie in him, but he’s still got a ways to go from here.
Dance of the Dead (2008)
Originally published on Film Monthly 19 October 2008
Dance of the Dead is one of those horror films that borrows liberally from various sources and jams them all together into something new. There are hints of classics in the zombie film canon: a bit of Cemetery Man to start off with, some clear references to Return of the Living Dead sprinkled about, and bits of Shaun of the Dead, Night of the Creeps, Wild Zero, Dead Alive, etc. etc. It’s the kind of film that will irritate a certain kind of horror fan to no end. That kind being the fan who sees only what’s lifted and not how it’s skillfully assembled into something that both offers clear homage to what’s come before and has its own charms as well.
The film opens with a brief altercation between the caretaker of the cemetery in the smallish town of Cosa Valley and some uncooperative corpses. At the end of the scene the camera pans to the telltale cooling towers of the local nuclear power plant, and the stage is set. The action soon moves to Cosa High, where Jimmy Dunn (Jared Kusnitz) is having a very bad day. After being sent to the principal’s office to get his detention assignment (for mouthing off to his hateful biology teacher), he has a run-in with redneck Kyle Grubbin (Justin Welborn, “Ben” from The Signal in a very different role) and ends up pissing off his girlfriend Lindsay (Greyson Chadwick), who then refuses to go to prom with him.
Jimmy’s friend Steven (Chandler Darby) isn’t doing so well, either. His attempt to ask cheerleader Gwen (Carissa Capobianco) to the prom is thwarted when she reveals she wants to ask out Nash Rambler (Blair Redford), singer/guitarist for high-school punk outfit Quarter Punks. Dejected, Steven takes up the Sci-Fi Club’s suggestion that he go with them to the cemetery to try out a piece of equipment invented by one of the club member’s brothers. What it does exactly, they don’t know, but it seems to become highly active right shortly before the first round of zombies attack. Meanwhile at Cosa High, the prom goes on. Can the Sci-Fi Club and their newfound cohorts stop the zombie apocalypse before it ruins the big night?
Once Dance of the Dead gets started, it rarely slows down. Lindsay and the Sci-Fi Club end up together while Jimmy, Kyle, and Gwen meet up and try to get everyone together. The zombies in Dance of the Dead are mostly very fast and very strong, but often seem to come apart with surprising ease when the scene calls for a splatstick laugh. As in any good horror comedy, though, the focus is on the survivors and how they deal with the situations in which they find themselves. There’s a lot of very funny dialogue, and the performances are great across the board. Especially funny is Mark Oliver as the seemingly insane gym coach Mr. Keel, who suddenly finds his military training extremely useful.
Unfortunately, Dance of the Dead loses some of its shine watching it at home on DVD. This is a film that’s truly meant to be played on a big screen in a dark room full of horror fanatics, and it’s a damned shame Lionsgate didn’t give the film a theatrical release before sending it straight to DVD. Director Gregg Bishop keeps the film moving at a pace quick enough to keep the ADHD crowd in thrall, the whole works constantly pushing forward in a gleeful teenage sugar rush of blood, brains and rock ‘n roll. Even on DVD, though, it’s easily one of the most fun films of the year, and an instant classic that deserves a spot among the best zombie horror comedies.
Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D (2013)
Originally published on Film Monthly 29 January 2014
Before a potential audienc
e member even has a chance to think about it, the title Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D conjures a host of concepts and impressions. Dario Argento is a legendary horror filmmaker, but his recent output has been weak. In particular the long-awaited conclusion to his “Three Mothers” trilogy, Mother of Tears, was a spectacular disappointment after 30 years of keeping his audience waiting. However, horror fans are often dedicated to their favorite filmmakers, and many are holding out hope for Argento to turn things around. The concept of Argento doing a new take on the most popular vampire character around certainly has some potential, even if the “3D” tacked onto the end smacks of desperate opportunism. So if the hopeful horror fan combines the title with the fact that the film features Rutger Hauer in a principal role, it’s fair to be optimistic. Unfortunately, the finished product does not justify that optimism.
Jonathan Harker (Unax Ugalde) is called to the small village of Passbourg to act as librarian for Count Dracula (Thomas Kretschmann). Jonathan was referred to the count by his wife’s best friend Lucy Kisslinger (Asia Argento), daughter of Passbourg’s mayor Andrej (Augusto Zucchi). It seems he has arrived at an unfortunate time, though, with the recent death of a young woman named Tanja (Miriam Giovelli) followed quickly by a brutal murder committed by town lunatic Renfield (Giovanni Franzoni). Harker begins work on Dracula’s sizable library while Lucy eagerly awaits the arrival of her best friend Mina (Marta Gastini), but things soon take a turn for the strange when Tanja, now living in the Count’s castle with Renfield as her slave, attempts to seduce Harker and Dracula is forced to reveal himself as a vampire.
None of which should be any surprise to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the classic Dracula story. Argento and his three (!?) co-screenwriters have basically just swapped some things around and made what is more or less a straightforward version of the basics of the Dracula story. Perhaps the most surprising and inexplicable addition to the tale is that of Tanja, who appears completely nude not five minutes into the film, is turned into a vampire by Dracula for some reason, and then gets a pretty sizable chunk of screen time devoted to her and her relationship with Renfield. Clocking in at 110 minutes, Dracula 3D is certainly never in a hurry to get anywhere, so perhaps it should not be surprising that Tanja gets more screen time than Harker or Mina, and considerably more than Van Helsing (Rutger Hauer), who doesn’t even show up until after the halfway point of the film’s running time.
The film’s pacing would not necessarily have been a problem if Argento had genuinely brought something new to the story, but he and his collaborators seem uncertain of what kind of Dracula they want to present. Most of the time he’s a snarling monster, blood smeared all over his face, but when Mina arrives he turns into a near-parody of the maudlin, “tortured soul” Dracula. This is a major issue, but the biggest problem in Dracula 3D is its truly atrocious computer generated special effects. A swooping camera runs through the village in the opening credits and looks like the opening sequence from a Myst or 7th Guest knock-off; later, when Dracula transforms from a wolf back to his human form, it looks like the scene was engineered as a cut scene from a Playstation 1-era fighting game. There are some good practical effects here and there (thanks to effects maestro Sergio Stivaletti), but the overload of incredibly cheap CG is a huge distraction and drags the film’s already cheap look down a few more notches– Jersey Shore Shark Attack had more convincing CG, and that’s saying something. Fans may keep holding out hope that Argento may return to form, but sadly this isn’t the film where he does it.
Dark Touch (2013)
Originally published on Film Monthly 31 January 2014
Marina de Van is perhaps best known for her debut feature In My Skin (aka Dans ma Peau, 2002), which was a precursor to the brief wave of French horror films that saw filmmakers like Alexandre Aja, Xavier Gens and Pascal Laugier come to international attention with brutal, graphic films that pushed the boundaries of on-screen violence and frequently ended up on the wrong end of censors’ scissors in the States. In My Skin shared the gruesome, queasily realistic makeup effects with those films, but was more of a character-driven psychological thriller than a straight genre exercise. It came as some surprise that her follow-up feature, 2009′s Don’t Look Back, came at the tail end of the horror wave her first film helped kick off and completely rejected violence and blood for a much more unsettling and disorienting depiction of a character suffering a psychotic break. In that sense, it was a natural follow-up to In My Skin, but Don’t Look Back suffered from too much direct explanation of its central mystery: the more the audience knew about what was causing the problem, the less interest the film held. Dark Touch is de Van’s latest film, and while it features some intriguing ideas and unsettling imagery, it overcorrects the major problem with Don’t Look Back, presenting pieces of a mystery but nothing to tie them together.
Late one night, Neve (Missy Keating) arrives at the house of her neighbors Nat (Marcella Plunkett) and Lucas (Padraic Delaney) after running through the dark forest. The girl is traumatized, frantic and covered in blood. They call her parents to pick her up, but they seem more annoyed than concerned. Neve is something of a problem child, causing frequent trouble at home while blaming the house itself for trying to attack her and her baby brother. Nat suspects there may be something else going on with the family, but Neve’s father is a well-liked doctor in their small community, and no one else seems too interested. After a fire in their home kills her parents, Nat volunteers her home as a place for Neve to stay while the police figure out what happened to Neve and her family. Nat, Lucas, and Tanya (Charlotte Flyvholm), a counselor at Neve’s school, try to help bring her out of her trauma and find out what happened.
But Neve is more disturbed than any of them could guess. She flinches at the slightest movement, and is unsure what to do with affection. She talks to Tanya about how Nat and Lucas hug her and smile at her as if she had never seen such behavior. Worse, she is singled out at school by the other kids, who whisper about her being a killer. Her only relationship like friendship is a tentative rapport with a pair of similarly ostracized siblings whose unkempt, shell-shocked look is not unlike her own. Neve becomes preoccupied with Nat and Lucas’s daughter Mary, who passed away years earlier, and as her behavior becomes more erratic and unpredictable, the couple are pushed to their limits. It becomes clear that whatever was happening in Neve’s family before was nothing anyone could have guessed, and Neve’s role as victim may not be as simple as it seems.
Dark Touch starts off strong and de Van injects it with some intriguing and unsettling ideas and imagery, but as the mysteries behind what happened in Neve’s family and how she came to become whatever she is just keep piling up with no clear answers. This actually keeps happening all the way up until the end of the film, and like Don’t Look Back, Dark Touch suffers from a weak third act. Again, though, it’s for completely different reasons: Don’t Look Back loses its power when it explains too much, whereas Dark Touch holds too much back and ends confusingly, seemingly tying up things that were never main threads of the plot to begin with. There’s no denying that the first hour of Dark Touch is bleakly compelling, but some overt “scary kid” stuff at a disastrous birthday party breaks the film’s fragile spell, and it never quite recovers. While de Van remains a filmmaker to watch, Dark Touch is not the masterpiece her fans have been waiting for, but it remains worth watching as de Van is willing to face head-on dark territory from which even her fellow French horror filmmakers would shy away.
Daydream Nation (2010)
Originally published on Film Monthly 5 May 2011
The “coming of age” film is a well-worn trope by now, and every generation of filmmakers seems determined to put their stamp on it. Sometimes this results in strange and interesting combinations of genres and films that genuinely have something to say, such as the recent Deadgirl and Make-Out with Violence (both 2008). While nowhere near as bleak and difficult as those films, writer/director Michael Goldbach’s debut feature Daydream
Nation obviously aspires to join the ranks of artful coming-of-age films, but is unfortunately hampered by a few major issues.
Kat Denning narrates and stars as Caroline Wexler, a teenager who has moved with her father (Tedd Whittall) to a small town following the death of her mother. Caroline is snarky and sarcastic, and makes no attempt to hide her contempt for her fellow students, the school they attend and the town in which they live. The only thing at school that catches her interest is young English teacher Barry Anderson (Josh Lucas), a struggling novelist dating the school gym teacher Ms. Budge (Rachel Blanchard). After seducing Mr. Anderson, Caroline begins dating her classmate Thurston (Reece Thompson) as a cover, but soon she finds her feelings complicating the situation.
This story is told through vignettes punctuated by title cards, each section presented somewhat out of order. For example, the audience meets Thurston well after Caroline does, so she must go back and fill in his backstory. This is probably done as a representation of Caroline’s scattered thoughts, presented in a type of diary format where everything is filled in as necessary, but it often just feels like a way to inject a bit of mystery or drama where it would otherwise be lacking. A parallel storyline about a serial killer leaving the bodies of teenage girls around the town is barely touched on except when it conveniently dovetails with Caroline’s stories, and its resolution late in the film feels like a cheat.
This reliance on coincidence is one of Daydream Nation‘s major failings, but perhaps its most glaring shortcoming is the fact that Caroline is not a compelling narrator. It is well into the film before she finally stops and says it’s time that we learn about her, but even then we don’t really learn anything that actually tells us who she really is. Caroline is a completely self-absorbed narrator who, ironically, never really talks about herself. When she becomes angry at another character late in the film for not knowing anything about her, it’s hard not to identify with the other character. If the audience has had to listen to her interior monologue for the last hour and we hardly know anything about her, how is anyone else supposed to?
The Unrepentant Cinephile Page 17