TYBS # 2 (OCT 2006)
Here’s one recent fantasy/horror movie to date and a few old movies with one indie gem thrown in that Fangoria Magazine has put forward as a must-see. Have a happy Samhain!
THE PRESTIGE
THE STORY: Combine two turn-of-the-century century English magicians, a bitter grudge and good, old-fashioned testosterone-fuelled spite and what do you get? A spanking movie like The Prestige.
The Prestige isn’t some enigmatic school of magic but the third act in any trick, with the first and second acts being the Pledge (ordinary thing is shown) and the Turn (ordinary thing becomes miraculous). Can’t give too much away here, but suffice to say that the movie lives up to its revelatory title.
Rupert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) were once good friends working as assistants for the same magician when a trick involving Angier’s wife goes horribly wrong. This accident foreshadows their future rivalry when they become skilled magicians themselves – of vastly different styles at that: Angier is flamboyant and entertaining but short on talent, Borden is extremely gifted but his performances are dry, with little showmanship.
Through a cut-up narrative that’s uncannily never jarring or prickly we are told the story of these two men through the years in journals and flashbacks. They try to outdo each other with their tricks and illussions, think up of creative ways to sabotage each others’ acts, often resulting in much injury.
Malice palpably drips from the screen as we witness how far these men will go just to score points in their rivalry (Check out David Bowie as eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and what he does for Angier). What’s at stake is pride, reputation and the memory of loved ones lost to this monster of enmity.
I hate to be vague but wait for the final reveal at the end for a plot twist that’s the filmic equivalent of a conjurer’s “Rabbit in a Hat.”
THE LOWDOWN: In this film the jive “Can’t we all just get along?” is just a fanciful turn of phrase. Both characters will undoubtedly laugh and say “No.” That’s why we must thank director Christopher Nolan (Memento, Insomnia and Batman Begins) for making this movie more than just a treatise on the old London magic scene or the garden variety “how’d he do that?” popcorn stuffer.
The acting is top-notch, especially when Jackman and Bale are joined by Michael Cane (he didn’t win that Oscar for nothing), Scarlet Johansson (such eye-candy in a corset!) and even LOTR’s Andy Serkis (the guy who plays Gollum). In fact the writing and the protrayal of the two magicians is so finely tuned that we are given, not just three dimensional heroes or villains, but real people in an extraordinary environment and circumstances. The effect is that you can’t root for any one magus because they’ve both done horrid things in the name of some pretty petty reasons. That’s a magic trick in itself, no?
That’s just one of many up direk Nolan’s sleeve, though. His greatest sleight of hand is to show that, up until a certain point, what Angier and Borden had was true professional rivalry. They never wanted to kill each other.
True, they stole each others’ women, wrecked each others’ workshops and systematically ruined each others’ lives, perhaps doing grievous bodily harm in the process, yes, but to outright kill each other was as boorish and tired to these men as sawing curvy assistants in half.
This will become awfully clear to the viewer in one scene where Borden actually tries to save Angier. That said, I do so hope Nolan directs the adaptation of Jonathan Strange.
BLACK SHIRT SAYS: Ah, the hearts of men make for the best monster ever. This is a horror movie, in my opinion, in the sense that two guys can take something so entertainingly wondrous like stage magic and taint it with the suffocating coils of their personal vendettas, turning it into an odious creature. Nevermind your corner three cup monty, go see this movie.
SILENT HILL
THE STORY: Sharon, the adopted daughter of Rose (Radha Mitchell) and Christopher (Sean Bean) often sleepwalks and when she’s found she screams “Silent Hill!” to the face of her baffled, terrified parents. Sharon also sketches disturbing events in crayola, depicting said town in all manner of brutal killings and hellish landscapes. Sharon remembers nothing of these when prompted, often recoiling when proffered the fact that she made the drawings.
Fed up with these visions assaulting her child, Rose decides to drive herself and Sharon to Silent Hill and there seek answer, therapy or buried memory. Problem is, Silent Hill has been a ghost town since 1974. A huge charcoal fire accident (the town’s main industry) made the place uninhabitable, not to mention chalked with deadly ash and fumes from the underground fires still burning that ensures you’ll have to wear infection masks for a guided tour.
If you’re familiar with the video game this movie is based on, you’ll know there’s more to Silent Hill than just the coal-blackened town. After crashing their car, Rose finds Sharon gone and herself in a twisted, dark-side dimension of Silent Hill where she must battle a bestiary of horrors to save her adopted kid’s soul.
These include truly horrid monsters, religious anti-witch fanatics which comprise the bulk of the town’s surviving citizens, the random dimension shift that turns the place from deserted town to hell on earth and Sharon’s demonic doppelganger. Toto, I think Kansas went bye bye at the town gates.
THE LOWDOWN: I really wanted to like this movie. The first installment of the Konami videogame, back in the late 1990s, scared the heck out of me and my friends. Though we were playing with the lights out, it took five guys (one at the controls, one reading from a purloined cheat sheet and three guys coaching) to finish the game and we were all white-faced and white-knuckled through out. What a blast.
Playing Silent Hill has been one of the most memorable horror experiences of my life. Sadly, the movie is a mere shadow of its interactive brother. Though there are more than enough visual frights (the giant sword-wielding, beak-headed monster was a treat) done with FX finesse. But where it fails isn’t the creatures, the town or the blood and gore.
Two things do: the story and the acting. The former was doing great up until the middle, when the whole thing degenerated from fine surrealism into a campy B-movie mess of witch-hunting and lines so silly you can’t believe they weren’t written for parody. Even the subtle, ambiguous ending can’t redeem the bottom heavy script. Ah, the script. We can also blame the latter on the faulty production and miscasting. While first rate actors like Sean Bean and Kim Coates are put in the sidelines, B-list actors are given the plum roles. Better actors in the hard roles might have pulled off the asinine and downright stupid lines this movie required.
Presumably, Radha Mitchell was cast in the hot-mom-battles-the-forces-of-darkness role to appease the hordes of male gamers that the production outfit knew would be misled enough to see this disaster. Even her nice rack can’t save her she makes the “witches are people too” bombastic speech.
BLACK SHIRT SAYS: Genuine cinematic moments are overshadowed by holes in story consistency (the cellphone that should ring whenever a monster approaches does so only once), appalling lines (“I am the Reaper!” says the child-doppelganger and we pity the kid trying to deliver that sentence) and half-hearted efforts at surreal, psych horror. Play the game instead (any of the four will do you good).
WHEN A STRANGER CALLS
THE STORY: Cherubic-faced hot teen Jill Johnson (Camilla Belle) gets grounded for going over her mobile phone limit and has to baby sit for her dad’s friend -- a lakeside mansion whose built-in smart technology ensures the house is light years more intelligent than our heroine. While she’s babysitting, the rest of the town’s young and hip are at the annual Bonfire Festival. Poor, poor Jill.
While at said house Jill gets clockwork prank calls in between opening doors, walking down corridors, opening more doors, admiring jewelry and checking the fridge. That’s about all that happens in 80 percent of this movie.
I can almost hear Jerry Seinfeld making his pitch: “Okay, picture this: It’s a movie about nothing!”
THE LOWDOWN: When stuff finally does happen its Jill running around startled at her own shadow, jumping at cats, closing curtains, tracking down lost maids or exploring the premises. Even finding her ditz of a best friend dead in one of the rooms elicits only a slight rise of interest. I don’t think I’ve ever yawned so much.
Often, it’s only Camilla Bell and an empty room so her acting talents (which are at best average) are extremely taxed. While she’s eye candy no doubt, the gazillion fakies, false leads and anti-climactic calls take their toll.
When the cops finally trace the calls to inside the house and the killer reveals himself (his face is always in shadow, mind) I’m completely rooting for him to dismember the darn kids and the darn babysitter. Some skin and/or blood would be a welcome release from all the tedium, but that doesn’t even happen. Jill gets nary a bruise. Not that it would save the movie. I don’t think even God can accomplish that by the Nth time the phone rings and only breathing is heard.
The truly bathetic ending in the insane ward ensures that this remake will make it to the “how not to make a horror movie” hall of fame easy.
BLACK SHIRT SAYS: They say the low-budget original released back in 1979 was loads better. With this one, there’s more interest factor in watching your grandmother’s spittle dribble down her chin on a cold morning. Wake me up when the stranger calls so I can tell him to eff off. On second thought, don’t.
JOSHUA
THE STORY: Kelby, James and Wally grew up together as best friends in the small town of Bisbee (“Population: Happy,” the town sign acerbically proclaims). When they were around 10 years old they found a baby abandoned in an alley. They decided to take it to their barkada hideaway: a ramshackle little cabin in the woods, name the boy Joshua and raised it as “their son.”
What they did (and fed) to that child as it grew up was in lieu of “bringing nightmares to life.” When Kelby realizes what they’d done, he and Wally team up to torch the cabin with Joshua chained inside it, much to James’s chagrin. Blame it all on that darned middle-class, dysfunctional Midwest family upbringing.
13 years later Kelby returns to Bisbee for the funeral of his father. With his fiancée in tow he discovers that Bisbee has turned quite Southern Gothic and that his two former best friends have developed psychoses of their own (James has taken to luring pretty girls into his apartment for vivisection and Wally has become an overfriendly cop with a tenuous hold on his sanity).
Ah, but James has been up to more than just slicing girls. He’s also feeding their parts to a strange creature in his sub-basement. Could it be Joshua? Plus, there’s the “real story” behind who exactly was responsible for the creation of Joshua (was it Wally, James or Kelby?). In between there’s tasteful use of gore (oxymoron, I know), Rednecks rutting in incest, passable monster prosthetics and special FX and one scene where our hero makes chopping a melon a most disturbing sight.
THE LOWDOWN: This is an indie movie with a mid-range budget so it’s forgivable that the camera work is shaky, the cinematography is amateur, the lighting is flawed and the characterization caricaturish, sometimes comical. But the storytelling is outstanding and you get the feeling that everything else was intentionally bland so that you’d focus on the story and not the peripherals.
This was picked by Fangoria’s Gore Zone as a must-see movie with “take no-prisoners storytelling.” Boy, you can always trust the Fangoria guys.
With bizarre plot twists and clever use of devices (like dreams and surreal flashbacks) we are drawn into Kelby’s past, unfolding a grisly tale of inflicted evil, cannibalism, damaged people and southern gothic secrets. When you finally find out who (or what) the creature under James’s basement is, you’ll be applauding the subtle and sophisticated way the whole plot was handled.
Ward Roberts performs as Kelby Unger admirably. He vacillates from genuine warmth and cold aloofness with apt conflict between his warring sides. His character is also smart enough to pocket a carving knife when his best friend (dressed in a half-ridiculous, half-scary skin suit) goes to get the creature from the basement. No frozen-in-fear-hero here.
The rest of the cast make the best of their functional roles (Erica Watson as Kelby’s girlfriend Ashley is strictly supportive and reactionary, Jeremiah Jordan as nervous cop Wally is the epitome of creepy) but the scene stealer goes to Alexa Hayes as Kelby’s younger sister and town wanton Trish Unger.
This diminutive blonde only has four scenes in the movie and two of them have her wearing only blue panties and an oversized, boat neck shirt. Anybody who can hold viewer attention with only those on and come off as unsettling and attractive at the same time will go a long way. When she hugs her brother hello for the first time after a long absence, there’s such an overtone of flirtation that it both shames and excites us.
BLACK SHIRT SAYS: Even without a musical score, nearly zero lighting and only the bare bones of a set design to speak of, Joshua is an indie gem whose stark, dread-filled atmosphere, guerilla film values and raw special effects make the previous two, high-budget, Hollywood movies pale in comparison. Hardcore horror fans buy this and rejoice.
THE PRESTIGE
THE STORY: Combine two turn-of-the-century century English magicians, a bitter grudge and good, old-fashioned testosterone-fuelled spite and what do you get? A spanking movie like The Prestige.
The Prestige isn’t some enigmatic school of magic but the third act in any trick, with the first and second acts being the Pledge (ordinary thing is shown) and the Turn (ordinary thing becomes miraculous). Can’t give too much away here, but suffice to say that the movie lives up to its revelatory title.
Rupert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) were once good friends working as assistants for the same magician when a trick involving Angier’s wife goes horribly wrong. This accident foreshadows their future rivalry when they become skilled magicians themselves – of vastly different styles at that: Angier is flamboyant and entertaining but short on talent, Borden is extremely gifted but his performances are dry, with little showmanship.
Through a cut-up narrative that’s uncannily never jarring or prickly we are told the story of these two men through the years in journals and flashbacks. They try to outdo each other with their tricks and illussions, think up of creative ways to sabotage each others’ acts, often resulting in much injury.
Malice palpably drips from the screen as we witness how far these men will go just to score points in their rivalry (Check out David Bowie as eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and what he does for Angier). What’s at stake is pride, reputation and the memory of loved ones lost to this monster of enmity.
I hate to be vague but wait for the final reveal at the end for a plot twist that’s the filmic equivalent of a conjurer’s “Rabbit in a Hat.”
THE LOWDOWN: In this film the jive “Can’t we all just get along?” is just a fanciful turn of phrase. Both characters will undoubtedly laugh and say “No.” That’s why we must thank director Christopher Nolan (Memento, Insomnia and Batman Begins) for making this movie more than just a treatise on the old London magic scene or the garden variety “how’d he do that?” popcorn stuffer.
The acting is top-notch, especially when Jackman and Bale are joined by Michael Cane (he didn’t win that Oscar for nothing), Scarlet Johansson (such eye-candy in a corset!) and even LOTR’s Andy Serkis (the guy who plays Gollum). In fact the writing and the protrayal of the two magicians is so finely tuned that we are given, not just three dimensional heroes or villains, but real people in an extraordinary environment and circumstances. The effect is that you can’t root for any one magus because they’ve both done horrid things in the name of some pretty petty reasons. That’s a magic trick in itself, no?
That’s just one of many up direk Nolan’s sleeve, though. His greatest sleight of hand is to show that, up until a certain point, what Angier and Borden had was true professional rivalry. They never wanted to kill each other.
True, they stole each others’ women, wrecked each others’ workshops and systematically ruined each others’ lives, perhaps doing grievous bodily harm in the process, yes, but to outright kill each other was as boorish and tired to these men as sawing curvy assistants in half.
This will become awfully clear to the viewer in one scene where Borden actually tries to save Angier. That said, I do so hope Nolan directs the adaptation of Jonathan Strange.
BLACK SHIRT SAYS: Ah, the hearts of men make for the best monster ever. This is a horror movie, in my opinion, in the sense that two guys can take something so entertainingly wondrous like stage magic and taint it with the suffocating coils of their personal vendettas, turning it into an odious creature. Nevermind your corner three cup monty, go see this movie.
SILENT HILL
THE STORY: Sharon, the adopted daughter of Rose (Radha Mitchell) and Christopher (Sean Bean) often sleepwalks and when she’s found she screams “Silent Hill!” to the face of her baffled, terrified parents. Sharon also sketches disturbing events in crayola, depicting said town in all manner of brutal killings and hellish landscapes. Sharon remembers nothing of these when prompted, often recoiling when proffered the fact that she made the drawings.
Fed up with these visions assaulting her child, Rose decides to drive herself and Sharon to Silent Hill and there seek answer, therapy or buried memory. Problem is, Silent Hill has been a ghost town since 1974. A huge charcoal fire accident (the town’s main industry) made the place uninhabitable, not to mention chalked with deadly ash and fumes from the underground fires still burning that ensures you’ll have to wear infection masks for a guided tour.
If you’re familiar with the video game this movie is based on, you’ll know there’s more to Silent Hill than just the coal-blackened town. After crashing their car, Rose finds Sharon gone and herself in a twisted, dark-side dimension of Silent Hill where she must battle a bestiary of horrors to save her adopted kid’s soul.
These include truly horrid monsters, religious anti-witch fanatics which comprise the bulk of the town’s surviving citizens, the random dimension shift that turns the place from deserted town to hell on earth and Sharon’s demonic doppelganger. Toto, I think Kansas went bye bye at the town gates.
THE LOWDOWN: I really wanted to like this movie. The first installment of the Konami videogame, back in the late 1990s, scared the heck out of me and my friends. Though we were playing with the lights out, it took five guys (one at the controls, one reading from a purloined cheat sheet and three guys coaching) to finish the game and we were all white-faced and white-knuckled through out. What a blast.
Playing Silent Hill has been one of the most memorable horror experiences of my life. Sadly, the movie is a mere shadow of its interactive brother. Though there are more than enough visual frights (the giant sword-wielding, beak-headed monster was a treat) done with FX finesse. But where it fails isn’t the creatures, the town or the blood and gore.
Two things do: the story and the acting. The former was doing great up until the middle, when the whole thing degenerated from fine surrealism into a campy B-movie mess of witch-hunting and lines so silly you can’t believe they weren’t written for parody. Even the subtle, ambiguous ending can’t redeem the bottom heavy script. Ah, the script. We can also blame the latter on the faulty production and miscasting. While first rate actors like Sean Bean and Kim Coates are put in the sidelines, B-list actors are given the plum roles. Better actors in the hard roles might have pulled off the asinine and downright stupid lines this movie required.
Presumably, Radha Mitchell was cast in the hot-mom-battles-the-forces-of-darkness role to appease the hordes of male gamers that the production outfit knew would be misled enough to see this disaster. Even her nice rack can’t save her she makes the “witches are people too” bombastic speech.
BLACK SHIRT SAYS: Genuine cinematic moments are overshadowed by holes in story consistency (the cellphone that should ring whenever a monster approaches does so only once), appalling lines (“I am the Reaper!” says the child-doppelganger and we pity the kid trying to deliver that sentence) and half-hearted efforts at surreal, psych horror. Play the game instead (any of the four will do you good).
WHEN A STRANGER CALLS
THE STORY: Cherubic-faced hot teen Jill Johnson (Camilla Belle) gets grounded for going over her mobile phone limit and has to baby sit for her dad’s friend -- a lakeside mansion whose built-in smart technology ensures the house is light years more intelligent than our heroine. While she’s babysitting, the rest of the town’s young and hip are at the annual Bonfire Festival. Poor, poor Jill.
While at said house Jill gets clockwork prank calls in between opening doors, walking down corridors, opening more doors, admiring jewelry and checking the fridge. That’s about all that happens in 80 percent of this movie.
I can almost hear Jerry Seinfeld making his pitch: “Okay, picture this: It’s a movie about nothing!”
THE LOWDOWN: When stuff finally does happen its Jill running around startled at her own shadow, jumping at cats, closing curtains, tracking down lost maids or exploring the premises. Even finding her ditz of a best friend dead in one of the rooms elicits only a slight rise of interest. I don’t think I’ve ever yawned so much.
Often, it’s only Camilla Bell and an empty room so her acting talents (which are at best average) are extremely taxed. While she’s eye candy no doubt, the gazillion fakies, false leads and anti-climactic calls take their toll.
When the cops finally trace the calls to inside the house and the killer reveals himself (his face is always in shadow, mind) I’m completely rooting for him to dismember the darn kids and the darn babysitter. Some skin and/or blood would be a welcome release from all the tedium, but that doesn’t even happen. Jill gets nary a bruise. Not that it would save the movie. I don’t think even God can accomplish that by the Nth time the phone rings and only breathing is heard.
The truly bathetic ending in the insane ward ensures that this remake will make it to the “how not to make a horror movie” hall of fame easy.
BLACK SHIRT SAYS: They say the low-budget original released back in 1979 was loads better. With this one, there’s more interest factor in watching your grandmother’s spittle dribble down her chin on a cold morning. Wake me up when the stranger calls so I can tell him to eff off. On second thought, don’t.
JOSHUA
THE STORY: Kelby, James and Wally grew up together as best friends in the small town of Bisbee (“Population: Happy,” the town sign acerbically proclaims). When they were around 10 years old they found a baby abandoned in an alley. They decided to take it to their barkada hideaway: a ramshackle little cabin in the woods, name the boy Joshua and raised it as “their son.”
What they did (and fed) to that child as it grew up was in lieu of “bringing nightmares to life.” When Kelby realizes what they’d done, he and Wally team up to torch the cabin with Joshua chained inside it, much to James’s chagrin. Blame it all on that darned middle-class, dysfunctional Midwest family upbringing.
13 years later Kelby returns to Bisbee for the funeral of his father. With his fiancée in tow he discovers that Bisbee has turned quite Southern Gothic and that his two former best friends have developed psychoses of their own (James has taken to luring pretty girls into his apartment for vivisection and Wally has become an overfriendly cop with a tenuous hold on his sanity).
Ah, but James has been up to more than just slicing girls. He’s also feeding their parts to a strange creature in his sub-basement. Could it be Joshua? Plus, there’s the “real story” behind who exactly was responsible for the creation of Joshua (was it Wally, James or Kelby?). In between there’s tasteful use of gore (oxymoron, I know), Rednecks rutting in incest, passable monster prosthetics and special FX and one scene where our hero makes chopping a melon a most disturbing sight.
THE LOWDOWN: This is an indie movie with a mid-range budget so it’s forgivable that the camera work is shaky, the cinematography is amateur, the lighting is flawed and the characterization caricaturish, sometimes comical. But the storytelling is outstanding and you get the feeling that everything else was intentionally bland so that you’d focus on the story and not the peripherals.
This was picked by Fangoria’s Gore Zone as a must-see movie with “take no-prisoners storytelling.” Boy, you can always trust the Fangoria guys.
With bizarre plot twists and clever use of devices (like dreams and surreal flashbacks) we are drawn into Kelby’s past, unfolding a grisly tale of inflicted evil, cannibalism, damaged people and southern gothic secrets. When you finally find out who (or what) the creature under James’s basement is, you’ll be applauding the subtle and sophisticated way the whole plot was handled.
Ward Roberts performs as Kelby Unger admirably. He vacillates from genuine warmth and cold aloofness with apt conflict between his warring sides. His character is also smart enough to pocket a carving knife when his best friend (dressed in a half-ridiculous, half-scary skin suit) goes to get the creature from the basement. No frozen-in-fear-hero here.
The rest of the cast make the best of their functional roles (Erica Watson as Kelby’s girlfriend Ashley is strictly supportive and reactionary, Jeremiah Jordan as nervous cop Wally is the epitome of creepy) but the scene stealer goes to Alexa Hayes as Kelby’s younger sister and town wanton Trish Unger.
This diminutive blonde only has four scenes in the movie and two of them have her wearing only blue panties and an oversized, boat neck shirt. Anybody who can hold viewer attention with only those on and come off as unsettling and attractive at the same time will go a long way. When she hugs her brother hello for the first time after a long absence, there’s such an overtone of flirtation that it both shames and excites us.
BLACK SHIRT SAYS: Even without a musical score, nearly zero lighting and only the bare bones of a set design to speak of, Joshua is an indie gem whose stark, dread-filled atmosphere, guerilla film values and raw special effects make the previous two, high-budget, Hollywood movies pale in comparison. Hardcore horror fans buy this and rejoice.
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