[REC] ² (2009): or, 28 Floors Later

October Horror Movie Challenge, Day 13!

 
An apartment building in the center of a Barcelona has been locked down, sealed off with plastic wrap, and surrounded by police and officials. It seems the people inside have come down with a particularly bad case of the Extreme Ocular Hemorrhage and Homicidal Violence Flu. The virus is extremely contagious, leading the municipal health department to take drastic measures. A SWAT team is sent in, along with the secretive Dr. Owen (living Pixar character Jonathan Mellor) to locate Patient Zero and get a blood sample, which they hope will allow them to find a cure. But when one blood-spitting murder machine gets surprisingly un-murdery after Dr. Owen holds up a crucifix and lays some scripture on his ass, the members of the police party realize there's something much more sinister than just a virus going on...

Picking up precisely where 2007 hit [REC] left off, [REC] ² is more of the same--but I didn't really mind that much. The demonic possession-as-virus idea is not bad as such explanations go, adding a supernatural layer to the standard 28 Days Later-style infection flick. (Which by now should in fact be its own subgenre.) Once again co-directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza use the first-cameras again, here mounted on the SWAT team's helmets for command and control purposes--to set up some tense "moving through the shadows" shots and frenetic attacks by the infected remnants. The "night vision" shots are back too, and used here to the same good effect. Manuela Velasco also returns in a reprise of her role from the first movie, with a welcome if predictable twist.

[REC] ² doesn't do anything particularly new, but it does deliver an exciting, bloody, action-packed and sometimes creepy ride. 2 thumbs up.

"We're out of jelly."

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Dead Alive (1992): or, Kicking Arse for the Lord

October Horror Movie Challenge, Day 12!

Young Lionel Cosgrove (Timothy Balme) meets cute with Spanish Gypsy babe Paquita (Diana Peñalver) after her second-sighted mother reads romance in her cards. Lionel's own Mum (Elizabeth Moody)--a domineering harpy of a woman--is none too pleased with the new relationship, and spies on the couple to ensure that she remains the only woman in her son's life. When she follows Lionel and Paquita to the zoo and is bitten by the only Sumatran Rat Monkey in captivity, however, Mum picks up a rather nasty zoonitic bug--she runs a fever, bursts into cold sweats, and parts of her body start falling off into her custard. Soon Mum has passed the disease on to several local residents, and Lionel is sent scrambling trying to contain the mess. And what a mess it is...

Come on, do I really have to summarize this one?

One of the most over-the-top, silly, and gory movies of all time, Peter Jackson's Dead Alive is a flick that just keeps topping itself. You think it's got as crazy as it's going to get when it introduces the flip-top nurse zombie...then it throws in the famous Kung-Fu Priest (Stuart Devenie), bodies ripped in half, an animated (and strangely adorable) set of roving internal organs, and a skull-bursting Zombie Baby. By the time we get to the famous end party scene (Oh Crikey! It's Lawnmower Deth!), the viewer might rightly believe he's seen it all...but as Lionel warns his girlfriend, "I haven't seen Mum this evening..."

This is the movie I believe the term "splatstick comedy" was coined for, and imo the one to which it applies most perfectly. Jackson's movie is full of brilliant physical comedy and sight gags that would not be out of place in a Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton one-reeler--only without all the dismemberment and copious bodily fluids. Timothy Balme is a gifted physical comedian of the Charlie Chaplin school, and the way his Lionel goes to greater and greater extremes to maintain some semblance of normalcy while the world literally goes to pieces around him is both hilarious and affecting.

The special effects are as funny as they are disgusting--from faces being ripped off, legs being stripped to bone, multiple impalements (on grave markers, splintered wood, and memorably a still-blazing light bulb), to of course the show-stopping stop-motion Rat Monkey. Jackson also works in a nod to his touchstone flick King Kong (1931), and the early scenes in Sumatra starkly prefigure the scenes with the savage tribe in the director's 2005 remake.

For a justly celebrated horror-comedy classic, my rating of Dead Alive is a no-brainer: 3 thumbs way up!

"♫ FEELINGS! Whoa-whoa-whoa....♫"

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The Slit-Mouthed Woman (2005): or, Open Wide and Say AAAAAAAUGH!

October Horror Movie Challenge, Day 11!

 
A doctor and a nurse working the graveyard shift at a hospital specializing in cosmetic surgery retire to a forbidden, closed-off room for a little stress-relieving sex--or quite a lot of it, actually. Unfortunately, the rumpy-pumpy is interrupted by the appearance of the Slit-Mouthed Woman--a long-haired ghost seeking revenge for the mutilation that earned her the name. Three years later, the hospital is abandoned and the ghost a popular urban legend. A journalist writing for a Cosmo-esque magazine who was tasked with writing an article on the story disappears a few days before deadline, and pretty young go-getter Yoko is tasked with finishing the story. As she investigates the Slit-Mouthed Woman's history, she and her live-in stepsister Kazumi are drawn deeper into a mystery that will soon threaten their happiness, if not their lives.

I really don't have that much to say about The Slit-Mouthed Woman. I didn't know anything about it before queuing it up on Netflix instant, but I believe it's an example of the pinku genre of Japanese film, short movies that typically mix extreme genre film-making (often horror, martial arts, true crime, and/or ultraviolence) with tons and tons of softcore sex. The ghost story is competently done, drawing from a well-known and fairly creepy Japanese legend you can read more about here. The woman's first appearance is pretty scary, though her subsequent materializations diminish the overall effect with their clockwork regularity: people enter the hospital, they have borderline-explicit sex (including many, MANY lingering shots of sloppy tongue-kissing--director Takaaki Hashiguchi clearly has a fetish), and then BOOM, ghostliness. The journalist's story is really just a framework for these vignettes. Basically it plays out like Skinemax international, only with better acting.

If you're the sort of person who likes ghostly urban legends and lots of nudity and sex, this is a good way to spend just over an hour of your time. Slight, but not terrible. 1.75 thumbs.

Nota bene: there are several movies based on this story, apparently, including this one from Asia Extreme. The one on Netflix instant is *not* that movie.

No more ribs before bedtime!

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Night of the Creeps (1986): or, Consider Me Thrilled

October Horror Movie Challenge, Day 10!

 In Earth-Year 1959 AD, a passing insterstellar research craft is the scene of intrigue and mutiny, as a creature who looks like E.T. on steroids steals a canister of dangerous parasites and makes a waddling bee-line for the air lock. In the ensuing hail of laser fire and gratuitous alien butt-shots, the mastermind fails to make good his escape, but does manage to fling the canister out of the ship, where it becomes trapped in Earth's orbit and crashes near the campus of an American university. A jock and his girlfriend are caught between a rock and a squishy place, as the boy falls prey to the alien worms while the girl is hacked to death by an escaped axe murderer! And all this in the first five minutes!

Nearly 20 years later, nerdy nice guy Chris (Jason Lively) is smitten by sorority girl Cynthia (super-cute Jill Whitlow). At the urging of his handicapped but fearless friend J.C. (Steve Marshall in a show-stealing performance), Chris pledges to a fraternity run by The Bradster (Allan Kayser), a sadistic Aryan preppie who is also Cynthia's erstwhile boyfriend. Brad tasks the boys to steal a corpse from the university research facility and dump it on a rival fraternity's steps--and I bet you can guess which body they corpse-nap. Soon the alien parasites are running rampant, turning students both living and dead into shambling, bloodthirsty zombies with exploding heads! It's up to Chris, J.C., and beyond-grizzled and gruff detective Ray Cameron (Tom "Fucking" Atkins) to exterminate the alien menace before the planet is overrun and the sorority formal ruined.

One of the true cult-classics of 80s horror, Night of the Creeps is a great time from beginning to end. Writer/Director Fred Dekker (the man also responsible for the much-loved 1987 kids' horror-adventure, The Monster Squad) delivers a fast-paced, quick-witted, gloriously gross hunk of grade-A cheese that should satisfy any fan of the genre. His script is full of quotable quips and unforgettable images, from the suspended-animation body of the 50s jock (which J.C. memorably terms a "corpsicle") to Cynthia in formal dress fighting off zombies with a flamethrower, to Atkin's immortal catchphrase, "Thrill me!" The acting is good across the board, with Atkins and Marshall making the best impressions. Add some great makeup effects, some fun, grody gore (watch particularly for the infected zombie cat puppet), and a special appearance by legendary character actor and national treasure Dick Miller, and there's really nothing left wanting.

A flick I haven't watched in years, and one I'm very glad I revisited. 3 thumbs!

"I don't know, Brad...you've just been so cold to me lately."

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Unholy (2007): or, Some Things are Better Left Unknown

 October Horror Movie Challenge, Day 9!

Pianist and GMILF Martha (the lovely and legendary Adrienne Barbeau) has her life turned upside down when her daughter Hope (Siri Baruc) commits suicide in the family cellar, after warning her mother cryptically to "beware the experiment." With her mostly useless stoner son Lucas (Nicholas Brendon) in tow, Martha starts digging into the dark history of their small town, which leads her to menacing encounters with the local creepy recluse Gertrude (Susan Willis, whom I mistook for Cloris Leachman until I read the end credits), the worlds most threatening florist (Richard Ziman), and into the bowels of local folklore involving Lester Krauss (Joseph McKenna), also known as The Necromancer. Much more than just a bedtime boogeyman, Krauss was apparently a Nazi occultist working on the "Unholy Trinity" of parapsychological powers--Invisibility, Mind Control, and Time Travel--under the post-war auspices of a shadowy US Government agency. As the plot unravels, Martha learns that not only was Hope a subject of Krauss's experiments, but so also was the entire town--herself and her son included. Soon she finds herself in a race to find out what really happened to her daughter, and perhaps to save history from the evil machinations of a time-traveling Nazi warlock--the worst kind!

I remember when Unholy was being hyped by certain horror websites and on messageboards back in '07--fans were of course excited to see Barbeau working in anything, and the Nazi occultism plot seemed a can't-miss premise. (If memory serves, I think there was even some kind of abortive Augmented Reality Game launched to build anticipation for the flick.) Then the hype seemed to disappear, and I forgot about the flick until it turned up in the Netflix instant queue.

Well, some things are indeed better left unknown, including the entirety of this terrible, terrible movie. It's hard to tell which is more at fault--the nonsensical script by Sam Freeman or the clunky direction of Daryl Goldberg--but both smell up the joint with alarming consistency. Goldberg substitutes dissonant orchestral stings for suspense, leaves out huge chunks of context, and drops in some of the worst CG I've seen since Barbie: Fairytopia. Barbeau gives it a decent shot (I wonder whether she realized what kind of stinker she had somehow signed on for), but even an actress of her ability is consistently hamstrung by the script's wooden dialogue and intelligence-assaulting contrivances. Ziman is entertaining as the confrontational storekeeper, and for his part McKenna makes a very creepy Nazi doctor, but the rest of the acting is uniformly bad--though again, perhaps we can't blame the actors, given what they had to work with.

Unholy tries to set up a time-twisting mystery thriller, but the only mystery I was interested in solving was how they got Barbeau to agree to be in it in the first place. 0.75 thumbs. Avoid.

"Get my agent out here...RIGHT NOW!"

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Ginger Snaps Back (2004): or, The Past is a Bitch, and So Am I

October Horror Movie Challenge, Day 8!

In the winter of 1815, sisters Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins) are traveling by river through the Canadian wilderness when their riverboat capsizes, their parents and protectors drown, and they find themselves stranded miles from civilization. As bad as that sounds, things get even worse: they discover an Indian camp that has recently been the scene of a slaughter--huge holes in the tepees, blood and guts everywhere, and the only survivor a mystical old seer whose predictions are (predictably) cryptic and grim. After Brigitte steps into an iron wolf trap, a strong but silent Native American hunter (Nathaniel Arcand) helps the girls to relative safety--a wooden fort under the command of a fur trading company. But the wary unwelcome they receive (and the inch-deep, bloody scratches on the heavily fortified gates) hint that there might be even more dangers in store for our intrepid siblings.

If you're familiar at all with the first two entries in this series, you'll know that the cause of all the trouble is a bad case of Werewolfery, which Hunter says the Europeans brought to their land, just like the plagues of small-pox and alcoholism. Running out of supplies and surrounding by a ferocious pack of man-beasts, the widowed Captain Wallace Rowlands (Tom McCamus) is also hiding a dark secret about the supposed death of his son--a secret that will of course land Ginger right in the middle of the full-moon madness, with Brigitte the only one she can count on to help her break the curse. But given the choice between sisterly loyalty and rescuing future generations from the Horror of the Werewolf, what will the kind-hearted but needy younger sibling do?

I was a big fan of Ginger Snaps (2000), finding it a refreshing, even invigorating entry in the werewolf subgenre, which had been languishing arguably ever since the triumph of 1981's monster masterpiece An American Werewolf in London. I also very much enjoyed the second entry, Ginger Snaps: Unleashed (2004, filmed back to back with its sequel), which in my humble should have been a star-making turn for Emily Perkins in a complex, harrowing role she absolutely knocked out of the park. I thought the movies had some great fresh ideas--I love the relationship between the outcast sisters, and the notion of the transformation as gradual and one-way; in this world, when you turn, you turn forever, making the race to find a cure that much more intense. However, I somehow missed this third installment, and the lukewarm reviews it received upon its release (much of which expressed bafflement at the decision to go period-piece with the story) did nothing to make me rush out and see it.

However, this many years after the fact and able to view it on its own merits, I found Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning a well-made, entertaining, and even thrilling modern werewolf movie. Director Grant Harvey makes good use of the Canadian wilderness and period sets, creating a believable window into the past. And DP Michael Marshall deserves props for his gorgeous shots of some absolutely beautiful scenery, to say nothing of his lensing of the exciting werewolf battles and dream sequences.

But of course the heart of all three movies is the relationship between sisters Brigitte and Ginger, their outsider status and absolute devotion to one another. While I found it extremely difficult to buy Isabelle as an 1800s teenage, Perkins once again turns in a fantastic, emotional performance--one which drew me in and made me concerned for her, and thus frightened and excited by the werewolves' attacks (and the menace from baddies inside the fort: leering Reverend Gilbert and battle-scarred soldier James (Hugh Dillon and JR Bourne, respectively). The other trapped trappers provide good performances as well, and the director gets some mileage out of the religious, racial, and personal tensions their precarious situation brings out.

Standing on its own, Ginger Snaps Back is a well-made period horror film that I think would make a good companion piece to fan-favorite Wendigo-flick Ravenous (1999), and could go toe-to-toe with it, for that matter. Another 2.5 thumb rating.

"I didn't mean to eat all the jelly donuts! OMG, Brigitte, help me!"

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The Baby's Room (2006): or, Chillin' in the Crib

October Horror Movie Challenge, Day 7!

Young parents Juan and Sonia (Javier Gutiérrez and Leonor Watling) and their infant son have just moved into their new home: a palatial but dilapidated old house that would ordinarily be far beyond their means, but which for some reason the realtors have priced within a mid-level sports journalist's budget. Before you can say "stop me if you've heard this one," they're hearing bumps in the night and strange voices on their baby's crib monitor. Juan goes hi-tech and purchases a home alarm system and a video monitor for his bouncing little boy's room, which only leads to more disturbing revelations: in the dead of night, the terrified father spies the shadowy figure of a man sitting beside his baby's bed! Rushing to the rescue with a butcher knife, Juan nearly skewers his confused and sleep-addled wife, who has witnessed none of this and is rightly concerned about her husband's mental well-being, to say nothing of the baby's safety and her own.

Alone in the house, Juan continues to see strange visions through the video monitor--furniture that isn't there, rooms arranged differently on the screen than in real life, and even more of the shadowy, cigarette-smoking man. Wondering if he is imagining it all and fearing for his own sanity, he is finally vindicated when his baby monitor-visions lead him to a secret room, apparently a doorway to another realm. There he discovers the identity of the shadowy man who has been haunting him, but the solution to that riddle only prompts more disturbing questions...as such things so often do, in cases like these.

I've heard a lot of positive buzz for The Baby's Room since its release in 2006 as part of the Spanish film series Peliculas para No Dormir (Films to Keep You Awake). I'm delighted to report that the good press is more than justified. Director Álex de la Iglesia and his writing partner Jorge Guerricaechevarría here deliver a creepy, thrilling, and inventive horror story that turns out to be much more than just your standard haunted house tale. Gutiérrez and Watling have great chemistry, and both turn in excellent performances. Also, I liked how the writer and director played with the conventions of the "endangered baby" story, here making Gutiérrez's Juan the "hysterical" figure, with Watlin's Sonia the supportive but disbelieving spouse. No spoilers on the cause for the haunting--but I thought it was pretty interesting, and I dug it a lot.

Well-photographed, well-acted, well-plotted, and well creepy, The Baby's Room is another winner from the new Spanish Horror revival.Recommended with 2.5 thumbs.

"And when I push *this* button, the baby will self-destruct!"

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