Horror Business
Halloween is just a few days away, and I have spent this October as I spend most: preparing for Satan’s glorious return by watching as many horror movies as possible. In years past, I’ve mixed it up with classics and new releases alike, but this year I decided to tackle only established films that I hadn’t yet seen for one reason or another. This included recent blockbuster franchises (Saw, Paranormal Activity), infamous “video nasty” exploitation (Cannibal Holocaust), and gems from admired directors’ back catalogs (Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers, Peter Jackson’s Frighteners), among others.
By November’s arrival, I will have watched at least a dozen films, and, egged on by the fantastic new social film diary site Letterboxd, I wrote reviews for a handful of them. Since Letterboxd is not yet open to the public, I decided to republish those reviews here.
Hostel Part II
When I recently finally saw the first Hostel, I was surprised by how fun it was. Eli Roth’s first feature, Cabin Fever, had not endeared him to me, and that plus Hostel’s reputation for being a torture porn standard-bearer alongside the idiotic and gimmicky Saw films had done little to persuade me. But I had to admit Hostel was competently made and showed both the reverence Roth has for his influences and the glee he takes in his work.
I was similarly impressed going into Hostel Part II, which puts a new trio of college kids on the chopping block but adds a narrative layer from the other side of the blade, showing us how the plans are set in motion to seal these kids’ fates. It’s not an unusual trick for a sequel to essentially repeat its predecessor with added backstory that saps both films of any and all mystique, but Hostel Part II manages to keep things interesting by offering us a glimpse into the mindset of its villains, seemingly normal men who are willing to pay big bucks for the chance to disassemble undergrads.
Unfortunately, the one thing that’s not repeated from the first film is the fun. In particular, a very deliberate set piece designed for one character’s demise (a literal bloodbath) seems intent on being remembered for all time as cinema’s definitive torture porn sequence. It’s not fun, and it’s not scary; it just feels like it was made on a dare.
With a little less marketing savvy, it might have been called Hostel II: The Switcheroo, mainly because the protagonists are female this time, but ultimately because of the twist it introduces toward the end. It’s actually not a bad twist, but we don’t have much opportunity to enjoy it, as it apparently signifies the editor’s cue to dispense with the careful pacing and get this thing done in under ninety minutes already. The resulting rushed ending is deeply unsatisfying.
If I’m going to become an Eli Roth fan, I’ll need to see him build on the promise of the first Hostel. This sequel just doesn’t do it.
The Others
Remember when Nirvana exploded and every major label scrambled to sign any band they could find that was even remotely similar? Well, if The Sixth Sense is Nirvana (and given how quickly M Night Shyamalan squandered whatever goodwill his breakout hit engendered, I hesitate to draw the comparison), then The Others is Bush.
The themes, tone, essential plot points, and even the color palette are all lifted directly. To its credit, this is not immediately apparent, and the way the exposition is carefully doled out over the first two acts makes it genuinely intriguing for awhile. But once it brings the hammer down and starts clueing you in to you what’s really going on, it feels all too familiar.
The main thing that made The Sixth Sense work was that it was actually an affecting drama (thanks in large part to Toni Collette’s overlooked performance) masquerading as a horror movie. The Others has the same goal, but the drama falls flat. Nicole Kidman works so hard to keep you guessing whether she’s crazy or not that it becomes a study in overt dynamics (which the overwrought score echos faithfully). Everything out of her mouth is either a whisper or a shout, and it pretty quickly gets to be too annoying to have any sympathy for her.
If you’re in the mood for a good maternally-minded ghost story, I recommend skipping this one and seeing The Orphanage instead.
The Crazies
The Crazies arrived in 1973, five years after George Romero’s auspicious debut (Night of the Living Dead) and five years before his masterpiece (Dawn of the Dead). As a low-budget doomsday thriller, it lands directly between those two films as well, making great use of what he learned from Night of the Living Dead’s confined space (paranoia, a winking cynicism, and subtle but devastating irony) while sketching out in long form what he would later condense into Dawn of the Dead’s apocalyptic first act (the failure of institutional crisis management).
In terms of overall quality, The Crazies is definitely the least of the three films, but the one area it succeeds above the other two is in its use of dialogue. Romero has little faith in humanity’s capacity for conflict resolution, so his characters tend to spend a lot of time arguing. It can be overbearing and repetitive (as in the case of 1985’s exhausting Day of the Dead), but The Crazies’ heated debates manage to develop characters, generate suspense, and keep the plot moving at a good pace without ever feeling too artificial.
Of course, what superficially differentiates The Crazies most from Romero’s best-known films is its lack of zombies (strictly speaking, anyway). But any good zombie movie knows that zombies are but one of many available excuses for us to bring about our own ruin, and this one does too.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
A lot of foley artists and sound designers in the ’70s and ’80s seemed to have this fetishistic preoccupation with footsteps. In any scene where people were on the move, the soundtrack focused on footfalls to the exclusion of all else. The foley was produced with what I’m guessing was a maximum of three different kinds of shoes (loafers, heels, tennis shoes) on two different surfaces (asphalt, linoleum-tiled concrete). Despite being thoroughly unconvincing, it dominated the audio mix every chance it got.
The closest parallel I can draw is the outrageously unnatural sound effects in low budget kung fu movies from the same era. Those, of course, were a clear stylistic choice meant to echo the equally outrageous visuals. Maybe lavishing the same kind of aural attention on something as mundane as walking was intended to make a statement. Maybe there was a collective of foley artists who recognized their craft as the final frontier of Dada.
Anyway, films that were heavy on foot chases in quiet, desolate locations were goldmines for these footfall fetishists, and Halloween III was one such film. And there is nothing else to say about it. It is a pile of shit.