It Follows

I'm having a hard time organizing my thoughts for this movie, so I'm going to give you a mish-mash of unconnected thoughts.

- It’s hard to ignore the obvious Halloween references throughout the film.  All the wide shots from a steadicam.  The calm, tree-lined suburban streets with more than a hint of evil lurking.  The pulsing synth.  The fact that the supernatural killer is referred to as “The It” in interviews, which is pretty close to “The Shape”.  I kept waiting for Michael Myers to pop out from behind a row of shrubs.

 - With all the style – all the window dressing – it would be easy to miss the fact that this, at its heart, a slasher movie.  There is an unstoppable force heading right towards you at a slow pace.  It never runs.  It never wavers.  If it is shot, it falls down, gets back up and keeps coming.  Jay is our final girl.  Unlike the stereotypical final girl, she has had sex.  But, like the stereotypical final girl, she has the attention of the killer and does what she has to in order to survive.  The plot of the movie is summed up in the title: It Follows.  And, like our favorite killers, it never stops.

- I’ve heard a lot of talk about the unnecessary nudity in this.  It’s true that there is a decent helping of nudity in this, but I would not call it unnecessary.  None of the nudity is alluring.  It is all courtesy of The It, and it is all ugly.  It is all uncomfortable.  The It is, in essence, an STD, and it chooses (at times) to manifest itself in forms of twisted and ugly sexuality.

- I love the slasher aspect to this.  I also love the fact that it is always walking.  There’s never a fear that it’s going to be hiding in the closet, waiting to pop out at you.  It doesn’t try to hide.  There is no fear that it will suddenly be in hiding in the backseat of your car.  It doesn't work that way.  It doesn’t sneak around.  It just keeps coming.  Like a slasher or a zombie, it is relentless.  You need to sleep.  To rest.  To take a break.  It doesn’t need that.  While you’re sitting still, it’s getting closer.  And there’s nothing you can do about it.

- I like to think that they cast the actor who played Greg because he kind of looked like Johnny Depp, and they wanted a nod to Nightmare on Elm Street.

- I mentioned the soundtrack earlier, but I'd like to bring it up again here.  It was composed/performed by electronic artist Disasterpeace, and it sets a perfect tone.  It goes from minimal and creepy synth tones to full-blown noise explosions.  He draws a lot of comparisons to Carpenter's scores here (I have to believe a lot of that was at the behest of the director), but he is able to put his own spin on it.  I am currently listening to this.  It is storming outside and my back is to an open door.  I am looking over my shoulder every 30 seconds or so, just making sure The It isn't creeping ever closer.

- It was interesting how differently this thing was dealt with.  Hugh/Jeff (although I thought he looked more like a Ricky/Wesley) had sex with Jay and took off.  His thought process was solid, if a bit cold: if The It kills the person it is tracking, it will then go after the previous infected person.  (An added note: only those infected at some point can see The It.  So, if you haven't been infected, you will just watch your friend freak out, but you won't actually see anything.)  If he passed on The It to Jay and stuck around only to watch her die, he would be next on the list, and The It would have a very short trip to kill him.  For Hugh, the disease was one of isolation.
Jay and her friends took it another way.  They looked out for her, whether they actually knew what they were looking for or not.  A couple of them offered to have sex with her, in part because they were horny teenagers, but in part because they really did care about Jay.  For them, the disease brought them together.  I found it interesting the different ways these groups dealt with this killer stalking one of them.  I'm pretty sure it's some kind of "glass half full or half empty" thing, but with a disturbingly naked and placid killer slowly creeping closer to you.

I want to get deeper into this, but I can't really do that without doing some major spoilers, so I guess I'll refrain from doing that.  The hype for this movie has grown pretty large, but, just like The Babadook, I feel this movie is able to avoid being a victim of its own hype.  It's a terrific movie with a great style, a huge nod to the past and a pretty good sense of humor.  It's not quite the movie I thought it was going to be, but I'm perfectly okay with that.

Rating: 5/5

The Babadook

Synopsis (from the official website):

From breakthrough writer-director Jennifer Kent comes the creepy psychological horror movie The Babadook that has received an explosion of acclaim following its world premiere at Sundance 2014.  The film tells of a single mother, plagued by the violent death of her husband, who battles with her son's night time fear of a shadowy monster.  But soon, she discovers a sinister presence is lurking in the house.
With echoes of past and contemporary classics like Rosemary's Baby, The Tenant, The Exorcist, The Omen and Let the Right One In, the film is an immaculately crafted tale starring Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman.  The supporting cast includes Daniel Henshall, Hayley McElhinney, Barbara West and Ben Winspear.

My thoughts:

The hype machine was fired up for this one.  The Babadook had been making the festival rounds and was getting nothing but rave reviews.  I wrote a post about the trailer, in which I detailed my attempt to lower my expectations.  I succeeded to some degree, but I was still very much looking forward to this one.  When I finally got my grubby mitts on a copy of this (complete with a severely dialed-back version of the pop-up book), I squealed.  I squealed like a little girl.  In a little dress.  Little saddle shoes.  Little pigtails.

That does sound like a little girl.

The first half hour of this was a little rough.  They needed to set up Essie Davis' Amelia as an exhausted, barely-clinging-to-her-sanity mother of a problem child (the word they kept using was "disobedient," but he was really just an unholy terror).  They needed to do this so that, when Mister Babadook showed up, we weren't sure if there were really a monster in the house or if it was just the frayed edges of her sanity finally becoming fully unraveled.
It's the way this was done that really wore me down in the early going.  Her son, Samuel, is a shrieking horror.  He sees monsters in the house from the beginning, so he comes up with a series of weapons to battle them (my favorite is a backpack that hurls a baseball with a mechanical arm).  As you can imagine, this ends with him breaking lots of things.  He doesn't get along with other children, which leads to them picking on him and him retaliating.  Between his gadgets and his violence, he could be seen as a mix between Macaulay Culkin's character in Home Alone and his character in The Good Son.  He is kicked out of school and forced to spend more time at home with his sleep-deprived mother.  But, most of all, he shrieks.  He kicks and screams and screams and screams and screams...

It's really obnoxious.  I fully understand that's exactly the point, but it's grating.  We're supposed to sympathize with Amelia when she feels like she just can't go on.  She may not love her child, and we're supposed to see exactly why she is at this point.  It's effective, but it's still not a lot of fun to watch.  Then again, we're watching as a mother pretends to love her child, all the while fluctuating between being afraid of him and resenting him.  This isn't supposed to be fun.  

Then Mister Babadook shows up, and the movie really takes off.  A pop-up book shows up and she reads it to her child.  It's horrifying.  She destroys the book, only to have it show up later with some more pages added.  Are those new pages real?  Was the book put there by a stalker, or was it The Babadook?  

She starts hearing noises in the house at night.  Seeing shadows move.  When the first growling strains of, "Ba ba-ba dook dook DOOK," filled the room as she hid under her covers, I felt a chill go up my spine. 
Even then, it was unclear whether or not The Babadook was real, or just a product of her deteriorating sanity.  Was she really hearing those things, or did she just think she was?  She was sleep-deprived to begin with, but, as the movie progressed, it seemed like she didn't sleep more than 15 minutes a night.  That little sleep can do terrible things to a mind.

TERRIBLE things

As Amelia's sanity slipped further way, Samuel somehow became the voice of reason.  The tables had turned.  He was now terrified of his mother, and with good reason.  As much as she recoiled in horror when the book showed her killing her son, a part of her seemed like that would be a good idea.  As a child, what's more terrifying than a mother who wants to kill you?  How she came to that point is trivial.  To Samuel, it doesn't matter if she's possessed by a monster or just exhausted: the end result is the same.

I don't want to get into it too much more, lest I creep into spoiler territory.

I loved this.  As I mentioned, the first act can be a little dicey, but it's a necessary evil.  The second act is great and filled with a lot of creepy moments.  The third act goes completely bonkers, in the best way imaginable.  It can be a little hard to watch at times - we basically have a front row seat for some nasty family violence - but it's not pointless.  Everything is here for a reason.  It's a film that doesn't pull any punches, but also isn't shocking for the sake of being shocking. 
This is an extremely affecting psychological thriller that may-or-may-not involve an actual monster.  While it may not be as terrifying as I had hoped it would be, it was still really creepy and was on my mind for days.  A lot of these images and themes are extremely hard to shake.  This movie works best when you're paying full attention to it.  Find a quiet night, turn off all the lights and lose yourself in The Babadook.

Rating: 5/5

One final thought:
They decided to make copies of the Mister Babadook pop-up book featured in the film.  Did I buy one?  Yes.  Yes I did.  However, I have some concerns.
Let's say that reading this book wills Mister Babadook into existence.  Doesn't it seem like a bad idea to flood households with a book that calls forth a monster?  It's basically the plot of the Pinky & The Brain Christmas special, except instead of it ending with The Brain taking over the world through hypnosis, it ends with a ton of people housing a monster and possibly killing all their loved ones.  This seems like a very bad idea.

Also, is there only one Babadook, or will each book conjure up a separate Babadook?  If there's only one, the results would be delayed.  He would terrorize one family until he's done, then move on to the next (or he would try to split his time equally and end up with all of us being mildly inconvenienced by his presence).  If there is one Babadook for every book, we're in big, big trouble.
I know they say you can't get rid of him, but I take that as a personal challenge.  You and me, Mister Babadook.  Let's dance.

Mini Review: Oculus

As many of you know, I've been writing for Horror-Writers.net for quite some time now.  I started off writing reviews, but have since become the main TV writer there.  That (along with my time at PackerUpdate.net) has cut into my movie review time.  I'm still watching movies, but I find that I don't have as much time to write about them as I used to.  As much as I'd love to write a long, in-depth review on every movie I see, the reality is that I just can't do it at this time.
So I thought I'd change it up a bit.  In an attempt to ramp up this side of my writing, I'll be posting mini reviews for the horror movies I watch.  Nothing huge.  Just a sentence or paragraph saying what I thought about it.  Maybe I'll get around to writing full-length reviews of these.  Maybe I won't.  But these mini reviews should help me to still talk a bit about every movie I watch, if only a little.

First up, Oculus.

The trailer for this looked really creepy.  I had high hopes, but I was trying to keep my expectations low.    I had a fear that it would basically be Mirrors 3.
I'm happy to report that this was tremendous.  The cast was great (Karen Gillan and Katee Sackhoff, in particular).  Even the child actors were really good.
This was a really creepy film throughout.  I love how it played with the perception of reality.  I was never quite sure if what I was seeing was real or just an illusion of the mirror.  It hooked me early and kept me interested throughout.  There were a number of images that will be sticking with me for a long time.

Rating: 5/5

Entrance

Description from Netflix:

After mysteriously losing her dog one evening, a Los Angeles barista questions her commitment to living in the city and decides to get out.  But when her going-away party takes an odd turn, she finds that the city just might not let her go so easily.

What I liked:

1. The acting was stellar.  I believe everyone involved had limited acting experience, yet they were all terrific.  For a slow movie to work, I have to feel invested in the characters, and it succeeded in doing that with some great acting.

Pictured: Acting 

2. The sense of paranoia and dread that slowly built throughout the movie.  There was one particular scene in which Suziey was walking down a road at night and was being followed by a car.  It was a long scene, but it was effective.  That was when the movie really seemed like it started to pick up.

3. The ending.  The last 20 minutes of this movie were terrific.  All of the paranoia and dread came to a head in terrifying and stressful fashion.  What had been a look inside the mind of a woman hitting a quarter-life crisis in a big city became a living, breathing nightmare for her and her friends.  This is when the movie turned from psychological thriller to slasher/home invasion.  The last 10 minutes or so is basically one unbroken shot, where the actress (Suziey Block) was actually tied up to make it more believable.  It's a tense and horrifying end to the movie, and the final scene is absolutely chilling. 

What I didn't like:

1. It opens extremely slowly.  Lots of scenes of Suziey going to work, talking to friends, and looking for her dog.  Short of the dog disappearing (which we don't even see), we're really just watching a girl go about her daily life, while getting ready to move.  It's really boring.  Beyond being really boring, it doesn't even seem like it's building towards anything for a long time.  It was about halfway through the movie before any tension started to build.  Which makes this movie feel an awful lot like Death Proof: lots of talking, not much happening.  It almost lost me in the first 20 minutes.  I'm glad I pushed through to the end, but, if I didn't know there was a good ending waiting for me, I probably would have hit stop before the 30 minute mark.

To recap: set in the city.  Slow start.  Lots of talking about nothing in particular for long portions of time.  A killer that shows up near the end and starts hacking.

Holy crap.  It's Jason Takes Manhattan.

Voorheesed! 

Rating: 2.5/5

Let's break this down a little further:

First 60 minutes: 1/5

Last 25 minutes: 5/5

Escape From Tomorrow

Description from IMDB:

In a world of fake castles and anthropomorphic rodents, an epic battle begins when an unemployed father's sanity is challenged by a chance encounter with two underage girls on holiday.

Before I talk about this, let's watch the trailer again.  Because the trailer is amazing.

You know what that looks like?  It looks like a terrific psychological horror movie filmed (illegally) in Disney World.  You can read what I said about it the first time I saw the trailer here.

I was excited.  You were excited.  I tried to temper my expectations, but I couldn't help myself.  I mean, look at that trailer?  For someone who went to Disney World quite a few times as a child, I couldn't help but be excited for this.

Sadly, it wasn't very good.  Most of the great moments can be found right there in the trailer.  What I thought would be a movie about a man slowly losing his mind at Disney World (complete with lots of horrifying takes on familiar images) turned out to be a movie about a married man with two children lusting after every woman he happened to cross paths with.  Underage French girls.  A nurse.  A fallen Disney princess.  Current Disney princesses.  

And that is what drove the story forward.  They easily could have made this movie revolve around horrific Disney imagery, but instead chose to drive the story based on the libido of a middle-aged man.  Not the best choice.

Some of the imagery was great.  The fact that it was shot in black and white really helped.  The acting may not have been great, but it wasn't terrible.  I loved the music.  It alternated between whimsical and dark, and it fit the mood of the film very well.

There was a decent amount of green screen, and it was terrible.  However, since they shot the bulk of the movie on location at Disney World, any added shots (as well as any scripted scenes featuring more than a couple of people) needed to be filmed in green screen.  It looked awful.  But, given the limitations of the film, I give the green screen a bit of a pass.  It was distracting, but they had to work with the limitations they set for themselves.  It was bad, but not the worst part of the movie.

Within the next week, I'm sure to have some better formulate thoughts and opinions on this.  As it stands now, I'm just disappointed.  And tired.  But mostly disappointed.

Rating: 1.5/5