Conjure Me Some Shortening

James Wan is a true and deserved success story.

Starting out with a low budget, big idea'd little film called Saw that changed (for better and a lot worse) the very nature of the theatrical horror genre, this is a director with has only improved with each foray into the genre. While he leaves us lowly horror fans behind to carry on the rather fertile (though now rather uncertain) legacy of The Fast & the Furious (or Fast/Furious or Fasurious or whatever the new not-numbered sequels will be called), let us hope he makes the occasional visit back to us.

You know...because the guy clearly has a thing for creepy dolls.

Quick Plot: We start with a fun little prologue of sorts that qualifies The Conjuring for The Shortening. In the early '70s, a pair of roommates report their experiences with a possibly haunted, probably evil, and most certainly ugly doll named Annabelle to Ed and Lorraine Warren (the impossibly handsome Patrick Wilson and the impossibly awesome Vera Farmiga). The Warrens are the country's most esteemed pair of psychic investigators and deal with Annabelle as you do: lock it in a glass case inside your Friday the 13th: The Series-esque basement of haunted chotchkes.

Moving on to our main narrative we meet the Perrons, a pleasant family of seven moving to a secluded country estate in Rhode Island. Just a few nights in the mysteriously low-priced real estate gives way to the usual trappings of any haunted house:

-Every clock inside stops at the same time each night

-Dog Sadie refuses to enter, only to find the backyard even less safe

-Dad (Ron Livingston) discovers a hidden basement loaded with antiques

-The temperature remains freezing despite the furnace being in working order

-Middle child's sleepwalking keeps leading to an antique wardrobe that seems to house something else

- Mom Carolyn (Lili Taylor, taking a better stab at being in a ghost film titled in the noun form of a verb in the present perfect tense) wakes up with unexplained bruises all over her iron deficient body

-The youngest daughter discovers a disheveled music box that reveals an imaginary friend

-There's a ghost and it attacks everyone

Forgive the Foxworthy routine, but if your home is never above 20ºF, your daughters report invisible things grabbing their legs in the middle of the night, and your dog has all but drawn a police sketch of an angry Casper with its paws, you just might be in a haunted house.

Thankfully, Carolyn is able to reach the Warrens for an investigation, something that comes loaded with its own history as the clairvoyant Lorraine is still recovering from a horrific exorcism gone wrong.

By now, you're probably thinking that all of this sounds very familiar. Patrick Wilson already trespassed through The Further in Insidious, Lili Taylor saw her share of The Haunting, and just about every detail thus far has a faint smell of a Long Island home in Nassau County. 

Except this one is better.

There is little new in The Conjuring, and that's almost the point. The opening credits blatantly style themselves on those of any '70s ghost film, while The Changeling's bouncing ball makes an adorable cameo. There are traces of The Exorcist and Poltergeist at play, but here's the thing: The Conjuring knows how to position them.

Ever since he stretched a low budget and short filming time for Saw, James Wan has been steadily growing as a filmmaker. I'm in the minority that appreciated Dead Silence both as a stylish throwback and clear attempt to toy with certain horror elements. True, maybe I just like Wan because he and I share a fascination with puppets and their like, but in watching his development from Saw to Dead Silence to the strong-til-its-last-act Insidious, you can see a filmmaker with a love and understanding of the horror genre finding his own way through it. Sure, Insidious and The Conjuring call back all the tropes of haunted house movies--the kooky psychics, the children's games gone wrong--but think of what they do differently than so many others: when investigating a mystery, characters TURN ON THE LIGHTS. The first instinct? MOVE OUT. Like us, James Wan has clearly watched his share of ghost stories and translated what I assume to be his mental checklist into an effective chill.

It helps that Wan is working with a seasoned cast that clearly cares. Farmiga has been one of my favorite actresses for years, and not JUST because she goes head to head with Isabelle Badass Fuhrman in Orphan. No one is phoning in a performance here, and the cast is aided by a clean and occasionally, quite funny script from Chad and Carey Hayes. Wan carefully builds his characters and the situation with deliberate care, making everything onscreen hit harder when the chairs start flying.

High Points

In addition to all the aforementioned strengths--good cast, script, ambiance--I should point out something that Wan and his crew do incredibly well: architecture. As we followed a character investigating a strange sound, it dawned on me that I knew exactly which bedroom it was coming from and where said room was located in the house. Because the layout of the set was established so clearly (and innocently) early on in the film, I as a viewer was put in the same place as the characters, bringing me one step closer to the action and horror. It's something that can be overlooked so easily in the age of quick cuts, and yet watching The Conjuring made me realize just how much this kind of precision can help a film

Low Points

It's simply a matter of taste, but for me, as soon as the demonic forces go from eerie suggestion to concrete existence, the scares become a little less throat gulpy and more 'eh, at least it's not CGI'-y

Gentlemen, I apologize for my crassness, but it must be said: whenever Patrick Wilson appears in a film and does not show his rear, the ladies are sad

Lessons Learned

We could make all sorts of easy jokes about how the REAL horror of the Perrons is being a family filled with five daughters, but let's face it: if The Conjuring has taught us nothing else, it's that wallpaper of the 1970s was truly horrifying

Listen to your dog. ALWAYS listen to your dog

Ghosts smell like rancid meat or REALLY bad farts

Rent/Bury/Buy

Like The Purge, I was incredibly satisfied with 2013’s OTHER big profit, low budget studio horror film. The Conjuring isn’t perfect and won’t necessarily get the jumps out of all audience members, but this is the kind of well-made little ghost story ideal for an evening of lights-out, cats-on-lap viewing. Good stuff.

Shortening Cred: Though the real threat is a fully grown ghost, The Conjuring has a nice supporting turn by doll (and possible distant cousin to Seed of Chucky’s Glen) Annabelle.

BONUS! The Internet has informed me that little Lili Taylor stands at a mighty height of 5'2. Since she spends a fair amount of The Conjuring causing a ruckus, we'll use that as added proof that this film does indeed belong here this February.

Nope, I Can't Escape February Without A Dummy Attack

The 1940s are easily my biggest blind spot when it comes to cinema, particularly of the genre persuasion. Save for a few Val Lewton gems, I've seen virtually nothing from those years, so any chance to expand upon that is welcome. But I'll be honest about something:

I didn't know Dead of Night had a ventriloquist's dummy.

And I am not happy about that one bit.

Quick Plot: An architect drives out to a country home for a weekend design job only to immediately realize the bevy of socialites gathered there have been appearing regularly in his nightmares, despite the fact that he hasn't met a single one. Through cigarette smoke and '40s style chatter, the sextet begins to share their own personal stories of the supernatural.

That's right folks: it's an anthology!

Here's what we've got:

-Story 1 is the traditional "room for one more" tale as an injured racecar driver constantly sees a hearse driver with an ominous message
-Next up is a good old fashioned child ghost yarn set in a spooky but crowded house at a festive Christmas party
-Story 3 follows a wealthy woman's poor decision in buying her beloved a haunted wall mirror that once witnessed a violent crime. This story is the best thing in the world for two reasons:

1. It gives us such wonderfully aristocratic dialogue as "What do you want to do tonight? Dress up? Spend a lot of money?"

and


2. The lead wears a different headpiece in EVERY SINGLE SCENE. I know, I know. You're thinking "but it's one segment in an anthology, how many scenes can there be?" Well, as many scenes as there were fabulous headpieces in the costume shop's trunk.

-In the fourth tale, a pair of cheekily competitive golfers makes a friendly wager that involves the loser surrendering his lady love and drowning himself in a nearby lake, only to return to happily haunt the victorious (and cheating) newlywed. It's a strange blend of light-hearted comedy and, you know, the tale of suicide and ghostings.

-Finally, we get to The Worst Thing In the World: Michael Redgrave as a ventriloquist with a misbehaving dummy named Hugo.

I don't want to talk about it, even if this IS February's Attack of the Shorties.

In my 31 years on this planet, there a few lessons I've picked up. Perhaps the most life-saving ones are thus:

There are only two things in this world to fear: ventriloquist's dummies and caterpillars.

The sight of both instantly shrivel me into the fetal position, leaking a steady stream of urine and tears in what can only qualify as an exceedingly slippery floor environment.

You'd think Dead of Night being made in 1945 would help diminish that fear a tad. Hugo may speak like a helium-high scoundrel, but, well, he's just a typical black and white wooden doll whose movements can only be manipulated so much! you say, as if you have ANY understanding of the ancient evil arts.

Ventriloquist's dummies are never, without pretty much any exception ever, not evil. Even Pee-Wee Hermann knew this! 

Back on the impossible track that is resisting the urge to lock myself in a closet and instead discuss the movie: it's good. Perhaps because my 1940s film experience is so bare, even the fast-paced dialogue and highly mannered speaking feels fresh and different. None of the stories go on too long, and if they threaten to, such a crime is easily excused because LOOK AT THOSE FABULOUS HATS!

But the movie also features a dummy. A high-pitched voice dummy that does terrible things.

It's hard to forgive something like that.

High Points
HATS!

Low Points

DUMMIES!

Lessons learned
It’s jolly unpleasant when you find yourself smack up against the supernatural

Because a chap becomes a ghost surely doesn’t mean he’s no longer a gentleman

If you're wealthy, 'curious' and 'tragic' essentially mean the same thing

Rent/Bury/Buy
Long out of print, Dead of Night is well worth watching both for its pedigree as an early anthology and because it's simply a good movie. Even though it has a dummy. A dummy that is probably plotting in his little soprano voice an elaborate routine to torture me, singing and making vaudvillian puns throughout the process.

I am not happy about this.

A Haunting In Conne--er, Salem

“From the director of Paranormal Entity” isn’t generally considered a selling point for your film…unless your audience is Emily Intravia. Hence, we enter:

Quick Plot: After an apparently set-in-the-past prologue that gives us a slaughtered family, we flash forward to present day Salem. Sheriff Down has recently been hired with the added bonus of moving his brood into a gorgeously historic (and naturally haunted) house that just might definitely be located over the burial ground for the 19 hanged alleged witches of those infamous 1692 trials.

It doesn’t take more than a day or two for ominous signs to reveal themselves. After finding some hair clogs in the drain and dead crows on the floor, things start to get a tad more intense. Older daughter Ali receives creepy instant messages, while dad’s PTSD resurfaces to turn him into a major jerk. His much hotter wife can do nothing but watch, while teen son…well, we can kind of forget he exists until plot demands we remember.

Directed by Asylum stalwart Shane Van Dyke, A Haunting In Salem falls into a very particular class of straight-to-DVD horror. Much like Van Dyke’s previous better-than-it-should’ve-been Paranormal Entity (yes, you read that right), the film is far more capably made than the typical Megasharktopusacondas you might find floating on Titanic 2. Other reviews might be quick to deride the acting, but the performances are perfectly fine for the material and believe it or not, A Haunting In Salem actually has a few impressive scares.

Yes, we have the token grizzly man child caretaker spewing out predictable lines about the house’s history, but there’s also a nifty surprise suicide from an unlikely source and a few jumps that are timed just right. Is the movie anything special? No. Having recently watched another haunted house indie, Lovely Molly, it's hard to say A Haunting In Salem is worthwhile. Where Lovely Molly took the tried and true demonic possession trope and gave it a unique spin, A Haunting In Salem treads almost no new territory and doesn't necessarily conquer the old. 

In a word that's not a word, A Haunting In Salem is aight (I hope that came across with the same kind of Wire accent it had in my head). Better than it could have been but only if your expectations are low. And if you're skimming through Netflix Instant Watch and stop upon a haunted house movie made by the man responsible for Titanic 2, I imagine they are.

High Notes

People were quick to deride Paranormal Entity for its brand name, but when I look at that film next to this one, I think it's clear that Van Dyke is a more than capable filmmaker when it comes to delivering competent horror moments

Low Notes

The problem with a fairly briskly paced film like A Haunting In Salem is that it gives us virtually no time to connect with a single character. The teen daughter has a computer; the son plays baseball; mom is a hot mom and dad looks like an average man who was accidentally put into a dryer. I have no reason to care about a single one.

Lessons Learned

Big ol’ houses come with ghost stories (and a lot of leftover hair)

You can’t have your civic forefathers execute 19 people without getting some kind of a reputation

Slapping a man’s face after he tumbles out the third story window will not bring him back from the dead...or WILL it?

Rent/Bury/Buy

I don’t know who to recommend A Haunting In Salem to, but that doesn’t make it a total waste. The script is neither original nor tight, but the end result works better than it should, even if the film doesn’t tread new ground nor quite land on its own. I guess this is good for those just looking for some haunted house fun. It's passable channel surfing fodder and currently on Netflix Instant.

One Good Cop Dog

To say my expectations were high for 2008's Cop Dog would be an understatement akin to dubbing Clive Owen okay-looking or nachos a mildly enjoyable snack or this picture of bulldog puppies kinda cute.

Kinda?

C'mon: based on the kind of WTF trailer that defies any sense of ‘typical kids film,’ my heart was set on canine thespian Kuma’s title role to change my life.

Let us see if it did.

Quick Plot: Poor Marlowe looks awfully bored sitting in a cage at a K-9 training center, where all his four-legged friends are busy running through hoops and practicing scent trails. Some fancy editing tells us that Marlowe’s human police partner died nearly one year ago and his widow and son Robby are still picking up the pieces.

Not of the dead guy, at least, not literally (though the fact that he died in an explosion does lead me to now wonder). Robby has become moody and weird, leading his mom to consider stashing him away at some form of Cuckoo’s Nest-y juvenile facility. To perk him up, she agrees to adopt Marlowe who would otherwise be put out of his misery/boredom by going to a glue factory.

As a housedog, Marlowe isn’t a champ. He takes a liking to chewing up shoes, running amuck, and chasing the sexy lady dog.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, we know she’s a lady dog because she has pink bows on her ear, which actually has more of a weird schoolgirl porn star feel but what can you do.

Also on Marlowe’s list: catch the bad guys who killed his partner AND stole his Rick Grimes-meets-the-urban-sombrero hat.

As worn by Parker Lewis himself, all grown up with a shaggy Bill Paxton circa Titanic haircut.

Step back, Clive Owen. There's some fierce competition brewing...for my heart.

The bad guys--Parker Lewis and his lackey, a doofus whose sole character trait is that he chews more gum than Violet Beaureguard--are obsessed with unlocking a Lost-like hatch in the backyard of Robby, the same locale where pops saw his gruesome end. Of course, you would suspect that said Lost-like hatch is hiding something super secret and important, and I'm almost positive we do eventually discover what said super secret and important secret is. Except it's now been 18 hours since I've watched Cop Dog and like Guy Pearce in a sports jacket, I can't for the life of me remember what it was.

I think I drink too much.

In one of his typical acts of blatant bad behavior, Marlowe runs away from Robby to chase the loitering bad guys and promptly gets hit by a truck (meta-ly played by the film's director, John Murlowski, he of the vastly different Golden Christmas and Freeway Killer). Despite Robby's cries for WATER!, Marlowe joins his late partner in the heavenly afterlife...or does he?

In the world of Ghost Cats and Karate Dogs, one would think that "Cop Dog" was enough of a title hook to serve as a film's premise. Clearly, one is not familiar with the fanciful machinations of screenwriter Steven Palmer Peterson (he of the spectacular Lifetime original Murder On the 13th Floor, a 'thriller' that manages to obliviously insult career women and the African American race in a rather adorable manner). My completely uninformed understanding of the screenwriting process for Peterson went something like him saying this: "Sure, a COP DOG is neat, but what the kids REALLY want from their cinema is more GHOST COP DOGS. Now hand me another Zima!"

At Marlowe's funeral, his sad lieutenant bestows upon a despondent Robby the dog training whistle his dad used to use on Marlowe. Before you can say, "Oh! Is this a MAGIC whistle that will summon Ghost Cop Dog to aide Robby in the investigation of his dad’s murder," allow me to point out the fact that a dog training whistle might have come in handy a week earlier when THE DOG WAS EATING FURNITURE AND RUNNING IN FRONT OF TRUCKS.

But I digress. Robby soon discovers that it is indeed a magic whistle that will summon Ghost Cop Dog to aide him on his investigation, and the plot kicks in.

Because Robby's best friend's dad is a paranormal investigator with a stable Skype connection, the kids learn that they must solve the mystery of dad's passing within one year of his death or else pops and Ghost Cop Dog will be trapped in a horrible netherworld limbo (that is hopefully nowhere near as painful as the film Netherworld) forever. That's a lot of pressure to put on a kid during his summer break, but thems the breaks when Parker Lewis is rocking an urban sombrero.

Thankfully, his pal Deb is willing to do whatever it takes to catch these rascally villains, including participate in the strangest montage yet to grace Animals Doing Human Stuff month. See, after the kids discover one of the bad guys has an annoying--yet convenient--habit of leaving chewed up gum at the scene of the crime, Robby concocts a genius/really gross plan in 5  steps:

1-Collect recent receipts from nearby convenience stores that carry various chewing gum

2-Identify which flavor and brand of chewing gum has been left behind

3-Cross-check the findings with the receipts to identify which store the assailants have been frequenting

4-Hang out at said store until the bad guys come in and purchase the precise chewing gum pattern order

5-Kill them? In truth, the fifth step was foggy.

The real question you're wondering, of course, is how did the kids match the chewing gum to the receipts? The answer is simple:

Montage of two preteens pulling out sticks and spider eggs from days-old discarded gum to identify its flavor.

Maybe that's why my macaroni 'n cheese dinner wasn't as tasty as I expected it to be.

Much like Patrick Swayze after his tutorial with Vincent Schiavelli, Marlowe can occasionally harness some corporeal powers to attack the bad guys or, as revealed in the greatest coda of all time, impregnate a porn star terrier mix. In other words, it all ends happy with Robby NOT going to the juvenile crazy house and Marlowe spreading his seed to give us more ghost cop dogs for eras to come.

High Points

KUMA!

Low Points

Aside from one of them being Parker Lewis, the villains in Cop Dog offer nary a note of being interesting. Perhaps my standards were raised to unreasonable heights following Craig Ferguson’s glorious turn in Lenny the Wonder Dog, but I don’t even remember what the bad guys actually wanted (other than gum)

Lessons Learned

Guys are handsome, not pretty

Sometimes people LEAVE and they DON’T come back

Contrary to popular belief, giving a dog that just got hit by a car water will not bring him back to life

After you have a nervous breakdown, you can see the world more clearly

Standard Animals Doing Human Stuff Trope Tally

New Kid In Town: X

Recent Dead or Divorced Parent: Check OBVIOUSLY

Montage: Check. And gag.

New Friendship: Check

Potentially Inappropriate ‘Friendship’ Between Child & Unrelated Adult (Human): X. 
Evil Corporate Enemy: X. Parker Lewis answers to no one.

Original Song: I wish.

Bully Comeuppance: X

Small Town Values: X

Back To Nature Moral: X. 

Overall Score: 3/10. But it has Kuma, so let’s adjust to 30,000,000,000,000,000,007/10 for more accuracy.

In Conclusion...

I'd like to thank all of you that hung around for this Animals Doing Human Stuff month, especially those rock stars who contributed their own reviews. I imagine most of my readers generally come here to learn about homicidal dolls and killer refrigerators, so I apologize if these past 30 days didn't quite satisfy your bloodlust. With a few years of blogging under my collar, I wanted to experiment a little more with some new types of cinema and as you can probably tell, the only things I enjoy nearly as much as horror is are good old fashioned terrible movies or, on the flip side, bizarrely misdirected gems that don't understand their audience. The ADHS genre is bursting with such treasures, some of which we got to ravage like a cat from outer space at an orgy, others that left us wanting, well, wanting more ghost cat. Ultimately, we had our montages, troubled kids, divorced/dead parents, bully comeuppances, and in a few glimmering moments, original songs that could possibly bring about world peace or destroy the music industry once and for all. It's a gamble really.

October begins tomorrow, and with that will come a full month exclusively devoted to the horror cinema you've come to expect from a blog about...you know...horror movies. So long as I keep that balance of candy corn and pumpkin beer at a manageable level, expect much.