The Brides of CPAP-Ula

Hotels are such a natural setting for horror that it's kind of shocking we don't get more. Maybe it's the intimidation factor of The Shining, a ghost that hangs over virtually any hospitality-themed genre flick. One solution? Lean into it.

Quick Plot: Ruthie (GLOW's Gayle Rankin) has inherited an independent hotel somewhere in upstate New York from her grandmother, who deliberately skipped over Ruthie's mysterious and by accounts, incredibly irresponsible mother. Ruthie would be happy to sell the property and move on but her girlfriend Cal convinces her to at least consider the esteemed role of hotel proprietorship. Deep in emotional debt to the loyal Cal, Ruthie agrees to take a second look.

The weather is cold and the Ubers limited, but Ruthie and Cal bring along Maddie (inconveniently Cal's ex) who in turn brings Fran (even MORE inconveniently the woman Ruthie recently cheated with) to spend a weekend surveying the possibilities while also utilizing two commercial kitchens and an indoor swimming pool.

Tangled former lovers aside, it really does sound like the perfect holiday.

Naturally, things go very, very wrong.

Are the ghosts of the reasonable amount of people who died in Comely Suites haunting the quartet? Is Fran a witch? Ruthie a chainsaw-wielding maniac? Molly Ringwald's TED-Talking hospitality guru pulling the strings?

Many questions are asked in writer/director Stewart Thorndike's Bad Things, and pretty much all of them go defiantly unanswered. This is a film that seems fully aware that it's not going to satisfy most viewers with its aggressively ambiguous finale. 

A bad ending doesn't necessarily ruin a film. I'll recommend Yellowbrickroad until my dying breath knowing full well it leaves everyone (me included) scratching their heads in the final seconds. But in the case of Bad Things, the confusion is so wild that it's pretty impossible to find any kind of satisfaction. 

I don't think that's an accident on Thorndike's part. I just don't understand the choice. 

It may have been the large empty unit surrounded by still snow, but I found myself thinking a lot about Oz Perkins' The Blackcoat's Daughter. It's another film that does tremendous things with a sort of cold (literally AND figuratively) atmosphere but never seems to find the human throughline to connect the audience to the material. 

Bad Things is a frustrating film, perhaps all the more so because I'm pretty sure it's SUPPOSED to be. Normally that would make me mad (and it doesn't NOT make me mad) but there's enough strangeness in the details of Bad Things that I wasn't, well, IRATE. I know that's a terribly unclear summation, but in some ways, it's probably the best I can do. 

High Points

So many hotel-based horror films seem to rely on the natural creepiness of Victorian style turrets or easy colonial ghosts, but there's a whole different sense of unease here in Comely Suites. The walls are muted pink, the paintings generic, bedcovers stiff...there's a lot of eeriness to mine in the utter blandness of this kind of space, and Thorndike and her production team make the most of it

Low Points

Seriously: what actually happened in these 90 minutes?

Lessons Learned

Fatherly and flirty is not the sexy combination you think it is

More often than not, it doesn't pay to stay friends with your ex

Hospitality is an experience, not a space

Rent/Bury/Buy

Overall, I can't say I liked Bad Things, but I continue to find it intriguing. There's definitely something THERE, though ultimately, the movie seems content to not give it to us. I can't particularly recommend it, but I'd be more than happy to hear someone who got more from the film speak for it. As you might guess, it's streaming on Shudder.

The Shin-n-n-ing

For a good chunk of movie audiences, Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining stands as one of cinema’s greatest accomplishments in terror. To its grandfather, it was (at least at the time of its release) blasphemy.

Thusly did we get Mick Garris’ extremely literal 1997 miniseries, written by King and filmed at the very hotel that inspired the tale. To experience all three tellings is a pretty fascinating exercise in the art--and sometimes, fingerpainted afterschool activity--of the adaptation.

It surprises some (okay, my cats) to learn that I haven’t read that much of Stephen King’s canon. I adore his essay work, but each of the handful of King fiction I’ve picked up continue to kill me with final act buzzkill (Salem's Lot is a pleasant buck of that trend). Lately though, I’m becoming more forgiving in my old age of literary criticism. I blew through Carrie with plenty of energy, so following it up with one of King’s most celebrated hits seemed like the best idea since buying Maximum Overdrive on DVD.

More refreshing than a soda can to the groin!

If you’re a horror fan who has never read The Shining, head to your nearest library/local bookstore/airport and give it a go. Though King himself acknowledges that some of his prose is on the messy side, the book moves like a fascinating nightmare. Wendy, Jack and Danny are all written with a firm ear towards character and their tentative hold on a fragile family unit is as devastating as the latter half is scary. Jack’s descent is inevitable, but as King astutely recognizes in his introduction to the book's reprint, Jack isn’t a one-dimensional monster anxiously awaiting his transformation. We care about these people, making every swing of the roque mallet hurt.

But let’s face it: most readers don’t travel 500 plus pages through The Shining for a family drama about the perils of alcoholism. Inside the ghostly holdings of The Overlook lurks some true terror, from an eerily macabre masked ball to the iconic Room 217. Most memorable is Jack’s, Danny’s and Dick Halloran’s meet-ups with the growling lion made of topiary. It’s truly remarkable how effective scenes of evil garden creations can be on the page...

And how damn silly looking they are when brought to life by 1997 era CGI. Kubrick famously omitted the topiary from his film, claiming special effects wouldn’t do it justice. Perhaps that’s true (considering how giggly the 1980s BBC version of The Day of the Triffids made me, I’d say yes). Or maybe, like so much else in his version, Kubrick didn’t think they worked according to his vision.

Can't imagine why...

An adaptation, you see, is just that. It’s an interpretation of preexisting material, not necessarily a direct translation of it. 


One of my biggest pet peeve comments I hear from movie viewers is the whine that “they changed it from the book!”  Why is this offensive? ‘They’ (evil filmmakers with their own ideas) didn’t change YOUR book. They didn’t rape its author and force it to birth this creation or chain him or her in a tower until the writer released a Galileo-like false confession that erased any original ideas. Books and movies exist on two different plains of the universe.


Sometimes, a close-to-the-page film breeds greatness (No Country For Old Men, Atonement) while others fall flat (The Road, Blindness). What I respect most is a film that honors its source material’s essence but understands well enough that the language of film can veer wherever it wants and still be great (i.e., Children of Men or The Sweet Hereafter, fine literary works that bred incredible filmmaking).

Kubrick falls into the latter category. His Shining plays quite a bit with its source material, retaining its skill but filling it with an entirely different substance. Does it work as a film? Certainly. As an adaptation? Yes. It’s just not the translation loyal readers (and one writer) may have been waiting for. 

Jack Nicholson’s Jack is, much to the annoyance of Stephen King, not the Jack on his pages. He starts with a Joker grin and ends with the same Joker grin frozen solid, and while it’s a terrifying character that has rightfully become iconic, it’s ultimately far less complex than the tortured recovering alcoholic of the novel. It’s probably Kubrick’s biggest deviation, and one that builds an immediate distance between the audience and characters. Sure, Shelley Duvall (say nothing negative; woman has a lifetime get out of jail free card for creating Faerie Tale Theatre) as Wendy comes off as a bit of a nag, but that doesn’t mean we ever really understand Jack wanting to plant an axe into her back.

It’s understandable that the casting would irk King, particularly since the author used the character as something of a metaphor for his own struggles with alcohol. For that reason alone, it's clear why the author would take such a strong position (executive producer and screenwriter) on the second stab at adapting his material. The problem, of course, is that he put it in the hands of someone who loved the novel even more than he did.


I have a lot of respect for Mick Garris. The man clearly adores the genre and would sell his kidneys and children to make horror even better.

But that doesn’t mean he’s a good director.


The Stand is a mediocre retelling of King’s epic, with lots of aspects (the ridiculousness of the sultry pill-popping Laura Sangiacomo as a virgin, the casting of Rob Lowe, and much more) that just don’t work. His Masters of Horror episode, Chocolate, has some interesting ideas with painfully awful execution. And Sleepwalkers...well...there have been worse adaptations of King pieces.

And yet, it makes perfect sense that Stephen King would watch him direct his adored text. I obviously don’t know what their working relationship was like, but I imagine conversations went as such:


MG: So Mr. King, I was thinking of cutting that scene where Halloran misses the plane to Denver. It seems a little unnecessary, don’t you think?

SK: No way. It’s important in showing how hard the dude’s trying. Also, I wrote it.


MG: Totally! Forget I ever said a thing. Um, what about the one that comes about ten minutes later, where Halloran lands and the car rental cashier kindly tells him she’ll call ahead to put chains on the vehicle? It kind of cuts into the action over the Overlook and, well, I don’t know that we need it.


SK: Did you hear me the first time?


MG: Of course! I mean, you’re right, 110% right. I guess that means I shouldn’t even ask about that scene later where Sam Raimi has a cameo playing the guy that lends him the snow mobile thing, right? I mean, the people need to see that he gets a snow mobile thing from Sam Raimi. And when Halloran arrives at The Overlook and gets out of the snow mobile thing to brush the snow off the sign that says “The Overlook” even though the audience already knows that, you know, that’s The Overlook, we need that right?

SK: Quiet kid. Just remember Uncle Stevie’s rule.


MG: If it’s on the page, it stays.


SK: Got it. Now print me out a new picture of that Kubrick dude and tape it over that dart board yonder. I got things to do.


As King and Garris discuss in the commentary tracks, the miniseries is indeed the ideal format for a dense novel’s filming. It’s not easy to tell a 500+ page story in two hours of screentime, so the extended running length makes perfect sense.

But what Garris and King don’t realize is that a book is its own thing, one that exists on its own dimension inside the readers’ heads. We bring our own aesthetic to what we read--for whatever reason, I cast Elizabeth Mitchell and Kyle Chandler as the Torrances and resurrected Scatman Crothers from the grave to revisit Halloran--and so a literal word by word adaptation will almost always fall flat. Watching a bizzarely dreadful Melvin Van Peebles discuss his travel plans does absolutely nothing for the narrative. Just because it’s in the book does not, in ANY way require it to be filmed.

Likewise, a film can use its facilities to enhance its source material, be it through music, visuals, performances, or random touches. You know, like how Crothers' Halloran decorates his Florida condo:

No reason for it exactly, but it's memorable and interesting, something that makes us wonder a little more about the character. The miniseries never dares to embellish.

There is good inside 1997’s The Shining. Rebecca DeMornay and yes, Steve Wings Weber are quite strong as a couple on the edge, and both the loving and abusive scenes together are believably powerful.

As for the rest of the miniseries...well..the last shot was neat. Of course, before that we deal with Haunted Mansion caliber ghosts and Peebles' terrible line readings, heavy-handed musical cues and laughable CGI, plus a fatal step in miscasting that makes Danny a precocious 8-year-old that doesn’t know how to read. I won’t insult child actor Courtland Meade’s performance, as it’s not awful...just not right. I may have missed the exact moment where his age was discussed (for silly reasons involving me not understanding how to read a double sided disc, I was forced to download Part 2 en espanol and channel my inner 8th grade honors student to understand the dialogue) but either Danny is WAY too well-spoken for a 6 year old (who then graduates two years early in the film’s painful flash forward coda) or an 8-year-old with a learning disability, which doesn’t fit his clearly bright and well-spoken character in the least. Either way, WHAT IS GOING ON?

Also, his hair looks stupid.


Then there’s the time period, or lack thereof. Danny talks like a child of the 90s while The Overlook uses rotary phones and Dick Halloran dresses like Willie Dynamite circa 1971. I’m confused.

Plus now I just want to rewatch Wilie Dynamite.

But enough bashing of a not necessarily terrible way to spend 4.5 hours. It made Stephen King and most likely, those who believe an adaptation should be a book-on-film satisfied. I can’t imagine it entertaining someone who didn’t read the novel, but as an example of (in my opinion) what an adaptation shouldn’t be.


Also, I spotted a goof (Part 3, flowers moving before Wings comes into frame) and I NEVER spot goofs.


Oh, and the miniseries features a Ghost Dad coda that's way more hilarious than Ghost Dad.

Also, did I mention Danny's stupid haircut?

I don’t think Kubrick’s film is perfect, though I do cite it as a brilliant horror film and even more brilliant, if almost unrelated interpretation of a great read. I also don’t think Garris or King were wrong to revisit the material in their own manner. I just wish they remembered what film can do and actually tried to do it.

Master of the Pedlar's Inn

Oh fiddlesticks. I really wanted to like The Innkeepers. Actually, based on my adoration for Ti West's House of the Devil and my genuine belief that he was responsible for the good parts of the not really that good Cabin Fever 2, I wanted to LOVE The Innkeepers.

Sigh.

Quick Plot: The Yankee Pedlar Inn is a quaint little historical hotel about to close its doors forever. On its last weekend in business, clerks Claire (Last House On the Left's Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) decide to pull some Ghosthunters action and see if they can find any genuine evidence of its supposed supernatural guests. Along the way, they kinda sorta help out the natural guests: an aggravated single mom with her young son, a mysterious old man, and a former sitcom star (Stakeland’s Kelly McGillis).

What follows is some chipper banter between Claire and the nerdy Luke, followed ever so slowly by the confirmation that yes indeed, there’s a ghost afoot at the Pedlar Inn. Much like House of the Devil, the film’s style is to charm us with its lead before subjecting her to all sorts of scary movie hijinks…at the last possible minute.

I hate being this kind of person when discussing film, but here goes:

The Innkeepers is no House of the Devil.

Now in most worlds, this would be more than fine. No director should spend his or her career making the same film over and over again (helLO Tim Burton), but the issue is that The Innkeepers feels like it’s trying so hard to BE The House of the Devil with a softer edge. It’s not just the concept of the film being a throwback to late ‘70s genre style; it’s that the pacing and characterization feel directly cut from the same fabric, just dyed a different color or some other analogous comment. There’s even a Greta Gerwig stand-in (Lena Girls Dunham as a chatty barista) tossed in for comic relief.

So logic would dictate that if you liked The House of the Devil, you’ll like The Innkeepers…but I didn’t. I didn’t because it wasn’t ever dark enough to be genuinely scary, nor could it ever find its solid footing as comedy. The climax happens in 10 minutes (I know—just like HotD) but for me, it simply did nothing.

As an hour-long Masters of Horror episode, The Innkeepers would have worked great. Perhaps it will age well in ten years as a sort of underrated good genre film that people expected the wrong thing from the first time around. I won’t rule that out. I just also have no desire to rewatch it soon and make that decision.

High Notes

Much like Jocelin Donahue’s one-woman show in House of the Devil, Sara Paxton finds the perfect notes to make Claire likable, cute, and sympathetic

You know how annoyed I get when horror films make obvious and forced homage to older classics? (i.e., look at how I named my characters Romero and Carpenter!). Hence my utter glee when Luke informs Claire that he took Room 216 and she responds “Of course.” Now anyone with a passing familiarity to The Shining will deduce Room 216 gives a comfortable closeness to Room 217 and can get the joke without another word of explanation. THIS is how you honor a past film

Low Notes

The utter disappointment I felt watching something mediocre and unambitious from a director that I know can do better

Lessons Learned

Saying I love you on IM is like saying it during sex

Psychic conventions are generally held in small Pennsylvanian towns

Never skimp on bread. You’ll always regret it

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa????? Moment of Me Watching the Film

I was eager to explore IMDB because I thought the little boy was played by the same child actors as Lysa Aryan’s 6-year-old-and-still-happy-to-be-breastfed son on Game of Thrones. Sadly, he is not, but GUESS WHAT? The character’s mother? Gina from the early ‘90s era Sesame Street. I have no idea how to feel about that, other than glad she’s not breast-feeding her too-old son

Rent/Bury/Buy

It’s easy to blame my disappointment with The Innkeepers on expectation. But if Ti West was worried that people would be disappointed with Not The House of the Devil, then why make a film that carries so much of The House of the Devil into every frame? Anyway, this is, as you would expect, decently made, affectionately scored, and well-acted. It just did not work for me in the least. I’d love to hear people tell me I’m wrong, so if there’s something I didn’t get, go head and give it to me. Especially if it’s loaded with cheese. I’m really hungry.

Location Location Location

As some of you know and others don't care about, I spent the last year or so contributing to Pop Syndicate, a recently renovated website that lost all its past content (and writers). The following article appeared in 2009 and since you can't find it anywhere else in InterWorld, I'm rerunning it here. Apologies for the deja vu.


Some time back, I mentioned a movie that deserves no real further discussion: Moscow Zero, the Val Kilmer-headlined Russian thriller with little thrills and even less Kilmer. What bothered me was not so much that the film was dull (because anything that helps me sleep is welcome in my life) but that it wasted one of the greatest potential settings of any horror. The Moscow Metro system is deeper than hell and probably crawling with more agents of evil than Walmart in December. 

Naturally, this got me thinking of other places that naturally frighten visitors and the films that utilized set location for maximum thrills. Enter at your own risk:

Closed carnivals

Is there anything sadder than a man-made playground abandoned by man?  Squeaky rides and stale popcorn just aren’t the same without screaming kids that beg for seconds and then throw up the remains on wooden roller coaster...especially when the amusement park is littered with ghostly apparitions that really like to waltz. Hence, the classic 1962 Carnival of Souls, a beautifully surreal ghost story inspired by a lonely Salt Lake City locale and filmed to translate its spooky atmosphere onto the big screen. 

Warehouses

Part of my workday is stationed in an overcrowded appliance warehouse. Recently, I took a wrong turn and ended up navigating a labyrinth of boxes that would make the Goblin King grip his codpiece in GPS-less fear. Storage facilities are dangerous places, and not just because they tend to be generously stocked with sharp objects and sloppily stacked with heavy boxes. While Final Destination 3 packed on the precarious nail gun and other fatal industrial accouterments, my heart goes out to Child's Play 2 for its factory finale. Many people never understand why a two-foot doll instills such fear in so many filmgoers, but imagine a petite plastic redhead chasing you through an endless maze of ominous cardboard. It’s scary. And brown.

Hotels

The thing about lodging facilities is, despite all lazily standard attempts to make you think otherwise, they’re not your home. In fact, they’re no one’s home, yet countless scores of travelers have come before to sleep, make love, and flip through basic cable, all under the watch of bland pastel paintings in rooms that look identical to a million others across your respective country. There’s something existential and empty about the very idea of a pay-by-the-night place. Of course, The Shining is the definitive hotel horror for capturing the vast emptiness of a place that has been well lived (and died)-in before a cracking family moves in. I’d also point to the more recent Bug. The terror of this Friedkin thriller/drama/horror/undefined piece of disturbia doesn’t necessarily lie in its setting, but Ashley Judd’s cheap residential motel does help to create an atmosphere that never feels quite like home--thus making her lonely and longing waitress all the more vulnerable to forming a not-so-healthy connection with Michael Shannon’s quiet and slowly unraveling stranger. One thing’s for sure: by the end of Bug, you’ll never have to worry about confusing that room with the Day’s Inn.

Empty asylums

What’s scarier than a home for the criminally insane? How about one abandoned by the criminally insane? House on Haunted Hill makes nice use of its institutional mansion setting, but few films have created such a terrifying location as Brad Anderson’s Session 9. Filmed in the former Danvers State Hospital (aka the State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers, a far scarier title), Session 9 follows a frustrated asbestos removal crew and their ill-fated attempt to clean up am empty  (and most likely haunted) asylum. Like Carnival of Souls, Session 9 absorbs its environment, squeezing every drop of horror and letting it spread into the cast, music, lighting, and overall filmic effect. Plus, it achieves the seemingly impossible task of making David Caruso sympathetic. 

Tundra

I gave up watching Survivor the day Mark Burnett announced the show would never be filmed in the Arctic. To me, watching resourceful people combat frostbite and fight polar bears is far more exciting than seeing bad cases of sunburn aggravating oozing mosquito bites... which is probably why I hold winter horror in such high esteem. For true frozen conditions, John Carpenter’s The Thing pretty much corners the vast, cold market on ice, especially since Kurt Russell & Co. battle the boredom and isolation of Antarctica while  dealing with a shape-shifting gooey creature set on world domination. The more recent 30 Days of Night took great advantage of the Arctic Circle’s weirdly misunderstood sunrise patterns by, naturally, making it a haven for vampires. Sure, it fudged the actual earth science a tad, but 30 Days of Night also answered the question for why America’s largest state has such a small population.  

So my safely nestled readers, which films have you constantly noting the nearest exit? Also, what are some of your everyday hot spots just waiting for a bloody massacre to redden to floors?