I Fall To Pieces

Yes, I'll admit it.  I'm a sucker for a hard luck story and in horror movies, these tend to belong to lonely young women.  I'm not sure why it's so easy to write about a young woman dealing with her inner demons and reacting to the world around her but it seems to wedge itself into our subconscious so easily that I guess we never think about it.  In horror movies, though, those young women are usually psychotic.

Lucky McKee's 2002 indie masterpiece May is a prime example.

This movie made me uncomfortable in the way only a good slow-burn movie can.  And it IS a slow burn.  This is NOT a movie for the ADHD crowd (and, really, the only reason I got myself to sit and watch it is because I had the flu). In any case, it's good slow.  We don't need to have quick-cut scenes and MTV editing to have an enjoyable movie experience.

May is an interesting movie because it draws parallels to Carrie (which is why Angela Bettis got the starring role in the TV remake) without being too terribly obvious about it.  In fact, it's more like "What would happen if Carrie didn't develop that whole "I can destroy you with my mind" thing and actually survived high school?"

In this film, May is ostracized due to a lazy eye.  Petty, I know, but she spends her entire life being supremely self-conscious about it and because of her own imperfection, she is constantly on the lookout for a "perfect" friend to offset it.  Someone who is so perfect that she can ignore her own flaw.  Initially, this is a china doll given to her by her mother with the advice "If you can't find a friend, make one" that she is never allowed to remove from the glass case in which it resides... because Mom is a bitch.  Mom is the one who made her ashamed of her lazy eye.  Mom is the one that complained that the WRAPPING PAPER was ruined when May tore it opening the gift.  Mom is the one who gave her daughter a tiny, shaming mother-figure upon which to build all of her insecurities because, in classic horror movie fashion, the doll talks to her.  Because May is insane.  Like, completely binkers. 

If we left it at that, this would be a standard slasher but, much like Carrie, McKee takes May a step further by actually giving the main character hope.  Hope that she can have friends.  Hope that she might not be stark, raving loony.  He gives her not only a boyfriend (Jeremy Sisto) but a girlfriend (Anna Faris), as well, and she finds herself (and us with her) focusing on those parts of them that she finds to be perfect.  Jeremy's hands, Anna's neck and we find ourselves looking through her good eye at others perfections as the film goes on.  Leering as May is (at EVERYBODY), we never get the feeling that we're stepping into "male gaze" territory and Bettis is WONDROUS in her ability to show a slow descent into a psychotic break.  Why this woman doesn't get more work in mainstream film is completely beyond me.

But, as her own insanity worsens, so do her relationships until she is ultimately rejected by Sisto AND Faris and, to top it all off, her cat.  Yes, her cat recognized the crazy and is thankful that he didn't stick it in her.  Faris and Sisto can't really say the same.  Do I really need to tell you where all this recognition of crazy leads?  When crazy gets recognized, crazy migrates to the nearest sharp object.

Crazy, though, at least in this case, is still sympathetic as a victim of poor self-image and parental shaming.

All in all, I highly recommend this movie.  It's a fantastic character study and, even as slow-paced as it is, it's a lot of fun to watch... you know... if you like madness ending in bloody murder and hints of necrophilia.  I could probably do without that last part but HEY!  Go watch the damn movie.

Wait. You're an Oscar™ Winner?

Elizabeth Shue and Jennifer Lawrence.  What the hell have you done?

Let's talk about House at the End of the Street, shall we?  Spoilers, bitches.  Lots of 'em.

I'm OK with exposition, really, I am but when a movie starts out with a neighborhood party greeting the new folks, Oscar™-winning mom and pretty new girl, with the urban legend of the secretive boy next door and the murderous psycho girl who killed their parents who now lives in the woods and survives by hunting squirrels, you know you're in for a bad time.

And of course, pretty new girl falls in with the town jerk who takes her to a party.  Pretty new girl then deftly avoids date rape at the hands of town jerk so she makes this odd connection with the secretive boy next door when he saves her from a ten mile walk because WHO DECIDES THEY WANT TO WALK TEN MILES IN THE DARK INSTEAD OF SEEING IF THEY CAN GET A RIDE FROM SOMEONE ELSE AT THE PARTY?!?  Does no one see where this is going?  And then she just blurts out "Your sister killed your parents."  TACT, BITCH!  Learn it.

The locked door in the basement?  SERIOUSLY?!  Where they balls-out let us know where murderous psycho girl is living?  How about a little mystery, huh?  I mean, at least let me GUESS that murderous psycho girl is there.  Don't fucking bring her soup and a sedative.  And how does secretive boy next door manage to GET injectables?  Ya know for a mystery-thriller, I'm not getting a whole lot of mystery, here.

Enter middle-aged cop, who wants in Oscar™-winning mom's shorts.  He gets to make secretive boy next door likeable.  Something tells me this isn't going to work.

And, now, wait a minute.  Secretive boy next door is actually responsible for the playground accident that cause his sister to become murderous psycho girl?  And his parents were apparently high at the time so they didn't help at all?  What the hell?  Why did the parents have to be drug users?  Oh, yeah.  To give murderous psycho girl a REASON to kill them and to give secretive boy next door a reason to be overprotective.  Duh.

Oh, look.  Murderous psycho girl escaped into the woods because she's a crafty bitch who knows how to open a locked door even when she's pumped full of drugs.

MY LORD, IT'S ANOTHER UNCOMFORTABLE DINNER SCENE!!  And Oscar™-winning mom, who, as it was shown in other scenes, is not the best mom in the world, decides to lay down the law and basically kills the evening.  How rude.

I'm not even sure I can subject you to more of this.  This movie is PAINFUL.

But I will.  Because I love you.

So, pretty new girl decides to hang out with secretive boy next door against her mother's wishes... because we didn't all see THAT coming, and murderous psycho girl comes out to play with sharp things because irritating emo hipster music is just that annoying.  Secretive boy next door gets pretty new girl out of the house just in time to avoid being skewered and murderous psycho girl freaks out the neighbors by escaping and living out her urban legend status again.  Yay.

And... something happens while secretive boy next door is subduing her.  Did she pass out?  Is she dead?  Something snapped but it sounded like a twig.  Do we care?

Insert "mother-daughter dysfunctional talk" here.  Because you can't have dysfunctional without fun!

Another party scene... and, like an idiot, pretty new girl invites secretive boy next door because he's not already a town pariah, and he gets into a fight because teenagers are assholes.  He wins the fight but the kids almost literally break out the torches and pitchforks to chase him to the old mi... I mean his house.  And, in the midst of all this the kid who lost the fight has his parents calling Ryan an animal and threatening to sue while middle-age cop is still hitting on Oscar™-winning mom.

IT HURTS!!  It really does.

Meanwhile, pretty new girl decides to snoop at secretive boy next door's house and discovers the sub-basement lair of murderous psycho girl.  WHAT THE HELL, WOMAN?!?

Well, what do you know?  Murderous psycho girl is still alive after all.  And she's muzzled.  And pretty new girl goes poking around in his garbage.  Because she's stupid.

Insert "WHAT THE HELL, SECRETIVE BOY NEXT DOOR?" exposition scene here.

OK, I'm not going to tell you any more, but this movie is some seriously fucked up, wannabe Psycho bullshit.  It's just... bad.  I mean, not even good bad.  It takes itself entirely too seriously, for one, and there's a lame-ass twist that just makes it sad.  So sad that I think I'll have to watch, like, a month's worth of My Little Pony to make the sad go away.  The acting is OK but the scriptwriter and the director need to be dragged into the street and shot.  Watch it if you want but make sure you don't pay for it.

Donner, Party of 15?

Yes, I know.  Lame joke.  But the fact remains that cannibalism is still very much a taboo in global society and for that reason it fits oh, so neatly into horror films.

There are a whole slew of tropes that utilize cannibalism to make us squirm (and squirm we do) because being eaten is something our DNA is kind of wired against.  It's one of the primary reasons we have these fantastic brains of ours.  To reduce the chances of becoming something large and predatory's midnight snack.  The thought of being eaten by another human being is just disturbing in about seventy million ways.  I mean look at what it did to the evening news...

My favorite of these tropes, though, because it can add a whole new level of creepy to what might otherwise be a standard slasher, is the cannibal clan.  These people bring family togetherness to a ghastly new place.

I'm not sure if they ever really existed but they sure sound sordid, don't they?  A family that preys on other human beings?  Storing the meat?  Grinding it into pie filling.  Hoarding the personal effects so the victim can't be traced?  Often incestuous?  There's just so much about them that digs into the tiny cracks in our fear centers and TWISTS.

The first widely sensationalized story about a cannibal clan is Christie-Cleek but far better known is the Sawney Bean Clan, thought to have existed in 15th or 16th century Scotland.  The story was put out in The Newgate Calendar, which was a crime catalogue of Newgate Prison, but most historians agree that the clan never actually existed.

Still, though, the thought of about 50 people living and breeding with one another in a cave along a sea cliff (so that the entrance could be hidden during high tide) robbing, killing, salt-curing and eating human victims is SO beyond the pale that the story frightens us even today and has been a consistent source of inspiration for those of us with a macabre frame of mind.  It's also been a huge influence in Scotland's tourism industry.  Sick fucks.

As far as film goes, there are a TON of examples in which we'll find large groups of humanitarians.  The most obvious example is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  TCM combined the stories of real-life serial killer Ed Gein and the story of Bean and Company with surgical precision.  If you want different takes, though, watch the original and then watch the remake.  The original used more influence from Gein and his habit of making doilies and lamps and things out of the remains of his victims but the remake focused on the fact that the entire family wanted dinner.  For the most part, beyond Leatherface himself, they were all human.

For a more twisted example, look to The Hills Have Eyes.  The family here is DEFINITELY of the "incest is best" variety.  Largely, this is because they're all malformed due to living in a nuclear testing zone and who wants to fuck this?

Michael Berry might be a fine actor but he's pretty much the visual epitome of "Inbred Mutant".

The movies Offspring and Wrong Turn are pretty much formula for this type of thing.

And there are a lot of less obvious examples, too.  Parents, for example, spends the entire movie with the kid determining just exactly where those "leftovers" come from, seeing as how they never seem to have a proper meal.  Lucky Stiffs gave us Donna Dixon as a member of such a clan and her unlucky boyfriend is Christmas Dinner.

We even see it on TV every so often.  Torchwood gave us "Countrycide" and The X-Files gave us "Home" and "Our Town", all of which served to give even me the wiggins.

Here's where that "whole new level of creepy" comes in.  In most horror movies, you're fairly certain that there is only one monster.  Here, you've got an entire FAMILY of them and in some films, you can't tell who's a cousin or not.  You can get to help but who's to say if the person giving you a ride isn't taking you back to meet the folks?  Even the cops might be in on it.  Or, as in Texas Chainsaw, maybe they're not really cops at all.  It instills that extra bit of paranoia that may not keep YOU guessing but it should definitely freak out the characters.

So, yeah.  Cannibal clans?  Fun stuff.

I'm off to lunch.  Don't wait up.

Swamp Things

Remember how I said I have a weakness for Shark movies?  It's still true.  Even if they're completely laughable.

What can I say about Shark Night (or Shark Night 3D if you spent the extra four bucks) that isn't going to hurt someone's feelings?

Well, the actors are...

The plot is...

The scenery is...

OK, there is nothing redeeming about this picture other than that the premise is so utterly hilarious that this movie has "drinking game" written all over it.  I would not suggest actually PLAYING said drinking game because you'd all be dead of alcohol poisoning in the first 10 minutes, but it certainly has that potential.

I mean, it crosses horror movie genres and does so badly.  If you're going to do a slasher flick, do a slasher flick.  If you're going to do a shark movie, do a shark movie.  If you're going to do a revenge film, do a revenge film.  Never the three shall meet.  And really, revenge and shark should never meet, either.  We SAW what happened with Jaws 4.

Spoilers ahoy, kiddies.

So, the premise of the movie is that this girl and her friends decide to hang out at her summer house which is in the middle of a salt lake... somewhere... in the South, maybe.  We're never quite sure.  She stops to get gas and meets up with her old boyfriend who is hideously scarred, only not so hideously as to make him unattractive for some reason, and he and his hickbilly buddy are acting all creepy and Deliverance-y.  No, we don't know why, yet.  Then they get a boat to go out to the lake house and get involved in a high-speed chase with the sheriff who, apparently, used to do this all the time with the lead girl.

The kids make it to the lake house and bullshit with the sheriff for a few then start doing teenage horror movie things like drinking and changing into bikinis in slow motion and going wakeboarding.  During the outing on the boat, the black guy (and it's always the black guy who goes first) gets attacked by a shark and loses his arm only it's not really lost because Our Hero, the pre-med student, goes in and gets the arm to put it on ice.  Insert panicky teenagers here.  So, yeah, while they're trying to bring him to the hospital (which is oh, so conveniently located about an hour away), black guy continues to bleed, attracting another shark that attacks the boat, which knocks a girl into the water (who promptly gets eaten) and making them crash into the boathouse.  Black guy promptly gets pissed and ACTUALLY TAKES A SPEAR into the water to kill hisself a shark.  He does, but it's the wrong one...

So, anyway, long story short, ex-boyfriend and hickbilly have imported sharks to the salt lake so they can make videos of shark attacks that they can sell to the Discovery Channel for Shark Week.

Wait.  What?  Oh, no.  It gets EVEN BETTER!

Ex-boyfriend was WAITING for lead girl to come back so he could feed her to a shark because she's the one who accidentally scarred his face in a panic WHILE HE LEFT HER TO DROWN in a scuba diving incident.  Yes, folks, he's out for revenge because the girl he left to die accidentally left him with a conversation piece that doesn't detract from his looks one iota.  Not only that, but to do so, he imported multiple species of sharks, not all of which are adapted to live in murky water and including not one, but TWO, Great Whites, SPECIFICALLY FOR THIS PURPOSE.  Money-making venture aside, this has all the earmarks of an Austin Powers world domination plot.  All it needs is head-lasers.

This movie is what failure tastes like but in that sweet, sweet, schadenfreude-like way that makes me laugh all the way through it.  Don't watch this if you want to be scared, because you won't.  Watch it for the express purpose of mocking it and the filmmakers and the actors and all of their descendants for generations to come.  Never let these people forget what laughable trash they made.  And laughable it is.  As a comedy, I give it an 8.  As a horror movie?  4 tops.

...Smell My Feet...

Trick'r'Treat is the bestest, most funnest, most awesome-ist Halloween movie EVER MADE!

I was going to wait until Halloween to do this but I figure this will give you guys time to get to Best Buy and get yourself a copy because you all seriously need to see this movie, even if you're not a horror fan, because this movie is about Halloween (which we all know is my favorite holiday) and it's customs and traditions.  Santa can eat it (and probably did, the fat bastard).  The Easter Bunny?  Who wants hasenpheffer?  St. Valentine?  Fuck him in the ear.  Give me a Jack O'Lantern, any day.

As I said in the Creepshow post, this is an anthology movie but it almost doesn't play like one.  In most anthologies, the stories aren't related to one another.  There may be a wrap-around that connects them through the tellers of the tales, but the stories are generally very different.  In Trick'r'Treat,  director Michael Dougherty weaves the stories and characters in and out of one another so deftly and so smoothly that, even though there are four (almost 5) different plots, the movie is seamless.

The movie opens by explaining to us that there are rules to Halloween that must be obeyed or horrific things happen and the rules are the impetus for the plot.  Things like letting the Jack O'Lantern burn out by itself and never smashing one, always having candy for trick or treaters (otherwise, you're open for a nasty trick), dressing in costume to ward off true evil and always checking your candy.  Throughout the movie, we meet those who follow the rules and those who disobey and the figure behind it all is little Sam, a boy in footie-jammies and a cute little scarecrow mask who is DEFINITELY more than he seems and he's got some uses for candy that are simply delicious.

The stories themselves are almost innocent in terms of horror movie standards but the have that evil kick that makes them all kinds of twisted fun.  From the school principal (Dylan Baker) with more than one dirty little secret, to the cranky old man next door (Bryan Cox) who is more likely to send you off his property with a butt full of rock salt and buckshot than with candy, to the co-ed (Anna Paquin) who is out to get rid of her virginity and to the kids out to play tricks and tell urban legends, all of the stories are delightfully creepy and just add to the macabre charm of Halloween.  Besides?  Who doesn't love it when a little kid yells out things like "CHARLIE BROWN IS AN ASSHOLE!"?

As I said earlier, the characters interact with each other through the whole movie and part of the fun is picking them out in each of the other stories.  It makes the movie a game which makes it even MORE fun.

I have nothing bad to say about this movie.  Nothing at all.  Even with an R rating, I would suggest this movie for the 13 and up crowd.  It's not overly scary and not overly gory.  In fact, as Goldilocks would say, it's just right. This has been said before by many, many people but this movie should have gotten a wide theater release but it didn't.  Warner Bros. sat on this for ages and then finally released it directly to DVD/Blu-Ray which I think was a HUGE mistake, even though it made them a ton of bank.  In any case, I'm hoping for a sequel but since Warner Bros. has ditched it's direct-to-video division, it doesn't look like we'll get one.  Sad face.  Boo.

Once you watch it, though, you'll never break the rules again.  Sam is watching.  Always watching.