Don't Answer It!

It occurs to me that if a horror movie advertizes itself as "psychadelic", I should probably just stay the hell away from it.

2009's Someone's Knocking at the Door is such a movie.

There's really not a lot of story to this one.  A bunch of med students, hopped up on the goofballs, are hunted down by the ghosts of a married pair of sadistic sexual serial killers from the 70s who are looking to repay a few folks for the experiments of which they were the subjects.

Yeah, I'd be angry, too.

The kills in this one are fuckin' creepy.  Death by anal sex (cause creepy ghost dude is packing a fuckin' knee-length club).  Vaginal suffocation.  It's like they took the "don't have sex" trope and just said "Well, fuck it... literally...".

LUBE!  GODDAMMIT, MORE LUBE!!

Now, while this movie does have a kind of awesome, visceral grindhouse feel to it, it's a little... too psychadelic.

Yes, yes, it's all about drugs and sex and violence and there's a definite comedic touch as well but it gets confusing.  Painfully confusing.  I'm gonna try and watch this one again but only because I really need some clarification as to why things go down the way they do. 

In the meantime, I'm just gonna take this as the director saying "Eew, that Goatse thing is NASTY.  Let's make a movie about it." 

It's not a bad movie, it's just weird.

You have been warned.

Ugh, Seriously?

I've been home sick with a cold for the past couple of days so I've been stuck on the couch.  Medication made me pick this off of FearNet.  I cannot be held responsible.

I'm not even going to review this.  It's a horrible remake of April Fool's Day.  It didn't even really bother to change the plot.

Just FYI, indie filmmakers?  An ENTIRE cast full of deadpan snarkers?  Not going to work.

I also fully blame Nick Stahl for the downfall of indie horror.

Freaky fuckin' gnome.

I turned it off.  I'm not even sure how long I had until the end.  I don't care.

Please. Don't Leave.

One of the more common location tropes is the "Abandoned... Whatever".  It could be a playground (usually seen in a post-apocalyptic nightmare of some kind), a church, a school, an apartment complex (Candyman, anyone?), what have you, but my favorite in horror films is the abandoned mental hospital.

State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers

These places are old (not TOO old... Danvers, pictured above, didn't close until 1992), in dangerous shape and should have been demolished ages ago.  The peeling paint, rusting pipes, decrepit medical equipment and rotting floorboards are visual reminders of what happened here.  It doesn't take a psychiatrist to tell us why these places are scary.  

First off, they're abandoned.  Without a handy piece of paper telling us WHY the grounds were left behind, our minds will tell us all kinds of deliciously nasty stories about the place and what happened there.  We don't need proof.  Proof just wrecks the storytelling and there are people that will take advantage of that to make a buck in the form of horror movies or haunting tours or what have you. A buck I will gladly pay because I like scary storiesANDJUSTTAKEMYFUCKINGMONEY!!

There's a fixer-upper...

Second, they were mental hospitals.  Mental illness is, in and of itself, a terrifying thing.  To not have any control over yourself is something that any sane person should be afraid of.  As a bipolar individual, myself (and being one of the few people I know to have ever experienced a psychotic break), I know how helpless I felt and the thought of being admitted to one of these places during their heyday, where I would have been even more helpless and vulnerable, scares me shitless.  

We hear stories even now of the abuse that goes on in care facilities and it just seems unfathomable that it was allowed to happen in the first place.  Sexual abuse by the orderlies, solitary confinement, padded cells, straight jackets, being left to sit in one's own waste, being put on display for the entertainment of the masses (granted, those last two weren't common after 1900 or so).  Even some of the "treatment options" just sound diabolical.  Electroshock therapy, the ice-pick lobotomy (thought to have been discovered at Danvers), insulin-shock treatment, forced sterilization, Metrazol, Thorazine.  All in the name of keeping the mentally unstable within wrangle-able parameters.  All with a pretty heavy body count.

Not a fish-eye lens, huh?  Welp, time for my drugs.

Now, in horror movies, even fully functioning hospitals are places of disease, germs, needles and death so you can imagine how an abandoned hospital is going to look, particularly a mental hospital.  As long as film makers can get the look right, our minds will take care of the rest.  Fortunately, they don't have to work too hard in a lot of cases.

Just looking at Danvers, it's been the inspiration for a lot of spooky stuff.  It's believed that Danvers is the inspiration for HP Lovecraft's Arkham Sanatorium (which, in turn, was the inspiration for DC Comics' Arkham Asylum) and Danvers is referenced by name in Pickman's Model.  The asylum was featured in the 1958 film Home Before Dark and the 2001 film Session 9, one of the most brilliant movies ever made, was actually filmed in Danvers State Hospital before it was renovated into Avalon Communities.  (Just FYI?  The central building was basically kept intact for the refit.)  The video-game Painkiller featured Danvers as well in a level named "Asylum".  The outside of it, anyway.  And the World of Darkness "Mage: The Awakening" role-playing game setting used the hospital as the base for a clan of Tremere vampires who were feeding on the patients.

I'm a little concerned about the red stuff...

Suffice it to say that the abandoned mental hospital isn't just a symbol of societal entropy.  It's also a reminder that our minds are not always the safe havens we think they are.  When some dumbass says "Hey let's split up" in one of these places, it only increases isolation and, as we all know, isolation in horror movies is a bad thing.  Here, we're not necessarily talking about just a monster, though, we're talking a possibility of a full-on psychotic snappy-snap.  

Also, inevitably, a main character will have some kind of connection to the place that they may or may not have been aware of or shared with the class.  Blood Night; The Legend of Mary Hatchet is a perfect film example.

All in all, though, I think I like this trope because it is a reminder that we are not living in the dark ages of mental health treatment, anymore.  We still have a ways to go, but the mad have a little less to fear.

And we're all mad, down here.

Innapropriate Familial Relations

Remember how I said that the British were awesome at horror?

I kind of take that back.  Just a little, though.

See, I watched Inbred this weekend and it left me with a strange feeling of unease.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this is trying to be Britain's answer to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Hell, the poster practically SCREAMS Cannibal Clan.  And, to be fair, it's not a bad watch.  There's just too much wrong with it for me to not say anything.

In terms of story, there's not really a lot there.  A couple of case workers bring their young charges to the country for fresh air and some good hard work to get the evil out of their sinews.  We've got your standard bunch of kids, the pyro, the asshole, the black kid and the girl, all of them in the system for fairly unknown reasons except for the pyro.  Case worker number one is big, jovial, Laugh-a-lot Bear who's entirely too naive to be doing case work and case worker number two is Practical-Woman who obviously knows that the best way to the kids hearts is a trip to the local pub.  On the way into this tiny town, the kids see this out the car window:

Because EVERY kid LOVES a game of Shank the Scarecrow.

The local pub is run by the guy who's in charge of the whole town.  Which should tell you plenty given the name of the movie.  Dude apparently sticks it in EVERYBODY.  His wife makes "scratchin's" (supposedly pork rinds) that come in two varieties, hairy or wet.  There's a guy with a carrot fetish that harasses the girl. 

Anyway, the next day, the kids are brought to the train yard to be taught how to salvage.

Wait, really?  We teach kids to do this, thus training them for a lifetime of  vandalism and air conditioner theft?  Wow.  Way to go, Britain.

So... the kids run afoul of carrot guy again and try and report him to Pub dude while, at the same time, trying to get medical attention for Laugh-a-Lot who managed to slash his own femoral artery.  Pub dude decides to behead Laugh-a-Lot, lock the rest of them in a store room and put on a minstral show.

What?

Yeah, so there's the end of our plot.  The rest is "Let's kill people in new and interesting ways."  No, seriously.  That's it.  It's fun to watch.  Especially when you deal with Boo Radley in Drag.

Tell me about the rabbits, George.

But, really, there's nothing else of substance.  There's humor, in the form of the Ferret guy with the mysterious "incident" that causes him to be left out of the festivities and some in the show itself, but really the rest is somewhat badly acted "OMGWE'RERUNNINGFOROURLIVESALLBREATHLESSANDSHIT!!"

Add to that all of the conspicuously awful CGI:

If I can see it in this picture, you can see it on the screen.

And you've got a halfway decent watch but one that is not the best way to spend your time. 


But if you've got time to kill, go for it.

Heehee... kill...

No Vacancy

Sometimes a movie comes along and you think you should hate it but you kind of don't.

2011's The Innkeepers is that movie.

See, it's kind of this Clerks-esque ride into the "ghost hunting" thing that Syfy has made so popular, much to the dismay of anyone but a complete dumbass.  I mean, seriously, I'm perfectly OK with admitting the possibility of ghosts just because of the Law of Conservation of Energy but do these people really expect something to happen to them a la Amityville?  Call me a skeptic but unless I see stuff flying around and blood dripping off the walls, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the dead really just don't care about you that much.  Because you're the tool with the camera.

Yep.  Tools.

In The Innkeepers, we are treated to the final weekend of  the Yankee Pedlar's existence.  (The Yankee Pedlar is a REAL hotel, by the way, in Torrington, Connecticut, that is REALLY supposed to be haunted.)  We don't know much about the hotel other than that it supposedly houses the ghost of Madeleine O'Malley, about whom we also don't know much other than that she hung herself in the hotel and the owners buried her in the basement.

Aww.  Why so glum, chum?

Claire, (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) are stuck manning the front desk and most of the movie is them not manning the front desk because they really only have 2 legitimate rooms booked throughout the whole movie.  But, they're amateur ghost hunters, dammit, and they want to prove that this place is haunted.  Except they broke the camera so they have to do it with audio, only.

Enter the failed actress, Leanne (or Lee, played by Kelly McGillis) of whom Claire is a HUGE fan.  She's kind of a mean drunk but she's also a psychic.  Since she can sense some stuff, she, like a gap-toothed five-year-old in a Shake'n'Bake commercial, helped. 

Kind of just by being there. 

In the most useless way possible. 

Fuckin' magical lesbian.

Woo.

Anyway, there are a LOT of reasons to hate this movie, primary among them because there are really no scares in it until the very end.  There's no escalation of events, either.  It goes from zero to sixty in the last fifteen minutes (actually more like zero to 35... school zone, y'see...) and drops to zero again. 

 Also?  Spooooooky gummie bears.

But the funny thing is I don't hate this movie at all.  I kind of like it.  It's got great dialogue which is incredibly natural, the cast is wonderful and the story is believeable.  It's very much a throwback to the single-setting horror flicks of the seventies and eighties and I will say that, compared to Shark Night 3D, Sara Paxton was kind of delightful to watch as the weird, quirky, pixie girl.  She didn't always look as if she were about to burst into tears.  And Pat Healy is adorkable.

This movie could be seen as a testament to the failure of the economy that people are willing to hang onto a job until the very last second for a paycheck, even if they'll completely slack off on the last day. 

This movie is, for lack of a better word, cute.  It's got some scares and it does rev up at the end but don't watch it if you expect to be scared.  You won't be.  Watch it for the character interaction which is actually brilliant. 

You kind of expect Dante and Randal to show up.