¡QUÉ HORROR! 2016

Candidate #3

WHY HORROR?

(October 2014)

"Horror has come a long way since it first got its hooks into me. As a devout fan, I used to feel like an outsider, but these days, I meet fans everywhere I go.
“Horror is now more popular than it’s ever been.”

--Tal Zimerman

I could be wrong and memory is f*cking with me right now, but I think this is the very first actual doc that’s made its way to ¡Qué horror! Candidacy (as opposed to the occasional faux doc that’s made the rundown).

Rob Lindsay and Nicolas Kleiman’s Why Horror? follows long-time horrorhead Tal Zimerman as he explores his life-long fascination with the genre, asking the titular question, “Why horror?” of art historians and literature experts and language professors and psychologists, as well as a host of familiar genre faces, from the old school vanguard (John Carpenter, Don Coscarelli, George Romero) to current established names (Alexandre Aja, Simon Barrett, Eli Roth, Ben Wheatley).

For any audience member who happens to be a kindred spirit to Tal, the game-changing benchmarks of a lifelong horrorhead of a certain generation--such as the socio-political horror of Romero’s original zombie trilogy, giallo, the home video boom, the self-referential metahorror of Scream, J-Horror, found footage, and the digital revolution sparking the current wave of global horror--are all touched on in the great animated section “A Way Too Brief History of Horror Cinema” (with VO from one of our all-time favorite hobbits, Elijah Wood).

There’s even the acknowledgement that, yes, Virginia, there are actually female horror fans (who make horror films too!), with appearances by the Soska sisters and Karen Lam.

For the more critically-minded horrorheads out there, or, for those who, at the very least, are curious to dig at the possible roots of their fascination with the genre, Why Horror? is an excellent and highly recommended watch that smartly encapsulates just how deeply horror is entrenched in our humanity, and how it’s really a universal language that we all know.

The question is, just how fluent are we willing to be in it?

“I like ‘smarts.’ I just like intelligent views of the world. And I am deeply committed to finding ‘smarts’ where other people don’t think to look for it. And I think horror is the perfect place.”

--Dr. Susanne Kord

European Languages, Culture and Society

University College, London, England

(Why Horror? OS courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com.)

A Rundown of the 13 (+1) Best Horror Movies I've Seen in the Past Year

[5 of 13]

MANIAC

(May 2012)

While Elijah Wood returned to the hobbit thing in An Unexpected Journey, he also revisited the whole serial killer thing in Franck Khalfoun’s redo of William Lustig’s 1980 slasher, Maniac.

Written and produced by Alexandre Aja (with help from frequent collaborators Grégory Levasseur and Maxime Alexandre), this one has some brutally effective kills courtesy of the awesome Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger of KNB EFX, plus it’s largely presented to us from the POV of Wood’s Frank Zito, the titular psycho.

As far as content and narrative elements, this is certainly not the most original of this year’s rundown (it's the only feature remake on the list), but it’s definitely got a bunch of things going for it.

There’s that tricky POV cinematography (from the aforementioned Maxime Alexandre), a score by Rob* reminiscent of Georgio Moroder’s work for Paul Schrader’s Cat People remake, and an excellent callback to two of Jonathan Demme’s films. (Note: Playing what has become the signature theme to The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill may not be the smartest choice for a music cue after you’ve just invited a virtual stranger up to your apartment.)

* The Maniac score is available as a limited vinyl release from Mondo with "variant white vinyls randomly inserted."
How awesome is that?!

(Maniac UK quad courtesy of impawards.com.)

¡Qué horror! 2013

Candidate #9

MANIAC

(May 2012)

While Elijah Wood returned to the hobbit thing in An Unexpected Journey, he also revisited the whole serial killer thing in Franck Khalfoun’s redo of William Lustig’s 1980 slasher, Maniac.

Written and produced by Alexandre Aja (with help from frequent collaborators Grégory Levasseur and Maxime Alexandre), this one has some brutally effective kills courtesy of the awesome Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger of KNB EFX, plus it’s largely presented to us from the POV of Wood’s Frank Zito, the titular psycho.

As far as content and narrative elements, this is certainly not the most original of this year’s ¡Qué horror! candidates thus far, but it’s got a bunch of things going for it.

There’s that tricky POV cinematography (from the aforementioned Maxime Alexandre), a score by Rob* reminiscent of Georgio Moroder’s work for Paul Schrader’s Cat People remake, and an excellent callback to two of Jonathan Demme’s films. (Note: Playing what has become the signature theme to The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill may not be the smartest choice for a music cue after you’ve just invited a virtual stranger up to your apartment.)

* The Maniac score is available as a limited vinyl release from Mondo with "variant white vinyls randomly inserted."
How awesome is that?!

(Maniac UK quad courtesy of impawards.com.)

MIRRORS
(Review)

In my review of Kim Sung-ho’s Geoul Sokeuro (Into The Mirror)—upon which Mirrors is based—I make note of a quote from director Alexandre Aja where he states that he “…decided to start from scratch and not connect with the original Korean movie.”
Well, he does take some of Geoul Sokeuro’s principal elements—the troubled cop forced to moonlight as a security guard; the department store ravaged by a fire; the sinister, eponymous mirrors—as well as the original’s final climactic kick, and basically streamlines the narrative, pruning the varied facets Kim stuffed into his film.
What we then get is a “reimagining” that recalls Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (which Aja freely admits is his “favorite movie ever”), dotted by some rater-R gore, and shadowed by fleeting echoes of John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, and Hideo Nakata’s water fixation.


I think my biggest problem with Mirrors is that it has no genuine sense of tension in its narrative, unlike Aja’s audacious—and so very aptly titled—Haute Tension. Even Aja’s follow-up, his remake of The Hills Have Eyes, already not as piano wire-taut as Haute Tension, still ended up playing better than Mirrors.
The unfolding of the film’s central mystery—which of course lurks in the darkness of the department store’s history—isn’t handled very well either, clumsily relayed to us via expository flashbacks and some phone calls by Kiefer Sutherland (who plays Mirrors’ lead, cop-turned-security guard Ben Carson) to his hapless infob!tch (more on that later).
And the decision to more properly pin down the true nature of the film’s mirror-centred phenomena doesn’t really do it any favours either; the original’s eclectic mix of narrative elements was certainly a lot more interesting than Aja’s simplified approach.


There’s also a whole lot of underutilization going on here as Amy Smart (who I’ve had a soft spot for ever since Felicity) is given the brief and thankless job of being Ben’s patient, younger, bartending sister Angela, before being brutally dispatched in the film’s “jaw-dropping” gore highlight brought to us by the most excellent N & B of KNB EFX, Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger.
Then there’s Guy Ritchie cohort Jason Flemyng, who’s given the brief and thankless job of being Larry Byrne, Ben’s cop friend and seemingly always available infob!tch, just a phone call away. (I haven’t actually checked, but it’s entirely possible that Flemyng spends as much screen time as a voice over a cell phone, as he does in the flesh.)
The film also doesn’t do very much with Mary Beth Peil (Grams, from Dawson’s Creek), who plays a pivotal role in the proceedings.


There are a few nice touches, mind; some subtle creeps—the handprint and doorknob bits are effective—and the aforementioned gory sequence involving Smart, being the ones that most readily come to mind.
Those bright spots however, are vastly outnumbered by scenes of a flashlight-wielding Sutherland walking about the husk of the fire-gutted department store or talking to Flemyng over his cell, which all then leads up to a disappointing WWE climax as Ben goes toe-to-toe with the film’s big bad.


I really wanted to like this one, wanted it to be the Aja film that would hands-down kick my a$.
But it isn’t, and now I’ll have to wait for Aja’s Piranha remake (in 3D, no less!), which I sincerely hope will be bucketloads of thrilling, popcorn horror fun.
Note though, Monsieur Aja, that I loved the Joe Dante original (which still swims about in the murky, nostalgia-laced deeps of my horror geek brain), so expectations will be high.
Oh, and one more thing: let’s have another original soon, eh?


Parting shot: A review of Geoul Sokeuro can be found in the Archive.

(Mirrors French OS courtesy of impawards.com; images courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com.)

FRONTIERE(S)
(Review)

And the French have done it again…

Xavier Gens’ Frontiere(s)—which brought him to the attention of Hollywood and got him the Hitman gig—follows a group of youths on the run from the police, who decide to stop at a hostel in the French countryside, with disastrous results.
Riffing freely off Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Gens’ splatterfest is a gruesome and sordid affair that puts Yasmine (Karina Testa) through the wringer in the worst way. If you thought Marilyn Burns had it rough in Chain Saw, think again.
Seriously. That was a cake walk.

Now, for those of you who’ve been to the Iguana before, you’ll know that I love me my horror with subtext.
Sadly (for me, at least), Frontiere(s) is more survival horror than anything else, one of those cinematic endurance tests for its prospective audience. The thing is, unlike Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension, which seemed to focus more on the thrill and the tension of the hunt, Frontiere(s) seems more preoccupied with revulsion and degradation than anything else.
On the level of a balls-to-the-wall piece of extreme horror, it certainly delivers, no question about it. It delivers in buckets of blood and gobbets of flesh. I just wish it had been about more than just a French variation of the “pretty young things in peril” scenario.
And to be fair, though the protagonists’ personalities are rather negligible here, the snatches of filial relationships within the family of crazies which we do get to see are fascinating, though those remain pretty much in the background.

Ultimately, Frontiere(s) is a nasty piece of work, and if you strap yourself in for that sort of ride, you’ll have a hell of a time with this one.
This is so much more effective than the recent slew of 70’s horror remakes from Hollywood, and just the latest reason why I will never, ever set foot in France, where the crazies really seem to be over-the-top wacko…

Parting shot: Frontiere(s) gets a limited U.S. release on May 9, 2008, and hits DVD shelves four days later on the 13th.

Parting shot 2: A review of Gens’ Hitman can be found in the Archive, as well as one of another gem of French disturbo-horror, Kim Chapiron's Sheitan.

(Frontier(s)—as per its international title—quad courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com; OS courtesy of impawards.com; images courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com.)

THE EYE
(Review)

First, a few words regarding my thoughts on the Pang Brothers’ original Khon Hen Phi.
Though it did have its moments, I have two main problems with it.
One: there were several stretches of the film where the tension was not quite at a level that could sustain the narrative and maintain my interest in the on-screen proceedings.
Two: that climax seemed rather jarring given all the largely low-key bits that had come before it. I always considered that sequence a little too Hollywood a capper for this otherwise very Asian horror film.
So it seemed rather appropriate that an English-language remake would spring into being. And though I was looking forward to it when Hideo Nakata’s name was floating around the property, it eventually fell into the laps of French directing duo, David Moreau and Xavier Palud. Now, their Ils (Them) grabbed enough of my attention to at the very least warrant my interest in their redux, so it was with, what I termed in my Ils review (located in the Archive), “a healthy sense of anticipation,” that I approached The Eye.
What I got was a mixed bag: though The Eye has, like its predecessor, some moments, and that Hollywood climax seems slightly more at home here, the problem of the narrative sustaining its own tension is, sadly, still evident.

Now, as I’d expected, both Alessandro Nivola (as Patrick Faulkner) and Parker Posey (as Helen Wells) carry their own weight here, though Posey flies in and out of the narrative pretty quickly. (Appropriately enough, she’s a stewardess.)
What came as a surprise is that Jessica Alba (as blind violinist Sydney Wells, whose cornea transplant suddenly gives her both normal, and second, sight) actually delivers a passably effective performance, probably the best I’ve seen from her.
Though she does miss a beat here and there, it’s still commendable that she’s clearly stretching here. So long as she steers clear of any future Fantastic Four malarkey, there could still be some hope for her.

It was, however, disappointing that Moreau and Palud couldn’t capture that same sense of tension they nailed in Ils.
I actually had the same reaction to Alexandre Aja’s follow-up to Haute Tension, his remake of The Hills Have Eyes, that it wasn’t as taut as his previous film. Of course, in both cases, the set-up for Ils and Haute Tension is such that the majority of the on-screen action—of the stalk and slay variety—occurs in a rather short amount of time.
Now, while in The Hills Have Eyes, the tension seemed to dissipate since it became spread out over a number of different characters, in The Eye, it ended up defused by the nature of the narrative itself.
There just doesn’t seem to be an adequate amount of atmosphere and suspense to tide the audience over and keep them on the edge, even during the slow bits.
I do however, give props to Patrick Lussier, whose editing, though not exactly brilliant, is quite effective in a number of spots.
Though having mentioned Lussier, I do have to mention something else.

There was talk that floated last year about re-shoots for The Eye that did not involve Moreau or Palud, and that in fact, Lussier was the man who came in to handle them.
It’s a distinct pain that this is becoming a frequent practice, particularly when the film is the first Hollywood project for a foreign director (it’s reportedly happened to the Pang Brothers’ The Messengers, Oliver Hirschbeigel’s The Invasion, and Xavier Gens’ Hitman, to name a few).
To be fair though, The Eye is certainly better than either The Messengers or Hitman. It’s also not as severely compromised as The Invasion. In point of fact, if the Frenchmen were indeed not involved with those re-shoots, then it isn’t plainly evident where those new bits are in the overall picture.
As far as the film’s stand-out moments go though, they don’t quite measure up to the original’s.

If it’s two things I took away from Khon Hen Phi, it was the long-tongued ghost licking obscenely at some meat (sadly gone in this version) and the floating elevator dude (present here, though I do recall finding the original’s take far creepier).
And though I did say the climax felt a little more at home here, this version of the sequence also went whole Hollywood hog with the idea, complete with incidental car chase. Also, as I recall, in Khon Hen Phi, there were some casualties. (Weren’t there? It has been awhile since I’ve seen it…)
Here, Sydney apparently gets everyone out alive.
Sure, this is post-9/11 America, but I suspect it’s really because of one thing: this is Hollywood, people, so the victories have to be grander, don’t they, the triumphs more complete and all-encompassing.
As it is, we’re lucky they still kept the “blessing in disguise” outcome, so the climactic victory still came at an apparent cost.

Ultimately, The Eye is an acceptable English-language remake, and though I can’t really say it’s significantly better than the original, neither is it particularly worse. All in all, a passable way to while away some time. On the heels of what Moreau and Palud achieved with Ils though, this is, admittedly, a bit of a let-down.

Parting shot: Reviews of Ils, both Fantastic Four installments, The Messengers, Hitman, and The Invasion can be found in the Archive.

(The Eye OS, banner, and image courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)

IN THE INTERESTS OF ALL THINGS RECYCLABLE (3)
GEOUL SOKEURO
(INTO THE MIRROR)

Though Haute Tension director Alexandre Aja has implied that his upcoming Mirrors is more re-imagining than remake, it still found its origins in Kim Sung-ho’s Geoul Sokeuro, so I figured why not make the return trip to the haunted (and awkwardly-named) Dreampia Department Store, and its multitude of mirrors which hide a frightening and fatal secret.

Looking back…

It’s been awhile since I last saw Geoul Sokeuro (Into The Mirror), and I’d somehow managed to forget what a fascinating hybrid it is, succeeding in taking several elements that sometimes prove to be disparate and contrary in other lesser films, and making them work hand-in-hand. Here, you’ll find the supernatural co-mingling with the psychological, while some corporate double-dealing is going on, all of these aspects functioning within what is ostensibly a police procedural.

Wu Yeong-min (Yu Ji-tae) is a former police officer who, following a fatal on-duty shooting incident, is now Security Chief for the about-to-re-open Dreampia Department Store. It’s a made-up post for Yeong-min, a disgruntled courtesy from his uncle, Jeong Il-seong (the ubiquitous Gi Ju-bong), who owns Dreampia.
But just as the young man is a troubled sort, so is his current place of employment. A fire, some injuries, a death; all of this a year past, yet cause for a picket line from family members seeking just compensation.
Now, what seems to be an apparent suicide of a Dreampia employee threatens the planned grand re-opening, though Officer Heo Hyeon-su (Sorum’s Kim Myeong-min) suspects otherwise. And while we, the audience, also know it wasn’t suicide—this is the effective opening sequence of the film—we also know it isn’t as simple as the suspected serial killer.

Writer/director Kim Sung-ho takes this fairly straight-forward set-up, peoples it with borderline stock characters (the troubled, disgraced cop; the greedy businessman), and then proceeds to take the narrative down some rather interesting avenues. With a script stuffed to the brim with fascinating notions, and which remains constantly aware of the thematic and narrative possibilities of its central image, Kim assembles a movie that is decidedly and defiantly not in the vengeful, long-haired contortionist ghost School of Asian Horror.
Kim is also cognizant of the visual possibilities, so, given that the film delves into the nature of mirrors and reflections, we have a whole lot of symmetrical shots and doubling, with a load of sleight-of-hand, computer-assisted mirror trickery, and naturally, twins.

What’s also interesting about Geoul Sokeuro, I feel, is that it’s arguably a tad too cerebral to be as scary as, say, a Ringu or a Ju-on, that it is, perhaps, far more interested in constructing a sense of mystery than scaring the living daylights out of its audience.
Though that may very well be the case, what does stick after a viewing of the film, is the disturbing nature of mirrors, of just exactly who—and what—is reflected there. For my money, that’s a far more potent legacy than some transitory jump scares.
Admittedly, the nearly two-hour running time, coupled with its purposeful pace, may make Geoul Sokeuro seem longish and slow to some, but as I pointed out, this isn’t your average Asian horror film.
So if you’re open to something different from the scene, Geoul Sokeuro has got all of that going for it, and it’s got a climactic death scene which is not only thematically apropos, it’s also worthy of Argento.
What else do I need to say?

Since then…

Yu Ji-tae has been in a number of movies since Geoul Sokeuro, though most film geeks will recognize him from Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy and Chinjeolhan Geumjassi (Sympathy For Lady Vengeance).
Meanwhile, Kim Sung-ho went on to direct a segment in the omnibus film Nunbushin Haru (One Shining Day). Commissioned for the 60th anniversary of Korea’s liberation, Numbushin Haru’s narratives dealt indirectly with the relationship between Korea and Japan.

Looking forward…

In a ShockTillYouDrop.com interview, Alexandre Aja said this of his upcoming remake/reimagining: “I think we all have a special relationship [with] mirrors. The idea was to really find a way to make a movie that will change a way of watching yourself in the mirror and try to do something scary. I wanted to do something that falls in line with The Shining—that's my favorite movie ever. For me, when New Regency came to me with the concept of Mirrors, I felt like I could try to explore something in the vein of The Shining. Greg [Levasseur] and I decided to start from scratch and not connect with the original Korean movie. I think we have something really scary."
He also went on to say that his initial director’s cut was "very graphic" and "takes the shocking gore and violence of survival horror and applies that to the supernatural thriller. I'm happy with the movie we made and in our genre you have to be tough and not make compromises. A lot of times you're asked to pare back and trim down the gore, but I'm fighting to keep it in—to make the movie I want to see as a core audience member."

Sounds promising.
And given that I’m a big fan of most everything in Haute Tension, except for that needless climactic plot flip, and I felt that Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes remake lacked the unbearably taut thrills of his previous outing, I’m still in the market for that Aja film that will completely and utterly kick my a$$.
Here’s hoping Mirrors will be it. (And if it isn’t, there’s always his next project, his remake of Joe Dante’s Piranha…)
Aja’s Mirrors stars Kiefer Sutherland, Amy Smart, and Jason Flemyng.

(Geoul Sokeuro OS courtesy of film.gildia.pl; Into The Mirror DVD cover art [2-disc UK release] courtesy of amazon.co.uk.)

THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2 (Review)

It’s some two years after the events of Alexandre Aja’s remake of The Hills Have Eyes, and it seems that the military have been conducting sweeps of Sector 16 apparently without finding any of the cannibalistic mutants that roam the area. They’ve just recently wired the place with surveillance and monitoring equipment, and a detachment of National Guard trainees are sent in on a delivery run, routine grunt work that turns deadly when the blood starts to flow.

Directed by Martin Weisz (Rohtenburg) and written by original Hills writer/director Wes Craven, and his son Jonathan, this sequel feels like nothing so much as a quickie cash cow, slapped together to rake in the dough. Populated by a bunch of dull ciphers, the film strides nonchalantly towards the climactic gorefest with nary a spike of excitement or tension to break the tedium.
I may not by the biggest fan of Aja’s Hills, but at the very least, that had this palpable sense of bleak desperation, where you could almost feel the heat and the grit and the sand. Wiesz’s Hills 2 is a pedestrian entry in the annals of modern horror cinema, the sort of shocker that really has no proper context in which to view the onscreen bloodletting. All we have here is a gruesome exercise in the torture and maiming of characters as we watch dully while they’re picked off one by one.
There’s a half-hearted attempt to humanize one Guard, Missy Martinez (One Tree Hill’s Daniella Alonso), but that doesn’t really hold water, so ultimately, all we have here is meat, pure and simple, waiting to be stalked and gutted. (And in the case of Flex Alexander’s Sarge, you’re almost praying for it.)
We’re not even treated to the demise of recognizable TV stars like the usual horror movie of today (the House of Wax remake alone had alumni from 24, Gilmore Girls, and One Tree Hill, with Paris Hilton thrown in for good measure). The ultimate anonymity of these soon-to-be-dead-and-defiled Guards (and by extension, this film) is assured.

Writer Ed Gorman once described Craven’s original The Hills Have Eyes as “… an existentialist’s notion of a Saturday matinee,” while film critic Steven H. Scheuer considered it “… a serious attempt at social criticism within the horror genre.”
I haven’t seen the movie in ages (viewed in an after-school screening at a friend’s house during the glorious age of the Betamax), but I do recall my reaction: it was a riveting experience, and ultimately unpleasant, a bleak, nihilistic film that got under one’s skin, or like desert sand into the creases and crevices of one’s body. (Of course, at the time, I had no idea what the word “nihilistic” meant; I just knew it wasn’t a “fun” horror movie.)
And though it was the sort of movie that I wasn’t particularly eager to view repeatedly, it left a mark. It was potent low-budget cinema, that, like Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre before it, looked and felt awfully real, like some hellish documentary directed by an Inquisition torturer.
Thus, though Aja’s remake was certainly a passable example of today’s brand of extreme horror, it still felt fake compared to the original.
Weisz’s sequel feels even less genuine, mostly because it doesn’t really sink its claws into the audience. It just kind of presents the situation without placing us in the middle of the action. The experience is like watching Top Chef, or Hell’s Kitchen; you can see the food, but you can’t taste it. You just have to take the judges’ word for its edibility.

So how do I know The Hills Have Eyes 2 is a good horror movie? Because Martin Weisz and Wes Craven told me so.

Parting shot: Incidentally enough, I was also disappointed by Craven’s own sequel, 1985‘s The Hills Have Eyes Part II. Weisz’s version, though co-written by Craven, tells a different story, as this one spins off from Aja’s Hills, which made the idea that the cannibals were mutated by atomic testing—only implied in Craven’s original—explicit, by setting the action in Sector 16.

(Original The Hills Have Eyes 2 OS rejected by the MPAA, courtesy of eatmybrains.com.)