¡QUÉ HORROR! 2012
Candidate # 8

SNOWTOWN
(May 2011)


As a feature debut, Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown--which chronicles the crossing of the paths of “Australia’s worst serial killer,” John Justin Bunting, and young James Spyridon Vlassakis--is an astoundingly self-assured piece that is a particularly difficult cinematic experience to sit through.
And I mean that in the best possible way.
This one has a profound sense of disquiet and unease that permeates its nearly two-hour running time, with riveting central performances by Daniel Henshall as Bunting, and Lucas Pittaway as Jamie Vlassakis. The fact that this is Pittaway’s acting debut (he was spotted at a shopping center and asked to audition for the role) makes his on-screen achievement even more noteworthy.
Fair warning though, as I said earlier, this one’s tough to get through, but what Kurzel manages to capture here is a level of disturbing that many straight-forward horror films never even come close to.

Parting shot: Snowtown will be known during its US release as The Snowtown Murders, actually the title of one of the books Snowtown’s script was inspired by.


(Snowtown OS’ courtesy of impawards.com)

LONG WEEKEND
(Review)


I made mention of an eco-horror double feature comprised of Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter and Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth in my review of Fessenden’s film (which slumbers in the Archive).
Now, I’ve found a film I can wholeheartedly place alongside that pair for a chilling eco-horror troika.
That would be Jamie Blanks’ remake of Long Weekend.*


Though I’ve yet to have the opportunity to see Colin Eggleston’s 1978 original, Blanks’ redo sticks to the premise of a couple on a weekend getaway, who find themselves at the cruel mercies of nature. (The remake is still written by Everett De Roche, who penned the original and who had worked with Blanks previously on Storm Warning.)
This time out, it’s Jim Caviezel and Claudia Karvan (soon to be seen in the upcoming Spierig Brothers’ Daybreakers) as Peter and Carla, a married couple whose relationship is clearly in dire straits when we join them as they prepare for the eponymous getaway.
The bitterness and recrimination is so palpable, even when it’s submerged, you can’t help but wonder what they saw in each other in the first place. There must have been love at some point; they’ve got the wedding bands to prove it, after all. You just can’t really see it these days.
And by the time the reasons for their estrangement are revealed to us, not only is it too late for their marriage, it’s quite possibly also too late for their lives as well.


Even as it chronicles the final death throes of a relationship gone horribly toxic, the film also shows in no uncertain terms, the callousness and presumption with which we, as a species, treat our planet.
The fact that Peter is a “self-centred prick” (as Carla calls him at one point in the film)—or, as I prefer to think of it, just a plain old flaming a$hole—is cold comfort when his actions (and Carla’s as well, for that matter) probably happen every single day, in some part of the world.
It’s interesting to note that these actions come from two different places. In Peter’s case, they’re done out of complete disregard for anything else other than himself. In Carla’s case, it’s out of an innate dislike and distrust of the outdoors.
It’s always a telling point to observe a person once they’re taken out of the confines and comfort of civilization and made to rough it. That’s when you can tell the stuff a person’s really made of.


I should stress at this point that this is not an “animals attack” sort of film (though there is that in the mix; and one must never forget that De Roche also scripted the “giant pig in the Outback” extravaganza that was Russell Mulcahy’s Razorback); Blanks’ Long Weekend is more about mood and atmosphere and good old fashioned creepiness.
In fact, aside from that eco-horror troika, I will also place Long Weekend squarely beside such venerable titles in the Creepy-a$$ Aussie Film Library as Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave. If anything, Blanks’ remake has made me even more curious to see Eggleston’s original.


Here, Blanks and De Roche focus on the fear of the unknown, of what’s out there, beyond the campfire’s glow and the headlights stabbing off into the deep, primeval night.
It’s about how so many things in our world are plainly beyond our understanding and our control.
At one point in the film, Peter points out to Carla that not everyone is afraid of nature.
Well, if Long Weekend is anything to go by, maybe we should be.
And if “fear” is too strong a word and emotion, then perhaps a healthy sense of respect will do.
Given the current state of our planet, it’s long overdue.

* In the U.S., Long Weekend has been retitled Nature’s Grave, as evidenced by the rather horrid DVD cover art below.


Parting shot: In the interests of full disclosure, there are a couple of skeletons in Blanks’ cinematic closet.
Primarily, there’s Valentine, and to a lesser extent, Urban Legend.
Urban Legend had a couple of passably effective sequences, but as a whole, wasn’t really that distinguished a title. Valentine, on the other hand, was just plain dreadful.
Though I’ve yet to see Storm Warning (which I understand may well be worth a look), I can safely say Long Weekend clears Blanks’ slate of its past blemishes.

(Long Weekend OS courtesy of impawards.com; Nature’s Grave DVD cover art courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com; some images courtesy of outnow.ch.)

FRINGE
Season 1 Episode 1
Pilot
Written by J.J. Abrams & Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci
Directed by Alex Graves
(WARNING: SPOILERS)

When Fringe was first announced by the trades, I had a number of reservations:
One: though J.J. Abrams’ name was attached, I can’t say I love everything he’s worked on.
If you’ve visited the Iguana before, you may know that I’m a big Lost fan, and I was also a fan of Felicity. And Cloverfield was brilliant.
But I never got into Alias, and I wasn’t that thrilled with Mission: Impossible III either.
Two: the other writer/producers announced were Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, whose scripts for M:i:III and Transformers didn’t inspire much confidence.
Three: the supreme hurdle for the show, as far as I was concerned—the premise sounded terribly X-Files-ish.

So how could the show get out from under that daunting shadow? And could the Pilot, at the very least, win this X-phile over?
I think I’d have to say the answer is a qualified “Yes.”


First off, the Pilot has a very effective pace, keeping the narrative engine going at a fast clip, while allowing time for involving character bits.
We have FBI Special Agent Olivia Dunham (Australian actress Anna Torv), whose very personal stake in the preliminary case is telegraphed well, her desperation and anxiety palpable without being overpowering.
Then there are the father and son issues between underachieving genius (IQ 190) Peter Bishop (Dawson’s Creek’s Joshua Jackson) and his mentally unstable father Walter (played most excellently by mad King Denethor himself, John Noble, incidentally also Australian).
Oh, and the case—which will require the expertise of the elder Bishop, institutionalized nearly two decades ago, and the younger Bishop, who must serve as his father’s guardian—involves the very messy deaths of all the passengers and crew on an international flight which lands at Boston’s Logan Airport on auto pilot. (I was hoping it would be an Oceanic flight, but alas, no such luck…)

Is there, perhaps, a smidgen of convenience in the speed at which matters are expedited on the Pilot? Maybe.
But I’ll let it slide, as it is, quite literally, a life-or-death situation, and the fact remains that the Pilot never drags, and it’s a great opener that’s got the thrills, the laughs, and the requisite Abrams air of mystery to make it eminently watchable.


Clearly, this is the first Orci-Kurtzman script that’s kept me attentive and absorbed, and all involved lucked out with their casting of Noble as the certified (and certifiable) genius.
Noble delivers a portrait of tragic intelligence, laced with an unnerving air of potential lunacy, the kind of brilliance fueled by an unfettered mind. And what is more freeing, after all, than insanity?
Plus, Walter gets the best lines, and Noble delivers them with a grand, understated flourish. (The LSD bit is priceless.)

If there’s anyone in the cast who still hasn’t completely won me over by the Pilot’s end, it’s Jackson, who, unlike Noble, doesn’t quite emanate “genius” (unstable or otherwise) from his acting pores. Sorry, but at the moment, Peter just doesn’t seem to scream “190 IQ.”
We’ll see though. Still early in the game…


Getting back to the pluses, the mystery throughline for the show—“the Pattern”—is introduced effectively in the Pilot, a hook which is central to Fringe’s viral marketing, complete with the show’s catchphrase: Find the Pattern.
There’s also a megacorporation—Massive Dynamic (“Your World Is Our World.”)—that figures into the narrative goings-on, has a connection to the elder Bishop’s past, and whose motivations are, to say the least, shadowy.
Oh, and their equivalent of the on-screen text to establish setting (ala X-Files) is a neat visual which takes a page from Heroes’ chapter titles. (I particularly love the bit in Iraq.)

Now, all indications seem to point to the show being more episodic, as opposed to the heavily serialized nature of Lost.
Given though that there is “the Pattern” to contend with, I imagine Fringe may follow the lead of—and yet again, the comparison arises—The X-Files, which was largely episodic in nature, with the mythology episodes popping up over the course of its run.
Or, perhaps the template here will be more akin to Alias, as I can’t imagine Fringe will have out-and-out comedic episodes as The X-Files did.


Regardless, the show owes much to Chris Carter’s pioneering work, as well as all the test driving the post-X-Files shows of this stripe managed over the intervening years.
While it understandably took stretches of The X-Files’ freshman season for all involved to work the kinks out of the show (after all, there wasn’t really any precedent as far as the kind of series it was aiming to be), the Fringe Pilot is pretty much a fully-formed, ably constructed entity.
Not as audaciously slap-in-the-face as, say, the Lost Pilot, or, going back further, Twin Peaks’ opening salvo, mind, but effective and involving nonetheless.

So consider me hopeful and strapped in for the ride, though I will admit to still having some reservations about the upcoming experience.
Colour me cautiously optimistic over this one.


(Images courtesy of impawards.com [Fringe OS, design by FOX IN], latimes.com, tvweek.com, fringetv.blogspot.com, and fringetelevision.com.)

LOST
Season 4 Episode 9
“The Shape of Things To Come”
Written by Brian K. Vaughan & Drew Goddard
Directed by Jack Bender
(WARNING: SPOILERS)

“I know who you are... what you are. I know that everything you have you took from me.”
-- Charles Widmore to Ben

Okay, this was a pretty moving installment, the first post-strike episode following the 6-week break, so let’s kick off from the Island, shall we?

The doctor from the freighter washes ashore, dead, so a plan is cooked up to fix the NaomiPhone just enough so that they can communicate through Morse code; Daniel plays electronics dude, in the absence of Sayid.
But when Daniel does send the query out regarding the doctor, he says the reply is that the helicopter will be by in the morning.
Turns out though that Bernard knows Morse, and says the reply was actually, What are you talking about? The doctor’s fine. (Hmmmm.)
So this blatant lie pisses Jack off, and he asks Daniel straight out, Were you ever supposed to take us off this Island?
And Daniel says, No. (And I’m going, F*cker! You knew about the “find Ben then kill everyone else” plan? I gave you the benefit of the doubt, Danny-boy! F*cker!)
At that point, it just killed me to see Jack as the realization sinks in that using the NaomiPhone was a monumental mistake, just as Locke had warned…
Poor Jack…

Meanwhile, the people who shot both Rousseau and Karl take Alex to the fence and have her disarm it. (So they really are Widmore’s people, and it wasn’t some evil Ben scheme to get rid of the other two people in Alex’s life… Again, sorry, dude.)
But disarming the fence triggers an alarm, which makes a phone in Ben’s house ring, the call interrupting the game of Risk currently underway (where “Australia’s the key to the whole game”; hrrrmmm). When Locke asks Ben about the recorded message (Code 14-J?), Ben says they need to hunker down at his place.
But Claire is over at her house, so Sawyer goes over there. (Locke is about go with Sawyer, when Ben says, You stay by me, because then you’ll be safe. They won’t harm me, and I need you safe because we have to get to Jacob’s cabin together. Locke later on says, But I can’t even find the cabin. Ben replies, But Hugo can.)
As Sawyer makes his way to Claire’s place, three 815 sock puppets are shot. Some bastard then blasts Claire’s house, and I’m going, Bastard! Claire can’t die! Not like that!
Sawyer searches the flaming wreckage, and finds Claire, alive. (Whew. That future Desmond flash—Claire and Aaron getting on a helicopter—has to happen…)
Sawyer carries her to Ben’s house, and Hurley has to break a window for Sawyer and Claire to get inside. (Ben’s already barricaded the door and refuses to open it.)

Within, a debate immediately explodes between Sawyer and Locke, about just tossing Ben over to the invaders, a discussion that’s interrupted by the doorbell.
It’s Miles at the door, with a walkie for Ben. They want to talk, Miles says. They have your daughter.
Ben then talks with one of the goons that we saw on the freighter, Martin Keamy (Kevin Durand, who played half-man, half-dog Joshua on Dark Angel, and Ashton Kutcher’s cellmate Carlos in The Butterfly Effect; he’ll also be seen as Gabriel in Scott Charles Stewart’s upcoming angel smackdown Legion, as well as the Blob in the Wolverine spin-off film), who takes Alex out and threatens to shoot her if Ben doesn’t surrender. Ben makes a counter-proposal, but Keamy says, You’ve got 10 seconds, or I shoot your daughter.
Ben says, She’s not my daughter. I stole her from an insane woman when she was a baby. She’s a pawn, nothing more. She means nothing to me.
BANG.
Alex dies, and seriously, for the first time, I felt sorry for Ben. There’s a look of complete devastation as he stares out the window at his dead adoptive daughter, and he says, He changed the rules. (And I go, What? Is this really just a massive chess game to Ben and Widmore?)

Once Ben gets himself together, he enters some secret chamber (locking everyone else out), and when he emerges, he says, When I give the signal, we’re all going to run to the treeline. (Oh, by the way, Claire’s apparently fine.)
Hurley says, What? Towards the guys with guns?
Ben says, Oh, no. We want to stay as far away from them as possible.
Just then, the house starts to shake, like there’s an earthquake, and when they look out the windows, we see Smokey, making its locomotive noises, as it starts attacking the invaders!
Everyone then runs for the treeline, except for Ben, who says he has to say goodbye to his daughter. (And his moment at dead Alex’s side is such a sad, sad moment. I hate Vaughan and Goddard for making me feel for the monster that is Ben…)

When Ben catches up with Locke and company, Locke says he’s sorry that Alex died. He also calls Ben out on the lie (that he didn’t know what Smokey was).
Ben says, You can ask Jacob what it is when we get to the cabin. (Sigh.)
Sawyer says, Screw that. I’m going to the beach and I’m taking Claire and Hurley with me. Locke pulls out a gun and says, Hugo stays with us.
Sawyer says, No way, and pulls out his gun.
Hurley says, Put down your guns. It’s okay. I’ll go with Locke.
Sawyer doesn’t like that one bit, and warns Locke, You harm so much as one hair on his curly head, I’ll kill you. (Another fantastic moment in this episode, as Sawyer clearly displays his protectiveness over Hurley; earlier on, of course, it was with Claire.)
So Sawyer, Claire, Aaron, and Miles head off to the beach, while Locke, Ben, and Hurley are off to find Jacob’s cabin.

Onward ho, flashforward (though we don’t know that right off.)
Ben finds himself in the Sahara Desert, his arm wounded, in a fleece-lined Dharma jacket (that doesn’t look at all like it was made for desert wear). He then goes into deadly bad-a$$ mode as he kills two armed Bedouins and takes a horse to presumably get to civilization.
We next see him at a hotel, where he checks in under the preferred guest name, “Dean Moriarty.”
He then makes it a point to inquire about the date, and that’s when we find out it’s October 24, 2005, and we’re in a flashforward. (Note that Ben makes it a point to confirm the year, as if, well, he wanted to make sure he was in 2005, and why do you think he’d want to do that? Hrrrm…)
He also sees on the TV, a newsbit about Sayid attending the funeral of his wife! (And the reason why Sayid ended up working for Ben begins to crystallize…)

As it turns out, Sayid found Nadia, only to have her die on him, and according to Ben, the man who killed Nadia was working for Charles Widmore. (He also claims that he used Des’ boat to get off the Island, but that smells fishy…)
Later on, it looks like Ben is tailing the purported Widmore assassin, and it looks like the assassin has just caught Ben, but of course, it’s all a set-up, and Sayid shoots his a$$ dead, till the gun is empty.
Ben then walks away, but Sayid stops him. Ben says, It’s over, Sayid. Walk away and mourn your loss. This isn’t your war.
Sayid says, I spent 8 years looking for the woman I loved and I found her, and these people took her away from me. This is my war too…
(And I’m going, Dammit! Sayid asked for it. Then I think, Oh, no, don’t let this be some despicable manipulation on Ben’s part. Not when I actually felt sorry for him for the first time, ever.)
Ben says, Don’t let your despair turn into anger because it’ll never leave you then. I speak from experience.
(And I’m thinking, Oh please, please mean what you’re saying…)
But Sayid wants to join the war, and asks, Who’s next?
Ben then says, I’ll be in touch, and walks away, and I’m going, Don’t smile. Don’t smile. Don’t—F*cker!
The smug, evil bastard smiled. He played Sayid (and me) like a second-hand fiddle. (And I hate Vaughan and Goddard even more for pulling off these astonishing reversals.)

We then close with a coda in London, as Ben makes his way to Widmore’s digs.
It’s a great face-to-face between these adversaries during which we are made to understand that Widmore believes the Island is his, and that Ben merely usurped it from him.
Widmore asks, Are you here to kill me, Benjamin?
And Ben says, We both know I can’t do that.
Ben then says, But you killed my daughter.
Widmore says, Don’t pretend to be the victim here. You killed your daughter. (And I can only assume he meant, You killed her by not just surrendering when you could have.)
Widmore then asks, So if you’re not here to kill me, what are you here for?
Ben says, I’m here to tell you I’m going to kill your daughter (a very audible gasp from yours truly). “Penny,” is it? I’m going to kill her and then you’ll understand what I feel like and regret changing the rules.
And Ben walks away.

F*cker.

Okay, explosive episode which pretty much turns on the astonishing reversals Vaughan and Goddard pull off, by toying with the audience’s emotions toward Ben.
And of course, now that it’s made clear that Ben is targeting Penny, it’s even more evil, the position the writers have put us in.
On the one hand, we can completely see Ben’s side of it, in that he truly did care for Alex, and since Widmore took his daughter away, it would only be fair that he deprive Widmore of his daughter.
But that daughter is Penny, dammit!
Penny!!!

Then there’s an ill-attired Ben popping up in the Sahara, asking what year it is.
So is there actual physical time-traveling going on in the Lost-verse, or did Ben teleport from someplace else, and just wanted to ensure he hadn’t also inadvertently moved through time?
And poor Sayid, whose happy ending with Nadia was so cruelly taken away off-screen, and who was manipulated so coldly into becoming Ben’s Crying Freeman…

And there better not be any long-term damage from that house explosion Claire found herself in…
I mean, is it just me, or was her survival a little… miraculous? That house was decimated…

COUNTDOWN: 39.

(Images courtesy of ABC, variety.com, and ew.com [images 3 & 4].)

AFTERTHOUGHTS (42)

42.1 WHO CRUSHED THE JUSTICE LEAGUE?!
So how all-mighty is the Writers Guild? They’ve already reduced the recently concluded Golden Globes night to a whimpering, awkward mess, and now, they’ve just whupped the collective a$$ of the world’s greatest superheroes.
Is that scarier than Darkseid, or what?

As of January 16, Wednesday, George Miller’s Justice League film adaptation is on “indefinite hold,” this confirmed by Warner Bros., and reported by Variety.
The studio has also allowed the options on the cast chosen by Miller to lapse, leaving them free to take on other projects, though the studio did inform the actors that they are “determined to make the film with them in it.”
To be completely fair though, aside from admitting that the present script could “benefit from a little more work” (impossible at the moment due to the WGA strike), there was also the matter of tax breaks, or some such financial gobbledygook, as the reasons for the project’s failure to be greenlit.

Of course, the Australian government has already made this subsequent statement: “We understand the postponement of filming is absolutely confined to creative issues and especially to delays in refining the script due to the writers’ strike,” this, from a spokeswoman for arts minister Peter Garrett. (Naturally, they’d say that. I mean, who wants to be keeping company with the likes of Lex Luthor and the Joker, right?)
This has shed some light on the whole “let’s film in Australia” deal, at any rate, as it seems like WB was going for some sort of Aussie quota, to get that 40% rebate. (And some people wondered why Australian model Megan Gale was in the mix…)

Whatever the case may be regarding all that money talk though, the production of the Justice League film could begin, at the earliest, in late summer or early fall (provided the WGA strike is resolved soon).
All of which leaves WB, for the time being, without a superhero tentpole for 2009 (one of the main reasons why they were so hot to get Justice League in gear in the first place).
There still hasn’t been any movement or official word regarding Bryan Singer’s next project following the Tom Cruise-starrer Valkyrie. It’s still unclear whether his next film will indeed be the previously reported The Mayor of Castro Street, as Gus Van Sant’s Milk (also about slain San Francisco mayor Harvey Milk) is supposedly still an active proposition. If Castro Street stalls, then Singer could get serious about The Man of Steel again.
But there’s a whole lotta “ifs” in there.

Which leaves me a sad little camper at the moment. If there wasn’t gonna be any Man of Steel in ’09, then I could at least have looked forward to Miller’s take on the League.
Right now though, things are so up in the air, it isn’t even funny.

42.2 BUT THEN AGAIN…
On the other side of the coin though, with NBC searching high and low for fresh programming in this lean, struck TV season, the network has indicated to the SciFi Channel to take the Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica, off the limbo shelf for a serious second look, to determine whether it should be greenlit for production.
After all, there is a complete script ready to go.
And we, of the BSG faithful, are keenly aware of the final 20 episodes before we will be forced to bid adieu to the crew of the Galactica, so maybe a little love in this lean, struck TV season could be a good thing, yes?

42.3 AND SPEAKING OF A LITTLE LOVE…
So word has come down the pike that the DGA and the AMPTP have signed on the dotted lines, which, hopefully, will encourage negotiations with the WGA to be rekindled.
Variety’s got extensive coverage of the DGA deal, and you can go here (“DGA makes big gains in new media”) for a lotta numbers and mathematical whatchamahoozies outlining the agreement, here (“Industry reacts to DGA deal”) for, well, industry reactions to the agreement, and here (“Showrunners showing enthusiasm”) for, uhhh, showrunners’ reactions to the deal.
In that article is the following passage:

“Meanwhile, should a deal [with the WGA] be hammered out within the next month, network and studio insiders have said that portions of this TV season—as well as pilot season—could still be salvaged.
“It would be on a case-by-case basis. Some series could power back up relatively quickly and churn out at least a few more episodes this year, if not an entire back nine order.”

So here’s hoping, right?
I mean, come on, the fate of the Justice League depends on it!

(JLA artwork by Ariel Olivetti, courtesy of upperdeck.com; Battlestar Galactica image courtesy of scifi.com.)