A Rundown of the 13 Best Horror Movies I've Seen in the Past Year

[4 of 13]

THE PURGE

(May 2013)

America. 2022.

Unemployment is at 1%.
Crime is at an all-time low.

Violence barely exists.

With one exception…

That exception is The Annual Purge, a 12-hour orgy of chaos and destruction sanctioned by the U.S Government, during which “… any and all crime, including murder, [is] legal.”

The thinking here is, if you can just keep all that rage and all those violent tendencies bottled up inside yourself for 364 days, then you’ll have the Purge in which to vent all of it without any legal repercussions whatsoever.

Hate your boss? That bullying head cheerleader? Your wife who cheated on you with your best friend? The barber who gave you that sadass haircut?

There’s always the Purge…

Brought to us by James DeMonaco (who co-wrote Skinwalkers, of which I must admit, I was not a fan), The Purge is a hard-hitting, tense little exercise in cautionary horror that manages to give one pause to consider the nature of violence and the costs of a “stable” form of governance.

99 out of every 100 people may have a job, but this is a world where doing the right thing just makes you an idiot who brings down grief on the heads of those you care about, as well as your own, a world where anyone killed during the Purge is considered a “sacrifice to make [America] a safer place.”

Of ¡Qué horror! note: Rhys Wakefield, as the “Polite Leader,” plays an even bigger douchebag here than he did in last year’s ¡Qué horror! title, +1.

Lena Headey (familiar to ¡Qué horror! territory due to The Brøken) is also in this one, though sadly, she does not get to deploy any of her Many Bitch Faces of Cersei Lannister here. And as we all know, she’s a bloody expert at those…

Ah, well.

Can’t win ‘em all…

“Blessed be the New Founding Fathers for letting us Purge and cleanse our souls, Blessed be America, a nation reborn.”

Parting Shot: Reviews of The Brøken and +1 can be found lurking in the Archives.

(The Purge OS’ courtesy of impawards.com)

¡Qué horror! 2014

Candidate #1

THE PURGE

(May 2013)

America. 2022.

Unemployment is at 1%.
Crime is at an all-time low.

Violence barely exists.

With one exception…

That exception is The Annual Purge, a 12-hour orgy of chaos and destruction sanctioned by the U.S Government, during which “… any and all crime, including murder, [is] legal.”

The thinking here is, if you can just keep all that rage and all those violent tendencies bottled up inside yourself for 364 days, then you’ll have the Purge in which to vent all of it without any legal repercussions whatsoever.

Hate your boss? That bullying head cheerleader? Your wife who cheated on you with your best friend? The barber who gave you that sadass haircut?

There’s always the Purge…

Brought to us by James DeMonaco (who co-wrote Skinwalkers, of which I must admit, I was not a fan), The Purge is a hard-hitting, tense little exercise in cautionary horror that manages to give one pause to consider the nature of violence and the costs of a “stable” form of governance.

99 out of every 100 people may have a job, but this is a world where doing the right thing just makes you an idiot who brings down grief on the heads of those you care about, as well as your own, a world where anyone killed during the Purge is considered a “sacrifice to make [America] a safer place.”

Of ¡Qué horror! note: Rhys Wakefield, as the “Polite Leader,” plays an even bigger douchebag here than he did in last year’s ¡Qué horror! title, +1.

Lena Headey (familiar to ¡Qué horror! territory due to The Brøken) is also in this one, though sadly, she does not get to deploy any of her Many Bitch Faces of Cersei Lannister here. And as we all know, she’s a bloody expert at those…

Ah, well.

Can’t win ‘em all…

“Blessed be the New Founding Fathers for letting us Purge and cleanse our souls, Blessed be America, a nation reborn.”

Parting Shot: Reviews of The Brøken and +1 can be found lurking in the Archives.

(The Purge OS’ courtesy of impawards.com)

THE BRØKEN
(Review)


Now, given that great horror movie moment in Cashback (review in Archive), I was stoked to hear that Sean Ellis was taking on some weird sh!t in his follow-up, The Brøken.
Ask yourself this: what if, one day, you were to see yourself drive past you in your own car? What would you do?
It’s a situation radiologist Gina McVey (Lena Headey) finds herself faced with in The Brøken, and her response to this phenomenon is the lynchpin which drives this excellent and chilling sophomore feature from Ellis.


The questions are obvious: is this actually happening in objective reality, and if so, what is its nature? Or is Gina just plain nutters?
Since The Brøken is the sort of film best seen knowing as little as possible about it beforehand, I won’t go any further beyond saying that though we do see the nature of the bizarre goings-on as the film unspools, there are no real verbal expository bits, which we usually see in Hollywood horror; note how The Ring works out how to properly explain what we’re seeing on the screen, while Ringu pretty much just goes for the atmosphere and the scares, without really belabouring the whys and wherefores.
So, while we do get a sense of the nature and mechanics of the horror here, there is no grand underscoring, which, in this case, makes the end result—as with Ringu—that much more effective.


Ellis reunites with some significant Cashback personnel like Angus Hudson (cinematographer), Scott Thomas* (editor), and Guy Farley (composer), to brilliant effect, presenting us with a tight, elegantly constructed chiller.
Aside from being a great piece of horror cinema, The Brøken also plays—curiously enough—like an indictment of two recent films, both remakes, both reviewed here at the Iguana.
I won’t mention which films those are, of course, so as to keep The Brøken’s central premise a mystery—you’ll know them anyway once you’ve seen what Ellis has achieved here.
Ellis succeeds in doing, with a tremendous and confident flourish, what those films so clearly failed to do: present us with an involving, creepy, and ultimately disconcerting narrative that plays on certain common fears.
Check out The Brøken, and witness the continued growth of writer/director Sean Ellis, a bright new star in the British cinematic firmament.


* It should be noted that Thomas was also the editor on Philip Ridley’s excellent The Reflecting Skin.

Parting shot: Though nominated at Sitges 2008 for Best Film, The Brøken ultimately lost to Jennifer Lynch’s Surveillance. (Hudson, however, did win for Best Cinematography.)

Parting shot 2: It’s interesting to note that Rick Astley (and I’m assuming this is the Rick Astley) is sent off “A Special Thank You” in the end credits.
Hurm…


(The Brøken OS and images courtesy of beyondhollywood.com.)

TV WATCH 2007 (4)
Odds & Ends

There were a couple of other new Pilots I also got to see aside from the three I’ve already reviewed (Chuck, Reaper, and Pushing Daisies: see TV Watch 2007 1-3 in Archive: August 2007) that I thought I should at least mention and give some of my reactions to.

Bionic Woman
Coming from Battlestar Galactica producer David Eick, I was hoping this would kick my a$$ something fierce. Sadly though, it doesn’t really get moving in any exciting and significant way.
And though it is nice to see Katee Sackhoff as some other character besides Starbuck (and there’s also a cameo from another BSG alum), there isn’t anything here that we haven’t seen before.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles (SPOILERS)
This Terminator spin-off is marginally better than Bionic Woman, though not by much.
Picking up after the events in T2, this one also doesn’t get very exciting. One of the few commendable things about this Pilot though, is Thomas Dekker, who used to play Zach on Heroes. Even back then, he showed he was an excellent young actor, and that is no different here.
Sadly, Lena Headey’s Sarah Connor just doesn’t register the way Linda Hamilton did in T2. I’m not sure if it’s because Headey’s performance isn’t as powerful as the one she gave in 300, or if Hamilton just really nailed the character’s transformation into shotgun-toting, kicka$$ momma in T2. Maybe it’s a little of both.
And Summer Glau’s teen Terminatrix is passably interesting, but if there isn’t some future romantic subplot between her and John Connor (it’s the ultimate Romeo and Juliet scenario!), the whole emotionless killing machine thing could get old really, really quickly. (And isn’t this just a variation of what she already did on Serenity?)
At the moment, Dekker is far too good for this show, so it better shape up as the season unfolds.

(Bionic Woman images courtesy of nbc, nymag.com, and scifiblog.net; Sarah Connor Chronicles images courtesy of fox, seattlepi.com, starburst, and myweb.tiscali.co.uk.)

CASHBACK
(Review)

At the 2005 Oscars, when Martin McDonagh‘s “Six Shooter“ won the Award for Best Short Film, there were a couple of other interesting nominees, but the one that really stayed with me though, was Sean Ellis’ “Cashback,” about an employee at an all-night grocery, whose coping mechanism for the boredom of his job is to imagine he can stop time, and walk about, unseen, in a freeze-frame world.
Well, Ellis has since turned that impressive short film into an equally impressive feature.

Ben Willis (Sean Biggerstaff, perhaps most widely seen in the first two Harry Potter films, where he played Oliver Wood) is on his final year at art school, and he’s just broken up with his girlfriend, Suzy (Michelle Ryan, about to be seen as Jamie Sommers in the new Bionic Woman TV series). Even as he suffers the acute pangs of separation, he suddenly finds that he has become “immune to sleep.” Now finding sleep apparently unnecessary, Ben gets a third of his life back. Of course, at this juncture in his life, that just means more seconds and minutes and hours wallowing in the Suzy-shaped hole in his life.
So he takes a night shift job at Sainsbury’s, an all-night grocery, where he meets a crew of colourful characters, who each have their own particular methods of dealing with the deadening job hours. As in the original short—which is actually contained in Cashback, some 15 minutes into the feature’s running time—Ben finds that his way is, paradoxically, by stopping time.

Ellis treats this fantastic conceit wonderfully, telling a tale of the beauty that can be found hidden in the most mundane of moments, of the importance of each instant in our lives, and of the possibility of miracles secreted in between the ticks of a clock’s second hand.
Ben, of course, is our anchor to the narrative. We are privy to his life and those pivotal and formative moments that inform all of our youths—that first, almost-kiss; our first sight of a naked body—through a series of flashbacks, where Ben is played by newcomer Frank Hesketh. It is through these flashbacks (and Ben’s narration, which carries us through the entire film) that we understand why Ben is the way he is, and perhaps most importantly, gain insight into the manner in which he sees beauty.
So, while Ben is our solid footing in reality, giving us a mirror in which to see ourselves as witnesses of our world, he is also our gateway into the fantastic, as he shares his ability with us.
It is a testament to Ellis and cinematographer Angus Hudson, that a technique that is fairly common in music videos (of that lone figure and the camera moving in a reality on pause) can still have the potency that it does here.
Ben moves through the fluorescent-drenched aisles of Sainsbury’s, sketching the female customers, admiring beauty, perfecting his art. Rarely has the supermarket been a setting for such transcendence. (There is a scene in Go! that captures that same sense of beauty in the utterly mundane.)

And while this is the heart that beats within the film, the visible layer of Cashback—its celluloid skin, if you will—is that of a love story, of the period of healing after being crushed by the wheels of heartbreak, and of the miraculous rediscovery of love, hiding in plain sight.
It’s also about the reality that we are all selling off our time, the seconds and minutes of our lives, and how we need to ensure that we don’t end up on the losing end in the daily shuffle to keep money in our bank accounts.
It’s about the indelibility of every single moment, of the quirks of serendipity, and the delicate, fragile, and ultimately volatile nature of human relationships, of how seeing “the wrong second of a two second story” can have damning consequences.

For all its wonder though, Cashback is not perfect.
There are, perhaps, one too many colourful characters in Ben’s life, most of whom are little more than comedy relief, and the film does fall into cliché once or twice. (It’s been awhile since I’ve been amused by a musical montage of characters preparing for a night out.)
Also, though I love that one horror movie moment of the entire film, that scene opens up a subplot that I feel could have used a little more exploration, so that its use in Cashback’s climax would have been a tad more well-earned.
Still, what works in this film far outweighs what doesn’t.

And some of what does work, are the performances of the principals, Biggerstaff, and Emilia Fox, who plays Ben’s co-worker, Sharon Pintey.
In Biggerstaff, we find that part of all of us who silently yearns for another, who admires from afar, but is initially unable to articulate that desire verbally. For some, it will be through song, for others, poetry. In Ben’s case, it is his art.
There is a genuine sense of heartfelt longing in Biggerstaff’s performance; for his ex-girlfriend, for his dream, and it is that air of honesty that makes us accept him as a character, and makes us receptive to his tale.
Fox meanwhile, convinces, particularly in the manner in which for most of the time Sharon is at Sainsbury’s (at the cash register or walking the aisles), she trudges, zombie-like, beneath the harsh fluorescents. The only time she actually comes alive, and we see the true vibrancy of the person, is when we see her outside the grocery’s confines, having a meal with Ben, cheering the lads at a football match.
It’s a little something that Cashback says, but it’s nonetheless something important: even that bored check-out girl who recites her litany of automatic pleasantries (if she’s even pleasant at all), is a person too.

It’s also interesting to note that Ben’s ability can be interpreted as simply the way in which he views the world around him. Yes, there are instances where we see the effects of his stopping and re-starting time in objective reality, but these can still be argued as being part and parcel of his worldview.
Even with that interpretation though, the message the film wishes to impart, of the importance of time and what can be found in its midst, is still the same.

Ultimately, it all comes back to the importance of each second of our lives. How we need to acknowledge time’s passage, so we can live accordingly, and not lose sight of ourselves, and the beauty that surrounds us every single moment of every single day.

Parting shot: Sean Ellis’ upcoming film is The Broken, which kicks off when, on a busy London street, Gina McVey (played by 300’s Lena Headey) thinks she sees herself drive past in her own car.

(Cashback OS and images courtesy of worstpreviews.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

300

(Review)

As a child, Frank Miller saw Rudolph Mate’s The 300 Spartans and something flared in his mind. Years later, after establishing himself in the world of comics by authoring landmark tales for popular characters like Marvel’s Daredevil and DC’s Batman, he wrote and drew his own dramatization of the battle of Thermopylae, 300, for Dark Horse Comics (who also have Mike Mignola’s Hellboy in their stables).
7 years after the 300 hardcover compilation won the Eisner* for Best Publication Design, Zack Snyder’s burly and ballsy adaptation charges onto film screens the world over.

300 is the spare and lean tale of King Leonidas (Gerard Butler, from Joel Schumacher’s Phantom of the Opera) and his band of battle-hungry Spartans mounting a fierce resistance against the hordes of the invading Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro, currently seen loitering around the island in Lost), Persian warlord, self-styled god-king, and avant-garde fashion template.
And even as Leo and his loyal warriors decapitate and dismember the enemy, the unfortunately named Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey, seen in Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm, and soon in TV’s The Sarah Connor Chronicles) attempts to rally troops for her husband, who has gone against the will of the council in defying Xerxes and his United Colors of Benetton army.

Though ultimately uneven, 300 works best when the fusion of green screen, slow motion, digital effects, and testosterone deliver scenes of carnage the likes of which have never been seen in the sand-and-sandals epics of the past.
Brad Pitt’s Achilles? Russell Crowe’s Maximus? Kirk Douglas’ Spartacus? Light weight wimps, one and all. Three seconds with any single member of Leo’s Spartan band would reduce these would-be he-men into quivering lumps of jello.

Given Sparta’s culture of violence, it’s only fitting that 300’s battle scenes are terribly effective, getting a lot of mileage from the stylized look Snyder chooses for the film. It’s like watching a rugby match with swords and spears and bloody body parts flying everywhere.
This is undoubtedly Snyder’s triumph. After giving us the excellent Dawn of the Dead remake, he has followed in the footsteps of Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (incidentally also based on Miller source material)** and entered the halls of today’s breed of heightened, stylized cinema with 300. And in between all the bloodletting, he even manages to achieve moments of dizzying phantasmagoric heights with the oracle sequence, as well as Xerxes’ harem of grotesqueries.
Again, Snyder’s triumph, and things look bright for his planned adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Once, I thought the best man for that job was Terry Gilliam, but Snyder looks like a great horse to bet on at the moment. (And if that single test shot of Rorschach—which can be seen on the 300 trailer on YouTube—is any indication, Snyder’s vision for Watchmen looks mighty tantalizing.)

However, though I do think 300 is a better film experience than Sin City, it still isn’t as pitch perfect as it could have been.
Let’s put aside for the moment the fact that Miller’s source material gleefully batters the skull of history (it is, after all, a “dramatization”) and doesn’t really delve too deeply into Sparta’s culture of violence (this is, after all, not that sort of movie either).
And while the light narrative—also painfully evident in Sin City—is forgivable here, as Snyder’s artificial world is enough of a visual distraction to let that shortcoming pass, what is more difficult to pardon are two key performances that grate and disappoint in equal measure.

David Wenham is Dilios, one of Leo’s men who is chosen to become the tale’s bard, and as such, Wenham is the film’s narrator, and his voice carries us through the film and its key moments. Sadly, there’s something about Wenham’s delivery and his reedy voice that just doesn’t sell the material. Keep in mind, these are words and dialogue that need a certain amount of gravitas in order to sound convincing. But whereas Butler gets it dead-on, Wenham just makes an unconvincing mess of it, which is regrettable, since he made such a fine Faramir in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. His narration is so off-key in some moments, that the words seem redundant and unnecessary, like a caption box in a comic book panel that describes exactly what the art is already showing you.
Another weak link in the performance chain is Rodrigo Santoro, whose performance is just bad and overplayed. Considering the costume and production design teams busted their a$$es to give Xerxes that killer look, and the effects wizards then managed to make him look like an impossibly tall (and painfully pretty) Dennis Rodman on one of his more outlandish fashion days, the least Santoro could have done was give us an acceptable performance. It’s the sort of role where the look could have done a lot of the work, and underplaying might have been the key, but instead, there are these overly melodramatic flourishes that do absolutely nothing to convince me that Santoro can actually act instead of coast by on his good looks. (It’s funny, ‘cause as best I can recall, his performance in Walter Salles’ Abril Despedacado—Behind The Sun—was okay. I’m honestly not sure what’s happened to him since.)

Thankfully, as far as performances go, Butler gives us a sinewy Leonidas crackling with stern, musclebound patriotism, one of those largely physical roles that is solidly backed by the palpable gravity of an actual personality. It isn’t difficult to see why these men are willing to follow Leo to their deaths.
Headey is also noteworthy as the fierce Spartan queen whose love for her husband and their martial way of life infuses all aspects of her demeanor and performance. This isn’t some quivering trophy wife pining away in her chambers for her husband who is off to war. Gorgo can open that can of whoop-a$$ with the best of them. (And with a name like that, is it any surprise?)
This truthful approach to the character and material by both Butler and Headey is so much more convincing and effective than the overplaying of Santoro or the anemic quavering of Wenham, and help in making 300 more than just eye candy.

In the end, 300 may have its share of warts and scars, but it’s clearly a win for Snyder, who is so hot a property because of this film, it’s not even funny.
I can only hope he does Alan Moore right and doesn’t cast either David Wenham or Rodrigo Santoro as Ozymandias. (Tom Cruise already came and went for the role. I’m almost afraid to ask who’s next.)

It’s also strangely ironic that a film that so openly glorifies a culture of violence will make a ton of money in today’s post 9/11 climate, where we constantly bemoan the volatile social climate we all live in.
Is it any wonder, really, when popular entertainment looks anything like this?

* The Eisner is the comic book equivalent of the Oscar.

** Miller also co-directed Sin City, a credit Rodriguez insisted on, even if it meant quitting the Director’s Guild of America.

Parting shot: 300 amassed a staggering $70.9 million over its opening weekend, and that's just in the US alone...

(Image courtesy of comics2film.com.)