¡QUÉ HORROR! 2011
Candidate # 43

INSIDIOUS
(September 2010)


When director James Wan and writer/actor Leigh Whannell made their feature length debut, they brought the world Saw, kickstarting what is now, to date, the most successful franchise in horror film history, for which it was inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records as the Most Successful Horror Movie Series.
They followed Saw with Dead Silence (with a then-relatively-unknown-in-the-US Ryan Kwanten), a film they felt was compromised by the studio system, so they agreed that if they were to collaborate for a third time, it would have to be on a film where they would have creative freedom.
Enter Paranormal Activity, which made a squillion dollars on a practically non-existent budget. Paranormal Activity’s producers turned right around and, under the Haunted Movies banner, threw all that money back into funding five micro-budgeted horror features. Apparently, Wan and Whannell were the first creative team they approached, and thus, we have Insidious, the pair’s take on the haunted house sub-genre.
Thus, we’ve got familiar conventions here: the strange domestic goings-on; the family under siege; the paranormal investigators; the psychic; but Wan and Whannell throw in some interesting spanners into the works that make Insidious both a very excellent example of the haunted house form, and a title that strives vigorously to be something more.
Whannell (as in Saw) appears onscreen, as “Specs,” one of the paranormal investigators, acting alongside Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne, who bring an earnest and genuine believability to the married couple at the centre of the film’s supernatural maelstrom. Wan, meanwhile, brings in his great design sensibilities, giving Insidious another edge up.
Whether or not a third act narrative turn works for you, Insidious is still an effectively creepy little number that doesn’t play it safe within a tried and tested sub-genre template, and that’s something to be commended.

Parting shot: As of April 2011, Insidious was the most profitable film of the year; at the time of this posting, the film’s worldwide box office receipts ring up to a total of just over $92 million, on a $1.5 million budget.

(Insidious OS courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com.)

A Rundown of the 13 Best, Most Recent Horror Movies I’ve Seen
[5 of 13]
28 WEEKS LATER (May 2007)


In a world where zombie films are currently very much one of the horror sub-genres du jour, and where even the undisputed master’s fourth go-around lacked significant bite, 28 Weeks Later detonates at ground zero and quite decisively raises the stakes for the rest of the zombie lot to follow…

Read the entire review here.

(28 Weeks Later OS courtesy of postergeek.com.)

28 WEEKS LATER

(Review)

We open with Alice (Catherine McCormack) and Don (Danny Boyle crony Robert Carlyle), cooking dinner. Then of course, we notice the lights are out and they’re running low on canned goods. And there’s a photo of another family in the kitchen.
London is in the bloodied teeth of the Rage virus, and husband and wife are in a cottage with a bunch of other survivors, all shellshocked and coping as best they can with this unimaginable catastrophe.
We all know this is an idyll, of course, a false one, as fragile as a soap bubble. And yet, when the bubble does burst and the chaos explodes on the screen, it still gets you, by golly.
And thus does Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later grab you by the balls, and never really quite lets go.


Roughly half a year after the events depicted in Danny Boyle’s welcome shot in the arm of zombie cinema, 28 Days Later, England is slowly being repopulated. Civilians are being brought into places like District One, a cordoned-off urban area with electricity and running water (and a pub!), guarded by NATO and the U.S. Army.
Don is reunited with his children, Tammy (Imogen Poots, seen for a bit in V For Vendetta) and Andy (newcomer Mackintosh Muggleton), who were away on a school trip when Rage first spread into the British populace.
Their arrival meanwhile, has alerted District One’s Chief Medical Officer, Scarlet (Rose Byrne, seen recently in Boyle’s Sunshine; review in Archive: April 2007), who is concerned about the lack of protocol regarding such young repatriates, a concern poo-pooed by the higher-ups.
And, as kids will be kids, Tammy and Andy sneak off into the quarantine zone to return to their home for one final time.
And Tammy and Andy, apparently never having seen a horror movie before in their lives, are in blissful ignorance of the fact that this is the catalyst for All Hell Breaking Loose.


In a world where zombie films are currently very much one of the horror sub-genres du jour, and where even the undisputed master’s fourth go-around lacked significant bite, 28 Weeks Later detonates at ground zero and quite decisively raises the stakes for the rest of the zombie lot to follow, among them, Romero’s fifth Dead film, Diary of the Dead, as well as a remake of Romero’s Day of the Dead, by Halloween: H20 and Friday the 13th Part 2 and Part III helmer Steve Miner.
(And yes, technically speaking, the 28 films feature the “infected,” but let’s call a spade a spade, gentlemen. And besides, they also play by the same rules and display the same conventions as zombie cinema. And if any of you still have trouble with that, shall we all agree to “apocalypse cinema,” then?)


And, as with Days, which featured excellent performances from its ensemble, Weeks has a good cast across the board.
Byrne, as she did in Sunshine, brings much-needed humanity to the proceedings (and in apocalypse cinema, that’s indispensable), and you can’t go wrong with Carlyle (one of the very few bright spots, along with Tilda Swinton, in Boyle’s disastrous adaptation of The Beach). If there are some of you out there who only know Carlyle through The Full Monty, well, here’s your antidote.
The curiously named kids are great too, as is Jeremy Renner (terrific in Michael Cuesta’s Twelve and Holding, and soon to be seen in the Brad Pitt-starrer, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). As Doyle, an Army sniper, Renner is the ostensible physical male lead; the sensible man of action in these sorts of movies.
Heaven help me, even Harold Perrineau is credible here as chopper pilot Flynn. I may not have liked his turns in The Matrix sequels and thought he was the weak link in the Lost ensemble (not to mention what he did to Ana-Lucia and Libby), but what Perrineau does here with his helicopter is unprecedented in the annals of horror movies. Utter bloody mayhem!


The canny move Fresnadillo and co-writer Rowan Joffe make here is to present us with a situation where not only do the survivors have to worry about getting infected, they need to worry about the military too. (It’s to the credit of Weeks that one of the film’s most intense and harrowing sequences is precipitated not by blood-vomiting madmen, but by the threat of bullets raining from the sky.)
The last time war seemed this insane on the cinema screen was Sam Mendes’ Jarhead.* And this is war, with an infected populace as the enemy. (And where the uninfected are simply potential enemies, like sleeper agents waiting to be triggered not by code words, but by a drop of blood, or saliva.)
Even District One is nothing so much as an occupied zone, with the military presence undeniable and unmissable.
Ultimately, Fresnadillo and company present us with a grim situation where you can’t even trust the military to be on your side when the chips are down.


As an entry in apocalypse cinema, you can’t go wrong with 28 Weeks Later. Some of the imagery in here is powerful and indelible, from piles of multi-coloured plastic garbage bags, to the black, oily smoke from bonfires burning the dead. And when the fit hits the shan, the frenetic hand-held shots and staccato editing from Days are here as well, put to good use, placing us in the middle of all the mad, gory action.
The tension is unbelievable in some spots here, and in a lot of ways, 28 Weeks Later plays like the nastier cousin to Days, uninterested in taking any prisoners at all.
Schizophrenically enough, it also plays like the nicer cousin in some bits.
The emotion is more overtly presented in Weeks than in Days, and the central dilemma which faces Don and his family is played out over the length of the film to interesting effect, thus providing an additional layer below the tale of survival which is the visible aspect of the narrative.


All in all, this one’s a keeper.
Boyle and Alex Garland (executive producers this time around) have proven that the 28 films, like Romero’s Dead movies, have the potential to interest us not with recurring characters (as is the usual rule with a franchise), but with a situation rich with narrative potential.
(I’m still of the mind that the Alien franchise should have taken a page from that book after Ripley’s death in Alien3, instead of forcing the issue with Sigourney Weaver in Alien: Resurrection. But that’s a whole different story.)
So if they can stay on their game, and come up with another story that isn’t “just another zombie movie,” then I’m all for 28 Months Later.
Years, too.
But maybe not Centuries… That could be pushing it…

* Sorry, not much of a war movie guy. I think Jarhead was the last “war movie” I saw, and it isn’t really even that. (Not in the way, say, Eastwood’s double whammy of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima are “war movies,” at least.)

(28 Weeks Later OS and images courtesy of aintitcool.com.)

SUNSHINE
(Review)

Before I wrote this review, Danny Boyle had only ever really disappointed me one time, with his disastrous adaptation of Alex Garland’s The Beach. He bounced back though, with a bloody-minded vengeance, with 28 Days Later (from a script by Garland), and followed that up with the charming curve ball, Millions.
Boyle then re-teamed with Garland for Sunshine.

Now, Boyle’s disappointed me one and a half times.

The Icarus II is on a mission.
Our sun is dying, and so is our planet. Following the failure of a previous mission (thus, the Roman numeral), Captain Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada, recognizable from the Ringu films) and his crew are presently in transit, with the payload that will signal a literal dawning of a new age on Earth, should they succeed.
The mission: to detonate a stellar bomb the size of Manhattan Island, in the sun, and thus, re-ignite it, giving humanity a second chance.

We’ve all seen this one before: the very survival of the human race in the hands of a crew on board a spaceship. (Sadly, we all still remember Armageddon and Deep Impact, don’t we?)
Now, not only is Sunshine a film from the Save the Planet from Destruction school, it’s also that particular sort of sci-fi film that seems to be an exercise in giving the Ten Little Indians a remedial course in Murphy’s Law.

We all know that in the course of completing their mission, the crew will make a singular, catastrophic decision that will then become the crux for the entire film’s narrative.
This will occur because, A) the decision was inherently the wrong one to make in the first place (see Alien), or B) human error will bollocks the whole thing up.
In Sunshine’s case, it’s B.
Fit will then continue to hit the shan as the story unfolds, repeatedly proving Murphy’s Law to the audience’s satisfaction, as the Indians drop like flies.
All the while, completion of the mission parameters will look increasingly bleak, till the last minute, when the day will be saved by the remaining crew members. (Survival of said crew members by end credits roll, uncertain.)

The reason Sunshine doesn’t do it for me is precisely because Boyle and Garland never seem to successfully transcend the confines of this type of sci-fi film. The structure of the film’s narrative is pretty much as outlined above, so the proceedings get pretty by-the-numbers in very short fashion.
Additionally, in a set-up like this, the characters aren’t usually very deep. The performances can elevate the material though, and supply us with subtext, with the impression that these people have lives beyond this ship, and have real relationships between each other. (Again, see Alien.)
Now, there aren’t necessarily any outright terrible performances in Sunshine. Most though, are serviceable, and not much else. Perhaps the only actors who manage to deliver something noteworthy are Cillian Murphy (as Capa; Murphy’s worked with Boyle and Garland before, on 28 Days Later), and Rose Byrne (as Cassie; Byrne was in Sofia Coppola’s brilliant Marie Antoinette, and incidentally enough, in the upcoming sequel, 28 Weeks Later).
Murphy is the only one whose character we really see in some significant personal private moments (sending off a message to his parents Earthside, for one), while Byrne’s Cassie brings a much-needed level of humanity to the crew (she’s the only one who seems to really give a damn about her other crew members, as opposed to blindly chanting the “complete the mission” mantra).

Beyond the fact that Sunshine isn’t as horrible as The Beach (and it’s certainly better than either of the asteroid movies), there isn’t much else I can say in its favor.
It’s serviceable sci-fi, but certainly not great. It does benefit, however, from Boyle’s sharp visual stylings, which go a long way to making the film an agreeable viewing experience.
Admittedly, Sunshine does have its moments.

Thus, it’s only a half-disappointment for me.
I mean, this is the writer-director team that gave the zombie film a welcome do-over with 28 Days Later, so when I first heard they were tackling science fiction, I got excited. So that’s months and months of anticipation, and now that I’ve seen it, well, Sunshine just doesn’t cut it.
Which is sad. I wanted to love this movie. I wanted to sit there as the end credits rolled and have that same rush I had after I’d seen 28 Days Later, that rush of having just experienced excellent cinema.
All I thought after Sunshine ended was, “Well, at least it wasn’t as bad as The Beach.”

(Sunshine OS courtesy of worstpreviews.com.)