THE NIGHT HOUSE (January 2020)

THE NIGHT HOUSE

(January 2020)

TRICK IT, DON’T LISTEN TO IT
 
In The Night House--David Bruckner’s follow-up to The Ritual--Rebecca Hall plays recently widowed Beth Parchin, whose barely bottled-up anger at the sudden and initially inexplicable death of her husband gradually erodes in the face of a dark and sinister mystery.
 
It’s a testament to the skills and talent of Bruckner and Hall, as well as the elegant screenplay by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski (all four are also Executive Producers on this), that The Night House remains compelling and absorbing, as said mystery slowly unpacks itself over the course of the film’s running time.
 
It’s also a sneaky one, this, its largely serene and placid façade belying a cold cruelty beating at its core, the action onscreen the calm surface beneath which vicious riptides and undertows swirl.
Or, to use another apt metaphor, our eyes are drawn to the beauty of the structure, which only serves to mask the cold, blank hollows at its foundation.
 
This is quite possibly the most gently nihilistic horror film I’ve come across.
It doesn’t hold the audience’s hand, nor does it offer any comforting, yet ultimately hollow platitudes regarding existence and mortality.
 
If this sounds like the kind of horror you’re in the mood for, then by all means, please step into The Night House.
Just be sure to leave the door open, in case you decide on a hasty retreat…
 
“Makes you wonder though, doesn’t it? What else didn’t I know?”
 
Parting Shot:
The fact that architecture and geometric spaces play a not insignificant part in The Night House bodes well for the Hellraiser reboot Bruckner is currently in post-production on, from a screenplay credited to Collins, Piotrowski, and David Goyer (also, incidentally enough, a producer on The Night House).
Plus! Jamie Clayton as Pinhead!
 
(The Night House OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

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

[7 of 13]

DEMON

(September 2015)

There's a real life tragedy behind Marcin Wrona’s Demon.

On September 18, 2015*, Wrona was found dead--an apparent suicide--in a hotel room in Poland, where the film was screening at the Gdynia Film Festival.

It’s a painfully sad punctuation to the title, which is an emotionally wrenching, and quietly disturbing look at the Jewish legend of the dybbuk.**

In the film, a young couple’s wedding day is upended by unforeseen circumstances, and in a horror film, “unforeseen circumstances” can mean an air of malaise and unease, as the bridegroom (an excellent Itay Tiran) begins to display increasingly erratic behavior.

While there is a streak of darkly wry humor running through it, Demon is largely an outstanding work of quiet horror, and is, ultimately, about loss and memory (both as a comfortingly bittersweet salve and a burdensome reminder of collective guilt) and the transitory nature of all things.

Which, sadly, leads us back to the real life tragedy of Wrona’s death, and the fact that his passing has robbed global cinema of a promising and talented voice…

* As per imdb.com and Variety; some sources list Wrona’s date of death as September 19.

** The dybbuk was also explored recently in David Goyer’s The Unborn and Ole Bornedal’s The Possession, though in both cases, with a more Hollywood mainstream horror approach.

(Demon OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

¡QUÉ HORROR! 2016

Candidate #16

DEMON

(September 2015)

There's a real life tragedy behind Marcin Wrona’s Demon.

Exactly a year ago, on September 18, 2015*, Wrona was found dead--an apparent suicide--in a hotel room in Poland, where the film was screening at the Gdynia Film Festival.

It’s a painfully sad punctuation to the title, which is an emotionally wrenching, and quietly disturbing look at the Jewish legend of the dybbuk.**

In the film, a young couple’s wedding day is upended by unforeseen circumstances, and in a horror film, “unforeseen circumstances” can mean an air of malaise and unease, as the bridegroom (an excellent Itay Tiran) begins to display increasingly erratic behavior.

While there is a streak of darkly wry humor running through it, Demon is largely an outstanding work of quiet horror, and is, ultimately, about loss and memory (both as a comfortingly bittersweet salve and a burdensome reminder of collective guilt) and the transitory nature of all things.

Which, sadly, leads us back to the real life tragedy of Wrona’s death, and the fact that his passing has robbed global cinema of a promising and talented voice…

* As per imdb.com and Variety; some sources list Wrona’s date of death as September 19.

** The dybbuk was also explored recently in David Goyer’s The Unborn and Ole Bornedal’s The Possession, though in both cases, with a more Hollywood mainstream horror approach.

Parting Shot: The fact that today (or possibly tomorrow) is Wrona’s death anniversary was completely lost on me until I started to write this post…

(Demon OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

reVIEW (17)
BATMAN BEGINS

With The Dark Knight currently filming and set for a 2008 release, I thought I’d take this one out of deep freeze.

Since the turn of the millennium, DC Comics has had a nearly null presence in the multiplexes, while their long-time four-color competition, Marvel, following its surprise hit in 1998 in Blade, has littered the pop culture consciousness with X-Men and Spider-Men, Hulks and Daredevils. And while DC attempted to rise to the challenge with last year’s Catwoman and this year’s Constantine, neither were what one would classify as excellent cinema.
Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins changes all that.

It’s been 15 years since Tim Burton’s hit, Batman, and 8 since the florid, gaudy explosion of Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin (which effectively killed the Bat franchise), and Nolan has managed to bring us the first Batman film that really and truly is, about the Batman.
Whereas past Bat films have had the tendency to play up the eccentricities of the Dark Knight’s bizarre villains, casting recognizable, A-list Hollywood names to further that agenda, Begins’ sights are firmly set on the tortured psyche of Bruce Wayne, on the dynamics of his guilt and fear, so thoroughly intertwined in the tragic murder of his parents in front of his little boy eyes.
Excellent choice, Christian Bale, to essay the Dark Knight this time out. The young actor’s physicality, intensity, and commitment (he quickly bounced back from the emaciated insomniac he played in the ultimately disappointing El Maquinista to get into shape for Begins) serve him well, as we see Wayne from more dimensions and angles than we’d previously been allowed access to. What we have is the most substantial, and thus, most credible Bruce Wayne/Batman thus far. It was, after all, Bale’s intent to give the definitive performance of the character(s), and in this, he has succeeded admirably.

Of course, even the best actor can crash and burn if the script and the director are inept. Thankfully, that isn’t the case here.
Sharing co-writing credit with David Goyer (who also penned the scripts for the Blade films, as well as Dark City), Nolan delivers a film that is decidedly more complex—emotionally and psychologically—than past Bat films, and one that clearly has more adult sensibilities. For all their dark subversiveness, Tim Burton’s Bat films had a quirky streak of humor running through them; Nolan’s Begins is far less cartoony, more grounded in the reality of the character, and the seedy, corrupt milieu of Gotham City.

Presented as a tightly-packed, urban sprawl, this Gotham is no less the nightmare of a city than the gothic noir metropolis in Burton’s films (as realized by the late Anton Furst in Batman, and Bo Welch in Batman Returns). Here, Gotham is a city where hope lies bleeding in the filthy gutter, where criminals like Tom Wilkinson’s Carmine Falcone flood the streets with drugs, line their pockets with politicians, judges, and cops, and profit from the misery of the masses. The kind of city whose hero would be a creature of shadow, treading the fine line between justice and vengeance; a hero who isn’t scared of collateral damage (though I had hoped that as Bruce Wayne, he’d have paid for all the property damage the Batmobile caused), a hero whose greatest weapon is fear.
Ideal then, that the film not only feature the villain Scarecrow (28 Days Later’s Cillian Murphy, who was actually on the shortlist to play Batman before Bale drove off with the cape and cowl), who uses a chemical to amplify his victims’ phobias, but that the story focus on Bruce Wayne’s fears as well, not simply of bats, but of the possibility of failing in his dead father’s eyes.
There hasn’t been a comic book film with this much thematic cohesion—of story, plot, and action—since Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (for my money, still better than the sequel).

With material of this integrity already in hand, Nolan takes the further step of surrounding the lead star with heavy-hitting thespians like Wilkinson, Gary Oldman (as Sgt. Jim Gordon, one of the few good cops left in Gotham), Morgan Freeman (as Lucius Fox, Wayne’s personal Q), Liam Neeson (as Ducard, Wayne’s Miyagi), and Michael Caine (as Alfred, Wayne’s Man Friday). In fact, there’s enough Oscar mojo here for younger cast members Bale, Murphy, and Katie Holmes (as Wayne’s childhood friend/love interest, Rachel Dawes) to get their own gold statuettes through osmosis.

Thus, with the leathery flap of a bat’s wings, and the sturm und drang theatricality of the operatic undertones of Bob Kane’s 66-year-old Dark Knight, DC Comics has snatched silver screen glory back.
And with Bryan Singer’s eagerly-awaited Superman Returns set to take flight on June 30, 2006, DC looks to be seriously flexing its celluloid muscles, something that should give even the mighty Marvel pause.

(Batman Begins OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

(The above review was previously published in 2005 under the title, “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Bat?”)

reVIEW (11) 
SAW

With Saw IV set to open this Halloween, I thought it a good idea to resurrect this review, which was previously published in 2004 under the title, “The Big Blood-Drenched Picture.”

jigsaw n : a machine saw with a narrow vertically reciprocating blade for cutting curved and irregular lines or ornamental patterns in openwork
vt : to arrange or place in an intricate or interlocking way in the manner of the parts of a jigsaw puzzle
adj : suggesting a jigsaw puzzle or its separate pieces

James Wan’s Saw is the cinematic equivalent of a bear trap (to borrow an analogy from the film); once it begins, those rusty, razor-toothed jaws snap shut, and there’s little else you can do but sit riveted to your seat till the bitter, bloody end.
What if you woke up to find yourself chained to a pipe in a decrepit bathroom, without knowing who put you there, or why?
From this seed, the twisted and gnarled script of Saw—written by Leigh Whannell, who plays Adam in the film—grows.
And it turns out to be one of the best, most intense, and most involving English-language horror films made in quite a while.

An excellent marriage of content and technique, Wan’s directing style, modern and yet not too MTV for its own good, complements the non-linear script written by Whannell to a tight tee. In much the same way that the David Goyer-written script for Alex Proyas’ Dark City emulated the structure of a spiral (a central image of the film), Whannell’s script is a jigsaw puzzle, referring to a central story element of Saw. The plot is structured in such a way that events and revelations are parceled out to us like puzzle pieces, for us to feverishly plant in place, as we attempt to make out the big picture. And, deviously, Whannell and Wan give us pieces that can fit into their slot in more than one way, so our perception of the big picture can change in an instant.

Now, a short lesson: the difference between a plot twist, and a plot flip.
A plot twist is a sudden curveball in the story that you don’t see coming: the apparent good guy who turns out to be a baddie; the seemingly innocuous neighbor who turns out to be a government agent. Plot twists in recent films are (spoilers!!!): exactly who the sacrifice is in Darkness, bringing to light just how wise the titular evil really is, or the fact that there is no Totenkopf in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, merely the video ghost of Sir Lawrence Olivier playing God-in-absentia, as his clockwork creation continues to run through its programmed agenda. There is also the last-second revelation that Beatrix’s child is still alive, at the end of Kill Bill Volume One.
A plot flip is a single event or revelation in the story which results in a total re-evaluation of everything that came before it, a pivot point in the story which requires you to see the whole tale from a different perspective. A very popular plot flip is the ending of The Sixth Sense, which forces you to see the whole film in an entirely different light. There is also Neo’s awakening from The Matrix into the real world (though this occurs early on in the film’s running time), or the pair of flips in Janghwa, Hongryeon (A Tale of Two Sisters).

The wonderful thing about Saw is that it has twists and it has flips. Usually, a film will either have a bunch of twists, or one flip; it’s rare that a film will contain both. (The Village is another recent film that displays its fair share of flips and twists.)
In Saw, the twists and flips are sudden and savage, malevolent Jack in the Boxes that spring out with a demonic howl, leaving in their wake a stunned sense of revelation, as we stand in ever-widening pools of blood, for a few precious moments too shocked to move, lest another come leaping out of the darkness (which it sometimes does).

Now, two films Saw has been compared to since its release are The Blair Witch Project and Se7en, Project merely because of Saw’s low production cost (reportedly less than $10 million), Se7en because of its mood and content.
Se7en seems the more valid of the two comparisons, though I will say this: Saw displays genuine malignancy and unease, as opposed to the faux dress-me-up-in-moody-dimly-lit sequences of MTV malevolence that characterizes Se7en.*
While The Blair Witch Project is the resounding triumph of marketing over content, Se7en is the victory of style over substance.
Saw, for better or worse, is the real thing; it’s the Se7en I wish Se7en had been.

Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival last January to sold-out screenings, Saw is currently enjoying box-office success in the US. Clearly, Saw has hit a nerve, and audiences are twitching and screaming and grimacing, fingers slipping on blood-drenched pieces, as they try desperately to put the puzzle together before the clock runs out.

* Just to be clear: I'm not saying Se7en is a bad film. Not at all.
But I strongly feel that whatever's good about it, is all thanks to David Fincher. What I'm saying is, remove Fincher's style from the equation, and there doesn't seem to be too much in Andrew Kevin Walker's script to differentiate it significantly from any other random religion-obsessed serial killer thriller.
Meanwhile, I feel that there's enough in Whannell's script that, even if it had been helmed by a director less inventive than Wan, that the resultant film would have still been an effective one. 

Parting shot: Saw is intense horror, and quite possibly not to everyone’s tastes. A good barometer would be Se7en: if you found that agreeable to your cinematic palette, chances are, you’ll appreciate Saw.

(Saw OS’s courtesy of impawards.com.)

THOUGHTS: On Superheroes

It’s curious that news of the gear shifting on both The Flash and Wonder Woman film projects came nearly simultaneously.
The writer/directors who had been steering both projects are now off them (David Goyer and Joss Whedon, respectively), and for pretty much the same reasons, director and studio did not see eye-to-eye on the treatment and approach to the character in question.
Whedon: “We just saw different movies, and at the price range this kind of movie hangs in, that's never gonna work.”
Goyer: “The God's honest truth is that WB and myself simply couldn't agree on what would make for a cool Flash film.”

You gotta wonder, when a studio shoots down projects from established names like Goyer (who wrote the screenplays for Dark City, Batman Begins, and the Blade films) and Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly), just what exactly is the studio’s vision of the character? How different can it be from that of people who are clearly entrenched in genre material? It isn’t like these are rank neophytes, after all.
On the one hand, I can appreciate the caution Warner Brothers and DC are taking with their properties (better taking their time to get it right, rather than Marvel’s trigger-happy film-everything-we-can-now attitude, which has given rise to fiascos like Elektra and Daredevil and Fantastic Four).

Sometimes though, you wonder at a studio’s “vision.” I mean, Batman Forever was bad enough, but whoever greenlit Batman and Robin should be shot.
And this isn’t even about a disgruntled fan: I never got into Buffy or any of Whedon’s other shows, and Goyer is a hit-and-miss affair for me (I love his scripts for Dark City, Batman Begins, and Blade II, but Blade and Blade: Trinity—which he also directed—blew, big time).

This is about getting it right, about being faithful to the source material and treating the character (and by extension, the character’s creators) with respect.
You have to ask yourself, is the studio really concerned with getting it right, or with coming up with a movie that’s designed and calculated to make money?
The thing is, they need to take chances too, and not just stick to what’s been tried and tested and been done to death.

Studios also need to keep the fans in mind, the section of the audience that tends to come back to a film again and again, if it’s done right. (And there’s a lot of revenue that’s made up of repeat viewings.) Which is not to say they should slavishly stick to the source material either, but rather, make a proper translation of said material onto film, retaining and tweaking whatever elements of the character’s mythos works best on the big screen.

In the end though, the proof’s in the proverbial pudding. There is no colour by numbers approach to film adaptations of comic book material (and there shouldn’t be). There is, however, instinct, creativity, and a genuine love and passion for the genre.
So let’s all hope Warner Brothers knows what it’s doing…

(Originally posted 020807)