A Rundown of the 13 Best Horror Movies I've Seen in the Past Year
[4 of 13]
The Zombie Apocalypse Slot

SEOUL-YEOK

(SEOUL STATION)
(April 2016)

Yeon Sang-ho's animated prequel to Busanhaeng (Train to Busan) actually plays better than its live-action sequel, and that’s probably all down to the fact that it’s a more atypical zombie cinema viewing experience than Busanhaeng.

Why is that, you may ask?

To wit:

A: Animated zombies are far more uncommon than live-action ones.

B: Unlike Busanhaeng, we don’t really see your usual zombie cinema character types here.

C: The social commentary is far more satisfactorily evident, with some barbed rants against country and government. And the class divide is likewise more overt here.

It should be noted though that there are some rather cruel and vicious moments in this one, some moments having nothing at all to do with the zombies…

If that all still sounds like your cup of (zombie) tea, then take heed: ¡Qué horror! strongly approves Seoul-yeok!

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS

(August 2016)

Now here's a zombie film that very consciously takes some relatively unfamiliar routes in its narrative, and that kind of zombie film is definitely worthy of some ¡Qué horror! love.

Mike Carey--yes, that Mike Carey--adapts his own novel, The Girl with All the Gifts, and helps (heh) gift us with a title that should settle in nicely in the annals of zombie cinema.

Now, in lieu of getting all spoiler-y, let’s take a look at some of the film’s other personnel:

Director Colm McCarthy first landed in ¡Qué horror! territory in the 2011 rundown, with his feature debut, Outcast. Now he’s back with his sophomore feature.

(He’s apparently been keeping busy on the telly front. And speaking of, he’s set to direct the Krypton Pilot for SyFy--yes, that Krypton--so that should be something!)

Composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, who positively killed on the score for the late and very much lamented Utopia, slays once again here.

(He also worked on the first series of Humans, though sadly, he didn’t score the second.)

And that cast!

Not only do we have Paddy Considine and Gemma Arterton, we’ve also got Glenn Close!

Glenn! Close!

And the feature debut of Sennia Nanua isn’t too shabby neither!

So, if you feel like supporting atypical zombie fare (and you really really should!), then by all means, pay The Girl with All the Gifts a visit!

Parting Shot:

While Carey is possibly better known in the comics world for his work on Lucifer or Hellblazer, as far as I’m concerned, his magnum opus in graphic literature is definitely The Unwritten.

(Seoul Station UK quad courtesy of impawards.com & The Girl with All the Gifts UK quad courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com; novel blurb OS courtesy of orbitbooks.net.)

¡QUÉ HORROR! 2017

Candidate #8

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS

(August 2016)

Now here's a zombie film that very consciously takes some relatively unfamiliar routes in its narrative, and that kind of zombie film is definitely worthy of some ¡Qué horror! love.

Mike Carey--yes, that Mike Carey--adapts his own novel, The Girl with All the Gifts, and helps (heh) gift us with a title that should settle in nicely in the annals of zombie cinema.

Now, in lieu of getting all spoiler-y, let’s take a look at some of the film’s other personnel:

Director Colm McCarthy first landed in ¡Qué horror! territory in the 2011 rundown, with his feature debut, Outcast. Now he’s back in the running with his sophomore feature.

(He’s apparently been keeping busy on the telly front. And speaking of, he’s set to direct the Krypton Pilot for SyFy--yes, that Krypton--so that should be something!)

Composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, who positively killed on the score for the late and very much lamented Utopia, slays once again here.

(He also worked on the first series of Humans, though sadly, he didn’t score the second.)

And that cast!

Not only do we have Paddy Considine and Gemma Arterton, we’ve also got Glenn Close!

Glenn! Close!

And the feature debut of Sennia Nanua isn’t too shabby neither!

So, if you feel like supporting atypical zombie fare (and you really really should!), then by all means, pay The Girl with All the Gifts a visit!

Parting Shot:

While Carey is possibly better known in the comics world for his work on Lucifer or Hellblazer, as far as I’m concerned, his magnum opus in graphic literature is definitely The Unwritten.

(The Girl with All the Gifts UK quad courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com; novel blurb OS courtesy of orbitbooks.net.)

reVIEW (37)
THE SKELETON KEY

Iain Softley’s The Skeleton Key is the story of Caroline Ellis (Kate Hudson), a caregiver who, disillusioned with her job at a New Orleans hospice, finds work through the classified ads at a rambling antebellum home in the Louisiana swamps, caring for Ben Devereaux (the impeccable John Hurt), who apparently suffered a stroke in the home’s attic.
Cue strange goings-on, and bang, we’re right in the middle of the latest Hollywood offering where things go bump in the night, and the audience is expected to scream shrilly and jump in their seats.

Now, to be fair, The Skeleton Key is far from horrible. It’s evident what Ehren Kruger (who also penned the scripts for the terribly flawed Arlington Road and Scream 3, as well as those of the English-language remakes, The Ring—which was disappointing—and The Ring Two—which was brilliant) wanted to do in The Skeleton Key, and the effort is admirable, though the story’s pacing could have done with a little more tightening, a problem also evident in Kruger’s script for The Ring.
Even though the question “So if that was the whole point of the exercise, why didn’t all this happen as early as Day 1?” is answered neatly and effectively by the film’s climax, the plot still manages to leisurely stroll through a languid Louisiana afternoon, when it should be walking at an ever-increasing clip (then breaking out into a good old-fashioned run for dear life) through alligator-infested swamps.
As with The Ring, the sense of a threat lurking ever closer doesn’t come completely through.

On the plus side though, as I said earlier, Kruger’s effort is admirable. Yes, there are ghosts (of a sort) in this tale of terror, but they are thankfully not of the recent Hollywood variety, rotting and moldering, yet still managing to look very slick and oh-so-MTV, all jerky and quick-cut.
And there is an attempt to mask the truth of the final reveal (you may or may not figure it out, in its bits or its entirety, depending on how involved you allow yourself to be, and how shrewdly observant you are), which turns out to be a whole lot more effective than some of the more recent Hollywood horror efforts like Hide and Seek.
It also helps that it isn’t painful to watch Kate Hudson, who, though not an exceptional actress, still manages to avoid the sort of performance one gets from a Julia Roberts or a Sandra Bullock. Caroline also just has enough psychological baggage to make her more than the usual one-dimensional cutout that sometimes populates this sort of film. And, as I said, John Hurt is impeccable. (The last time anyone made the most of what could potentially have been a non-role was when Glenn Close did the coma thing as Sunny von Bulow in Barbet Schroeder’s astounding Reversal of Fortune.) Additionally, Gena Rowlands is also effective as the prickly Violet Devereaux, Ben’s wife.

Sadly, though Iain Softley’s direction is certainly not flat, it still does not quite attain the level needed for the audience to actually feel, taste, and smell the locale, the kind of level that produces atmosphere, that makes us feel the cloying humidity of Louisiana; the kind of level achieved by Alan Parker in Angel Heart, or Paul Schrader in his remake of Cat People.
If memory serves me right, it was Schrader who said that he decided to set his redux of Cat People in New Orleans because it was the sort of city where strange things could be believed to be possible.
And yes, we are treated to certain facets of hoodoo, enough to make us shiver a bit, but far from enough to actually leave us marked, or, to use hoodoo parlance, “crossed.” So it’s sad that the setting isn’t fully exploited, given the eerie richness of New Orleans and the surrounding bayou country.

Ultimately, The Skeleton Key (like Softley’s “is Kevin Spacey an alien or not” effort, K-PAX) is a film that clearly wanted to be something a little off the beaten track, but in the end, turned out flawed and vaguely dissatisfying.
Still, though The Skeleton Key may not open all of its doors satisfactorily enough for the discriminating viewer, it is nonetheless an interesting space in which to move around.

(The Skeleton Key OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

(The above is a slightly altered version of a previously published review entitled “That Hoodoo That You Do.”)

reVIEW (19)
THE STEPFORD WIVES

In light of Frank Oz’s upcoming Death at a Funeral (the trailer of which looks all sorts of funny), this one’s coming out of storage.

Like Keanu in bullet time, Nicole Kidman is dodging bullets as fast as they come.
An injury on the Moulin Rouge set forced her to bow out of David Fincher's Panic Room, which, along with The Game, turned out to be one of Fincher's least notable works. She was also supposed to star in Jane Campion's artily-shot but horribly flawed adaptation of In The Cut; Kidman remained co-producer, even as Meg Ryan ended up in the buff for the role.
At certain points in their development, Kidman was also attached to star in last year's Catwoman and The Forgotten, the less said of both, I believe, the better. Instead, for 2004, she starred in Jonathan Glazer's Birth, and Frank Oz's The Stepford Wives. And though neither was a box-office hit, either one was certainly better than The Forgotten, and, from all I've heard about it, Catwoman as well.

The Stepford Wives was originally a novel written by Ira Levin, the same man who gave the world Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polanski's film adaptation of which, in turn, gave us the enduring, indelible image of a frail, paranoid Mia Farrow, painfully pregnant with the Devil's child, on the run from a cult of Satanists. The Stepford Wives was no less frightening, though here, the terror was not supernatural, but rather stemmed from the realm of science.
A work that studied the horrors of conformity (for which the term "Stepford" has come to mean, informally joining the English language as an adjective), The Stepford Wives had a film adaptation in 1975. Directed by Bryan Forbes, that version delved more into the horror aspect of the tale. Frank Oz's version is, at first blush, a lighter, more comedic look at the material.
Career-driven network president Joanna Eberhart (Kidman) is suddenly and unceremoniously fired after an unfortunate incident during the unveiling of EBS' new season line-up. Following a nervous breakdown, she asks for a chance to start over with her husband Walter Kresby (Matthew Broderick) and their two children Kimberly and Pete. Off they go to the suburbs of Connecticut, to the exclusive community of Stepford, where all is not what it seems.

From its opening credit roll, accompanied by visuals from old adverts of the latest in modern technology, of products designed to make life easier and more convenient, it's evident that behind the comedic veneer of the film, there are some serious statements to be made, just as there is something deeper behind the Tupperware smiles of the eponymous Stepford wives.
In that respect, as well as its overt idea of a return to a simpler time—in Stepford, there is "no crime, no poverty, and no pushing"—it is similar to M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. (Incidentally enough, both are quite possibly last year's most misunderstood and underappreciated films.) But, whereas Shymalan never loses track of his narrative while aiming to get his Message across, Stepford's script by Paul Rudnick seems both weak in its rhythm, and genuinely confused as to the exact nature of the change the women undergo, not to mention rudely dismissive of Joanna's children, who are no sooner introduced, before they completely drop off the face of the film, mentioned thereafter, but never actually seen.

While the Stepford process in the original source material is pretty much straight-forward, in Oz's revision, there is talk of nanochips being inserted into the brain, chips which contain the Stepford program, which should mean these women are still organic after being "perfected" by the treatment. And yet we are treated to the sight of an eyeless and bald mannequin that is Kidman's dead ringer, as well as the ATM sequence (the single most chilling and disturbing visual from the entire film); both incongruous and illogical, if these are really still women with some computer chips stuck in their heads.
Given though that the narrative could have been stronger, the idea of perfection taken to its extreme, of the forced submission and commodification of women—of a wife as the ultimate consumer product, complete with personalized remote control—is difficult to ignore. Amidst the scathingly funny one-liners are harsh observations of the gender wars, of, to paraphrase the film, women wanting to become men, and men wanting to become gods.

Arguably, the reversal that comes at the film's climax might be seen, on the one hand, as a clever little reference to the third sequel of the 1975 version. On the other hand though, it could actually subvert the whole piece in one telling blow, reducing the entire idea of homogenizing the world into the Stepford ideal as a plan born of lunacy, and not a cold, calculated conspiracy.
Whichever the case, this version of Levin's novel, with its wistful, pastel nostalgia for days long gone by, is funny. The script has zingy wit and irony to spare, and with a cast that includes Bette Midler, Christopher Walken, Roger Bart, and Glenn Close, the comic timing is near-perfect.

By and large, it's sad and ironic that the film doesn't live up to the Stepford ideal, and isn't the perfect movie it could have been. But then again, as Joanna says, perfect doesn't work. In this case though, imperfect doesn't exactly work, either.
Panned by the critics, by turns confused and narratively-challenged, The Stepford Wives is nonetheless a funny comedy, and has quite a lot to say about men and women, and the world they live in, and if only for that, must be seen.
And honestly, a couple of years down the road, should I find The Stepford Wives and The Forgotten both on cable at the same time, I know which film I'd zap myself to with the remote. Do you?

(The Stepford Wives OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

(The above review began life in 2005 under the title, “Welcome Back to Stepford.”)