¡QUÉ HORROR! 2019

Candidate #13

UPGRADE

(March 2018)

“I would like to introduce you to my present and the rest of the world’s future.

“I call it ‘Stem.’”

It’s been just over 15 years (Seriously?! 15?!) since Leigh Whannell burst onto the horror scene alongside James Wan with Saw.

And while Wan has gone on to direct titles outside the horror genre like Furious 7 and Aquaman (both of which crossed the $ 1 billion(!) threshold at the box office), Whannell has largely stayed within its confines, also helping birth the Insidious franchise with long-time collaborator Wan.

He then tried out the director’s chair on Insidious: Chapter 3.

Thankfully, he seems to have enjoyed that experience, enough that he’s given us his sophomore feature, Upgrade.*

“I am Stem. The system operating your body for you.

“Don’t be afraid.”

Set in the near-future, where technology has become even more all-encompassing than it already is today, Grey Trace (an excellent Logan Marshall-Green) suddenly finds himself a quadriplegic after a vicious attack.

Bitter and despondent, he’s given a chance to walk again by wealthy tech mogul Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson, who was in Amazon’s recent TV adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock).

But what could have been a second chance at a normal life becomes a bloody vengeance spree with the help of Grey’s new best friend, Stem.

“You now have full control again, Grey.”

Upgrade’s trailer suggests a balls to the wall sci-fi actioner, and the film proves to be that, an occasionally wild and exhilarating ride as Whannell executes some visual acrobatics to convey to the audience Grey’s tech-enhanced mobility. (It should be noted that Upgrade went home with the Midnighters Audience Award from the 2018 South by Southwest Film Festival.)

But the film is also spiced up with some gory kills and a potent streak of techno horror, as we get exposed to the fears and anxieties of how technology can impact on our humanity, on both individual and societal levels.

And that streak is wide and prevalent enough to land Upgrade onto this year’s ¡Qué horror! Candidates list.

“I’m sorry. We can’t let them win.”

* He’s also signed on to write and direct a new iteration of The Invisible Man, as well as tackle a remake of Escape from New York (for which he’s writing the script with the possibility of directing also open).

Parting Shot 1:

Reviews for Saw (and Saw IV) can be found here (and here); Insidious made the Candidates list in the ¡Qué horror! 2011 rundown.

More Logan Marshall-Green can be found in ¡Qué horror! 2011 Candidate Devil and ¡Qué horror! 2016 title The Invitation.

Parting Shot 2:
Get Out's very own Georgina, Betty Gabriel, appears here as Detective Cortez.
She's also currently starring in Season 2 of the brilliant, sci fi-tinged espionage show, Counterpart.

(Upgrade OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

¡Qué horror! 2015

Candidate #7

THE TAKING OF DEBORAH LOGAN

(October 2014)

The following film includes a partly edited medical documentary, outtakes, and surveillance footage from the scenes of the crime.

Adam Robitel’s feature debut takes the real life horror of Alzheimer’s disease and mashes that up with some supernatural goings on to produce a potent title in The Taking of Deborah Logan.

Here, medical student Mia Hu (Neighbours’ Michelle Ang) sets about centering her PHD Thesis film on the titular Deborah Logan (All My Children’s Jill Larson), hoping to document the effects of the disease, not just on Logan, but on her daughter Sarah (Anne Ramsay, from Mad About You and The Secret Life of the American Teenager), as well.

While there are some heavy hitters in the mix here (the film is produced by Bryan Singer--the closing credits actually declare it a “Bryan Singer Presents” production) and some familiar genre figures are thanked in the end credits roll (Bryan Cranston, Guillermo del Toro, Michael Dougherty, James Wan, to name some) the onscreen MVPs here are definitely Larson and Ramsay, who ground the proceedings in a very real mother-daughter relationship, warts and all.

“I do all my little puzzles. I do crosswords. I’m lifting weights. I am doing everything that I… I have read will help to stave off the progression of this disease. Stave it off! There’s no cure. And so, when I am in the middle of something and suddenly, my mind just… leaves the premises…. There are no words to describe how distressing it is.”

Much of the potency of the film is rooted in the awful deterioration that sets in with Alzheimer’s, and as the narrative unspools, there are shades of The Exorcist, in that we are also witness to the horror when modern medicine finds itself unable to deal with a patient’s condition, when the doctors are just as in the dark as the besieged victim and family.

There is also at least one instance of a quick cut “subliminal,” again, ala The Exorcist.

Admittedly, the title mines all that it can from the horror movie idea of the Creepy Old Lady, which is sadly quite unfair to all the Nice Little Old Ladies out there, but the end result is nonetheless an effective little found footage-y humdinger.

(The Taking of Deborah Logan OS courtesy of cineemcasa.com.)

¡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.)

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.)