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

[11 of 13]

13 SINS

(March 2014) 

"... Great wealth is within your grasp. 36 hours from now, you can be a very rich man. All you have to do is complete 13 challenges.”

The last time Daniel Stamm was hanging ‘round these parts was for the ¡Qué horror! 2011 candidate, The Last Exorcism.

This time out, he barges into the Final 13 by helming the English language remake of Chukiat Sakveerakul’s 13 Game Sayawng, where a grotesque game show gradually turns its contestants into savage cutthroats, all for that next bit of green.

“I will dance with the Golden Toad.”

Not only is the action relocated to New Orleans, but the stakes are amped up considerably for the film’s protagonist, Elliot Brindle (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World’s Mark Webber): he’s got a pregnant soon-to-be wife (True Blood’s Rutina Wesley) and mentally disabled brother (Devon Graye, who played teen-aged Dexter Morgan) who are depending on him.

And while there are certain elements from the original which have been excised (thankfully, the awkward tonal shifts and, less so, the active female supporting role), there are also welcome additions: among them, a deeper glimpse into the game’s backstory, and some familiar genre faces (Ron Perlman and Pruitt Taylor Vince).

Plus, George Coe (who currently voices Woodhouse on Archer) doing the “Game Voice.”

“So says the Golden Toad: ‘A brave arm makes a short sword long.’”

The changes from the original (which include the specifics of most of the game’s challenges) serve to tighten the narrative’s plot and thematics, and also serve to foreground the dark empowerment and paranoia that engulfs Elliot as he gets further along in the game.

Ultimately, 13 Sins is not only a more refined and polished version of 13 Game Sayawng, it’s also a harder-hitting and more emotionally potent piece.

“Try to think of this in the most positive, empowering way as a gun pointed to your head.”

Parting Shot: This could actually make an interesting double feature with Cheap Thrills...

(13 Sins OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

HEROES
Season 2
Volume Two: Generations
Chapter Eleven: “Powerless”
Written by Jeph Loeb
Directed by Allan Arkush
(WARNING: SPOILERS)

So this is a far more effective volume ender than last season’s Kirby Plaza showdown, but that’s getting ahead of myself…

Let’s kick off with Peter and Hiro’s face off, as they argue back and forth about whether Kensei/Adam is a goodie or a baddie, till Peter zaps Hiro unconscious.
K/A then takes his sword back…

But first…
Micah finally gets home to Niki but needs to rush back out again to save Monica. Of course, Niki being virused and all, doesn’t have her super strength at the moment, so Micah ropes her in to drive. (Though can’t he just “tell” a car to drive him wherever he wants to go?)
Using his cell phone to locate Monica’s cell, Micah and Niki track Monica down to the shop that the hoods who’ve taken her have been hired to torch. (Thus, St. Joan is about to be burned at the stake in New Orleans…)
They get there just in time for Niki to pistol whip the fleeing hood, and rush into the burning store to save Monica.
But Niki’s powerless at the moment, and though Monica gets out, the shop explodes, apparently taking Niki with it…

Back at the Company, Bob is ticked off with Elle and blames her for Claire’s decision to go whistle blower on their a$$. Bob suspends her from any more field duty, so Little Miss Sociopath turns to Mr. B in his cell.
I was never really a Veronica Mars fan, but the scene between Kristen Bell and Jack Coleman, particularly the beginning of it, with Bell’s fidgety eyes following the ball, is great.
Elle asks Mr. B to tell her what Bob did to her when she was just a little girl, and he begins to, but Bob arrives and tells Mr. B that the Company will have to do something to stop Claire from going public…

… which she’s busy preparing for, putting together all the files Mr. B amassed regarding the dastardly deeds of Bob et al.
Mrs. B tries to convince her otherwise, but Claire has her mind set. Even West tries to tell her he prefers his secrets rather than this going public deal. So Claire gives Flyboy his file, and the break up is official.
It looks like Claire’s got something new to cry about, when who should walk through the door but… Mr. B!
With the Bennets alternately relieved and confused, Mr. B drops the bomb. Claire’s plan to expose the Company’s misdeeds is “unacceptable.”
Instead, he’s made a deal: his family gets to live a quiet, normal life (the only thing he’s ever really wanted for them), and he comes back into the Company’s arms.
Mr. B doesn’t stick around for any discussion. He steps out the door, and tells Bob, “It’s done.”

And even as Mr. B leaves home, the man who shot him dead, Mo, arrives home, to find Maya cooking breakfast and Sylar powerless.
(So I’m wearing the dunce cap this time out, as I really thought Sylar was temporarily powerless due to the trauma his body underwent from the Kirby Plaza wounds. I should have suspected that the Company had actually injected him with the virus. With that turn of events though, why didn’t they just kill him when they had the chance, given how dangerous he’s proven to be… I mean, if he’s gonna die from the virus anyway, right? And actually, while on that train of thought, they should have just killed Kensei/Adam too. Just taken his blood and killed him a long time ago…)
Okay, sorry for the cold blooded digression. I should just take Bob’s job and be done with it.

Back in Mo’s apartment, it becomes all too clear to Maya that Sylar is not the Gabriel she fell for. And, having seen Mo’s data on his laptop, Sylar sees that the cure for the Shanti virus lies in Claire’s blood, and that in theory, this should give him back his powers.
So it’s off to the lab!
At the lab (which of course used to be Isaac’s loft, where Sylar ate poor Isaac’s brain), Mo discovers that Sylar’s been injected with the strain that’s killing poor Niki, and Molly helps Maya “find” Alejandro, only to realize that he’s no longer anywhere to be found, and that Sylar killed poor Alejandro.
So Maya’s about to get all black teary-eyed when Sylar shoots her. Then, before he gets injected himself, Sylar wants to see the vaccine in action, so he has Mo inject Maya first, and Claire’s blood heals her and brings her back to life, just as it did Mr. B.
Sylar takes that as his cue to scamper off with the other vial, even as Elle arrives and starts zapping.
(Elle, by the way, was snooping around Bob’s office, to find the files on her… gone. She then checks the surveillance monitors, to see Sylar terrorizing Mo. So off she goes to make Daddy proud.)
Sadly—and how many times must this happen?—Sylar escapes. With the vial meant for Niki.
Sigh.

Meanwhile, Parkman reports to Granny P and Nathan that Victoria Pratt is dead. (So that’s where Parkman was, while Molly was left alone to be used as a bargaining chip by Sylar… Bad Parkman!)
Nathan tells Granny P that Peter’s still alive, and that he’s apparently in cahoots with Kensei/Adam, as their fingerprints were all over the crime scene. Granny P tells them that they’re after the virus and that it’s in Odessa.
She also says that she actually helped K/A once (did she sleep with him too?), but stopped before it was too late, when she realized that K/A was mad, mad, mad. (And she wasn’t for wanting to blow New York up. Hmmm…)
Before they go, Granny P shoots off a thought in Parkman’s direction: if you can’t stop Peter, you may have to kill him. Bullet in the head. Only way to be sure. (Go, Granny P!!!)

Amusingly, we see the tail end of Nathan and Parkman’s flight to Odessa, as they land, and vow never to talk about what went on, ever again. Parkman also tells Nathan what Granny P “thought” him earlier, about just maybe needing to off Peter if he should prove a stubborn handful. Nathan says, “… nothing good ever came from listening to my mother,” and “… leave my brother to me.”
Conveniently, they touch down at Primatech just in time to be met at the door by Hiro. The three then rush in to find Peter having already TK’d the vault door open. Hiro tries to stop K/A, but Peter TK’s him, slams him to the wall, and looks about to telekinetically throttle him, when Parkman arrives and does the Jedi mind trick: K/A is using you, go deal with him.
But Peter fights back with his mind, and is quite literally sweeping the floor with Parkman’s a$$ when Nathan arrives and the brothers stand face to face. Nathan (bless his soul) talks reason to Peter, asking him, “Can you really trust K/A?”

While all that psychodrama’s going on, Hiro steals into the vault and has his own face to face with K/A. Heartfelt and bitter words are exchanged, and Hiro ‘ports them both away.* But even as he does so, K/A drops the vial containing the virus (which he was holding behind his back).
Luckily, Peter arrives in time to telekinetically catch it before it hits the floor. He then incinerates it between his palms, using Ted’s nuclear power.
Standing in a vault containing a whole lot of other mysterious items, the current generation realizes they’ve had enough of cleaning up their parents’ messes. Nathan decisively announces that he’s going public, about everything (ironically, what he once argued with Simone would be the wrong thing to do). He even tells Parkman to make sure people listen to what he has to say.
Of course, a hidden surveillance camera catches this pivotal announcement…

… and at the press conference, I get the sense of what’s about to happen as Nathan gets into a weepy speech, accompanied by shots of episodes past.
Just as he’s about to say, “I can fly,” he’s shot.
In the panic, we see someone walk away, though said someone is too far away to identify. (Parkman though should have been able to catch the killer’s thoughts, right?)

Granny P then gets a call on her cell, and she replies, “It was inevitable.”
She then says, “You do realize you’ve opened Pandora’s box, don’t you?”
End of Volume Two.

We then get a tease for Volume Three, entitled “Villains.”
Sylar injects himself in some back alley, like a heroin junkie.
First, his wounds heal, then, he uses his TK to pull an empty tin of spinach across the alley into his hand.
The big, bad brain eater’s back…

* We see later on that Hiro actually ‘ported Kensei/Adam into a coffin, buried in the same cemetery Papa Sulu’s grave is found. Once again, these people leave a dangerous fellow alive…
Will they ever learn?

Parting shot: So that’s it for this volume, and as fallout courtesy of the WGA strike, that’s it for the season too; Volume Three will be with us in the fall.
I’ll be back soon with the first installment of something I’ve decided to call In-Between Seasons, where I’ll give my assessment of a TV show’s recently completed season (including my thoughts on the finale), and give my two cents on where we should go from here…

(Behind the scenes images courtesy of gregbeeman.blogspot.com.)

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.”)