¡QUÉ HORROR! 2019

Candidate #14

OVERLORD

(September 2018)

“This is war, ja? People die in many unfortunate ways.”

In a world where the trailer, one sheets, and other marketing material for Overlord did not exist, you’d be forgiven if you thought that for its roughly first half, the film was merely a specimen of the contemporary World War II film**, with its narrative lens filtered through the blood and grit of the “War is Hell” aesthetic (as opposed to the glorified nature of conflict in old school WWII cinema).

There’s a fleeting glimpse of a “sick” woman and a passing mention of “tar” with “some kind of a power” at about the 30 minute mark, but it’s only at nearly its halfway point that it takes the in-your-face plunge into a strain of pulp horror tragically rooted in the real life atrocities of Nazi medical experimentation.

It’s that plunge that gives Julius Avery’s sophomore feature (from a screenplay by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith***) leave to gradually show its true colors.

“Does somebody wanna tell me what the f*ck is going on here?!”

True, there’s a healthy amount of action in Overlord, but it’s again that pulp horror portion of its cinematic DNA that makes it prime ¡Qué horror! material.

Think of it as the genre-infused prequel**** to Saving Private Ryan, where we get to see a mission that was instrumental in paving the way for Tom Hanks and company to storm Omaha Beach.

What’s also notable about Overlord are the brief moments it takes to subvert old school WWII cinema.

“… the Nazis are rotten sons’ a b!tches! And rotten sons’ a b!tches will do anything they have to to destroy everything that is good in this world!

“That is why we have to be just as rotten as they are!”

It’s the kind of film that casts Wyatt Russell in a role that would be the film’s nominal lead if this were an old school Hollywood WWII film, as a man of action and few words, a character that gets the job done, whose driving motivation is the capital M-“Mission.”

A character that brooks no deviations from the Mission, and is willing to unleash violence to achieve his goals, an exemplar for the ideal of the all-American can-do brand of machismo that was the stock-in-trade of the WWII cinema of yore.

Given the way the narrative unfolds, you can virtually see where the character arc of Russell’s Corporal Ford will end up.

There’s also a moment that involves Grey Worm himself, Jacob Anderson.

It’s a moment that brutally punctuates that, in the end, no amount of words can encapsulate the horrors of war, where any individual soldier is not a person with hopes and dreams, but rather just grist for the mill, expendable units ready to be jotted down as an “acceptable loss” on the road to victory.

The script also ensures the only prominent female in the narrative (Mathilde Ollivier) gets her own Moment or two, as she endeavors to help the American soldiers complete their all-important Mission.

“A Thousand-Year Reich needs thousand-year soldiers.”

But in the end, of course, this is not meant to be an accurate depiction of World War II, nor a complete deconstruction of WWII cinema, nor an existential war movie in the vein of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.

This is a more or less straightforward war movie that’s got action and some horror mixed into it. It’s genre infused cinema produced by J.J. Abrams, so settle in for a wild and bumpy ride.

“How does it feel, the blood of Eternity flowing through your veins?”

**  Granted, of course, that you were willing to suspend your disbelief long enough to accept the possibility of a desegregated military unit four years before President Truman signed Executive Order 9981.

*** Billy Ray (to whom a Story By credit is also given) co-wrote the screenplay for E. Elias Merhige’s Suspect Zero, while Mark L. Smith penned the script for Nimrod Antal’s Vacancy.

**** Because, hey, as proven by everything from Batman (the wrapping-up Gotham and the upcoming Pennyworth) to Breaking Bad (Better Call Saul) to The Big Bang Theory (Young Sheldon) to Game of Thrones to Star Wars, prequels are apparently the new sequel…

(Overlord OS’ courtesy of impawards.com.)

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

[11 of 13]

OUIJA: ORIGIN OF EVIL

(October 2016)

There's something to be said for well-crafted traditional horror cinema and Mike Flanagan’s Ouija: Origin of Evil, is certainly that.

A prequel to Stiles White’s Ouija--the 2014 film based on the Hasbro game (which I never got to watch)--Origin of Evil follows the Zander women, mother Alice (Elizabeth Reaser), her high school daughter Lina (Annalise Basso, who also featured in Flanagan’s Oculus), and 9-year-old Doris (Lulu Wilson), as they try and get by in Los Angeles, 1967, after the loss of their husband and father.

Alice’s business name is “Madame Zander,” and she and her daughters perform a community service by giving their clients closure through faux séances, or at least, that’s what Alice tells herself and her children.

Things go awry of course (because let’s face it, they have to, given that this is a horror movie) when Alice purchases a (gasp!) Ouija board.

The premise sounds dopey as hell, but Flanagan and co-writer Jeff Howard (who also tag teamed on the screenplays for Flanagan’s Oculus and Before I Wake) wring it for all the creeptasticness they can muster.

Parting Shot:

Oh, and look! Doug Jones and Elliott, errr, I mean Henry Thomas, are in it too!

(Ouija: Origin of Evil OS courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)

¡QUÉ HORROR! 2017

Candidate #12

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!

(Seoul Station UK quad courtesy of impawards.com.)

reVIEW (41)
DOMINION:
PREQUEL TO THE EXORCIST

After Paul Schrader’s Exorcist prequel failed to impress studio heads, the film was shelved, and Renny Harlin was brought in to come up with a new version, Exorcist: The Beginning (see reVIEW (40) in the Archive).
But after The Beginning failed to impress audiences, Schrader’s Dominion made the festival rounds, where the critics embraced it, eventually leading to a limited theatrical release.
And after I got to see it, it was obvious that this was the better of the two prequels.

Opening in Holland in 1944, Dominion: Prequel To The Exorcist kicks off with a harrowing sequence that serves to establish why Lankester Merrin (Stellan Skaarsgard) has strayed from the faith. We then pick up years later, as Merrin (on “sabbatical”) is excavating an ancient church which seems to have been buried just as soon as it was completed.
For anyone who’s seen The Beginning, this is the same basic premise found there, though in Harlin’s version, Merrin’s wartime trauma is parceled out as a series of flashbacks running the course of the film.
In hindsight, it’s clear what the studio heads chose to do with Schrader’s Dominion: inject traditional horror elements into the narrative, a gambit that still failed in my eyes, as I point out in my review of The Beginning that it “… ends up neglecting the horror film side of itself.”

See, I honestly don’t think Schrader (and screenwriters William Wisher, Jr. and Caleb Carr; yes, that Caleb Carr, author of The Alienist) intended Dominion to be a horror film in the traditional sense. In point of fact, it isn’t even a horror film in some of the senses that The Exorcist is a horror film.
That theme of evil as external supernatural force as opposed to internal natural instinct, the juxtaposition of the horrors of the Holocaust with the evil that embraces the African village, things that I felt The Beginning could have explored but didn’t?
Well, they’re all here. Apparently, they were diluted and dispersed in the transition to The Beginning. There are some provocative themes and ideas in Dominion, and they’re delved into in a satisfying and adult manner.
Aside from what I’ve mentioned above, Dominion also underscores the manner in which an alien entity (whether a foreign military presence or foreign religion) can exacerbate a local problem. There’s also an excellent sequence towards film’s end that suggests that any large-scale public display of violence is merely the symptom of an internal struggle with evil.
Merrin’s re-conversion here is also more palpable and logical, without the heavy-handed symbolism resorted to in The Beginning.

Now, after what—if memory serves me right—is my third viewing of Dominion, what occurs to me now that didn’t years ago when I first saw it is, Why did the studio heads greenlight Dominion in the first place, only to shelve it and cobble up the Frankenstein’s Monster that was The Beginning?
It had to have been all on the page in the screenplay, didn’t it? The veritable non-existence of traditional horror film elements in the narrative, the final confrontation as philosophical and moral debate? These and other bits like it that scream, This is not a horror film the way most people define that term.
They had to have seen it as early as then, and still they went through with it, only to back-pedal and shelve the film, then to back-back-pedal and release it anyway, all the while spending more and more money.
And admittedly, Dominion isn’t as scary as The Exorcist. In the end though, neither was The Beginning.
What’s particularly damning at this point is, at least Dominion didn’t even attempt to operate on the exact same playing field as The Exorcist, which The Beginning was possibly aiming for with its botched infusion of horror movie stylings.

In the end, Schrader’s Dominion is a fascinating treatise on the nature of evil, and God and man’s positions in relation to that evil, a treatise that just happens to be set in the world of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist.
It’s also an effective back story for the character of Lankester Merrin, a disturbing snapshot of his first encounter with Pazuzu.
And ultimately, that’s what a prequel is. A back story.
Not another excuse to make some more money off a franchise that shouldn’t have been one in the first place.

(Dominion: Prequel To The Exorcist OS courtesy of impawards.com.)