A Rundown of the 13 Best, Most Recent Horror Movies I’ve Seen
[9 of 13]
THE MIST (November 2007)


More so than being a monster movie—and it is that, a rather exceptional one, to boot—The Mist is really about the desperation and insanity that can grab hold of people who are suddenly faced with the disastrous and the inexplicable.

Read the entire review here.

(The Mist OS courtesy of impawards.com [design by BLT & Associates].)

MUTANT CHRONICLES
(Review)

“The Chronicles foretell of the release of the enemy, the ruin of the world, the final days of our age. But, they also prophesy the survival of Man. That Nakhdan the Deliverer, shall walk reborn among us, and deliver us from destruction.
“It is in the service of that prophecy that we are now irrevocably bound.”

Following an introductory sequence that establishes the nature of the film’s threat (an apparently alien machine which first landed here at the end of the Ice Age), we are quickly thrust into the middle of Simon Hunter’s Mutant Chronicles:
The year, 2707; the earth is ruled by four corporations—Capitol, Bauhaus, Mishima, and Imperial—massive entities who wage an endless war over what little natural resources are left on the planet.
But something is about to awaken that ancient, extraterrestrial machine, and only in the face of this all-consuming threat, will mankind unite, in a desperate bid to save the planet, and the entire human race.


The set piece that kicks off Mutant Chronicles—a border skirmish between Capitol and Bauhaus—effectively mires the audience, along with the suffering soldiers, in the brutal conflict that holds the world in a death grip.
Utilizing a grungy steampunk milieu for this particular future, Hunter (working off a script by Philip Eisner, who also wrote Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon) presents this section of the global conflict as World War I trench warfare revisited.
The explosions, the screams, the lethal gas, it’s all here, depicting war in a horribly intimate and visceral light.
There is nothing of today’s video game warfare here, with smart weapons launched remotely from locations insulated and far removed from the battlefield. Instead, this is the brutal combat of the early 20th century, where the blood, the sweat, and the dirt, are all too real.
But this mayhem pales in comparison to the bloodshed which ensues once the alien machine is set in motion, and implacable, inhuman hordes are loosed upon the already ravaged world.


Enter the squad of military personnel—which includes The Mist’s Thomas Jane, Sin City’s Devon Aoki, and Speed Racer’s Benno Fürmann—and the suicide mission that is quickly cobbled together by Brother Samuel (Ron Perlman), who represents the Order of Nakhdan, and is guided by the writings in the sacred Chronicles, an ancient tome protected by the silent Guardian, Severian (Perlman’s co-star in Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Anna Walton).
It’s in the hands of this tiny band that the final hope of the human race lies.


What is perhaps the most commendable trait of Mutant Chronicles is, it’s the sort of film that valiantly works around its budgetary limitations.
What we have here is an ambitious genre production that dares to tell a sweeping, wartorn tale of faith in the face of adversity, on a far humbler budget than your average Hollywood tentpole.
There’s quite a lot of green screen, CGI, and other assorted effects work here that, yes, look rather dodgy, but they’re in service to a narrative that boasts subtext, however fleeting, which is more than can be said for any number of big budget Hollywood monstrosities.


At its core, Mutant Chronicles is about how faith can thrive in even the most bitter and desperate circumstances, and that all will turn out right in the end, though perhaps not the way we may anticipate.
Given another pass at the script, a more dynamic action coordinator, and a Hollywood-sized budget, Mutant Chronicles could have stood a chance of turning out to be a genre classic.
As it is, despite its flaws and shortcomings, it’s still nonetheless an interesting, imaginative, and worthwhile watch.


Parting shot: It’s too bad that we see too little of Sean Pertwee and Shauna Macdonald, and John Malkovich’s role here is all but a blip on the film’s running time.

Parting shot 2: The film is loosely based on the Mutant Chronicles RPG originally published in 1993.

(Images courtesy of omelete.com.br [Mutant Chronicles OS and film images] and aintitcool.com [Mutant Chronicles quad].)

THE MIST
(Review)

Before I get into this, one thing: Frank Darabont has balls of steel. Nay, adamantium.
Balls of adamantium.
Indeed, he does.


I was first swallowed by Stephen King’s The Mist way back in 1981, in the truly exceptional and in many ways, groundbreaking, horror anthology, Dark Forces.
Mr. King’s The Mist left an impression for a number of reasons.
One: at 130 pages, it was the longest story in Dark Forces, and it introduced me to the literary form known as the novella, something too long to be called a short story, yet too short to be called a novel.
Two: it had an ending that was definitely not a happy one, and unlike, say, The Omen’s ending, where we see the main character bite the dust in his vain effort to slay the AntiChrist, The Mist’s ending was more open-ended. It presented a vague sliver of hope, but allowed the reader to decide the remaining characters’ fates; King basically left you to decide what shade you preferred for that downer ending. (Though a part of me was irked since King opted not to present a firm resolution to the story, I eventually came to understand that this was simply another way in which to end a story.)
As far as King’s novella was concerned, it ended with a choice: optimists could choose the greyer-shaded ending; pessimists, the blacker-.
In writing the screenplay for his film adaptation though, Darabont gives us a definite ending all right, and it’s certainly not a gentle one…


The day after a sudden, violent storm, David Drayton (a fantastic Thomas Jane) and his son Billy (Babel’s Nathan Gamble, soon to be seen as Jim Gordon’s son in The Dark Knight), along with a host of other townsfolk buying emergency supplies, get trapped in the local grocery when the strange titular mist comes rolling in.
People want to get home, of course. To loved ones left alone to clear up the post-storm mess, like David’s wife, Stephanie (Kelly Collins Lintz, from TV’s Surface and One Tree Hill). But no one can leave the Food House though.
There are things in the mist, see. Hungry things.


More so than being a monster movie—and it is that, a rather exceptional one, to boot—The Mist is really about the desperation and insanity that can grab hold of people who are suddenly faced with the disastrous and the inexplicable.
People get scared, irrational, unpredictable. Dangerous.
Throw in Mrs. Carmody, an unstable, religious fanatic (played by the supremely awesome Marcia Gay Harden), and an already dire situation quickly escalates into a vicious exercise in staying alive and sane.
This poor collective may have barricaded themselves in, but not all the monsters are out there in the mist…


King’s characters are brought to celluloid life by an across-the-board amazing cast which also includes Infamous’ Toby Jones, The X-Files’ Laurie Holden, Homicide‘s Andre Braugher, frequent Darabont collaborator William Sadler, and veteran actors Frances Sternhagen and Jeffrey DeMunn. Also in roles pumped up a tad from the novella, Reunion’s Alexa Davalos and Battlestar Galactica’s Sam Witwer.
The exceptional performances are then magnificently supported by some wicked creature design and effects by genre stalwarts, the KNB EFX Group.


But this is all brought together by the Man with the Adamantium Balls himself, Mr. Frank Darabont, who captures that sense of bubbling tension trapped in the confines of the grocery like some toxic gas, inexorably building up to some horrible apex where the worst in the human condition either simply deteriorates into a rank hopelessness, or combusts into raw, savage violence.
Then, of course, there’s that ending.
Hoo-boy, that ending!
Save for a handful of bits either excised from the original source material (an adulterous liaison) or added on (as per some characters getting their roles expanded from the novella, or new scenes to further flesh out plot or character dynamics), Darabont’s The Mist is pretty much the novella skillfully transfigured for the silver screen. The story’s major beats are virtually intact: Norm the bag boy, the pharmacy, what Ollie Weeks does right before they attempt their great escape, dot dot dot.
Those familiar with the novella’s generally bleak climax though, will still be chilled at the uncompromising coda Darabont chooses to close the film with. It’s brutal, people, and his The Mist is one of those emotionally potent and wrenching horror films that doesn’t hold back on its gut punches.


Coming out of a field where any weak link isn’t readily apparent, the MVP is still most definitely Darabont, who, in hijacking a substantial portion of The Shield crew during their hiatus (camera operators, D.P., editor, script supervisor, all of whom Darabont enjoyed working with when he directed an episode of the TV show) and making what he describes as a “very direct, muscular kind of film,” he’s crafted what I feel is, alongside Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil, the best Stephen King film adaptation I’ve ever seen.
Yes, I love (to varying degrees) Stand By Me, Carrie, Pet Sematary, and Misery, but The Mist is something else entirely, and so unlike Darabont’s previous King adaptations, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, it’s astounding.
I was hoping this would be good, but I certainly didn’t expect Darabont would kick me in the a$$ quite so convincingly; he took a 27-year old story and made a riveting horror film rife with tension and emotion, that is startlingly relevant to our post-9/11 world. (He also gets to sneak some Dead Can Dance and Drew Struzan in there, so, really, what’s not to like?)


Is it terrifying? Yes.
Is it comforting? Frak, no.
But does it say something?
Yes, it does, and anyone watching The Mist will hopefully see beyond the otherworldly beasties to learn something about the very ugly, and very real monsters that live under our own, very human, skins.

“On the one level, it’s meant to be a really cool, intense, scary creature feature. But if it were just that, I wouldn’t have wanted to adapt that story. What it does give is something somewhat subversive, which I think all the best horror is.
“Really, it’s an examination of people in a pressure cooker. What does a climate of fear make you do? What mistakes does it compel? How far off the precipice do we sail? Which speaks to the ending as well.
“I just find that absolutely fascinating, because we’ve been nothing if not living in a pressure cooker of fear and the exploitation of fear, the fear of fear, so far in the 21st century. That seems to be defining our behavior, so that makes it really fantastic material to dive into.”
-- Frank Darabont on The Mist

(The Mist OS courtesy of impawards.com [design by BLT & Associates]; images courtesy of aintitcool.com, filmz.ru, and shocktillyoudrop.com.)

(Frank Darabont quote from an aintitcool.com interview.)

THE TRIPPER
(Review)

“A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah.”
-- Ronald Reagan

After a brief prologue set in 1967, in the Northern California lumbertown of Carlisle, we flash forward to the present, where Carlisle is set to host the Free Love Festival, a weekend bacchanalia of sex, drugs, and rock and roll organized by one Frank Baker (ol’ Pee-wee Herman himself, Paul Reubens).
Throw in a bunch of modern day hippies (among them Jay himself, Jason Mewes), Carlisle’s “de facto peacekeeper,” Officer Buzz Hall (the Punisher himself, Thomas Jane), and a mad Ronald Reagan mask-wearing killer, and you’ve got The Tripper, co-written and directed by Deputy Dewey himself, David Arquette.

Given that this is a film that kicks off while the fires of the Vietnam war rage, set during a time when the war in Iraq continues to drag on with no apparent end in sight, and featuring a killer who dons the visage of a President who reigned over an America characterized by excess and conspicuous consumption, it’s obvious that Arquette is attempting to use the slasher film as a stage for some biting socio-political commentary.
Anyone who’s visited the Iguana before knows I love me a good horror film that actually says something, and though what The Tripper is saying is not necessarily anything new, my main problems with it are its ill-paced script, and the fact that a majority of the narrative’s characters are dope fiends who don’t really seem to deserve any audience sympathy.

Thus, not only does the film meander badly (I’d love to have used the adverb “trippily,” if the experience had been entertaining, which it ultimately wasn’t), but the gorehound in me found himself blasted back to the bad old days of the slasher film, when all I ended up doing was wait impatiently for the next victim to wind up dead. These are characters who are in a perpetually fraked-up state, and sympathy for these sorts is pretty hard to come by.
It’s always a challenge to get an audience to take a ride with characters like this, and when the film is a Trainspotting, or a Spun, or a Requiem for a Dream, you know all involved did their jobs splendidly. In films like these, you end up caring for and sympathizing with individuals you probably wouldn’t want to be seen in the same room with in real life.
Now, the average slasher film does have sex, drugs, alcohol, and wayward youth as some of its conventions. Not only does The Tripper up those particular antes exponentially, but Arquette asks us to spend most of our time with this host of druggies who seem to display no redeeming qualities at all. In the end, I don’t see why I should care for these people in the slightest.
And yes, we do have Samantha (Jaime King; from Sin City and TV’s Kitchen Confidential and The Class), who is currently abstaining from drugs because of a recent Bad Experience, and who is clearly the Last Girl-in-waiting, but she’s one out of six, and not a particularly compelling, charismatic screen presence. (Hey, if you’re gonna be the Last Girl, you better have some chops to deserve that honour.)

It’s also sad that some interesting actors (Balthazar Getty and Lukas Haas) are in this but aren’t really afforded anything meaty to chew on. Jane’s is perhaps the most noteworthy performance as the sane voice of authority, but of course, it’s a voice that’s drowned out by all the chemical hi-jinx going on.

One of the things The Tripper seems to be saying—an idea reinforced by the film’s end credits roll—is that while the American Powers-That-Be are evil, ineffectual passive resistance to that towering monolith is not really any better either.
Where The Tripper fails, I feel, is in not really presenting us with an alternative; in what is perhaps a gross oversimplification, the narrative doesn’t really put forward a stance between the ultra-left and the ultra-right which would make any sort of sense in this day and age.
I realize this may not really have been Arquette’s ultimate intent in the first place (this is, after all, a slasher film and not a Michael Moore documentary), but if you’re gonna get into this particular sandbox, you should at least play the game, right?

I wanted to have fun with this one, but in the end, it just didn’t float my boat.
Maybe if it had been funnier, or gorier, or more thrilling, or if it had had something more substantial to say, then The Tripper might have been worth the time and the price of admission.
As it is, re-watching a double feature of the Masters of Horror episodes, “Homecoming” and “The Washingtonians” (review in Archive: September 2007)—both effective exercises in horror as socio-political commentary—would be a far better prospect.

Parting shot: For those interested, Arquette also appears in the film as the redneck Muff, while the missus produces and has a teeny cameo.
Another name of note on The Tripper is comic book writer Steve Niles, whose 30 Days of Night has been adapted for the big screen and is just about to be unleashed on all of horror geekdom.

(The Tripper OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com; DVD cover art courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com.)