THE DEVIL’S CHAIR
(Review)

“I guess you’ve seen Hellraiser. I’m guessing you’ve seen all those kind of films. Pumpkinhead or whatever. That’s probably why you’re watching this now.”


Well, this one was interesting. I can’t say I completely love it, but it’s an intriguing piece of horror cinema nonetheless.
We open with the scathingly knowing narration of Nick West (Andrew Howard), as we’re treated to fragmentary glimpses of how this tale will end, before we’re quickly shown the foundation of Adam Mason’s The Devil’s Chair: Nick and his bird Sammy (StarStreet’s Polly Brown) are larking about the abandoned Blackwater Asylum, when they discover the eponymous chair, which becomes instrumental in Sammy’s apparent demise.


We’re never really certain what exactly happened—not yet, at any rate—but Sammy’s body is never found, and Nick’s crazed rantings about the chair land him in a functioning loonybin for four years, before he’s prematurely sprung by Psychology professor, Dr. Willard (David Gant, possibly familiar to some of you from Paco Plaza’s Romasanta, François Girard’s Le violon rouge, or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil).
Willard intends to write a book about Nick, about the incident and his delusions. Central to that book is Nick’s reactions to his return to Blackwater, in the company of Willard and a few handpicked students.


Right off the bat, we can plainly see the terrible Catch-22 here: if Nick is indeed a nutter, then the good doctor is returning to the scene of the crime with the lunatic murderer (something which is actually brought up by one of the characters early on in the film); if Nick is telling the truth, then there’s some weird supernatural shenanigans going on in Blackwater.
Either way, an abandoned asylum is the last place any sane individual would want to be in.
But Willard and academic company take the plunge, with Nick in tow, and The Devil’s Chair chronicles the results of that boneheaded decision.

“Look at this poorly written, badly acted bullsh!t! Is there any truth in this B-movie banality? No! No!
“There is no truth, my friends. Believe no one. Believe nothing.”


At its core, The Devil’s Chair is a fascinating look at the dichotomy of the traditional supernatural-tinged horror film and the more modern, grounded brand of endurance horror which finds its roots in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes.
Nick’s voice-over, which runs the entire length of the film, serves as a sort of postmodern commentary on the on-screen action, adding another layer to the whole. Initially, this may at first seem to be a way to inject a Guy Ritchie-esque air about the proceedings (complete with freeze-framing the action so as to better punctuate Nick’s observations and opinions), but ultimately the narrative technique bolsters the climactic reveal.
It’s the non-linear narrative though, which could make or break it for an audience.

As it is, that opening montage pretty much telegraphs the film’s outcome; it’s all right there.
Given though that the third act eventuality was always in my mind, when Mason and co-writer Simon Boyes choose to let that particular shoe drop, it’s still a horrible, pivotal moment that subsequently drags the audience through the grueling, bloody climax.
And, potential deal-breaker though it is, the reveal is certainly more intrinsic to the material than, say, a plot flip like Haute Tension has.
Love or hate that curve which The Devil’s Chair takes, it’s undeniably part of the whole.


For my part, I’ll say this: You know those moments in a movie where you see another film that might have been, had the filmmakers chosen to go down a particular path?
Those instances when you exit the theatre and go, Why didn’t I see that movie, instead of what I was actually shown?
Well, in the case of The Devil’s Chair, I can safely say, I’m glad I didn’t see that movie, the one that was actually going on… What we do see of it is enough to drive the point home.
After all, in this day and age of extreme cinematic horror, there’s something to be said for the adage “A little goes a long way.”

“I tell you what, party people, you geeks and freaks, you bloodthirsty morons... F*ck you. Bring on the red parade.”


As potent a brew as The Devil’s Chair is though (with enough bravado to sneak a David Lynch moment in before the end credits), it’s not without its warts.
There may have been a tad too many of those aforementioned Guy Ritchie moments, and the voice-over did get contrived in some bits, and in one stretch, strangely derisive of the film’s intended audience.
I was also none too thrilled with the CGI bits.
And even though the borderline hammishness of Gant’s portrayal of Willard makes a little more sense by the time the film wraps up, it’s still a borderline hammy piece of acting that we need to endure for the length of the feature.


Still and all, it’s an effective piece that marks Mason as a name to watch in the future. (I’ve yet to see his previous film, Broken, though in the wake of The Devil’s Chair, I’m certainly looking forward to his next feature, Blood River, which reunites him with Howard.)
If you, like me, revel in the broad and dark spectrum that horror resides in, then The Devil’s Chair is a title that needs to go on your viewing list.
At the very least, it could open up some involved discussions of the different kinds of horror, and the particular personal preferences of any given horrorhound.

“Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

Parting shot: Incidentally enough, having mentioned Ritchie, Howard had a role in his underappreciated Revolver.

(The Devil’s Chair OS courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com; images courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com & shocktillyoudrop.com.)

FRONTIERE(S)
(Review)

And the French have done it again…

Xavier Gens’ Frontiere(s)—which brought him to the attention of Hollywood and got him the Hitman gig—follows a group of youths on the run from the police, who decide to stop at a hostel in the French countryside, with disastrous results.
Riffing freely off Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Gens’ splatterfest is a gruesome and sordid affair that puts Yasmine (Karina Testa) through the wringer in the worst way. If you thought Marilyn Burns had it rough in Chain Saw, think again.
Seriously. That was a cake walk.

Now, for those of you who’ve been to the Iguana before, you’ll know that I love me my horror with subtext.
Sadly (for me, at least), Frontiere(s) is more survival horror than anything else, one of those cinematic endurance tests for its prospective audience. The thing is, unlike Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension, which seemed to focus more on the thrill and the tension of the hunt, Frontiere(s) seems more preoccupied with revulsion and degradation than anything else.
On the level of a balls-to-the-wall piece of extreme horror, it certainly delivers, no question about it. It delivers in buckets of blood and gobbets of flesh. I just wish it had been about more than just a French variation of the “pretty young things in peril” scenario.
And to be fair, though the protagonists’ personalities are rather negligible here, the snatches of filial relationships within the family of crazies which we do get to see are fascinating, though those remain pretty much in the background.

Ultimately, Frontiere(s) is a nasty piece of work, and if you strap yourself in for that sort of ride, you’ll have a hell of a time with this one.
This is so much more effective than the recent slew of 70’s horror remakes from Hollywood, and just the latest reason why I will never, ever set foot in France, where the crazies really seem to be over-the-top wacko…

Parting shot: Frontiere(s) gets a limited U.S. release on May 9, 2008, and hits DVD shelves four days later on the 13th.

Parting shot 2: A review of Gens’ Hitman can be found in the Archive, as well as one of another gem of French disturbo-horror, Kim Chapiron's Sheitan.

(Frontier(s)—as per its international title—quad courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com; OS courtesy of impawards.com; images courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com.)

THE CINEMATIC (UN)LIFE OF COUNT DRACULA
1922-1979
Part I: “A Symphony of Shudders”

July 13 1929
The Film Society has finally caved in to reason and handed the copy of that blasted film to me.
Just when I begin to think that everything Abraham worked so hard for is safe and out of the hands of profiteering criminals, yet another copy surfaces. Irritable piece of filth.
Blast Murnau and his colleagues!
I have consigned this particular copy to the furnace and even now am watching it burn. Seeing the tiny sparks floating up from the flames is doing me a world of good. The smoke though, reminds me of how that cadaverous thing met its demise.
I still recall how that monster looked. A repulsive, man-sized rodent! Revolting.
And the Society had the gall… the unabashed audacity, to invite me to its screening, even after all the fuss and bother of my legal entanglements with Prana-Film.
The film isn’t even any good at all. They changed the ending, for pity’s sake!
Sunlight, indeed.
What would have been so difficult about a Bowie knife?
Ridiculous.


1922.
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s classic silent film, Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens, is released.
For the purposes of this article, three important points to take note of.

One: the film is a thinly-veiled (and unauthorized) reworking of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, merely changing character names (Dracula becomes Graf Orlock; Lucy Westenra becomes Annie Harding; Van Helsing becomes Bulwar), locales (London becomes Bremen), and time periods (1893 winds back to 1838).
Florence Stoker’s campaign to have every single copy of the film destroyed is legendary.
Several times, beginning in July 1925, when all the copies owned by the Deutsch-Amerikansch Film Union were reportedly destroyed, Stoker’s widow came close to her goal.
But always, when it seemed that the film had finally been obliterated, the existence of another copy would come to her attention, and her protests would begin anew. This crusade was to continue till her death in 1937.
In the end though, what managed to escape her attention was a talkie that surfaced in 1930. Entitled Die Zwolfte Stunde (The Twelfth Hour), it was later discovered to be none other than Murnau’s Nosferatu, with a music-and-effects track added onto it.
Of this particular turn of events, writer Denis Gifford has said, “Nosferatu is the classic example of art saved from destruction by piracy.”


Two: visually, Graf Orlock’s bald, rat-like countenance has served as inspiration for everything from Tobe Hooper’s TV adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, to a whole clan of vampires in White Wolf’s role playing game, Vampire: The Masquerade, to the Reapers in Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II.

Three: Orlock’s death—disintegrated by the rays of the rising sun—appears nowhere in Stoker’s novel; neither does traditional folklore say that a vampire is affected by the sun in this manner.
Death by sunlight is a purely cinematic invention that has since filtered into vampiric lore, becoming an invaluable (and to some, indispensable) addition to the body of myth that has accreted around the nocturnal creature.
Think how different vampires would be today, if Florence Stoker had succeeded in her campaign.
No “death by disco” climax in Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn; no FX-laden Chris Sarandon death scene in Tom Holland’s Fright Night; no fiery ends for the down-and-dirty deadheads of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark; and the entire premise of David Slade’s 30 Days of Night would be meaningless.
Which just goes to prove that film is a powerful medium, rearranging the public’s perception of facts, fallacies, and fables.


Nosferatu was to be merely the first of a whole slew of films that would be based on Stoker’s novel, the stage adaptation, or simply feature a character named Dracula, whether or not he resembled Stoker’s character.
And just to illustrate the depths that crass exploitation can go, there have also been films that have had “Dracula” in their titles, but did not even have a character with that name appearing in the film itself.
Case in point: Blood of Dracula, which was about a hypnotized girl developing a taste for blood. No Count whatsoever.

Parting shot: Reviews of Blade II, 30 Days of Night, and Shadow of the Vampire (which presents a fictionalized look at the filming of Nosferatu) can be found in the Archive.

In Part II of “The Cinematic (Un)Life of Count Dracula” (also to be found elsewhere in the Archive), we take a look at the stage adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula, to get a better understanding of the film adaptations from 1931 onwards.
The article above is a slightly altered portion of the second part of the previously published Blood, Love and Rhetoric series of articles written in 1997, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
The opening diary entry is of course, a fiction of mine.
Much love and thanx to Karen, for inviting me into the sandbox where this piece of writing (and so many others) first got to play.

(Nosferatu OS’s courtesy of impawards.com; image courtesy of greencine.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.co.uk.)

MASTERS OF HORROR
Season 2 Episode 1
“The Damned Thing”
Teleplay by Richard Christian Matheson; based on the short story by Ambrose Bierce; directed by Tobe Hooper

Sheriff Kevin Reddle (Powder’s Sean Patrick Flanery, though perhaps more widely seen as TV’s Young Indiana Jones) is the law in the small town of Cloverdale, suddenly faced with the recurrence of a terror that struck 24 years ago, turning his loving father into a homicidal maniac and leaving him an orphan.
As it turns out, the titular “damned thing” is intimately connected to the Reddle family, unleashed by the Sheriff’s grandfather, a primordial entity whose coming is accompanied by flurries of violence and mayhem, perpetrated by otherwise normal everyday people.

Though “The Damned Thing” is by no means a terrible film, it still doesn’t get far beyond stretches of quiet character moments, punctuated by instances of explosive gore and bloodletting. And though director Hooper takes his time with the characters—as he did on Poltergeist—what we do see of them doesn’t make us sympathize with them enough to really care about the outcome of the story. (It is a kick though to see Sam’s brother, Ted Raimi, as Father Tulli.)
And not only is the big CGI reveal of “the damned thing” a bit of a letdown, the story’s ending also serves as a big “So what?” to cap off this season’s not-so-grand opening.

(The Damned Thing DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

(Originally posted 031107.)

VACANCY
(Review)

As if to pay homage to the granddaddy of all “loony in a motel” films, Vacancy opens* with what can be viewed as the 21st-century descendant of the Saul Bass-designed title sequence from Hitchcock’s Psycho, a sequence which coolly segues into the license plate of the car of Amy (Kate Beckinsale) and David Fox (Luke Wilson), a couple under the strain of an impending divorce.
It’s late, they’re lost, and the car’s beginning to look like it could be trouble. After apparently getting some help from a mechanic (Ethan Embry, goofy stoner Mark from Empire Records and the Jennifer Love Hewitt-yearning Preston from Can’t Hardly Wait), the Foxes eventually end up at the Pinewood Motel, overseen by its weirdo manager, Mason (Frank Whaley, fantastic in Keith Gordon’s A Midnight Clear and Thomas Carter’s Swing Kids).
They’re forced to spend the night at the ratty Honeymoon Suite, and when David can’t find anything on TV, he sticks in a VHS tape.
That’s when the fun starts.

Much as Eli Roth’s Hostel did, Vacancy uses the idea of torture and violence as a commercial venture as the springboard for its plot, and succeeds in giving its audience a tense and engaging thriller.
This is doubly interesting to me, as the film’s central idea is also a reflection on the fact that this kind of horror film (alternately called “torture porn”—from a phrase coined by New York Magazine’s David Edelstein—or my personal preference, “gorno”) is proving very profitable for Hollywood.
If the baddies of Hostel and Vacancy can make a quick buck off the misery and torture of hapless innocents, than why can’t Hollywood rip off audiences the world over with shrill screams and fake blood?
For any of you out there though who may take offense at anything called “torture porn,” let me assure you, Vacancy’s on-screen gore quotient is minimal in the extreme. There is violence of course, but not the sort of splatter movie violence where we see dismemberment and eye gouging and disemboweling. Vacancy is more thriller than gorno, and it’s a taut little bugger too.

What makes Vacancy even more effective is the fact that you become embroiled in this sullen, largely toxic relationship between husband and wife, played effectively by Beckinsale and Wilson. You feel the tension and the regret that this couple share, and you sense the spectre of the love that was once there.
You sympathize with them so much, that when the fit hits the shan, it’s actually a relief that they don’t devolve into hysterical recrimination. (After all, isn’t the fact that your lives are in danger far more important than anything else?)
It’s also a relief to see Beckinsale in something other than body-hugging black leather making out with Ben from Felicity, so if just for that, Amy Fox is a singular triumph.

If Vacancy has a weakness though, it can arguably be found in an ending that both soft pedals what came just before it, and perhaps in striving for realism (no protracted “psycho gets up after being stabbed/shot/mortally wounded to relentlessly stalk his victim” sequence here), director Nimrod Antal (Kontroll) and writer Mark L. Smith wind up crafting a climax that feels somewhat truncated.
That last shot had a feeling of: What?! That’s it?
Still, all in all, the ride getting to that final shot is worth it.
And if you’re not gonna give me much more than a good story about people in extreme, life-threatening situations (ie. no social or political commentary amidst the grue), then I’d much rather see an effective, if somewhat flawed, thriller than scene after scene of pointless blood and gore.

* It’s a savvy title sequence that’s one of the most interesting I’ve seen this year. (And that one sheet just slays, too.)

Parting shot: I love the conflation “gorno” (gore + porno), as it has that sleazy vibe to it, and a majority of the sub-genre’s titles strike me as violence for violence’s sake.
Don’t get me wrong, I love me a good horror film. Always have, always will.
But once you’ve seen Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, seeing other films of extreme violence (or, Heaven help me, seeing remakes of these classic films of extreme violence) just seems rather pointless, if they have nothing much more in their celluloid beyond the gore and grue.
Unless the point is to make a ton of money on a relatively low budget, which seems to be the case a lot of the time.
Now, when the film is a Hostel or a Saw, then I get it, and these are two of the films that give gorno its good name.
But when it’s a Turistas, or a Saw sequel, or a Texas Chainsaw remake (or prequel), or a Hills Have Eyes remake (or sequel remake), then these are the sort of films that give gorno its bad name.
And as you can see from the above sampling, they outnumber the goodies, believe me.

(Vacancy OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com.)

THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2 (Review)

It’s some two years after the events of Alexandre Aja’s remake of The Hills Have Eyes, and it seems that the military have been conducting sweeps of Sector 16 apparently without finding any of the cannibalistic mutants that roam the area. They’ve just recently wired the place with surveillance and monitoring equipment, and a detachment of National Guard trainees are sent in on a delivery run, routine grunt work that turns deadly when the blood starts to flow.

Directed by Martin Weisz (Rohtenburg) and written by original Hills writer/director Wes Craven, and his son Jonathan, this sequel feels like nothing so much as a quickie cash cow, slapped together to rake in the dough. Populated by a bunch of dull ciphers, the film strides nonchalantly towards the climactic gorefest with nary a spike of excitement or tension to break the tedium.
I may not by the biggest fan of Aja’s Hills, but at the very least, that had this palpable sense of bleak desperation, where you could almost feel the heat and the grit and the sand. Wiesz’s Hills 2 is a pedestrian entry in the annals of modern horror cinema, the sort of shocker that really has no proper context in which to view the onscreen bloodletting. All we have here is a gruesome exercise in the torture and maiming of characters as we watch dully while they’re picked off one by one.
There’s a half-hearted attempt to humanize one Guard, Missy Martinez (One Tree Hill’s Daniella Alonso), but that doesn’t really hold water, so ultimately, all we have here is meat, pure and simple, waiting to be stalked and gutted. (And in the case of Flex Alexander’s Sarge, you’re almost praying for it.)
We’re not even treated to the demise of recognizable TV stars like the usual horror movie of today (the House of Wax remake alone had alumni from 24, Gilmore Girls, and One Tree Hill, with Paris Hilton thrown in for good measure). The ultimate anonymity of these soon-to-be-dead-and-defiled Guards (and by extension, this film) is assured.

Writer Ed Gorman once described Craven’s original The Hills Have Eyes as “… an existentialist’s notion of a Saturday matinee,” while film critic Steven H. Scheuer considered it “… a serious attempt at social criticism within the horror genre.”
I haven’t seen the movie in ages (viewed in an after-school screening at a friend’s house during the glorious age of the Betamax), but I do recall my reaction: it was a riveting experience, and ultimately unpleasant, a bleak, nihilistic film that got under one’s skin, or like desert sand into the creases and crevices of one’s body. (Of course, at the time, I had no idea what the word “nihilistic” meant; I just knew it wasn’t a “fun” horror movie.)
And though it was the sort of movie that I wasn’t particularly eager to view repeatedly, it left a mark. It was potent low-budget cinema, that, like Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre before it, looked and felt awfully real, like some hellish documentary directed by an Inquisition torturer.
Thus, though Aja’s remake was certainly a passable example of today’s brand of extreme horror, it still felt fake compared to the original.
Weisz’s sequel feels even less genuine, mostly because it doesn’t really sink its claws into the audience. It just kind of presents the situation without placing us in the middle of the action. The experience is like watching Top Chef, or Hell’s Kitchen; you can see the food, but you can’t taste it. You just have to take the judges’ word for its edibility.

So how do I know The Hills Have Eyes 2 is a good horror movie? Because Martin Weisz and Wes Craven told me so.

Parting shot: Incidentally enough, I was also disappointed by Craven’s own sequel, 1985‘s The Hills Have Eyes Part II. Weisz’s version, though co-written by Craven, tells a different story, as this one spins off from Aja’s Hills, which made the idea that the cannibals were mutated by atomic testing—only implied in Craven’s original—explicit, by setting the action in Sector 16.

(Original The Hills Have Eyes 2 OS rejected by the MPAA, courtesy of eatmybrains.com.)

MASTERS OF HORROR Season 2 Episodes 1 & 2

“The Damned Thing”
Teleplay by Richard Christian Matheson; based on the short story by Ambrose Bierce; directed by Tobe Hooper

Sheriff Kevin Reddle (Powder’s Sean Patrick Flanery, though perhaps more widely seen as TV’s Young Indiana Jones) is the law in the small town of Cloverdale, suddenly faced with the recurrence of a terror that struck 24 years ago, turning his loving father into a homicidal maniac and leaving him an orphan.
As it turns out, the titular “damned thing” is intimately connected to the Reddle family, unleashed by the Sheriff’s grandfather, a primordial entity whose coming is accompanied by flurries of violence and mayhem, perpetrated by otherwise normal everyday people.

Though “The Damned Thing” is by no means a terrible film, it still doesn’t get far beyond stretches of quiet character moments, punctuated by instances of explosive gore and bloodletting. And though director Hooper takes his time with the characters—as he did on Poltergeist—what we do see of them doesn’t make us sympathize with them enough to really care about the outcome of the story. (It is a kick though to see Sam’s brother, Ted Raimi, as Father Tulli.)
And not only is the big CGI reveal of “the damned thing” a bit of a letdown, the story’s ending also serves as a big “So what?” to cap off this season’s not-so-grand opening.

“Family”
Written by Brent Hanley; directed by John Landis

Harold Thompson (Cheers’ George Wendt, who is reportedly appearing as the Vice President of the United States in the upcoming House of Re-Animator*) has some new neighbors. But what David (The Last Days of Disco’s Matt Keeslar) and Celia (Dawson’s Creek’s Meredith Monroe) apparently don’t know is that George has a terrible secret, one that could prove fatal for them all.
Landis (perhaps best known for his landmark horror film, An American Werewolf in London) handles this story very well, showing us some interesting parallels regarding George: just as the bland suburban façade of his home hides a gruesome truth, so is there a psychotic insanity that lurks behind his apparently harmless exterior.
That theme is then expanded upon with a third, initially undisclosed truth which only surfaces in the film’s final act.

But, despite “Family” being one of the better episodes of the second season (certainly better than the season opener, “The Damned Thing”), it does have its share of hiccups, among them, a number of scenes which border on pure audience misdirection, scenes which may seem a bit illogical, in light of the third act revelation. They aren’t blatantly manipulative, mind you, but they do skirt a questionable area.
Given that though, the episode is still bolstered by Wendt’s creepy Harold, and Monroe gets to spout some choice lines she would never have uttered on the Creek.
It’s also written by Brent Hanley, who penned the script for the excellent American Gothic horror film (and Bill Paxton’s directorial debut), Frailty.

* William H. Macy’s the President!