¡Qué horror! 2015

Candidate #8

LATE PHASES

(March 2014)

After barging onto the ¡Qué horror! 2012 rundown with Penumbra, Argentinian director Adrián García Bogliano is back with his English language feature debut, Late Phases, working off a script written by Eric Stolze.

Here, Nick Damici plays retired US Army officer Ambrose McKinley, who has only just moved into the Crescent Bay Retirement Community, when he is rudely made aware that something beastial seems to be active in the area, something that seems to have a monthly cycle…

So, yes, no need to be coy, it’s all over the trailer and the one sheet below: werewolf.

The beauty of Late Phases is, it doesn’t quite play like any werewolf film I’ve seen.

True, it’s got the familiar horror movie trope of the protagonist who seems to be the only one aware of the nature of the threat, but Damici’s crotchety (and blind) McKinley isn’t your average misunderstood horror movie lead.

With some excellent supporting performances by Ethan Embry and Tom Noonan, a practically unrecognizable Lance Guest, brief appearances by Dana Ashbrook and Larry Fessenden (also one of the film’s producers), and some noteworthy creature effects courtesy of Robert Kurtzman’s Creature Corps, Late Phases is a solid entry in the annals of werewolf cinema, which, let’s face it, needs a whole lot more of this kind of title to beef up its hairy, lupine ranks.

(Late Phases OS’ courtesy of impawards.com.)

SKINWALKERS
(Review)

As I mentioned in my review of Katja von Garnier‘s Blood and Chocolate, compared to the vampire, the werewolf has always gotten the shorter end of the proverbial stick (and in the case of the Underworld films, both races get screwed).
The latest film to feature our lupine friends, Jim Isaac’s Skinwalkers, is a curious mix of win and loss.

The premise is simple: skinwalkers (werewolves to the midnight movie crowd) exist, and the race is split down the middle; there are those who think of the monthly change as a curse, while others—those addicted to the kill—relish it as a gift.
There is a prophecy (isn’t there always?) of a special child who will hold the destiny of all skinwalkers in his hands.
Rachel (Nip/Tuck’s Rhona Mitra) is the mother of Timothy (Matthew Knight; The Grudge 2), who happens to be the child in question. Ignorant of their pivotal roles in this primeval struggle, widowed Rachel and child are being cared for and sheltered by Rachel’s brother-in-law Jonas (Elias Koteas, seen recently in David Fincher’s Zodiac) and his extended family.
And when skinwalker baddie Varek (Roswell’s Jason Behr) and his hairy homeys track down the prophesied child, Rachel realizes she married into a whole heap of trouble.

First, the cons.
The depiction of both sides of the war is decidedly uneven: while there is some attempt at sketching out the relationships and personalities of the good skinwalkers, Varek and his crew are little more than loping, savage ciphers. Save for one, there is no indication of who these skinwalkers were before they became the cruel hunters they are now, no inkling of motivation other than that they’re addicted to blood. There really aren’t even any tiny quirks to make one stand out from the other.
That’s exacerbated by performances that are rather bland and one-note, sadly a shortcoming that extends even to the goodie skinwalker camp. The only actors who actually register are the always interesting Koteas, Shawn Roberts (from George Romero’s Land of the Dead and the upcoming Diary of the Dead) as Adam, and, to a limited extent, Knight.
Particularly disappointing on this front are Mitra, who doesn’t quite convince as the woman who’s been lied to for thirteen years but must now step up to fight for her son’s life, and Behr, whose Varek isn’t the intimidating baddie this film so desperately needs. Their characters are all surface, with no emotional depth to them, like skinwalkers hiding behind flimsy human facades.

The script (by James DeMonaco, Todd Harthan, and James Roday) doesn’t help matters any either.
It’s a slow starter, taking some twenty minutes to kick into gear, really seriously moving only when Nana (Barbara Gordon), bless her soul, pulls out her piece and starts to shoot up Main Street. Once the narrative’s engine revs up though, it quickly settles into a choppy ride, the film never really quite hitting a satisfying stride.
Additionally, the plot’s surprises aren’t really surprises at all. Skinwalkers is rather transparent; given how the relationships and conflicts are laid out, you can basically see how it’s all going to turn out. And it’s never a good thing, when you can anticipate the beats of a story. (It also makes the characters looks pretty stupid when the audience knows more than they do.)

But there are pros.
One: the creature design by Stan Winston Studios.
Winston, who’s given us everything from xenomorphs to Pumpkinhead to animatronic dinos, delivers lupine bipeds with unsettling facial features, something new to the werewolf catalogue.
Sure, the transformation scenes could have used more bite, but man, those beasties were sure walloped by the ugly stick.

And two: despite my less than enthusiastic response to the film, it does end on a note that actually makes me look forward to a sequel, if one is even on the cards. Skinwalkers wraps on a situation that opens the door to the possibility of a down-and-dirty genre actioneer, with loads of guns and ammo, fangs and fur.

In the end, Skinwalkers isn’t a total loss, and if the right people can come together to deliver a swift and savage sequel, then this flawed effort would not have been in vain.

Parting shot: Jim Isaac’s past directorial efforts include The Horror Show and Jason X, both dismal affairs. Skinwalkers is his best film by far.
He’s also done fx work on such David Cronenberg films as The Fly, Naked Lunch, and eXistenZ, all of which I love.
(It’s safe to say I’m a bigger fan of Jim Isaac the special effects guy, than I am of Jim Isaac the director…)
It’s also interesting to note that Isaac considers Cronenberg a mentor of sorts, and not only thanks him in Skinwalkers’ end credits, but actually cast him in a small role in Jason X.

(Original Skinwalkers OS courtesy of empiremovies.com—the film’s release date was later moved to July; image courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com.)

reVIEW (6)
CURSED

Spurred by Wes Craven’s recent turn as a guest judge on On The Lot, I thought to resurrect this review of Cursed (a review which began life answering to the name, “Bad Moon Rising”; go ahead, you can call it that. I’m sure it won’t mind).

Saddled with such a sadly appropriate title, it’s a small wonder that Cursed actually got completed and managed to lope its way into theatres. Of course, once you get to see it, you may just wish it had been shot in the head with a silver bullet while it was still unfinished.
Brought to you by the Scream team, director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson, Cursed has had a tortured existence, laboring under its own version of the Mark of the Beast: delays, rewrites, and re-shoots.
Apparently, much like Exorcist: The Beginning, Cursed was practically re-shot in its entirety, much of the original cast (who were no longer available due to other film commitments) replaced, for the version unleashed upon us hapless movie-goers. Reportedly, one of the major changes was shifting it from an R-rating to a PG-13, effectively neutering whatever bite it may have initially had.

Ostensibly, the film is a horror thriller which purports to show us the travails of brother and sister Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg) and Ellie (Christina Ricci), who’ve both been infected by a werewolf. In actuality, it’s a flat and tiresome experience that is a definite low point for both Craven and Williamson.
Not that either is a stranger to low points, mind you. Since making an impact with the infamous The Last House on the Left in 1972, Craven‘s career has been checkered with soaring highs (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream/Scream 2) and abysmal lows (Deadly Friend). Williamson, meanwhile, exploded onto the scene with Scream, and delivered a brilliant sequel in Scream 2, but spiraled ever downwards, passing on the way to the bottom such disappointing sights as The Faculty, Dawson’s Creek, the again appropriately-titled Wasteland, and the horrific (in the worst sense of the word) Teaching Mrs. Tingle.
So… low points? These gentlemen both know low points. I suppose I was just holding out the hope that whatever elusive spark, whatever strange alchemy they managed to tap into with Scream and Scream 2, they would find a third time.
No such luck.
It’s almost as if both suddenly developed creative amnesia, and whatever they seemed to know about suspense and horror, on display so elegantly in the first two Scream installments, evaporated into thin air.

Nowhere in the entire running time of Cursed do we find even a smidgen of the taut suspense Craven and Williamson managed to pack into Scream’s now-familiar opening sequence involving Drew Barrymore, a phone, and some popcorn. What we have here is 96 minutes of ho-hum that isn’t even remotely entertaining.
And since Ellie and Jimmy need to kill the werewolf who is the source of the infection in order to return to normality, it actually gets to a point where you start praying for a RAW Smackdown with Real Actual Werewolves just slapping each other around in some mindless popcorn horror fashion, just to ease the tedium. Tragically, even that doesn’t come to pass.
Like I said. Ho-hum.

And anyone who’s seen Scream will tag Cursed’s opening for what it is: a sequence which introduces us to cannon fodder, in this case, American Pie’s Shannon Elizabeth and singer Mya, the former delivering a particularly hilarious performance as Becky, the werewolf’s first on-screen victim.
Hijacked for the miserable ride are Dawson’s Creek’s Pacey, Joshua Jackson, Smallville’s Lex, Michael Rosenbaum, Gilmore Girls’ Jess, Milo Ventimiglia, Judy Greer (Jawbreaker, The Village), and Scott Baio—playing himself (!) in an ultimately pointless subplot—presumably to pad the suspect list with a gaggle of red herrings, in a vain attempt to confuse the issue, never once fooling us as to the identity of the mystery master werewolf.
It should be noted at this point that in the process of the unmasking, there is a rupture in the film’s logic (or perhaps it was just me slipping into semi-catatonia for a few seconds, thus missing a vital plot point—though I doubt it), not that that’s such a big deal, considering logic is seemingly just as much of a rarity in Cursed as actual thrills.

The thing is, the field was wide open with werewolf films. I certainly wasn’t expecting another An American Werewolf in London, John Landis’ ultimate word in werewolf cinema, but they could have tried. They could have made some kind of positive mark. As it is, Cursed could have fallen smack dab in the middle of Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf and the seventh installment of this sad and sorry franchise, Howling: New Moon Rising, and I wouldn’t have blinked an eye.

The saddest part, I suppose, is that this terrible miscarriage masquerading as a movie was the result of the collaboration of two individuals who know the game: these aren’t neophytes here, not even sophomores. These are individuals with Masters at horror*, and yet managed to produce not a sleek, sly, and cunning beast, but a whining, mangy cur with its legs all wobbly, its tail between its legs, and its teeth all fallen out.

* Well, maybe in Williamson’s case, a Magna Cum Laude.

Parting shot: Ventimiglia has, of course, gone on to the phenomenal Heroes. (You can tell this is an old review, as I didn’t describe him as “Heroes’ Peter.”)

(Cursed OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

AFTERTHOUGHTS (3)

3.1 My sincerest apologies to Neil Marshall and Neil Jordan.
In my review of Blood and Chocolate (Archive: March 2007), I completely forgot to mention Dog Soldiers and The Company of Wolves as quality lycanthrope cinema.
And really, the only reason why that is, is due to the fact that Marshall’s subsequent film, The Descent, blew Dog Soldiers away. A very dark and brutal yin to Dog Soldiers’ testosterone-laden yang, The Descent is always at the forefront of my thoughts when it comes to Neil Marshall, so Dog Soldiers often gets overlooked, thus my failure to recall it when I was writing my Blood and Chocolate review.
For those who haven’t seen it, it’s about British soldiers running into some hairy opposition in the Scottish boonies.
It’s also spawned a sequel, Dog Soldiers: Fresh Meat, though this one is being helmed by Rob Green, who brought us the World War II-set The Bunker.
Now, as for the Jordan oversight, absolutely no bloody excuse except senility. So very sorry. His adaptation of the late Angela Carter’s work is dark and phantasmagoric and a must-see for any werewolf completists out there.
(I have also yet to see the Ginger Snaps films, so who knows, there could be some gems there too.)

3.2 In my review of Season 1 of Showtime’s Dexter (Archive: March 2007), I made mention of its brilliant opening credits sequence.
Well, it ended up as #3 on A.V. Club’s list of 22 TV Opening-Credit Sequences That Fit Their Shows Perfectly.

(3) Dexter
According to Showtime’s engrossing series Dexter, being a serial killer—even a serial killer who preys on his fellow killers—is all about hiding. Hiding bodies, hiding slides of blood in the back of an air conditioner, and hiding a pronounced lack of human emotion. But mostly it’s about hiding those pesky sociopathic tendencies that seethe just underneath the surface. Dexter’s opening credits hint heavily at those tendencies, with a highly sensory sequence of Michael C. Hall going through the motions of his morning routine. Hall swats a buzzing mosquito on his arm in extreme close-up, then smiles. From there, the fine line between morning routine and homicide gets blurrier and blurrier. The most graphic scenes come when Hall prepares his breakfast. He slices ham with a sharp knife, butter sizzles in the pan, a blood orange is sawed in half—all shot in the heightened style often referred to as “food porn.” Here, it’s closer to “food snuff film.”
(coloured text from avclub.com)

Check the list out. It’s got links to YouTube, where you can see the sequences yourself.

BLOOD AND

CHOCOLATE

(Review)

Poor werewolf. His sexier cousin, the vampire, has always had better luck on the big screen.
After the one-two punch of Joe Dante’s The Howling and John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London (both from 1981), there has been a distinct lack of quality lycanthrope cinema. There was Mike Nichols’ Wolf (Nicholson and Pfeiffer do scream “quality,” after all), but that lacked bite, and the more recent Underworld films (where the werewolves share screen time with their sexier vampire cousins) are just too MTV/CGI for their own good.
Taking a slightly different tack is Katja von Garnier‘s Blood and Chocolate.

Vivian (Agnes Bruckner, 24 Day 3) is one of the loup garou, who have lived among us in secret for centuries. She is also about to become the latest wife of the leader of the pack, Gabriel (Olivier Martinez, the lover in Unfaithful and the baddie in S.W.A.T.), who, alpha male that he is, takes a new wife every seven years.
But Vivian crosses paths with Aidan (Hugh Dancy, Galahad in Antoine Fuqua‘s King Arthur), an American graphic novel artist doing research in Romania on the loup garou. The young man brashly pursues her and the two become romantically involved, all the while being observed and harassed by the upstart Rafe (Bryan Dick, Brothers of the Head and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World), Gabriel’s son, and Vivian’s cousin.

Blood and Chocolate is more potentially doomed love affair than either action thrill ride or midnight horror movie, and in that, it’s closer to Wolf than any of the other films I’ve mentioned in this review.
Given that the main character is Vivian, it’s also rather evident that this is one of those films that targets the female demographic more than anything else. Like TV’s Blood Ties, it’s even got the pretty boy graphic novel artist. It also presents the transformation sequences as more ethereal than physical, eschewing both practical special make-up effects or heavy CGI work. All one has to do is leap into the air and twist, just so, and one shiny bright light later, you’re a hairy four-legged wolf.
Now, I have nothing against this sort of movie, if it happens to be a good, involving one, but Blood and Chocolate doesn’t even seem to try.

There’s a lot of lip service paid to the idea of being one’s own self, and some shots taken at the tyranny of a patriarchal society, but it doesn’t have anything to ground itself on, as Vivian doesn’t seem to be anything particularly special or different. Bruckner brings nothing noteworthy to the table in her performance, so the character doesn’t really come to life. And Dancy is a Brit who is a bit too successful at being the brash young American, not the most credible romantic lead in these strange circumstances.
But as off-target as these performances are, Martinez and Dick are significantly more problematic.

As the main protagonists of the piece, one expects actors of substance to inhabit the roles. Instead, we have Martinez, who lacks the presence and the gravitas to be the pack’s alpha male, and Dick, who just comes across as an annoyance of the Wicked Stepsister school, an auxiliary character whose raison d’etre is to make the main character’s life a living hell.
There are a number of reasons why Rafe would hate his cousin: Rafe’s mother (Astrid, played by Katja Riemann) is the wife about to be tossed aside in favor of Vivian; Vivian is aware of Rafe’s personal hunting of prey—against Gabriel’s law of communal hunting-as-ritual; he could even be threatened by her very presence, which would be confusing and embarrassing for a would-be alpha male.
But Dick just doesn’t communicate any of that properly. All he does is get in her face in the most irritating way, making him seem more like a spoiled brat than anything else, certainly not the next alpha male in line, as he seems to think.

Of course, the script (by Ehren Kruger and Christopher Landon, based on the young adult novel by Annette Curtis Klause) also doesn’t give the characters ample opportunity to display anything more than the most basic personalities, so the fault isn’t solely in the actors’ ball court. I’ve repeatedly bemoaned Kruger in the past, feeling that the only time he’s gotten it spot on was the English-language Ring Two. Blood and Chocolate falls somewhere near The Skeleton Key and The Brothers Grimm, in that it was trying to be something more than your average genre movie, but faltered short of the mark.

In the end, Blood and Chocolate was a wasted opportunity to develop genre material along lines not usually explored in feature films. I applaud the fact that this was clearly not meant to be your typical werewolf movie. Getting Von Garnier to helm this seemed an interesting and appropriate choice; given that she also directed HBO’s Iron Jawed Angels, she’s handled the subject of strong women before.
The result though, is a lukewarm piece that lacks conviction, and yes, bite.
Just because you’re not giving the audience Underworld action or Howling gore, doesn’t mean you give them a lifeless lump of celluloid either.

(Blood and Chocolate OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com.)