A Closed Book (2010) - 3/4

Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors is the centerpiece of Raul Ruiz's new and frankly unexpected thriller, A Closed Book. The image is famous for being the height of perspectivist painting. It depicts two elegantly-dressed ambassadors standing on either side of the frame. Between them is a skewed skull, which the viewer may only see by gazing at an angle. Standing front-on, the skull looks like a mistake, a stretched object of unrecognizable form.

In the two-person drama of A Closed Book, both characters are unable to recognize the threat they present to each other, to see the skull that stands between them. Their perspectives are wrong, too limited by each their own motives and histories. These characters are Sir Paul Napier (Tom Conti), a highly-respected art critic now old, retired, and left eye-less due to an accident; and Jane Ryder (Daryl Hannah), an art student who has just acquired the job of being Paul's amanuensis for writing his final book, his autobiography, titled A Closed Book.

Ruiz achieves a sympathy shift at about the thirty-minute point in this film that is difficult to achieve at all, let alone so smoothly. I began by assuming the gentlemanly, but very frank Paul with his eccentricities and occasional lack of patience is playing a perverse game, like a villain in a John Fowles novel. Soon, however, little clues start showing that Paul may be the victimized, not the victimizer. In subtle ways, Jane expresses contempt. She stands before him totally nude as he bathes. He can't see her and she's not merely using the opportunity to get some nudism out of her system: never has such a beautiful body been such an expression of contempt. It is an act of disrespect and humiliation, though he'll never know. The observant viewer will also notice Paul's paintings getting turned upside-down and objects mysteriously displaced. He doesn't know, so what's the point? Sheer contempt.

Were that contempt an anomaly, not unlike the disappearing girls in Picnic at Hanging Rock, I think A Closed Book would be a stronger film than it is. I can't resist saying A Closed Book would have been better left open. The film offers a resolution, an explanation, that debases the film somehow. It does complete the Ambassadors motif, however, as both characters spell a certain symbolic death to one another, when finally they exchange perspectives.

Of course, a Raul Ruiz film can be enjoyed in nine and sixty ways "and every single one of them is right." You can ignore the plot and just soak up the melodramatic atmosphere and Ruiz's very visible direction. You'd almost think he's been watching Mario Bava films, for all the showy moves. You can also enjoy getting into Paul's complex mind. He's certainly no stereotype eccentric grump. He's a complicated man with a sense of dignity and generosity whose eccentricity comes out of genuine depth. Jane is a complex character herself; she's certainly not a mere fury a la The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Her conscience shows through in just how often she apologizes. The performances are also enjoyable, being so suited to this very Anglo-Saxon mode of melodrama, at times very real and at others justifiably hammy. It's not so much the actors that are hammy as the characters. Or you can just enjoy the art-filled set. Or the slow, deliberate moments, like when Paul's housekeeper tries to figure out The Ambassadors and when he tells her a story about his youth.

I certainly enjoyed spending time in A Closed Book, though it is in some ways vapid, obvious, even pompous, and weakened by its closed ending and sometimes heavy-handed symbolism. In other ways, perhaps it's none of those things. It's a matter of perspective.

Scooby-Doo: Abracadabra Doo (2010) - 3.5/4

You can find some real gems in the strange world of straight-to-video cartoons. Take this new Scooby-Doo adventure, for instance. It's inventive, funny, and has some great locations and interesting faces--this is just what cartoons should be. Most kids don't want sweeping, theme-laden Disney epics for brisk entertainment: it's just too exhausting with its drama, music, and character development. Abracadabra Doo has the immediate-gratification and inventive powers of a Tex Avery cartoon along with its fun mystery story. Both kids and adults can appreciate that.

The story concerns Velma's younger, cuter sister, Madelyn. She's studying at a magic school. Now before ol' Hagrid pulls the Harry Potter bells in your head, this is genuine magic, as in conjuring, with David Copperfield. Even the owner of the school, Whirlin' Merlin, sports tight black pants, a flowy shirt, and long blond hair: he's ready for a magic act 24/7, as is his sexy assistant. Anyhow, a griffin has been terrorizing the school and scaring everybody away, so Mystery Inc. shows up in their mighty van to look for clues. Always looking for "clues", those guys. You don't hear much about 'clues' in real detective work anymore; I don't recall the word 'clue' ever being used in an episode of CSI. But I'm getting off track. At the same time the griffin is attacking, an icecream tycoon, Calvin the Cone King, is trying to buy the beleaguered castle from Merlin. The gang have to investigate the history of the castle to find out just where the griffin is coming from and why.

There is an entertaining cast of characters here. Of course the mystery gang is always entertaining. Frank Welker is great voicing Scooby and Fred, and Matthew Lillard does Shaggy himself. They're all on form here: it feels like the same gang I grew up watching, possibly even better. As to the supporting characters, Merlin is always pulling doves out of the unlikeliest places and appearing in vaguely sexy magician poses. His brother Marlin is Brian Posehn, in character design and voice. Sadly they don't let him do any of his jokes about the taste of semen. Instead he invents machinery to do better magic tricks. There's a very butch maid. A creepy groundskeeper always wielding that menacing pitchfork. The snooty ice cream guy always trying to make his real estate deal. They're all kinda suspicious and all amusing to see on screen, especially given Shaggy's and Scooby's reactions to them.

The jokes work for either adults or children. The animators and the writers are always finding interesting ways to exploit the setting, the situation and the characters for a few laughs. Some of the comedy seems to come down to an amusing phrase, like, "Won't somebody dab up this dairy?" I'm not sure why, but the alliteration of the sentence and the way it's delivered is quite funny. It's not even a punchline. There are also jokes using GPS and iPhones. It's a modern world. It should keep the whole family entertained, at any rate.

As to the scares, looming old towers in misty lakes with fierce griffins and screeching banshees set the spooky tone. For adults, this is fun and makes for great atmosphere. For children, this might offer some suspense and mild scares. Possibly it'll work as both a scary movie and a comedy for the kids, which is just what Scooby Doo stories are supposed to do. As an adult, I liked Abracadabra Doo very much; as a kid, I would have loved it.

The Perfect Getaway (2009) - 3/4

'The Perfect Getaway' is a title with two meanings, one referring to the murderous couple who have found a clever means of escaping detection; the other the island paradise of Hawaii on which the murderers are occurring. You don't get a lot of Hawaii-set horror/thriller movies. I can only think of a the mediocre trash novel, Fires of Eden, by Dan Simmons. On the cover of the paperback, Stephen King's blurb is 'Dan Simmons writes like a hot-rodding angel.' Personally I think he writes like a gimpy sheep with cataracts. But I'm getting discombobulated here. The point is, Hawaii is a great place for horror, if only because it's so beautiful and innocent it really catches you off-guard. Thankfully David Twohy takes us into that rare territory.

We follow a couple, nerdy Steve Zahn and girly Milla Jovovich (we believe that, don't we?), as they decide to take a hike to a less accessible but truly unsullied portion of Hawaii for their honeymoon, anxiously aware of the presence of a psychotic couple on the island. Along the way, they give the slip to a trashy hitchhiking couple and becoming traveling companions of a rather intense ex-special ops man (Timothy Olyphant, doing an incredible job) and his girlfriend. The odder Olyphant's behaviour seems, the more suspicious are aroused that he just might be a murderer. But then again, maybe it's that trashy couple who seem to keep tailing them. From Zahn's skiddish point of view, it could be either one.

Even though most of the film is given from Zahn's and Jovovich's point of view, with Olyphant's point of view interjecting once towards the middle during Zahn's bathroom break, curiously I found myself wanting to spend the whole time with Olyphant. The screenplay is written in such a way as to make us see how Olyphant might well be intense and a bit intimidating, but at the same time he's nice and a really cool guy. Yet Zahn is perpetually unpleasant with him and telling Jovovich how creepy Olyphant and his girl are. Zahn's character comes off as a pampered, xenophobic jerk and Olyphant a genuinely interesting, friendly person who lives life his own way. Another curious thing is that I'm fairly certain this is intentional: we're supposed to be both attracted to Olyphant and slightly sharing Zahn's apprehensions; and we're supposed to see Zahn is a bit of a jerk, even while his concerns aren't unjustified. It's very clever writing.

Twohy is a screenwriter-director I've long respected. I adore The Arrival, possibly the most entertaining alien invasion movie ever made. There is little question that The Perfect Getaway is just as well-made as The Arrival in terms of narrative coherency, entertainment value, and visual power. There are a lot of beautiful moments, as well as fun references for the film buff. There are, however, some problems.

The big problem is a matter of narrative. When you have an omniscient narrator, information cannot legitimately be withheld. Any information an omniscient narrator has that occurs within the timespan of the story's action must be laid out before the audience. In order to withhold information, we must either remain entirely with one character, effectively limiting the omniscience; or the narration must be subjective. In literature, this would be first-person narration. In cinema, this is usually accomplished via a 'subjective camera'. As I mentioned, we do get both Olyphant's and Zahn's perspectives at some point, so we do have an omniscient narrator. This means Twohy is cheating. But it gets worse. For the big reveal in the film to work, those withheld elements have to be recalled as well as some events prior to the time the story begins. That's legitimate. The problem is that nobody is actually doing the recalling! The narrator just suddenly spills it out before you as exposition. Well, if it could do that all along, why didn't it do it at the beginning? Just to make the surprise. And that's cheating. You don't find that in Hitchcock's films.

I don't imagine for a moment I can teach David Twohy anything. But everybody makes mistakes and that's one he made: The Perfect Getaway has point-of-view problems. Is it very damaging for the film? No, not really. It's still an entertaining story told with style. I was particularly interested in how Twohy edited the climactic chase scene to include not just fast cutting, but even split-screen effects of the same shot to give a fractured, hyperkinetic feel to the action. I don't recall having seen that in any other film; however, I don't watch many action films.

Upstairs (2009) - 1.5/4

'90s heartthrob Luke Perry costars in Upstairs, a thriller in which he plays a psychotic, uncouth man who takes an apartment at the mansion of a blind woman. The focus of the film is actually on the blind woman, Grace (Kelly Harrison), who rents the place as a means to pay off the mortgage on the mansion she's inherited. Her parents and her eyesight were all lost in a car crash. Perry seems like a nice guy, but he soon starts annoying her with loud music, prostitutes he pays for sadomasochistic games (so screaming), and just being generally creepy by coming into her part of the house and messing with her stuff.

Upstairs is an extremely formulaic film. It is so by-the-numbers that it's really embarrassing to see this film had any writer at all, let alone two screenwriters. If you could make a kit called "Write Your Own Terrorize-a-Blind-Woman Story" Upstairs is precisely what it would produce. Every little detail is mechanically set up for later in a tidy package. For instance, we get a scene of Grace counting her way to the fusebox and sure enough she uses this later to get the advantage of blindness. The whole movie is made up of such moments.

Usually the best part of a terrorize-the-blind-woman movie is the actually terrorizing moments and when she finally decides to get the upper hand. The problem with this film is that Grace is a real bundle of nerves, gittering, always gasping and startled. She's so irritating! As big a jerk as Luke Perry is here, you almost side with him she's such a nuissance. We get it: she's blind. It doesn't mean she's a fricken puppy! She makes so many little gasping and whimpering noises constantly that I wanted to muzzle her. Okay, so maybe that really is supposed to be her character: maybe she's just a jumpy person. But it sure makes her tiresome to be around. The worst thing is, she reminds me of myself in some ways, the way she becomes infuriated by the least inconsiderate behaviour from the tenant and allows it to spoil her day. It's that grey area where he's in his rights but still ought to be more considerate that always infuriates me as an apartment dweller.

The best part of the film is Luke Perry, who is actually extremely creepy as the mannerless psychopath. He just has no sense of shame and that makes him creepy. There's also a little girl, Stella Pejo, who's surprisingly good in her role as Grace's helper/music student. And these cops who become progressively annoyed with Grace's constant calls--they're the most human people in the film. Really, I don't blame them for getting annoyed.

The direction is best described as classy. Robert-Adrian Pejo (any relation to Stella?) directs the utterly trite story with elegance, a certain detached elegance. Why detached? Well, he probably knew how trite the story is himself. Anyhow, if Upstairs passes on television and you have nothing better to do, it's worth leaving on; but don't make an effort to see it.

Knife Edge (2010) - 2.5/4

The second-tier horror auteur who gave us the minor '80s horror classic Waxwork, as well as its sequel and Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat now brings us a supernatural psychological thriller, Knife Edge. I must say, for this kind of film, it's pretty good. It has that convoluted plotting you find in noir, melodrama, and giallo, and frankly it fits well into those genres. As a noir, it resembles Suspicion; as a melodrama, Dragonwyck; as a giallo, Fulci's The Psychic and The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave. It most resembles Evelyn, which isn't high praise, but still praise.

A Wall Street trader who seems to have almost psychic levels of intuition when it comes to trading gives up her high-paying job to move to the English countryside with her new French husband and son from a previous relationship. Turns out she is psychic and she begins getting visions of something awful that happened in her new house, the huge mansion of her husband. Unfortunately her husband can't quite afford the mansion and begins plotting to get her inheritance money. Is she having psychic visions? Is she losing her mind? Is she in danger? How is the house's past connected to her?

There are quite a few characters in this film--from lawyers, to relatives and nannies (Joan Plowright!)--and most of them seem suspicious to us and to each other. You can take guesses and you may end up right, but this is a plot-heavy film that doesn't finish revealing until the very end. It's generous enough not to hit you over the head with some plot points as well, which I found gratifying. While the melodrama was rather dull and difficult to believe--is this Frenchman such a twat he can't just ask his wife to borrow a few bucks for the mortgage?--it's a pretty decent and fun plot if only because it always has so many balls in the air.

I also liked some of the visuals. Hickox uses some digital editing to make fascinating dream sequences with such fantastical imagery as a tree covered in eyes; he also employs a few efficient superimpositions. The rest is competent, with the occasional interesting angle. Hickox has never been weak on visuals.

Knife Edge is an old film made in the present day, a classical psychological horror made with modern style and techniques. In some sense it could have been made in the '80s. It's not a throwback, nor is it particularly innovative; it's just an enjoyable supernatural thriller.

Shutter Island (2010) - 4/4

Shutter Island takes the notion of a psychological thriller to a whole new level: it's downright clinical. It's so easy to see psychiatrists as villains in movies, as though they're all Nurse Ratchett--which is, frankly, bullchett. Most psychiatrists are sincerely desirous of helping their patients. In Shutter Island, Scorsese plays with cinematic preconceptions such as these to pull us into an immersive and highly emotional web of paranoia.

Scorsese works hard to ensure from the beginning of the film til near the very end that we never know more than protagonist Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio). He's a US Marshall, circa 1954, come to Shutter Island with his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) to investigate the escape of a criminally insane woman from a facility for the criminally insane. As Daniels investigates, there seems to be something very wrong with the facility, especially once we meet the evasive Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and his Teutonic colleague, Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow); Daniels begins to suspect a conspiracy involving sinister experiments. There also seems to be something wrong about Daniels himself, as he begins having visions of his dead wife, flashbacks to concentration camp atrocities, and reveals he has ulterior motives for coming to Shutter Island. However, there seems to be something wrong with the whole setup from the beginning. Why would a marshall be required for a single escaped woman on an inescapable island when there are so many armed guards around?

It gets you thinking. And if you think hard enough or perhaps read the wrong review, you might even figure out the gist of what's wrong with this island; but it's unlikely you'll figure the whole thing out. Tracing back over all that happens, I see plenty of clues and that it's consistent all the way through. But figuring out the mystery really isn't the point of the movie.

The point is trauma and healing. Shutter Island is about the psychology, the emotions, the performances. I read that DiCaprio had a mild breakdown making the movie and I would believe him. It's a very demanding role he's playing; it demands he go to emotional extremities not many roles call upon. This is filmmaking in the vein of Ingmar Bergman. You rarely have seen an actor other than Max von Sydow as you see DiCaprio here. The film is engrossing initially, what with its mystery plot; but as the plot comes to a close and is summed up in a heart-rending moment, it's ultimately incredibly moving. It nearly made this grown man cry.

Scorsese's style manages to be both visible and unobstrusive throughout, as though it were resonating with the emotional tones of the scene. An arresting tracking shot of a concentration camp massacre horrifies more than any gore scene I've ever seen. And the most heartbreaking scene in the picture is shot from eagle eye in brief glimpses that somehow intensify the emotion while simultaneously conveying a character's ambivalent attitude toward the event. This meticulous style, which one tends to expect from Scorsese, invites deeper scrutiny.

The Fourth Kind (2009) - 3/4

Y'know, I've always found documentaries on abductions, hauntings, and possessions, with their straight-to-the-point dramatizations, much more frightening than any horror movie. With The Fourth Kind writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi seems to be acutely aware of this, because he aims to provide just that experience. The first minute of the film is Milla Jovovich speaking directly into the camera about how every scene in the film is based on genuine archive material about an event in Nome, Alaska. Not only that, Osunsanmi frequently splits the screen to show us the archive footage (which he also shot, of course; it's not real) running simultaneously with the Jovovich-starring dramatization.

The plot concerns a psychologist, Abbie Tyler (Jovovich), conducting research on a series of related phenomena in Nome, Alaska after having just lost her husband in what she believes to be mysterious circumstances. Her patients all report seeing owls in their rooms, staring at them in the middle of the night; her husband believed UFOs were responsible for the odd occurrences; and she believes an intruder stabbed her husband in the middle of the night. See how it all adds up? As she digs deeper and captures a strange metallic voice on tape, her psychologist friend (Elias Koteas) visits to make sure she remains stable and an expert on the Sumerian language and proponent of the Ancient Astronaut Theory translates the voice for her. Meanwhile, as Abbie's patients start dying, the sheriff threatens to take her children away.

The obvious influence over The Fourth Kind is The Mothman Prophecies. They're both based on true stories. They share the similar subject matter of a small town being terrorized by strange, possibly extra-terrestrial-related events. They share a similar discordant soundtrack. They share Will Patton. They even share a similar shooting style, as Osunsanmi gives us a bewildering series of close-ups of lips and such that could have come right out of The Mothman Prophecies. The difficulty with imitating a great film is that you risk being compared unfavourable. Just based on this movie, I'd say Osunsanmi is a pretty talented guy, but he's clearly no Mark Pellington. The other influence is, surprisingly, E. Elias Merhige. The use of supposed archive footage and its parallel with dramatizations makes a statement about fiction vs reality that bares resemblance to Shadow of the Vampire. But more tellingly, some moments in the archive footage could have come out of Begotten. Well, Osunsanmi's got the right idea: if you're going to be influenced, might as well be influenced by the best.

Now I want to talk a little about this archive footage issue. Because it kind of makes you wonder, "Why?" It sounds good on paper and in one's head, but in realization, it may not have been so wise. What I mean is, while there are some good effects achieved, it does so at a cost. The first point is that it's redundant. Sometimes you're watching two identical scenes playing side-by-side in split screen filmed with two different actors. There's no need to have that. Going into a film like this, we're already willing to suspend our disbelief; we don't need archive footage. It has the opposite effect, in fact. It makes us have to suspend our disbelief on two orders, and this has a distancing effect, as in Brecht's plays. If the archive footage and dramatization were not both well-done, this might be helpful; but actually, Osunsanmi did a great job making both parts very eerie in that Mothman Prophecies way. Another benefit might be in getting this theme of fiction versus reality down. That strikes me as a waste of time. That theme has been around for so long that if you're going to use it, you'd better have something damn profound to say; and Osunsanmi doesn't have much of anything to say. There are still many benefits, such as the way both the archive footage and the dramatization can be very frightening, each in their own unique way. While they never quite complement each other the way Osunsanmi probably intended, they still work very well individually.

There is another issue resulting from this experiment. I don't want to go into it too much. But the fact that the main portion of the story we're witnessing is a dramatization calls far more attention than is beneficial to the style in which it's shot. Dramatizations, let's face it, are supposed to be plain and honest. So when you get crane shots and eagle-eye views, constantly roving cameras, it seems out of place. But maybe I'm just nit-picking at this point.

Despite the slight failure of the experiment, The Fourth Kind is a good horror film. Very good, in fact. It really freaked me out, and I'm not easily freaked. It freaked me out in the way The Mothman Prophecies does. At moments, Osunsanmi pumps the volume up, in that good exploitative genre film way, on some of The Mothman Prophecies' tricks to make it chill-inducing.

Necrosis (2009) - 1/4

A group of friends head out to a cabin in the very mountains of the infamous Donner Party massacre. The creepy stories and/or spiritual energy of the place combined with their friend's failure to take his anti-psychosis medication leads to a murderous rampage.

Necrosis (AKA Blood Snow) is a film that tries to be a character-based drama with lots of build-up until the explosive moment. I like to support the little movies out there and Necrosis can be praised for trying to do something different, but the idea of 'build-up' here is an on-going argument about whether "Matt" will get to bed "Megan" punctuated by a few jumpscares courtesy the hallucinations of "Jerry." That might not be so bad if these people weren't so bland. They are every phony, mugging yuppie you've ever met at a party you really didn't want to be at. It's not even the actors' faults here: they're probably playing their characters right. And y'know what, I sympathise with Jerry. If I had to spend a few days in a cabin with these people, from his shrewish girlfriend to her inauthentic yuppie friends, I might stop taking my medication too.

Jerry, incidentally, is the only non-Caucasian in the cast, making this film seem a tad xenophobic. The role of Jerry is the most complex and the top actor in the cast is Asian James Kyson-Lee (from some TV series called "Heroes"), so it's normal he'd have the role. It still comes off as xenophobic. And that's not even getting to the punishment meted out to the sick Jerry at the end, which we're supposed to cheer, I imagine, as the white survivors embrace.

The editing and cinematography are somewhat subpar, but the writing isn't bad, insofar as flaky yuppies is what the writer wanted to capture. These people are pretty vapid, but they don't deserve to die or anything. And I will admit, since I was expecting a cheesy supernatural thriller, I was surprised by the turnout. It's a worse film than I expected, but a better film than the first thirty minutes led me to believe. Cameos by Michael Berryman and Mickey Jones are nice, but not enough to save the picture from being as vapid as its yuppies. Ultimately, avoid Necrosis, as there are much better 2009/2010 b-movies, like The Graves, which I recently reviewed, and Red Velvet.

Nevertheless, if you wanted to read a theme into Necrosis, the Power of Place would be a fascinating one. Places do resonate with their history, to some extent; the way they're treated influences the way others will come to treat them, and so on, until they develop this aura. The aura is, of course, in the minds of people, but so is the notion of 'place' as opposed to 'space'; placehood is defined by human perceptions of space. The sense of place combined acted as a catalyst to Jerry's psychosis, you see. So there you go. If you've seen the film, the least you can do is read something into it to justify having wasted your time. It's what I do.

The Graves (2010) - 3/4

From the pre-credits sequence and title, in which we're told The Graves is a "Brian Pulido flick," you know from the get-go you're in throwback territory. I'm not sure Pulido himself knew exactly where to throw the film back to: the grittiness of the '70s or the everything-goes excess of the '80s or even some '90s plotting, dialogue and casting. In fact, he almost seems to dedicate each act to a different decade. The dominant aesthetic is certainly blood-soaked grittiness, however. Besides, the hodgepodge of styles only rescues the picture--sorry, flick--from becoming derivative, as so many throwback flicks are.

The titular Graves are not what you might think: they're actually the main characters, two gorgeous young ladies with fantastic and lovingly-photographed cleavage, Abby and Megan Graves, introduced efficiently and slickly in the first act. Abby (Jillian Murray) is the slightly younger sister, more emotional and dependent; Megan (Clare Grant) is the older sister, tough and resourceful. These two ladies are on their way from Arizona to New York when they get lost in a tiny hick village with a secret, a sinister preacher (national treasure Tony Todd), and a tourist trap called Skull Village. Having made the mistake of visiting Skull Village, they find themselves pursued by a mad blacksmith and a sadist with a sickle (Bill Moseley) as well as a soul-eating spiritual force that lurks beneath the old mines.

What really elevates The Graves way beyond what it could have been is Pulido's smart screenplay, particularly in regards to the characters of Megan and Abby. If they don't work, the film doesn't work, because it's titled after them and we're with them the whole time. The first act lets us get to know them and they seem like genuine sisters into punk rock and comic books. Okay, so they are somewhat of a comic book nerd's fantasy. (I did some research and found Pulido is quite well known for his comic books, incidentally. I thought The Graves contained some product placement, but it turns out Pulido was plugging his own books--which is fair.) Moreover, Pulido's obviously seen his fair share of 'flicks' and is clever enough to make Megan really shine as the cool, collected, ass-kicking honey she can be. I think I fell in love with Megan myself. She avoids all of the cliche pitfalls without calling deliberate attention to this fact. At least she does during the first and second acts. Starting near the end of the third act, Pulido has her ask Bill Moseley, "Why are you doing this?" and tells him, "You don't have to do this." Must every girl try that in horror films? I felt Pulido knew better, plus he had developed her character to be so strong up to that point; so it was rather annoying. Then the fourth act nearly smothers the girls' personalties under all the plot.

That said, basically, you already know if you'll like this flick. If you think the idea of Bill Moseley wearing a rubber pig's nose chasing hot girls in tank tops with a sickle sounds awesome, you know you'll like The Graves. If you don't get why that's awesome, The Graves might not be for you. This film--oops, flick--struck me as sort of a combination of Texas Chainsaw Massacre II with While She Was Out topped with some supernatural touches. If you like either one of those films, there's no reason you won't enjoy the heck out of The Graves. I really liked both of those films, so I really like The Graves. I think it works on every level: The Graves offers everything a film of this sort should offer in exactly the way it ought to be offered. Pulido has an interesting and original idea here, which I won't reveal, and he runs with it. Bravo, Pulido!

Town Creek (2009) - 2.5/4

When is a war truly over? It's officially over when either one side has been defeated or a peace is called. But the effects linger; it's not over for the people. Lives have been lost, families torn apart, animosity remains amongst the people. We're still not out of the gravity of World War II. We can look back on the American War of Independence without any real bitterness, without feeling the pain. However, there are still survivors of World War II and the horror of Hitler has never fully died. Black tendrils stretch out from his hateful existence of decades ago all the way to today. In Town Creek, those tendrils take a very concrete form, and that form is an immortal Nazi necromancer named 'Wirth'.

Joel Schumacher directs a tense and efficient picture with Town Creek. After a brief ten-minute prologue that puts all the pieces in place, he pulls is right into the action and it's a non-stop battle for the remaining eighty minutes. We learn a Nazi agent is boarding with a German immigrant family while studying the occult power of a runestone discovered around Town Creek back in the 1920s. And we learn that a young paramedic lost his war-hero brother (a veteran of Iraq) in mysterious circumstances around Town Creek in the 2000s. When that brother suddenly appears again, they arm up and head out to the farmhouse where they do battle with the sinister necromancer by night.

A necromancer is a monster rarely encountered in horror cinema. I'm not sure why, because there are a lot of fascinating avenues with such a monster. For one, each time some living being is killed, the necromancer can raise it from the dead as his puppet. In Town Creek, this leads to a particularly remarkable sequence with a horse. It's one of the most sublime moments of modern horror cinema. We can thank Schumacher for trying out some very interesting ideas using his monster, for exploring the possibilities. Soon, however, it comes time for the protagonists to protag and that's when the possibilities tend to be curtailed for the sake of the plot. This is unfortunate, as I felt Schumacher had more tricks up his sleeves; but the brisk ninety-minute runtime makes this necessarily the case, alas.

The shooting style of the first twenty-minutes or so, with the two brothers invading the farmhouse, will remind anyone who has seen Martyrs of that movie. Where Martyrs then descends into idle philosophical wankery and unpleasant torture, Town Creek at that point becomes a tense, atmospheric battle with supernatural remnants of the Third Reich that threaten to destroy the world.

Schumacher is one of those middle-brow directors who can't quite be called an intellectual, but can't be dismissed as a mere genre director either. He does makes some obvious mainstream moves, like having a girl stare dramatically out of a dingy farmhouse window into the night and say, "It begins." Gee, could that be for the trailer? However, he does have ideas to work with, visually and thematically. There are the past-present relationships I referred to in my first paragraph. But also, this is a film with Nazis, so as you might imagine, guilt and responsibility are major themes. The family keeping the necromancer at bay are also guilty of several torture-murders. How innocent are they? Is Schumacher making a statement in defence of the Bush administration's torture-interrogations? Or is he making a more subtle statement about the moral complexities of such issues? It's something to think about, if merely enjoying a good necromancer-based horror movie isn't enough for you. If however that is enough for you, then you'll find plenty to enjoy. Town Creek is an effective horror picture with some great, original ideas on screen in its third act.

Triangle (2009) - 3/4

A day sailing amongst a group of upper-middle class friends and a lower-class mother (Melissa George, from Mulholland Dr.) of an autistic child is suddenly overwhelmed with a mysterious storm. Thankfully an abandoned cruiser is there to pick them up. Or is it abandoned? We follow Melissa George as she puzzles out the temporal rift they find themselves caught in as her friends start dying around her.

It isn't easy to write a time-loop story. It's like the hare in that classic Tortoise and the Hare parable: it starts strong, then it gets lazy. That's almost always the case and it's not that different with Triangle. The typical time-loop story starts by entering into the mystery and the audience is enrapt trying to puzzle it out, trying to put the pieces together before the film can expose it. This is exciting. Of course it can be handled incompetently, but Triangle certainly doesn't have that problem--it's a very skilled picture. So it is very exciting during the first act or two. The typical time-loop story also starts to lose steam at about the middle. This is because, once you've got the gist of what's going on, you can pretty much predict a lot that's going to happen. The feeling of putting the pieces into place with little effort is not quite as enjoyable as the perplexing first and second acts. So is it with Triangle. There's always a chance for a final few moments of intrigue toward the beginning of the fourth act and then it unravels as a good denouement should. So is it with Triangle. As skilled a time-loop story it is, it remains a pretty typical time-loop story, with bits and pieces culled from a lot of recent horror pictures (from Event Horizon to Population 436).

What Triangle does have to offer, however, is a willingness to show the full implications of the time-loop with powerful visuals. I can't think of a single other time-loop film that shows a pile of bodies that are all of the same person. That's pretty clever. So writer-director Christopher Smith (Creep, Severance) is to be applauded for keeping the script coherent and paying off that script with some great visual ideas; these visuals keep the material fresh and engrossing, even when you've already caught its tail.

There are two big mis-steps Smith makes, and the first is spilling out his theme in as pedestrian a manner possible. It's as though he just couldn't trust the audience to make the connection on their own; he had to spoon-feed us. Upon entering the abandoned ship, the Aeolus, the characters comment that Aeolus in Greek mythology is the father of Sisyphus and that Sisyphus is the rock-pushing guy punished for cheating death. So that gives the whole game away right there at the beginning. It's a stupid, stupid move. Even worse is that it makes you have to accept that symbolism is written into the fabric of the universe rather than just the script. But there you go.

Yes, the whole film is sisyphean; in fact, you could better describe it as autistic. What you have is the obsessive repetition of events that overpower with a sense of futility. Everything must remain exactly the same. Even when Melissa George for a moment believes she's doing things differently and getting somewhere, a moment will come when she's overwhelmed with the futility of her situation: she's done this a hundred times before.

The futility is a powerful punch that the audience feels as well. Smith is to be applauded for that at the same time as chastised for it. You see, you kind of wonder, "Why do I need to see this?" and at the end I found myself wondering, "Why didn't you just start the movie here?" I think the idea is that he did start the movie there. But he'd really have to cheat to reach that conclusion. That's the second mis-step.

A final point I want to note is that Melissa George, who basically has to hold the whole film on her shoulders, does an incredible job. She's on screen 95% of the 98 minutes; we experience the whole film through her. It's as much due to her performance as Smith's script that Triangle works. She can go from dazed to manic in a moment and you believe it. Less importantly, I've never seen her looking so lovely. She's a natural beauty. The make-up she has in Mulholland Dr. worked against her. Here we see her shine with very natural, almost invisible make-up.

The Reflecting Skin (1990)

The Reflecting Skin is a grotesque picture on childhood horror, the terror of being innocent. This is especially the case when one's father is incinerated before one's eyes, one's closest friends are murdered by a gang of bored teens in a shiny car, and the mysterious foreign woman might be a vampire with a taste for one's older brother (a young Viggo Mortensen). The film is told entirely from the point of view of Seth Dove, a fairly typical boy with a strong imagination trapped in a lifeless rural area and surrounded by creepy and/or disturbed adults.

Renowned playwright Philip Ridley wrote and directed with a fine touch for the visual. The hanging jaws decorating the whaler's widow's home threaten to devour the meek Seth as he apologizes for a cruel prank. A dessicated fetus he finds buried and begins speaking to, an exploded frog, a sheriff missing multiple bodyparts (a reference to Lionel Atwill's character in The Son of Frankenstein, I wonder?), amongst other things contribute to the grotesque texture. Visual motifs of contrasting green and yellow grasses, some smooth and some jarring transitions comprise Ridley's visual style.

While Ridley's background as a playwright lends the films many strengths, it also detracts in some ways. Even had I not known Ridley wrote and directed, I would have guessed a playwright wrote the screenplay, simply because it reeks of the modern dramatic style. If you've ever read or seen performed Beckett, Pinter, or Shepard, the mother's muttering about gasoline, the economy of objects (heaven forbid that whaling spear not be used as a weapon!), and the sometimes too-evident linguistic motifs will seem familiar and artificial. And if you haven't read or seen any of those performed, think of the play with which Barton Fink opens.

Overall, The Reflecting Skin is not so heavy on narrative as it is on experience. Ridley's strength is really in recreating for the audience the genuine experience of childhood encountering, even creating, horror with innocence and gradually losing that innocence. A series of interrelated experiences over a single, awful summer in Seth Dove's life serve to steal Seth's innocence away as he ultimately makes a decision that costs someone their life. I could feel Seth's bewilderment and dread at many points, whereas at other points his psychology was alien to me. He's not a normal kid; but with parents like his, how could he be? At times one sympathizes with him and at other times he's a terrible puzzle. I think that's true of most innocent things, particularly children. We've all done odd things as children and experienced things of which we couldn't quite grasp the ramifications.

It's notoriously difficult to direct children, probably even more difficult to capture childhood in a film, let alone a horror film. The Reflecting Skin is second only to Night of the Hunter in accomplishing this. On the one hand, it's much more honest about children and childhood than Night of the Hunter. Lilian Gish's insipid comment that children "abide" is frankly embarrassing. On the other hand, The Reflecting Skin manages to set that childhood in a drastically more perverse landscape.

Zombies: The Beginning (2007) - 2/4

The final film of the great trashmaster, Bruno Mattei, Zombies: The Beginning is a fitting finale to a truly odd cinematic career. If there's anything that characterizes Mattei's approach, it's that anything goes. He comes up with an idea and in it goes. We sometimes say of people that there's no filter between their brain and their mouths; with Mattei, there's no filter between his brain and his script. Never once have I ever had the feeling that Mattei censored himself or even considered, "This idea might be too weird." So was his approach with this shot-on-video Philippine zombie epic that harvests ideas from every corner of Mattei's brain. That's not to say Zombies: The Beginning is a perfect movie or even a good movie. It's riddled with flaws and I'll talk about those too, but first the plot.

Zombies begins with the discovery of a woman on a raft by a rescue team. After recovering, she explains to the biotech company for which she works that her ship encountered an island where the dead are reanimated and everyone else was killed. They don't believe her and she becomes a Buddhist nun. Half a year passes and she's still having nightmares of her experience. The opportunity to be free of these nightmares presents itself in the form of Paul Barker, a bigshot scientist for her former company that wants to take her back to the island for research along with a military team. Off they all go to the island where they find themselves in a zombie trap with days to go until help arrives.

I'll start with the faults. There are some boring stretches, for one. These are dialogue-laden stretches and the actors are mostly dreadful, the dubbing worse than dreadful. Hey, this is a Mattei film! The lead actress (Yvette Yzon) isn't bad at all, but her dubbing does her a disservice. She has to carry a lengthy, indignant speech before the board of directors early on, then she has to debate Barker at the convent, then we see the military team prepping and bantering. These military guys, incidentally, have the worst dubbing of all; one of them has a voice best described as what Homestar Runner would sound like if he were a morbidly obese castrato. Even the rescue mission is played out at length with focus on verisimilitude, when it really adds nothing. I guess you could call it filler until we get to the island. It's a drag, but it's worth slogging through. Yzon is a beautiful lady (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2068456/) and you get to look at her the whole time, so it's not so bad.

While the digital shooting is quite good, Mattei makes the mistake almost all shot-on-digital zombie movies make: slow-motion. Why must they all do this? Close-ups of zombies eating, often in slow motion. Make-up effects are more effective when glimpsed quickly. In fact, several things are shot in slow motion when they needn't be.

Another fault is one that at times is also one of the good points, and that's the use of cliches. The military guys are the same military guys that you've seen in every low-budget action sci-fi/horror of the '80s, except, if possible, even more cardboard and disposable. So you can kind of predict the scientists and the military won't get along, in good Day of the Dead fashion. It's kind of annoying. These guys aren't even as interesting as the morons in Rats: Night of Terror, because at least those guys were weirdos from underground. On the other hand, it can be amusing to see what films he's 'referencing'. The girl saved from the raft is Aliens, her returning to the island to overcome her nightmares is Mountain of the Cannibal God, the military and scientist mix is Day of the Dead, etc.. And I daresay Mattei's been watching horror hentai movies and playing Playstation games, because this movie's got some fricken weird ideas!

Or maybe I do Mattei a discredit. Maybe he really did just come up with this disturbing stuff himself. But disturbing is the word. Once they get to the island, we see Mattei really kick into action. The cinematography is serviceable, but it's the lighting that's excellent. It's always dark and raining on the island, but the way it's lit makes it look like a video game. You'd almost think you were watching a cut scene from some military strategy game. The video game comparison doesn't stop there. Once inside the research compound on the island, we're in Resident Evil territory. Humans have been used for horrendous research, there are fetuses everywhere, zombie women in cages, zombie women pregnant with monster fetuses, a zombie with some strange gadget on his head. And it gets even more incredible, but I dare not spoil the ending. It's really so bonkers, so outrageous, I was in awe. Mattei actually disturbed me. It even outdoes the end of Rats: Night of Terror.

And he frightened me too. The jump scares and suspense moments are quite often very effective. Not so much for the soldiers: I knew they're zombie-fodder from the get go. But the biologist/nun is our worthy protagonist and I sympathized with her. I cared about her fate. It helps, too, that Mattei designed some really interesting creatures and put the effort into good make-up effects.

I don't want to spoil anything further, as much as I would like to say more. I would rather let you discover. There are things in this movie that are just over-the-top weird and brilliant: midget zombies, mutants, apes. Things anyone but Mattei would have said, "Well I'd better have a reason for this." It's great trash and a fitting farewell. Bruno outdid himself.