Hisss (2010) - 2.5/4

I've heard a little about Bollywood, but haven't seen much. Their cinematic form seems to have discarded all notions of consistency in tone and has instead striven to entertain in every possible way simultaneously and often conflictingly. Hisss is a Bollywood film directed by American-as-Apple-Pie Jennifer Lynch. How much of her vision remains is hard to say, but she's disowned the film. How many shots were directed by her is also hard to say. But the resulting film is nevertheless both entertaining and interesting.

"I may have brain cancer, but I can still piss like a horse." The man who utters that line is the film's villain, a psychopathic white guy (Jeff Doucette) who wants to become immortal. The best way to become immortal is to find some cobras mid-coitus, kidnap the male, put him in an aquarium, and randomly administer electric shocks. The female snake then transforms into a hot Indian supermodel (Mallika Sherawat, in this case), a snake goddess, who will find the kidnapper and trade a special diamond for her mate. This diamond can grant immortality.

Of course, it won't really go down like that. Shapeshifting snake deities will just eat you and vomit your semi-digested corpse into the nearest gutter. And that's where Hisss is a horror film. Mallika does come to the city looking for her mate. But the only trail she has is the people who assisted in the kidnapping. Instead of questioning them, she sniffs them out, swallows them, and vomits them up in nasty, slimy balls. For vore fetishists, this is no doubt very exciting stuff.

It also excites the interest of a local detective, however. Despite having little to do with the plot itself, the film is strangely concerned with the detective's personal life. He and his wife have been striving to have children, but she keeps miscarrying. Meanwhile, his mother-in-law--easily the film's finest character--believes he's really a woman, a lonely spinster in need of love. She also thinks the news broadcasts about the snake goddess's victims is a TV series starring her son-in-law.

Apparently Jennifer Lynch conceived Hisss as an absurd love story between the snake goddess and her snake lover. The producers, however, conceived of the film as a snakewoman horror film with a hot babe slinking around naked. The mixture is strangely Shakespearean in the way it appeals to high and low cultures, poetic and entertainment interests at the same time. That's not to say the film is brilliant; the producer interference has probably done a lot more harm than good. The film's finest moments are likely fragments from Lynch's vision: the poetic, fairytale moments when Mallika slithers up a tree or light post totally naked and, in silence, longs for her stolen love--the whole film, in a way, is moving toward the completion of the interrupted coitus. There are also parallels between the snake couple and the detective and his wife that are rather nebulous as the film stands, something to do with love, fertility, and respect for life. Their destinies are bound together. Alas, whatever message Lynch was going for here is tough to decipher.

One of the stranger responses I had to Hisss was to wonder why the snake goddess would work so hard to pursue her snake mate when, in human form, she has her pick of all these human males. Even though she is technically a snake, she's in human form; she could stay in human form and have a human mate. The film seems to deliberately pull these anthropocentric strings. As a man, I found myself almost jealous of the snake: why should he get this hot mate when we humans are such superior males? Perhaps this anthropocentrism as part of what Lynch wanted to explore with this film and why she made efforts to parallel the humans to the snakes. In the film's present form, it's hard to say.

However mangled and inconsistent Hisss may be, it is a fascinating mixture of conscious and subconscious, art and entertainment, poetry and exploitation. Weird, often unintentionally funny, the film is worth at least one viewing for Western horror audiences, to whom snakewomen movies, a subgenre of Indian cinema, are unusual.

Don't Let Him In (2011) - 1.5/4

"Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun." - Ashley J. Williams

A problem one has after watching a lot of movies, especially low budget movies, is that you've seen it all before. Rather than marvel over a movie being bad, I'm constantly surprised by how creative filmmakers are at making the Same Old Plot (SOP) somehow interesting. How can a psychopathic killer stalking cute college girls still be interesting? After watching so many films with the SOP--whatever the P may be--I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter so much whether the film is good or bad, but whether it's weird, fascinating, stamped with some personal style. It has to have that something special. That Something Special can even trump concerns of Good and Bad.

This is especially important to note for filmmakers working with very low budgets. The tendency amongst first-time filmmakers with low budgets is, unfortunately, to stick to 'safe' plots that have been done many times before. These plots have been done well and glossy by Hollywood, interesting and quirky by other low-budget filmmakers. Yet many filmmakers try to imitate the respectable Hollywood instantiations and, lacking both the imaginative quirks of independents and the gloss of Hollywood, merely present the plot in the most banal style possible. Low-budget, independent filmmakers have to take risks, dare to be odd, disliked, bad. That takes imagination and creativity; in independent cinema, there's no-one to be creative for you.

The problem with Don't Let Him In isn't that it's bad. I suppose you could say it's good--it doesn't take enough risks to be bad. The acting is of a high quality, the gore is decent, the pacing is good; there aren't any problems with the dialogue, characters, or the plot development, as it follows very well-established guidelines in these areas. Yet the film isn't the slightest bit interesting. It's good, in a sense, but totally plain, flavourless, nondescript, bland. It has nothing really weird in it, no peculiarities, no offbeat variations, fascinating flaws, or moments of creative brilliance--in short, no personality. It just coasts along, ever so competently, without imagination.

Don't Let Him In concerns a very familiar plot. There is a psychopathic killer on the loose. A group of friends all go into the woods and realize they're at risk of getting killed by the serial killer dubbed 'The Tree Surgeon'; and soon enough they do indeed start getting killed. One character fights back with modest intelligence. There is a slight quirk, or variation, in the plot--a twist--as one would expect.

If that plot sounds like something you want to see, you can see it handled solidly in Don't Let Him In. While the film does nothing else, it delivers that plot quite well. The only thing approaching a stand-out moment in the film is a shot of the killer drooling. This shot won't perturb an unremarkable evening watching Don't Let Him In, however.

Husk (2011) - 2.5/4

Remember that magnificent story by Jorge Luis Borges where a spy is summoned to a mansion; there he finds himself trapped in an infinite labyrinth inside a novel and he shoots a detective to prove it? Well Husk has nothing to do with that. Husk is about killer scarecrows.

Husk is actually a sort of magic realist fantasy as much as it is a horror. Yes, it's about killer scarecrows. But it's also about a complex and inscrutable mechanism that creates, controls, and maintains the scarecrows, as well as the various instruments of the mechanism. It functions as follows: whenever humans enter the cornfield, they are attacked and crucified by a scarecrow; the victim is then entranced and summoned to a room in the farmhouse containing nothing but an Olde Tyme sewing machine; the zombie-like victim then stitches together a scarecrow mask and wears it; with that the victim is forever a scarecrow controlled by the mechanism, ready to assault more humans.

There are other rules governing the mechanism. For one, the scarecrows can't leave the cornfield once they're in it. They can't even return to the farmhouse. Also, only one scarecrow can be mobile at any given time. The mechanism can't control two scarecrows at once. And perhaps the most peculiar of all the mechanism's activities is the visions it grants to one of the victims, revealing the past.

The film tries to explain these rules by means of, as is so often the case, a past tragedy (fratricide); but the explanation is deeply inadequate for explaining the whole mechanism. Tragedy is not trauma; there's no reason a personal trauma like murder should become a cosmic trauma, unless of course the cosmos is within a dream. But even granting that Freudian premise, still only a few pieces of the mechanism are explained. Really, the rules are arbitrary. Whether that's a good or bad thing comes down to the individual viewer. Some will no doubt find it frustrating. I personally enjoyed the lack of explanation. It was much more interesting to me to see the characters struggling, like scientists, to figure out how this anomalous portion of the universe works rather than asking the more theological question of, "Why?".

The plot of Husk is that a group of 20-somethings are driving to wherever a group of 20-somethings would drive to when they crash right outside the farmhouse of the scarecrows. Naturally they gravitate toward the farmhouse seeking help. One-by-one the scarecrows whittle them down and convert them into scarecrows while the survivors, especially the young man gifted with visions of the farmhouse's past (Devon Graye), try to figure out the mechanism and fight back.

A difficulty many viewers will have with Husk is the plot holes, and just about all of these plot holes come from the arbitrary rules of the mechanism. For instance, if the sewing is so integral to the creation of the scarecrows, why not simply destroy the sewing machine? Or, for that matter, burn down the house? Several options appear open to them to interfere with the mechanism one way or another, either to stop the mechanism or at least render the scarecrows ineffectual. But, as we must always say of plot holes, "If they did that, there'd be no movie."

For anyone who wishes to dig further, there arealso some Freudian implications to enjoy. Following trauma, the sufferer represses the memory and the repressed trauma bubbles up as compulsive repetition. The Freudian ideal is to face the trauma and no longer repress it. In Husk, the mechanism is about as clear a representation of repetition-compulsion as one could hope for. The trauma is the fratricide that is too much for, well, the cosmos? the ghost of the murderer? or for the dreamer of this nightmare, namely the audience? Whomever it may be, it is through the character of the visionary that we begin to face the trauma. This parallel with psychoanalytic theory could well have been intentional, as so many young filmmakers are acquainted with film theory. If not, it's still a fruitful area of inquiry.

The main pleasure of Husk, however, is to just enjoy the killer scarecrows and the young adults kicking scarecrow ass. Killer scarecrows just aren't that common a movie monster. In fact, the best killer scarecrow before this film is in an episode of Friday the 13th: The Series. So as far as killer scarecrow action goes, Husk is an excellent update for the 2010s.

The Shrine (2010) - 3/4

The Shrine , the latest film from Canadian filmmaker Jon Knautz (Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer) centers on two curious, headstrong women. Carmen (Cindy Simpson), a journalist, and her assistant Sara (Meghan Heffern), defy their editor's orders and, with Carmen's boyfriend Marcus (Aaron Ashmore) tagging along, decide to investigate a series of disappearances centered in a Polish hamlet. The investigation leads them to a barn/church in the middle of a field where thugs chase them off, and to a mysterious fog over a stretch of woods. After both women enter the woods, one after the other, and stare at the demonic statue at the center, they must run for their lives from a local cult.

What makes The Shrine work so well is that it continues to evade anticipation throughout and does so without cheating. From beginning to end, it's difficult to predict just where the film is going. The fog, the statue, and the cult are obviously all linked in some fashion; but since all three are equally mysterious, there's no guessing just what's going on. Many films rely on some form of cheating to keep the viewer confused. The most infamous example of this may be High Tension. The Shrine pulls some sleight-of-hand, particularly in its use of subjective camera-work, but it never cheats; it earns our continued absorption in its mysteries and this interest is paid off as the mysteries are sufficiently dealt with.

If there's any major problem with The Shrine, it's an over-reliance upon these mysteries. The characters seem to spend the majority of the film walking or running from one location to another. The intervening confrontations and/or set-pieces are either non-events or very brief. As a result, there is more atmosphere than suspense. This isn't necessarily a problem, of course. Many great horror films, like Mario Bava's or Peter Weir's, are almost all atmosphere and mystery. The problem for The Shrine is that it does appear to strive for suspense, moments of tension, and when they work--and occasionally work quite well--they just aren't sustained long enough. For suspense to work patience is required.

To get deeper into The Shrine, though, I want to talk a little about about theory. Particularly, Linda Williams's famous article, "When the Woman Looks." The basic thesis of the article is twofold. The first point is that "In the classical narrative cinema, to see is to desire" and "The woman’s gaze is punished...by narrative processes that transform curiosity and desire into masochistic fantasy. " Any time a woman in a horror film grants herself the privilege of fulfilling her desire to see, to know, what she shouldn't--like Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil--she is punished. The second point is that the reason female curiosity must be so punished is that "the woman’s look at the monster offers at least a potentially subversive recognition of the power and potency of a non-phallic sexuality," namely the monster's. The woman sees herself in the monster, or the monster in herself: both are an alternative to male sovereignty and thus both must be oppressed by males to retain that sovereignty. Horror films are a way of representing the eruption and repression of these threats (monsters and women), however subconsciously, to the satisfaction of male viewers.

This is where I find The Shrine most interesting. Because, if Williams is right, The Shrine should be extraordinarily satisfying to male viewers--and as a male viewer, I confess it sort of is. The character of Carmen, firstly, is a strong, defiant, stubborn, and curious woman. There's no question that she's the leader of her little group. Whatever objections her boyfriend brings up, she doesn't just disagree with him in discussion, she totally plows over him and speaks for everyone: "We're going!" This character trait, in fact, makes her rather annoying. It would be just as annoying in a man. Dictatorships are never really pleasant. This only makes it all the more satisfying when she's finally broken and forced to realize all the wrong she's done. But first, let's look at the wrong.

What Carmen and Sara do is enter the fog and gaze upon the demon statue. It's telling that Knautz has only the female characters do this. The man stays outside. In the Williams paradigm, what the women are doing is (1) becoming curious, (2) satisfying their curiosity by taking control of the gaze and (3) finding in the gaze the monstrous alternative to phallic sexual power. And most importantly, (4) they are punished for satisfying their curiosity in this way. Both emerge from the fog traumatized and disoriented. Then the subsequent events of the film befall them.

Spoilers Begin Here

The 'subsequent' events of the film are also very telling, and even suggest Knautz intentionally rather than subconsciously pursued this theme. The first is Sara's death, which occurs at the hands of the cult. The cult, which struggles to subdue those possessed by the demon statue, holds her down and pounds a mask onto her face. As the mask comes down, we see on the inside of the mask two spikes that will pierce her eyes. What's important about this is that the eyes are particularly being punished, the eyes that were used in the gaze upon the demon. In the fate of Carmen, we see what the all-male cult is frightened of: the powers of the demon overcoming the powers of men. Carmen slaughters (1) a traditional family of father, mother, and child and (2) the priest of the cult. The demonic power is a non-phallic potency that threatens to destroy male power just as Carmen herself bulldozed over her boyfriend's part in decision-making. Carmen, then, is given the same treatment as Sara, with the participation of her boyfriend.

There are a lot of other details in The Shrine that can be explored in relation to this theme. For one, the demonic statue doesn't stay still when the women gaze upon it. As Carmen moves to the side of the statue to take a second photograph (and photography is a fitting motif) she's startled to find the statue's head has moved and the hollow sockets are staring right at her. She gazes into its eyes for a long time, in the film's most haunting and frightening moment, and it gazes back, like a hypnotism sequence from a Dracula or Svengali film, until its eyes bleed. Also of interest is the masculinity of the demon statue. Its body is large and muscular, its brow heavy. Also noteworthy is that the editor Carmen works for is male. It all amounts to a statement, however intentional or not, against the modern, liberated woman who presumes to know too much and, even worse, to take charge.

Spoilers End Here

While this aspect of The Shrine is interesting, it's not a message I can entirely get behind. A less pronounced idea is a statement against idle tourists, male or female. Ever since I saw a picture of Newgrange and spotted a stainless steel handrail installed into the stone for accessibility I've marveled at how tourism can totally exploit a region and its history for idle curiosity: "just to see." The tourists who happen by the demon statue in the fog are aptly punished for their idle curiosity. Had they taken the time to consult some locals, get to know and respect the area, they'd have saved themselves the trouble of dying.

Whatever Knautz's intention in making The Shrine so misogynistic, his efforts resulted in a fascinating and unique film with a good share of surprising moments. A little shy on the gore, this is just some smart and effective atmospheric horror--an increasingly rare approach. In fact, The Shrine is one of the best atmospheric horror films of the last few years.

Laid to Rest (2009) & ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2 (2011)

Laid to Rest is, to put it plainly, a horror fan's horror film. Everything a lover of horror films enjoys in the genre, including some of its more charming weaknesses, is offered by the bucket in this film. Kind of a miracle, in that it pushes the more salient features of slasher films to an extreme and is, on top of that, a competent and very good film.

The extremity to which I refer is in brutality and gore. We're now in the Third Wave of Slasher Films. The First Wave began the genre with the well-known conventions and equally well-known franchises: Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.. The Second Wave of Slasher Films distinguished itself by an awareness of the films' history, a self-consciousness of the slasher-esque situation they present. The major franchises of the Second Wave are the Scream films, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Urban Legends. The Third Wave of slashers is distinguished by its Return to Purity. These films look to what made slashers fun and try to give the viewer that. Adam West's Hatchet, the Wrong Turn films, Rob Zombie's Halloween films, and Laid to Rest all fall into the Third Wave. (It's no coincidence that Rob Zombie resurrected Michael Myers for the Third Wave, after all: Michael is the first and purest slasher monster.) The plots of these movies are as thin as need be, the women are hot, and the 'monsters' are impossibly strong--despite, in the cases of Hatchet and Wrong Turn, genetic decadence working against them--so that they can cut through skulls, rip apart heads, and do whatever godawful violence the make-up department can come up with.

Of the Third Wave of Slashers, the direct-to-video, independent pictures tend to be more brutal. Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 is about as brutal as a studio-released slasher could ever be--and it is indeed pretty brutal. Laid to Rest exceeds that film by a margin and Laid to Rest 2 exceeds it by miles. The slasher-monster ChromeSkull has no difficulty passing his blades through skulls, lifting corpses with one hand, or even exploding heads in the first film. In the sequel, bodies and faces are carved in every disturbing way imaginable, including a clumsy mastectomy. Since writer-director Robert Hall has had a long career in the make-up department of horror movies, it's no surprise that this area of his films keep up. Every slice is accompanied by realistic gushes of blood and nebulous chunks.

Where Laid to Rest impresses is in going beyond this first step of brutal set-pieces. West's Hatchet scarcely has a plot or characters; both are a clothesline on which to hang the slightly tongue-in-cheek brutal kills. Wrong Turn, similarly, offers more of a situation than a plot: there are dangerous, inbred hicks and there are people they want to kill. Rob Zombie's Halloween films stand out amongst Third Wave slashers for their intricate plots and, especially in the second film, three-dimensional characters. Laid to Rest exceeds these films in plot as well: a girl wakes up in a coffin in a funeral home with no recollection of how she got there; she's immediately pursued by the vicious ChromeSkull. The pursuit is the exciting, suspenseful slasher action. But the question of who she is and why she woke up in a coffin lingers through the action, giving the film a layer of mystery and a touch of absurd nightmare.

That Hall's script is able to provide answers to the mystery while sustaining the action is really the miracle. Instead of wasting our time with flashbacks, video footage, minimal dialogue, and realistic character behaviour gradually reveals the answers to some mysteries and leaves others remain--as some should. The film's structuring is a thing of beauty.

What isn't so beautiful about Laid to Rest is a flaw it shares with Third Wave slashers. This is a general callousness toward its characters. The brutality I praise above can and will strike any character, no matter how deserving of some nobility and dignity. Now it can be argued that a psychopathic killer could care less about how well a character as fought back and is fair game for brutal slaughter as anyone else. That is, of course, true. I'm not blaming the killer; I'm blaming the writer's approach. Laid to Rest, unlike, say, Hatchet, doesn't contain a great deal of comedy. ChromeSkull's kills are serious business. There is only one kill that is kind of a joke, based on a running gag and delivered to one of the film's most likeable characters while everyone watches. The death is disturbing (an inflation death), inexplicably tongue-in-cheek, and left me feeling there was no point caring about anyone's life--a rather important thing to do if a horror film is to be a good one. Compare to the death of Annie in Zombie's Halloween 2, where Zombie devotes a cinematic Moment of Silence to the character. While Zombie's approach is out of place and overdramatic, it's nevertheless superior to a glib dismissal.

Laid to Rest 2 shares the flaws of the first film and intensifies them. The protagonist of the first film, for instance, is casually dispatched within the first few minutes. Unfortunately, it also dispenses with the mysterious plot that made the first film so good. In this film, ChromeSkull is revealed to be the head of some organization of psychopaths who devote themselves to helping ChromeSkull set up his 'laboratory', make his weapons, and find his prey. Perhaps Hall believed the mystery of who these people are, why they're helping ChromeSkull, and who ChromeSkull really is, should hook audiences even more. But these are two different kinds of mysteries altogether. The first film gives us a close mystery of a single character's nightmare, loss of identity, unexplained location, and unknown enemy. In this film, we have more a conspiracy than a mystery. The conspiracy involves an annoying playboy who wants to be the next ChromeSkull. Unfortunately for him, the first ChromeSkull still lives and has no desire to be replaced. Meanwhile, ChromeSkull's other assistant (Danielle Harris) finds him another victim, a mostly-blind girl, to be his comeback prey.

The strong structuring and screenwriting of the first film is entangled, in the sequel, by its own ambitious plotting. Hall wants us to follow the ChromeSkull wannabe, ChromeSkull, the efforts of the police force to find the blind girl, the blind girl, a remaining character from the first film and how their threads all cross each other. Our attention is so dissipated, we care about no-one. Laid to Rest 2 is, consequently, a messy film. Characters are forgotten as the film jumps from one plot point to another, the protagonists don't really protag, and the various questions the film does raise by way of conspiracy are left unanswered. It is not a good thing that this drew comparisons in my mind to the infamous Thorn plot of Halloween 6. This is not to say the plot is all uninteresting; just that, in all its increased complexity, it lacks both the intimacy and mystique of the first film.

Perhaps a bit of hubris got in the way. Laid to Rest is a really good film and ChromeSkull is a really good slasher. But much of Laid to Rest 2 is devoted to telling us ChromeSkull is a really good slasher. When Hall has ChromeSkull walk over Godzilla's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, so as to say, "Here is horror's latest and best," we're given a basic theme of this film: ChromeSkull is already a legend and piddly psychopaths want to be as badass as him. The amazing thing is that Hall is almost able to justify this kind of hubris. When we see this dork trying to be ChromeSkull, we do side with ChromeSkull; we want him to show up the dork like Stormare stuffing Buscemi into the woodchipper. There are levels of evil and ChromeSkull is something beyond a common psychopathic serial killer. The mystery of him and his motive is really the core strength holding Laid to Rest 2 together; in fact, the full title, ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2 is quite apt.

Ultimately, though, Laid to Rest 2 ramps up the extremity at the expense of the intimacy and wonder that made the first so remarkable. In this way it loses itself in the same trap as most other Third Wave slashers. While it's not fair on Hall to ask that he simply remake the first film in the sequel and while his experiment in expanding the Laid to Rest universe is impressive in its own right, it is fair to note the experiment isn't entirely successful. Perhaps a decade down the road, in hindsight, this film will be viewed with the affection given to other bonkers sequels like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2--but I doubt it.

Overall, the Laid to Rest films are an impressive series of independent slashers and about the best the Third Wave of Slasher Films has to offer.

Death Stop Holocaust (2009) - 3/4

There are an awful lot of films trying to be grindhouse or drive-in films. The Tarantino and Rodrigues picture Grindhouse is the most prominent and is perhaps responsible for many similar films. On the other hand, with Tarantino making the style so mainstream and his followers and fans taking it up themselves, making films of this sort stigmatizes the 'grindhouse' affectation as being just more Tarantino-ism. There are, on the other hand, original grindhouse/drive-in filmmakers still working. Herschell Gordon Lewis, inventor of the gore film, just released his latest film, The Uh-Oh Show (2009), on DVD; it is as true a grindhouse picture as 2011 will allow and it is, needless to say, a small-budget ($25,000), shot-on-video picture. Tarantino's Death Proof or Rodrigues's Planet Terror can only be wearing the grindhouse aesthetic as an affectation. No drive-in filmmaker ever had a budget near Death Proof's ($30,000,000). It's unlikely they'd ever seen that kind of money in their lives. Whatever Tarantino did to popularize the nostalgia and willful imitation of drive-in and grindhouse flicks, his stigmatized followers in the shot-on-video, b-movie market are more truly grindhouse flicks than his films will ever be.

That said, even shot-on-video flicks must affect the grindhouse style. Death Stop Holocaust is a shot-on-video picture that affects the style as unabashedly as any other. The filmmaker, Justin Russell, goes so far as to insert burning celluloid effects. We know this is an affectation, because the film was shot on a Panasonic HVX 200 (a $4000 digital camcorder). There is no celluloid to burn. Nor is there any illusion that I'm at a drive-in when I recline on my futon and watch the DVD screener on my laptop. While in most cases, the affectation, then, is all it is; it goes no further than affecting the style in reference to a style of cinema that happened to appeal to and influence the filmmakers. Call it an homage or call it being hip, it is equally limited. Death Stop Holocaust seems to me a rarity in going beyond mere affectation to making use of the style to comment upon the content. Before we get to that, the content.

Death Stop Holocaust, a title seemingly drawn from a mad lib, concerns two college girls, Liz (Lisa Krenisky) and Taylor (Naomi Watts look-a-like Jenna Fournier), taking a vacation at Liz's family summer home on a nearby island. As soon as they arrive on the island, they find its denizens behaving strangely. A man tries to run them off the road in his van, a waitress distracts them while their gas is stolen, and hardly anyone else will say a word. Before they can get to the summer home, they're being terrorized by three maniacs in creepy masks.

Naturally a movie of this sort--a movie, that is to say, so threadbare in plot that it is purely about the experience--stands or falls on the effectiveness of the terrorizing. Holocaust stands. Justin Russell has the ambition, and the talent, to strive for something more than the usual maniacs-terrorizing-babes set pieces. He's definitely experimenting in Death Stop Holocaust and the results are often quite effective. The influence of The Strangers perhaps rests a little too heavily, as the masked maniacs wander the negative space of the frame silently, toying with us as much as with the victim, but not really accomplishing much else. On the other hand, this behaviour is unsettling if only in virtue of its inexplicability. And their ability and willingness to commit upsetting violence is established before the toying around even begins. We're therefore always left in suspense as to when and what they're going to do, though there's no doubt of their being able to do something whenever they please.

Beyond the maniacs, however, is where Holocaust transcends its generic conventions and approaches the truly nightmarish. For one, the town itself appears to be held in the grip of some spell, behaving in accordance with the maniacs' goals. That the oddness of the supposedly normal people in a town where Liz has fond childhood memories is never really explained, moreover, submerges us, as in our dreams of familiar places somehow altered and decadent, in the uncanny, the horror of the familiar perverted against natural order. In fact, one of the screenplay's missteps is in having a character explain any of the mystery at all, though, wisely, not much is explained.

Death Stop Holocaust transcends not just in the narrative, but also, as I alluded to earlier, in its form. The grindhouse paraphernalia are not merely doing the work of affectation. They play a role in Liz's consciousness, in the relationship between reality and nightmare. We're introduced into the film world via the classic "Our Feature Presentation" drive-in intro. This establishes the filmic reality of the world we're witnessing as the concrete reality. At times of intense horror the 'celluloid' burns up. The first time the celluloid burns is during a rape attempt; the second time is when Liz is sedated and has a nightmare. The suggestion is that reality itself, or at least Liz's experience of reality, is compromised by the sheer horror of the situations she's in. Since this also suggests a certain subjective relationship between the form and Liz's experience, we experience with her the reality of the island as a disjointed, absurd flow of nightmare. What she experiences in sedation, a sequence reminiscent of moments in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, is an indistinguishable part of her experience of the maniacs, one no more real than the other.

Despite my praise, Holocaust is not a masterpiece debut. For all of the nightmarish effects and grindhouse allusions, it may strike many horror fans as a tame picture, representing much of its brutality elliptically. That might not be a problem if the film didn't offer us suggestive glimpses of that brutality. And the various narrative lacunae, while strengthening the mysteriousness of the events, at some points simply dissatisfies. This is particularly true of the film's conclusion, which left me a little disappointed. If the film builds up to an event, some clue in the narrative must be present to make us see that event as significant in itself; and there are no such clues in Holocaust. A nightmare, after all, is uninteresting to anyone but its dreamer unless it has a point.

However, Holocaust is still a very strong debut, showing Russell's influences to be as broad as '70s exploitation, David Lynch, and modern invasion horror like The Strangers. Some work will have to be done for Russell to make his influences work with one another, but on the strength of Death Stop Holocaust, I look forward to seeing him experiment more. Death Stop Holocaust is indeed a true heir to drive-in cinema and, thanks to Russell's adventurousness, also much more.

Priest (2011) - 2/4

About halfway through Priest it struck me that I was watching The Searchers with alien vampires instead of Comanches and ninja priests instead of cowboys. That's not to say it's as good, interesting, or morally complex as The Searchers--or even as a wrinkle in John Wayne's left one; it's just to say that the writer looked to the most moving western ever made for his narrative structure and then filled it with a lot of sci-fi cliches, like a dogmatically-ruled futuristic city, some specially-trained warriors, a rebellious antihero, slick CGI and slow-motion fight sequences.

Priest is about an old warrior teaming up with a young warrior, a sheriff, to recover his niece, held captive by a pack of vampires. If she's been infected, the old warrior will kill her. The young warrior is in love with her, however, and wants to prevent this turn of events.

So that's The Searchers part of it. Here's the scifi part. Vampires are these alien-like creatures, all teeth and no eyes, and priests are like superhuman ninjas trained to fight them--they kick ass for the lord, yes. Vampires are supposed to have been wiped out. That's what the cardinals are telling everyone. The 'old warrior', a middle-aged priest, wants to kill some vampires, but the cardinals have a problem with him heading out to kill things they claim don't exist.

(There's something curiously insightful about how religion works in that, reflecting somewhat how the Catholic Church--the obviously caricatured institution in Priest--dealt with figures like Galileo. The film's representation of a personal religion apart from an institutional one also shows a level of intellectual maturity not usually welcome in Hollywood. So often the hero in these films must divorce himself from all spirituality. In this film, a few tyrannical men have seized power in the Church; otherwise, religion can be a source of personal strength.)

Meanwhile, the vampires are using this opportunity to launch an attack on the city. Karl Urban plays his villain character very Disney-like throughout this sequence, reeking mayhem and taunting the protagonist whilst striking silhouette poses and flailing his arms to no less than a symphony.

The whole film is, in fact, like second-rate Disney, as morally flat and cartoonish as Aladdin 2: The Return of Jafar. It entertains while it hastens past areas needing more development, insults your intelligence, and leaves you with no concern for the destiny of its characters: you'd hardly believe the writers have seen The Searchers were it not for the obvious borrowing. Priest sadly contains a good many missed opportunities for something more; but sometimes you just have to enjoy your priest-on-alien action in a post-apocalyptic western setting for what it is.

Dark House (2009) - 2/4

So often these mid-budget horror movies have one CGI monster or one guy with freaky make-up, whether ghost, demon, witch, or banshee; and this creature leaves you so underwhelmed, you wonder, "THIS is the terror?!". Dark House doesn't come up with anything better; it just multiplies it. Instead of one CGI monster or one guy with freaky make-up, we get a whole gaggle of them. The result is, actually, effective. While one of these creations underwhelms, the extra effort exerted in creating a horde of different creatures keeps each set-piece of the film novel and allows viewers to wonder what creature will pop up next.

The premise of Dark House is, in fact, built around these creatures. A crazy amusement ride entrepreneur (Jeffrey Combs) has designed his masterpiece, "Dark House", a haunted house using a series of lasers to produce holographic horrors. Each room of the house has some new hologram to freak out customers. The few humans are a class of student actors hired to interact with the holograms and customers. The one catch is that the house used as the "Dark House" really may really be haunted and one of the actors has a hidden past with the house. Naturally, the holograms go ape and folks start dying.

This familiar plot is a generous sampling from William Castle movies. A portion of House on Haunted Hill, a lot of Thirteen Ghosts, and maybe a dash of The Tingler, and you have Dark House's backbone, a loose basis for the various murder set pieces. Castle's films are haunted house rides, designed to give lighthearted, even cheesy, thrills in isolated moments. Dark House inherits that spirit. It even inherits Vincent Price's hamminess from House on Haunted Hill, channeled here by Combs in his eccentric millionaire performance. Copying something good is better than an original bad idea: like any William Castle movie, Dark House is fun.

Unfortunately, the screenwriters get a little too ambitious and try to throw us some unnecessary twists toward the end. As is often the case, these twists are fig leaves over something screenwriters tend to find embarrassing: simplicity. A straightforward haunting or insanity story can be elevated with a twist; but more often than not, as in this case, it's simply confused. Some may enjoy the twists, however, and some may not; but the story's simplicity throughout the majority of the film allows us to enjoy the film's real meat, which is just the inventive creatures and their kills.