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.