Eyes of the Mothman (2011) - 3/4

Something about the legend of the mothman, often classified amongst cryptozoological legends like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, that stimulates a degree of seriousness not reserved for those others. There have been several films on Bigfoot and Nessie, most of them silly and of very poor quality. The mothman, however, inspired The Mothman Prophecies (2000), one of the most elegant, mysterious, and mature horror movies since The Haunting (1960). And when one watches the various documentaries on Bigfoot and Nessie, where cryptozoologists build upon one another’s loose, largely invented or at least misconstrued data, and then a documentary like Eyes of the Mothman, one can see why there is such a difference. Because the mothman is not just a creature, it’s a protracted series of events that seem to contain some undeniable reality.

Eyes of the Mothman, much like The Mothan Prophecies, is an elegant and evolved work. The genteel shots of the local environments, the poetic voice of narrator Richard Pait that suggests honesty and patience, and the quotes from poets like Tennyson are the earliest cues that this is not the ordinary conspiracy/UFO documentary. As Eyes scrutinizes Point Pleasant from the Revolutionary War through TNT stockpiling, the mothman events and up to the present, the cues are confirmed. Eyes’s two-and-a-half hour runtime is intimidating, but ultimately justified by the breadth of research.

Eyes begins with the local folklore of Revolutionary War-era Chief Cornstalk’s supposed curse on the land. The anthropological scrutiny of the curse is given objectively: Native curses were land-based rather than individual-based, for various reasons. This grounding is not the basis for the remainder of the documentary, but serves two perhaps opposes purposes. The first is to start in mystery, the possibility of something spiritual or unnatural. The other is to show a small town prone to self-mythologizing. Director Pellowski deserves credit for allowing both suggestions to coexist.

Next is a fretting discussion of the World War TNT stockpiles in the Point Pleasant wilderness. Local ponds were frequently contaminated and mutant fish have been discovered. Eyes has its weaknesses on issues of science. The professor interviewed casually remarks that intelligent life has only been on earth for two-thousand years. That would make Socrates a feces-flinging primate. So rather than involve real biologists in the discussion, the possibility that the mothman is a genetic mutation is glibly implied without scrutiny. Again, this grounding has two purposes. For one, the vastly unpredictable worlds of biology and chemistry gives a natural alternative to Native curses. But Pellowski is also showing a small town distrustful of outsiders, including—if not especially—its own government.

Eyes thankfully plunges from there right into the peculiar phenomena of the mothman sightings. The rashes, swollen eyes, and psychological disturbances of the sightings are described by actual sufferers or other Point Pleasant locals. The relationship to the TNT stockpiles takes on some credibility. Some biologists did then and still now suggest witnesses only saw a particularly large, foreign crane—perhaps a mutant one.

Point Pleasant's situation develops from the mothman sightings into UFO sightings, visitations by men in black, the appearance of a strange man known as ‘Indrid Cold’—an innately creepy name, I think—the prophecies of things to come, and finally the collapse of the bridge. Following that particular tragedy, all the weird phenomena stops. Either the mass hysteria has been blown away by genuine tragedy, or there was a real and occult trajectory to the strange events.

The complexity of the series of events encompassed by the rubric ‘mothman’ is highly fascinating in itself, of course. There is just so much more to the Point Pleasant events than the mothman sightings. But what’s more interesting is how Eyes presents the mothman sightings as a real community event. Locals describe hanging around an area known for sightings, hoping to see the mothman. One even says it was like going to the drive-in. They were afraid of it, and yet they loved it. The mothman brought excitement in a boring town. The men in black brought a feeling of significance and importance. The bridge tragedy brought sense, one way or another.

Eyes never makes a statement. The complex mixture of genuine, confused, fudged, and then outright invented data is presented by Pellowski with honesty and integrity, albeit passively. Pellowski shows a certain reluctance to engage in open skepticism or criticism. The interviews also fail to engage any critics, but instead some unrelated ‘paranormal investigators.’ But the patient comprehensiveness of Eyes gives the intelligent viewer room to ponder. If there is any overarching point to Eyes, it is that the one consistent point amongst all witnesses, the strange, red eyes, suggest some reality to the events. But if there is any lasting value to be derived from this documentary, it is the scrutiny of a small town’s obsessions, collective neuroses, and mythologizing imagination.

Megan Is Missing (2012) - 2.5/4

Megan Is Missing may be the most warped, perverse piece of exploitation filmmaking to come out in a long time. Not because it is contains the rough, explicit sex of a Max Hardcore video—it doesn’t. Not because it contains the gore of a Rob Zombie movie—it doesn’t. Rather, it's because we have Max Hardcore videos, Rob Zombie movies, and everything in between—all readily available, and much of it mainstream—that we haven’t had a need for anything truly warped and perverse.

Until Michael Goi came along. With the lurid imagination of a pulpit-shaking preacher, Goi’s deeply repressed perversions emerge as fantasies about the depravity of modern teenage life and the hellish sufferings coming to those who partake. Ordinarily, the sexually repressed, in our modern world, are self-conscious enough to keep their twisted sexuality inside—if not their minds, at least their small circle of perverted discontents. Not Michael Goi. If he’s aware his imagination is not shared by others (or reality), he doesn’t show it.

Megan Is Missing begins by giving us a few days in the lives of two teenage girls, Megan and her best friend Amy, using ‘actual’ footage from their online chats and video blogs. Megan is popular and Amy is not. Megan goes to parties and Amy ordinarily does not. A pretty simple setup. But for Goi, Megan can’t just go to parties. She has to go to parties and blow every guy in the room while lesbian teens make out in the background. She has to tell surprisingly long, detailed stories about giving a well-endowed teen a blowjob when she was only ten. Amy, for her part, can’t just be a little shy or naïve, she has to be totally oblivious.

What’s troubling is how Goi imagines this. Thuggish teen boys are constantly ordering teen girls to suck their dicks. The girls don’t bat an eye. Totally normal stuff for Goi. He imagines teen girls, or even pre-teen girls, dutifully sucking dicks left and right. These things sometimes happen. But at the feverish level presented in Megan Is Missing, it simply doesn’t. Teenage boys, as douchey as they can be, don’t order every girl to suck their dicks. And if they do, they don’t get their dicks sucked, they get beat up by her boyfriend. Teenage girls are not all complete sluts who live for random dick-sucking, drugs, and alcohol. If it did, so be it. But it just doesn’t. Goi, undeterred by reality, imagines it does and with righteous indignation—not because it bothers him, but because it gives him a boner beneath his bible.

To be fair to Goi, he does set up a realistic psychology to take Megan and Amy through the film’s second half. As a girl who is used for sex since childhood, Megan is extremely adventurous and susceptible to the flattery and scams of internet predators. Of course, most teen girls are adventurous and susceptible to flattery and scams of internet predators. But I buy Megan’s story. Amy’s over-the-top naivety and self-loathing are similarly grounds for what happens in the remainder of the film, although it's less believable.

What happens next is Megan gets introduced to a teen boy online. He is, of course, an internet predator who quickly lures her into his trap. Amy tries to expose him, but just arouses his fury. She ends up, albeit unwillingly, in his hands as well.

This half of the film is where Goi’s repressed sexuality serves him well. He doesn’t just imagine the predator raping and killing the girls. Instead, the predator has to place Megan in a highly-degrading fetishistic setup. Amy is spared the extreme bondage, but is raped on camera for several minutes. Goi perhaps thought showing only her face would be tasteful, but it’s not. Focusing in on the pleading, squealing, crying, and finally assent to the situation is just what a deranged, sexual sadist would enjoy seeing. (The sadist, after all--the predator, not Goi--put the camera there.)

The big finale for Megan Is Missing is a seemingly interminable scene of the predator digging the girls a grave while Amy relentlessly pleads and bargains for her life. I found myself shouting, “Just bury her already!” As annoying as it was, I imagine Goi’s point was to show just how detached from empathy the killer must be. Wow, really? I would’ve never thought.

There is a degree of realism, for better or worse, to this last half of Megan Is Missing. Enough realism to earn the praise of Polly Klaas’s father. (Mr. Klaas’s letter can be found on the Megan Is Missing website.) A sexual sadist preying on teen girls certainly will be brutal and merciless. It’s uncomfortable to watch and to no real purpose other than exploitation. The extremely clumsy attempt at making the film entirely found-footage, which means we have to believe every cell phone conversation is recorded in video and stored on the phones, is Goi trying to show he's being 'realistic' rather than merely exploitational. Reality is so bent in doing so that it only exaggerates how much the recorded material is all Goi's creative choice--a choice clearly perverse, voyeuristic, sadistic, and exploitational. But this is Megan Is Missing at its best—unflinching, unself-conscious exploitation.

What I do, nevertheless, find worrying about the torture scenes is how Goi almost seems to be imagining a fitting hell for the transgressive Megan, one that is re-enacted in the body of her best friend for our education. These girls are being blamed for their stupidity. Their lives of revelry and dick-sucking, and their comfortable perusal of the internet, are attitudes that must be punished. If teens were kept in fear and trembling, the film suggests, they wouldn’t have to be raped and buried alive. A hard truth from the pulpit of Michael Goi.

Sinister (2012) - 3/4

Sinister is proof that you can take a handful of the Same Old Materials and, with some skilful weaving, produce a good, very creepy horror movie. With Sinister, you get unsettling 8mm footage of disturbing events, unsolved disappearances of several children, the horrific deaths of whole families, a mysterious killer, occult symbols, and a lone protagonist’s descent into the overwhelming depths of the mystery and the madness. Classic horror-thriller elements. Director Scott Derrickson, whose Hellraiser: Inferno I enjoyed more than most—I only wished it hadn't been forcibly made a Hellraiser movie—just puts them in the right order so that they work.

I wonder if the concept of ‘pace’ isn’t overused. Some of the best recent horror films don’t work by ‘pace.’ They work by rhythm. The Mothman Prophecies has an eerie rhythm—screw the pace. Sinister, likewise, has a rhythm. Ethan Hawke plays Ellison Oswalt, a true crime writer who finds the material for his next book in the eradication of a family save one missing child. When he moves his family to the very house of the crime, he finds a box of Super 8 footage in the attic that reveals the staggering extent of the crime(s) he’s investigating. Each of the crimes consists in the recorded murder of a whole family, except one child that always goes missing. They are dated about a decade apart. Oswalt watches a film each night. As unsettling film ends, a creepy event takes place in the house. This rhythm is repeated over and over.

The unnaturalness of this pattern can be distancing. You can predict, by the third time, that something will happen after he watches the film. Yet, the Super 8 footage is so compellingly disturbing that the subsequent scares remain effective. The rhythm pulls the viewer, much as Oswalt, onward into the disorienting horrors of the mystery.

The intrusion of the supernatural into the mystery is where Sinister begins to lose some of its potency. In a story as eerie and mysterious as Sinister, the otherworldly must be involved in some sense. But take, again, The Mothman Prophecies as an example of how the otherworldly can be eerily incorporated without overexplaining. You can skim the unnatural; you don’t have to cannonball into it. Derrickson cannonballs. Ghostly ballet and a mythological explanation for all that’s happened lead to the clever but disappointing climax.

Sinister's haunted rhythm is necessarily lost as Oswalt is forced by this trajectory into taking action, an inevitability in the conflict-resolution model but a disruption in a film like this. A potentially great horror film becomes a good one. The creepiness of the first half of Sinister nevertheless remains some of the best horror filmmaking of the past few years.

Red Lights (2012) - 2.5/4

Red Lights is all about fakery and misdirection. Like the best magician, it draws your attention elsewhere while it works its ‘magic.’ In the best cases, this is enjoyable. David Copperfield makes a babe in a bikini appear out of thin air. Where’d she come from? Excellent! In the worse cases, however, you find yourself fleeced by a swift conman. Red Lights both entertains and fleeces.

The first half of the film focuses on the relationship between a professional debunker (Sigourney Weaver) and her assistant (Cilian Murphy). Episodically, they do their job, exchange philosophical discussions, and provide character background. The second half introduces a world-renowned psychic (Robert DeNiro) that no-one has ever been able to debunk. Weaver and Murphy are drawn into the surprisingly dangerous world of trying to debunk to undebunkable DeNiro.

The debunking and philosophical discussions were earnest and intriguing. I was particularly delighted with Weaver’s performance as a debunker so assured of her time-honed principles and techniques that she’s become an atheist guru. One never senses from her a lack of spirituality or depth, an emptiness or apologetic undertone so often accompanying atheist characters in popular media. Murphy’s wide-eyed discipleship is charming if a little confusing. But that’s all part of the ‘magic.’

The fleecing, here, is knowing that almost all of the debunking scenarios, principles, and even some of the philosophical discussions are taken wholesale from the life and opinions of James Randi. The faith healer with the radio transmitter is, in parts, taken word-for-word from Randi’s debunking of Peter Popoff. That’s just one instance; there are more. I know, because I spent my undergrad as a wide-eyed Randi disciple.

Even DeNiro’s character is an embellishment of Randi’s long-time nemesis, Uri Gellar, the infamous spoon-bender. He excited minds in the ‘70s with his one-trick charlatanry that bamboozled genuine scientists, faded from view, tried to make a return on Israeli TV, and ultimately confessed to being a mere magician. The conflict between Randi and Gellar is exaggerated in Red Lights, but obviously the source.

I have a problem with this liberal theft from Randi’s career because, first of all, I think Randi’s life is interesting enough to be dramatized on its own and not cannibalized by fiction. Secondly, I’m furious with the lack of imagination shown by a writer (director Rodrigo Cortes) who really should have been able to invent, rather than steal, the material for his screenplay. This may not literally be plagiarism, but it’s not acceptable from a creative mind.

The conflicts between Weaver and DeNiro, Murphy and DeNiro, and even between Weaver and Murphy over DeNiro, I found mostly plausible and engrossing. DeNiro’s character is a slippery manipulator whose main mode of communication is chewing the scenery—making DeNiro’s task a cakewalk. Often his bombastic speeches are exaggerated to a laughable extent. But the film’s best moment is his philosophical monologue to Murphy. Like any viewer would, I wondered whether DeNiro’s character was genuine or not. I was invested in the conflicts between these characters and interested in how they would be played out.

Cortes’s whole methodology, however, is to fleece the viewer with a sucker-punch conclusion that really deflates a lot of the dramatic power earned up to that point. This is the kind of conclusion that requires a flashback to all the key ‘hints’ throughout the film. The kind of conclusion that the viewer doesn’t think of, not because it’s hard to figure out, but because it’s too tiresome and stupid.

The tension between the authentic, good film that could have been and the plagiarized, sneaky confidence trick it turns out to be leaves me ambivalent toward it. The narrative flaws I could have forgiven seem less venial without the good faith of the creator. The moments of skilful drama, owed primarily to the often wasted acting talent of Weaver, DeNiro, Murphy, and Toby Jones, make Red Lights passable entertainment—just remember, you can’t win a fixed game.

V/H/S (2012) - 2.5

Video Home System. With the VHS, you had all the entertainment of the multiplex and the ability to make your own life into a home video. Compared to youtube, VHS was rubbish. But we of the ‘80s generations love to fetishize archaic technology. A bunch of ‘80s-gen filmmakers decided to make a horror movie out of their fetish. V/H/S.

V/H/S is structured as an anthology film. A group of douchebags who make their money exposing unsuspecting women's tits on camera get offered a big break. If they find a tape in an abandoned house, they’ll be paid big. That’s the MacGuffin. Instead of one tape, they find an ambiguously dead body and a bunch of tapes. So they watch them all, giving us a series of horror shorts that are supposedly genuine recordings using the amazing system of home video production, VHS. Nevermind that a few of the shorts are more likely to have been recorded on MiniDV or directly to a computer’s hard disk.

Judging by the talent involved—Adam Wingard, Ti West, e.g.—I imagine they saw the opportunity to make something avant-garde here. To push the boundaries of horror by playing with the medium, introducing new levels of creativity to the increasingly stagnant but promising found-footage genre. Playing with ideas like recording-over existing footage and having the old footage show through, as often happened with that wily magnetic tape. Or entities that are either uncapturable by magnetic tape or, perhaps, entirely an artifact of magnetic tape.

I agree: they had the opportunity to make something avant-garde, a bold step into new areas of horror filmmaking. If they think they achieved that, then I disagree. They had many good ideas and they chose to show those ideas before developing them.

This is particularly true of the frame, the third, and the fifth segments. The third, directed by Glen McQuaid, creates an interesting technique in which a murderer becomes a series of magnetic tape artefacts, as if phasing in an out of reality—but a video, rather than physical, reality. The technique looks great and compelling. I wonder, ‘What the hell is this thing? Is it in the camera? In the world? How does it work?’ The implementation of the technique is sadly wasted on a glib slasher story that offers no explanation. The story is merely a showcase of the technique.

The fifth segment, directed by the group Radio Silence, introduces some brilliant, cocteauian flourishes of ghostly hands reaching through solid matter. The digital effects are seamlessly integrated into the camcorder footage. The idea is good. I just wish there was more of it, either in depth of detail or variety of effects. I also would have preferred a less trite conclusion to an otherwise interesting story.

The frame tale, by Adam Wingard, is the most devoted to struggling with the medium of a VHS tape. In a film titled ‘V/H/S,’ that’s a good thing. But old footage showing through is a well-known technique called ‘palimpsest’ in literature. It’s been exploited at least as early as Hoffman’s The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr. The technique is nothing new and so demands a vivid and original application. With Wingard, the technique merely hangs there, a suggestion to future filmmakers, ‘Wouldn’t this be a good idea?’

The experimental techniques attempted by V/H/S are interesting and do suggest some new directions for horror filmmaking. The problem is that they’re only suggesting rather than pioneering. If a filmmaker is going to just suggest, he’s placing himself alongside experimental filmmakers who are doing the same thing, but much better. Peter Tscherkassky’s “Outer Space” and “Dream Work,” for instance. Martin Arnold’s “Deanimated: The Invisible Ghost,” in which the Bela Lugosi film The Invisible Ghost is gradually stripped of all actors. The Maya Deren films that inspired David Lynch. The Stan Brakhage films that inspired Fincher’s cinematic textures. What V/H/S needed is more time in development to give these bones some real flesh.

Besides the conceit of being genuine VHS recordings, each story is linked by another motif. Starting with the frame narrative, all the stories focus on the exploitative nature of relationships between men and women. This motif is given a variety of interpretations, but it remains constant. In the frame tale, for instance, the men grab a woman in a car park and expose her while yelling, “Show her tits!” This is taped over one of the men trying to secretly videotape sex with a girl and getting caught.

The first story, written and directed by David Bruckner, is the most rigorous on the motif. A strange pickup from a nightclub is pressed into a gangbang by a group of men with a secret spy cam. The evening ends in a frightening, gory mess. Bruckner’s simple, controlled, highly effective short, albeit mostly predictable, is the best V/H/S gets.

The second story, from Ti West, concerns a roadtrip with a shy mistress that ends in lesbianic murder. West provides the weakest segment in V/H/S, with a banal story that could have been at the back of an Ellery Queen pulp fifty years ago. The story provides a single, startling moment, like a good punchline, then continues spiralling senselessly toward its uninteresting conclusion. West is the master of the uninteresting, as in his recent films, House of the Devil and The Innkeepers. Perhaps someone should let him know Antonioni’s dead.

In the fourth story, by Joe Swanberg, a man videochats with his long-distance girlfriend and talks her through some unsettling events in her apartment. His frustrating bumbling proves to be part of a sinister conspiracy. Swanberg’s segment, albeit the most detached from the idea of VHS, is one of the best. The imagery is creepy and the conclusion disturbing. Also, the girl has beautiful breasts.

The third and fifth stories service the motif. The slasher plot of the third involves the usual horny guys and slutty girls. One of the girls, however, is merely using the others as bait. The fifth concerns a group of young party-goers discovering a woman bound and in duress. Their ethical decisions get them surprisingly little gratitude.

V/H/S is not a bad film. I think it was conceived with the best of intentions and rushed into production by some ambitious, young filmmakers. With more thought and development, this could have been an excellent film. But given how rarely horror anthologies receive widespread notice, it’s unfortunate that V/H/S was anticipated as a major event in horror filmmaking. It’s not. For all its major names, like West and Wingard, and for all its budget, it is nowhere near as smart, entertaining, or sophisticated as the underseen and underappreciated Slices of Life (2010), by unknown Anthony G. Sumner with his little budget.