Gallowwalkers (2012) - 2.5/4

Gallowwalkers is a new entry in the relatively rare subgenre of the horror-western. The film's real attraction to most will be the star, Wesley Snipes. Perhaps expecting a westernized version of Blade, some viewers will be disappointed. But for those with broader expectations, Gallowwalkers is something new, something strange, ambitious, a truly inventive spectacle.

The horror-western is very difficult to pull off for several reasons. One is that horror really needs to feel immediate and threatening, whereas westerns are set in a past that is increasingly distant. Ghosttown and House II, for instance, get around the problem by having undead gunslingers appear in the present. These films end up being more goofy than anything else. Andrew Goth, who wrote and directed Gallowwalkers has a much more creative idea: invent an entirely new fantasy world. It's a much more difficulty strategy to work, but he pulls it off.

The world of Gallowwalkers is a sort of alternate-reality American old west. There are references to being in America, but this is no America I know. This is an America populated by creepy, long-haired blond men who can't grow beards and prostitutes in push-up bodices. We never really see where they live, but it's somewhere in the desert. Also in the desert are some mountains where the Sisters of San Diablo keep the gates of hell shut. Mercifully, Goth never takes the time to explain any of this. He shows enough for you to know this is an alternate universe and its inhabitants are so familiar with it, they don't waste their time explaining it. Why would they?

Unfortunately for Wesley Snipes, the Eastwood-esque nameless gunslinger whose story this is, the Sisters of San Diablo are falling down on the job. A cadre of rapists he already killed has come back from the dead and these undead jerks are wreaking havoc on all the albino ladyboys, stealing their skins and such. Snipes decides they have to go back to hell where they belong. Therein lies the minimalist plot.

Gallowwalkers relies less on plot and more on a mystical atmosphere comprised of Leone-esque longshots, close-ups, and sparse, bleached-wood sets. Closer to El Topo than to Blade, the film is bound to alienate and frustrate some viewers. I found the film beautiful in its Zen elegance, and fun in its outburts of violence and undisguised borrowings from Once Upon a Time in the West.

Certainly there are some flaws to be found. The mythos of the titular 'gallowwalkers,' once explained, loses a great deal of its urgency and is clearly much smaller a problem than originally presented. There are also several continuity issues. While Goth tends to make liberal use of elipsis, there are times when a character has plainly just transcended time and space. For instance, Patrick Bergen's character is on the gallows at one moment, then in a shoot-out in the next. The film's geography, because so abstract, is always difficult to pinpoint. These continuity errors make it patently disorienting.

Nevertheless, Gallowwalkers has something that has become an increasingly rare commodity: originality. This is something different. It isn't great, but it's new. A horror-fantasy-western that takes itself seriously. Certainly more difficult to enjoy than the latest remake of an '80s slasher, but also worth the effort. Check it out.

Maniac (2012) - 3.5/4

Maniac is a remake of the 1980 William Lustig classic slasher of the same title. Lustig didn't just approve, he also produced this remake, helmed by P2 director Frank Khalfoun. What makes Maniac really stand out, however, is the casting of Elijah Wood as the titular maniac, replacing the overweight and middle-aged Joe Spinell of the original. While the plot remains very similar, the new casting recasts (pardon the pun) the entire meaning of the film with impressive results.

Wood plays 'Frank,' a mannequin collector/restorer in New York. He was raised by his single mother, who whored around for cash and/or pleasure, often bringing men home where little Frank saw way too much. Frank now has a very ambivalent relationship to sexuality. Specifically, he likes to scalp women and place their hair on mannequins instead of screw them. One day the photographer Anna takes an interest in his mannequins and seems to offer womanhood some redemption at the same time.

A film like Maniac will never come anywhere near the Oscars or any other glitzy award ceremony. Yet, Elijah Wood's performance is as deserving of those awards as any other modern performance. Even as hampered as Wood is by the mostly-POV photography, where we share Frank's eyes, he still allows us to share Frank's anxieties, joys, and anguish through his voice and the few mirror shots Khalfoun provides. Wood proves, again, that he is the most versatile actor around, and easily one of the most talented we have.

The decision to force the film's viewpoint to be almost entirely Frank's was certainly a risky one. The intention, of course, is to make the audience sympathize and even empathize with a sadistic serial killer. Initially, however, the effect is alienating and uncomfortable. As the film's tensions increase and it hurtles toward an emotional climax, the discomfort is long forgotten. Wood's performance and Khalfoun's deft direction make it work. I'm still not sure it was necessary; but it works. By Maniac's end, I was entirely on Frank's side. I hoped not for the survival of a 'Final Girl,' but for her brutal slaughter. That became the happy ending: the serial killer protecting his heart from the awful people in the world. What kind of relationship between art and morality does this illustrate? I don't know. But Michael Haneke wishes he'd made Funny Games this well.

That is not to suggest the the film's psychology is insightful. Coming from the pen of Alexandre Aja, rewriting for Joe Spinell, there is little psychological realism present. Horror film psychology has always been a little glib, from the weird videos in Peeping Tom and the instant diagnosis at the end of Psycho on. Maniac pushes this to a point at which it has gone beyond even touching reality. The psychology of Maniac is fantasy psychology, where blood-spattered mannequins wearing fly-covered scalps can be models of purity for a psychosexually tortured psyche. I empathized with Frank and even rooted for him because, despite the near camp moments of fantasy psychology or maybe even because of them, there is a strongly pronounced emotional reality to the disturbed Frank, a wounded core that does not seem beyond redemption.

The bottom line is, Maniac makes very few missteps of any kind. It is a traditional slasher film made in 2012 that exceeds nearly any of the modern, ultra-violent slasher films made in the last decade-and-a-half. It also happens to be one of the finest horror film remakes I've ever seen. Khalfoun went way beyond what he'd done with the average P2, and Aja as screenwriter reiterates his ability to remake his favorite horror films. Bravo to all the talent involved.

Bad Kids Go to Hell (2012) - 2.5/4

Probably every reviewer that took on Bad Kids Go to Hell has described it as "The horror version of The Breakfast Club." Yes, there is even a Judd Nelson cameo. I suppose to some extent that's true. To a greater extent, I think Bad Kids Go to Hell is really one big joke--and not a bad one, actually.

The plot of Bad Kids Go to Hell is that a bunch of private school rich kids--and one not-quite-as-rich kid--with behavioral issues and seething resentment for each other get stuck in an 8-hour detention in the school's new library. By coincidence, all the students present had something to do with the library's construction on land once owned by a stubborn old Injun. When the students are a-dyin', either they're killing each other or it's a good ol' fashioned Injun ghost curse.

I'm not sure if it comes through in that plot description, but the whole scenario is over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek. You have the Poltergeist Indian curse deal, The Breakfast Club, the privileged teens, and the preposterous reason for locking them in one spot. I don't think director Matthew Spradlin had the least intention of treating this seriously. This is not a sneering attack on privileged children, an ironic treatment of horror themes, or a realistic take on The Breakfast Club. It's a joke.

The spitfire venomous dialogue in which every character expresses Tennessee Williams-level hatred for one another only makes the situation even sillier. These people are so hateful and acerbic. You certainly want them to die. But that's not the point either. The point is that it's all intentionally overblown. You can't take it seriously.

The best part of Bad Kids Go to Hell by far, however, is the series of flashbacks to what these kids are like in everyday highschool. With peppy techno music and slow motion, their wacky antics are presented with such deadpan realism and conviction. I know Spradlin doesn't take it seriously, but his trick is to make you feel he does. Interspersed amongst the venom, these absurd and hilarious flashbacks are moments of bizarre brilliance amidst the bizarre mediocrity.

The tone of Bad Kids is entirely inconsistent. The editing is often clumsy, with the flashbacks appearing without introduction. The acting is all over the place. The resolution as illogical and melodramatic as the rest of the movie. That really all adds to its charm. Bad Kids is far from a great movie, but it's good comedy. It cracks me up. I'm looking forward to Spradlin's next opus.

Berberian Sound Studio (2012) - 2/4

The plot description I had read of Berberian Sound Studio that intrigued me was, "A sound engineer's work for an Italian horror studio becomes a terrifying case of life imitating art." This is the main plot description from IMDb. The most glaring gem in the sentence is 'Italian horror studio,' suggesting the Gothic horrors of Mario Bava, the lurid Gialli of Sergio Martino, the supernatural weirdness of Dario Argento, the gore of Lucio Fulci, and the gifted nonsense penned by Dardano Sacchetti. The second, and to me more tempting gem is 'sound engineer,' calling to mind two of the greatest thrillers ever made, The Conversation and Blow Out. I expected a lot.

Maybe that's not fair to Peter Strickland. BSS is the filmmaker's second feature film, made independently and on a limited budget. Of course, these aren't actual standards to which I am holding the film. I expected a skillful homage to Italian horror, maybe a bit of a mind-bender, with sound playing an important role. Something to that effect.

Despite the claims to "life imitating art," however, Berberian Sound Studio really has little to do with Italian horror. Toby Jones plays Gilderoy, a British sound engineer hired to work on an Italian horror film that seems to fit somewhere between The Witchfinder General (a British film) and Mark of the Devil (a German film). He thought it would be an 'equestrian' film. What ensues is the small, awkward dramatic tensions between the bully Italian producer and the meek Brit. Whiffs of intrigue come from the lead voice actress's suggestions of something more malign. Little actually happens, however, until she quits and Gilderoy is literally absorbed by the film.

The film's action, due to budget, style, or both, takes place almost entirely in a single sound-studio room, a bedroom, and an office, with a few black background abstractions. The tensions between Gilderoy and the Italians, his moments with the actress, I found all very intriguing, even seductive. This is really a credit to Strickland's command of style and tone. However, his highly portentous approach to style can be tedious, as it continues to promise explosions that never happen.

The closest to a climax BSS offers comes about in the final twenty minutes and is much closer to David Lynch's Inland Empire than anything Italian. I don't think surrealism or reality-twisting is the unique province of David Lynch. However, when one treads too closely to Lynch's territory, comparisons will follow. What Strickland does in BSS was, frankly, done better and more interestingly in Inland Empire. From Berberian Sound Studio, I was expecting something much different and much less evasive.

Strickland's explanation is that "the film is out of view, and you only see the mechanics behind it." In a sense, this is true. The fictional horror film Il Vortice Equestre is out of view. However, the conflicts in Strickland's film do take place in view: the are the tensions between the British sound engineer and the Italians; between the oversensitive Gilderoy and the grisly horror film he's making. If this experience is supposed to drive him into some psychological or even metaphysical breakdown, it's preposterous. Many British actors and crew worked on Italian horror films. They lived to tell the tale. What Gilderoy goes through is a mildly unpleasant experience. It'll make a good story to tell friends at the pub. We might listen to the story and say, "Wow, hmph, those Italians!" We'd never say, "They should make a movie about that." An interesting experiment, but ultimately a disingenuous one.

The ABCs of Death (2012) - 2.5/4

The ABCs of Death has perhaps drawn more attention due to its sheer breadth of directorial talent than due to the formalist conceit. With 26 geek-gen directors involved, it was hard not to run into the title while browsing IMDb. The conceit itself is a fairly familiar 'brainstorming' technique: choose a letter of the alphabet, a word that starts with that letter, then base a work of fiction off that word. Each of the 26 directors was given this freedom, with the condition only that the short they produce contain a death. Needless to say, there's little consistency and one has to be ready to be surprised, pleasantly or not.

The overall experience of ABCs of Death is the major triumph of the film. Critiquing the individual shorts, an activity I will briefly partake in below, is itself a part of the ABCs of Death experience and one of its most enjoyable aspects. ABCs brings the short film festival into your home and allows you to be the judge and jury--not so much the executioner, alas. You see 26 shorts, some of them brilliantly creative, some of them a waste of time, some of them just confusing, and you get to hurl the full rotten-fruit-basket that is your tastes at them. The more people you watch it with, the more fun this probably is.

In my case, I watched with my wife and we both agreed Malling's "H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion," a Nazisploitation liveaction Furry sketch, was the most enjoyable and creative of the segments. That gets the Palme d'Or from our Living Room Cannes. We absolutely loathed "G is for Gravity" a lazy POV segment of a guy falling and drowning. From there, our tastes diverged. I loved "Y is for Youngbuck," an oversaturated dreamscape of blaring '80s keyboards and abused trust, but she thought it was foolish. She liked Xavier Gens' "X is for XXL," which I thought trite. I thought "W is for WTF" was extremely enjoyable and certainly lived up to its chosen 'word,' but for her cinematic headfuck she preferred "R is Removed," which I found a little too pompous.

The sheer variety of styles and content ensures you will find a few shorts you enjoy, a few you don't mind, and a few you hate. There are some avant-garde shorts, like the French-produced smugness of "O is for Orgasm," some animation like Morganthaler's tedious "K is for Klutz," comedy like Yamaguchi's amusing "J is for Jidai-geki," highly ambitious epics like "V is for Vagitus," and throw-away vignettes like Angela Bettis's "E is for Exterminate."

If there is anything consistent about ABCs of Death other than death, it is a peculiar obsession with toilets and what goes on in them. Whether its Ti West's rubbish short about a miscarriage in a toilet, Hardcastle's toilet monster, or Iguchi's tale of a lady absorbed into fart-heaven, most of these directors equated creative freedom with dick- and fart-jokes. The few that did not have earned my respect.

A week after seeing the film, I still find myself treasuring the experience. There is no other film like ABCs. Not yet, anyway. There are plenty of anthology films, but none that gives so much content. There'll be some significant rewatch value in revisiting some favorites and some forgottens. Ultimately, however, we can all make our own ABCs of Death by compiling a disk of shorts and may have just as much fun with it, if not more.

Prometheus (2012) - 3.5/4

Ridley Scott, like James Cameron, is a director I usually approach with low expectations. I am a shameless consumer of narrative; I enjoy a good story. Visuals must be of a highly spectacular nature to make me forget a terrible narrative. Scott and Cameron, however, care very little about narrative. Gladiator is all visual spectacle with a potboiler narrative matched by your average wrestling event. Yet, Scott spent $1,000,000 just to visually recreate the dead Oliver Reed for a 30-second scene. This is not quite a representation of Scott's style, however. Cameron is the meticulous obsessive. Scott is a visionary. He will sacrifice any element of his film to create enormous, visual impressions. Scott is about the cyclopean, the limits of imagination. He's not about the details, but the overwhelming, the truly awe-some.

So when Scott returned to his sci-fi roots in a supposed prequel to Alien (1979), I was for once very interested. He is peculiarly suited to sci-fi and Alien still impresses today. With Prometheus, Mr. Scott does not disappoint. The level of imagination and the visionary power displayed in this film are extremely rare, superseding even the previous Alien films in the sheer enormity and consistency of the vision. You could mute Prometheus and just look at it.

The story of Prometheus, to be fair to Scott, is actually decent. A nebulous corporation sends a team of thugs and scientists to investigate a planet fingered out in Irish archaeological digs. The world is desolate and the mysterious alien compound is filled with malevolent life. Our heroine is plucky and likeable, albeit no Ripley. The story's characters and trajectory seem almost intentionally cobbled together from sci-fi predecessors like Galaxy of Terror (1981) and Inseminoid (1981), and TV series Earth: Final Conflict (1997-2002). Stealing from the best isn't a bad strategy and these are very good films. Scott's laziness toward narrative is still showing, but this time he gets a pass.

The connection to the previous films in the Alien series is also intriguing. Any author or filmmaker takes a risk explaining their old work with a prequel. Alien was marked by the mysteriousness of its alien creature. Where it comes from, how such a creature thrives, is never really explained. Prometheus does explain its source, somewhat tenuously, and to its credit leaves more questions than answers. Even more to its credit, I find the new questions even more interesting than the old questions. Motif connections to previous Alien films also pleased me. It just isn't a real alien film without talking dismembered robot.

That said, the plot of Prometheus could have been abysmal and it wouldn't have mattered that much. Prometheus's visuals are awe-inspiring, even to the point of being mystical: One's self dissolves before them and is absorbed in their grandeur. Scott does not just create an amazing fictional planet or a cool-looking spaceship in this film. He does that, but he also creates layers of dream, technological projection, and past that superimpose over reality. He creates intense planetary storms, immense movements of structures the weight of which can be felt, new and strange alien creatures. He creates, using almost exclusively these visuals, that Lovecraftian emotion of human insignificance. That is a profound achievement. Ridley Scott at his best and sci-fi at its best.

Grabbers (2012) - 3/4

Making an independent, quirky horror-comedy that 'hits the right spot' is hard to do. More and more filmmakers try to do it, leaving more and more failures to wash onto our shores. Grabbers is another independent, quirky horror-comedy, this time from Ireland, and it's mostly a success.

The plot starts typically enough. A meteor, an island, a small town, and a hideous, tentacle monster from another planet, bake at 350 until golden brown. The fun quirk is that the locals--a charmingly grumpy alcoholic policeman, an uptight rookie from off-island, the village drunk, and a marine biologist--discover that the blood-sucking tentacle-beasts just can't hold their liquor. In fact, it kills them. So the village has to remain drunk while they take on the molusc menace.

The idea is great on its own. But it works especially well with its cast of characters. Each one, however insignificant to the overall plot, seems to have a fully fleshed-out personality. You almost imagine you could visit to island and see these people living there, unaware their encounter with space monsters was ever filmed. In fact, it's the characterizations of the supporting locals that are the most endearing.

As with many movies of this sort, the need to 'have a heart' and give us a coy romance has both advantages and disadvantages. Because--and only because--the characters are likeable, the romance is mildly charming and will put a smile on your mother's face. As a subplot in an already-packed, relatively short film, it is necessarily rushed, with little dramatic satisfaction as a consequence. I also think the need to include a romantic subplot when there isn't really time to develop it may come across as syrupy and ingratiating, which it is.

Also rushed is the pressure to reach a conclusion. The creatures are destroyed too easily as soon as the protagonists really have to get killing and have their big kiss. There is never any serious suspense, nor any serious monster mayhem--a shame given how well-designed the monsters are.

However, with such likeable characters, what screenwriter would want to do serious killing? The real fun with Grabbers is hanging out with these locals as they drunkenly struggle with tentacle monsters and their own personal issues. They're hilarious folk inhabiting a film with plenty of well-written jokes. No-one could go wrong visiting them once or twice and having a pint.

The Bay (2012) - 2.5/4

Directed by Barry Levinson of Rain Man fame, propagandizing an ecological message, and presented as a found-footage horror, The Bay is a very strange film however you look at it. The experience it provides is perhaps equally as strange and mismatched as you`d would expect. That`s not necessarily a bad thing.

The plot concerns an unexplained illness that suddenly and ubiquitously breaks out on July 4th in a small, coastal town. Local doctors struggle with the CDC to figure out what`s going on. Individuals enjoying a boating trip come home to find the town a blood mess. And an amateur public access reporter covering the July 4th festivities becomes, with the aid of her diligent cameraman, the world`s eyes and ears for the horrific event. Some time after the incident and the ensuing cover-up, she`s cobbled together her own material and some locals` amateur footage to make the film we see.

What The Bay really had going for it is that it`s probably the purest `mockumentary` horror made thus far. Nearly all found-footage horror films come across as either a few dolts with a camcorder or an overprocessed narrative movie masquerading as found footage. The Bay is, in a sense, an actual documentary of a fictitious event in a fictitious town. The movie plays and evolves like a documentary, following the development of the event, trying to explain it, and in doing so building toward a point.

Because The Bay does play out as a documentary, a lot of the conventional narrative benefits are lost. The closest The Bay gives to a protagonist is the reporter, but she`s no more a protagonist than Michael Moore is in his documentaries. We never feel for her as a character, except perhaps amusement over her ridiculously tight pants. There is, then, a degree of emotional detachment from what`s happening and our emotions can only engage with responding to the events themselves.

Fortunately, The Bay provides quite a few good events to engage with. There are some excellently revolting gore effects. There are some moments that are genuinely intense. Some that are shocking. There are even a number of effective scares. Taking tally, that`s more than a lot of recent narrative horror films offer.

Where The Bay does suffer somewhat is in finally explaining the mysterious disease. The explanation comes as a mild let-down because it`s slightly silly and a bit short on imagination. But, the disease must be explained to make the ecological point and the explanation given serves that well. Chicken feces, water treatment, the CDC--who knows what the point really is, but these are some vague targets. The explanation also ties the film in with 1950s nature-amok movies and could really be seen as parodical of ecological scaremongering.

Ultimately, the experience of watching The Bay is uneven, but strangely satisfying in many ways. I have no idea what Levinson was really going for with this movie, whether it`s an eco-horror message-movie or big, mockumentary joke, I just know that once I got into The Bay, after the first thirty minutes or so of wondering what I was watching, I enjoyed it.

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.

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.

Rosewood Lane (2012) - 2.5/4

    Rosewood Lane is the latest film from Victor Salva. A vaguely supernatural thriller, it concerns the incessant harassment of a neighborhood by a teenaged paperboy. In particular, the paperboy becomes obsessed with Sonny Blake (Rose McGowan), a radio psychologist who has just moved into the house of her deceased father--who himself may have been murdered by the paperboy.

    Victor Salva is always a complex filmmaker to approach, and not entirely for good reasons. Due to his unfortunate past, in which he sexually abused the boy star of his first film, Clownhouse, there is a tendency to look for biography in his work that may not be there--or, worse, to dismiss or express disgust with his work because of that past. Salva, however, is an undeniably skilled craftsman in the tradition of Spielberg, Coppola, and Hitchcock. Anyone ignorant of his past can enjoy his horrors and thrillers for the entertainment value alone. Nevertheless, Salva does have a tendency to personalize his films, a tendency often obscured by either unpleasant misreadings or pure enjoyment of the films. To do justice to Rosewood Lane, I will consider both the film's craftsmanship and Salva's personal expression.

    Salva begins delivering the tension very early in the film. An elderly neighbor ominously warns Sonny against having anything to do with the paperboy. Salva compounds this advice with some eerie shots of the paperboy sitting stationary, on his bicycle, in the middle of the road, blocking the path of a moving truck. He's distant enough to be aloof from interaction, but the shots of him suggest he's watching and listening.

    Soon, the paperboy is knocking at Sonny's door, and she's starting to notice objects in her house subtly rearranged. This begins an alternately suspenseful and infuriating cat-and-mouse game. The paperboy's seemingly supernatural speed and slipperiness, and his mystifying obsession with Sonny, give Salva the material to create considerable tension. The boy's smugness and abilities, however, can be infuriating. Had Salva not written Sonny as such a strong and intelligent character, this infuriating quality would have been tedious. As it is, however, our frustration is one we share with Sonny.

    What ensues is really a power game to see who is going to dominate who. Sonny begins trying to reverse the cat-and-mouse roles by tracking down or chasing the paperboy. He manages to give her the slip each time with his apparently supernatural swiftness, even mocking her in some eerie setpieces. But she forces his hand to a final confrontation and a surprising conclusion.

    Salva enriches the material somewhat by Sonny a past haunted by childhood abuse. The features of the house Sonny used to avoid abuse--basement, heating vents--become the features the paperboy uses to hurt her. There is a somewhat psychoanalystic sense of the paperboy being Sonny's victimized past returning to victimize her, a sense probably not intended except to create more emotional tension, at which it succeeds. Mostly, however, it strengthens our conviction that Sonny is tough and unwilling to let herself be victimized.

    The character of the paperboy is, as noted, very dislikable. And his ability to outsmart or at least outrun everyone can create tedium. Sonny's aggressive nature mitigates this somewhat, because what we're really wanting is someone like her to 'teach him a lesson.' However, I think this is an instant where Salva's personal interests have triumphed somewhat over his craftsmanship.

    What we observe in Rosewood Lane is a handsome, underage boy trying to worm his way into an adult's home and life, a boy who deliberately takes pleasure in showing what power he can exercise over adults. When he sits in front of the moving truck, for instance, or when he moves objects in Sonny's home; just being in her home or even the mere act of listening to her conversations, are ways he exercises power. (Listening is a relatively common technique children use on adults, especially foster children who need to feel in control of their situation more than most children.)

    Knowing Salva's past as a convicted child molestor, it is difficult not to make something of this. But, in order not to be trite or glib, we have to be careful not to read in our own prejudices. The superficial reading would be that the film's dynamics represent a sort of allegory for Salva's own obsession. He struggles to lead a normal, respectable, and, due to his work, mildly public life, all the while he is victimized by this boy. The boy represents his own obsession with boys, and the boy's incredible sneaking powers shows how hard it is for Salva, how anywhere he turns the obsession may have slipped in unnoticed, much as how Jeepers Creepers II features a group of attractive, teenaged boys without shirts.

    While that would be a fairly accurate picture of how such sexual addictions work, and while that may even partially describe what Salva is expressing, I don't think it exhausts it. I think Salva's mind is more complex and his vision more ambiguous.

    The primary characteristic of the paperboy is his defiance, his need to express his own indomitability and his power over others. I don't think it's just the nature of addiction being allegorized in the narrative's action. I think, for the addict, the object of addiction is dominating and defiant. It exerts a power over the addict that he or she does not want it to do. This is true especially in one's fantasy life. And to pursue one's fantasies in the real world, as Sonny's pursuit of the paperboy, is doomed to failure.

    I don't want to suggest Salva is cast into turmoil every time he sees a boy, but I do think the narrative presents a case of victimization by a boy that is akin to what someone like Salva may sometimes feel. That Salva's film releases have routinely been protested by his victim, Nathan Forrest Winters, adds another element to the idea of boy as dominant and defiant.

     Reading more elements of the film into this sort of analysis would be possible. But I don't see the value in taking it any farther. Salva's films always seem torn between entertaining and expressing, and he always prefers to err on the side of entertainment. As he's quite good at creating suspenseful setpieces and his films have never yet failed to entertain me, I don't see a problem with that. Rosewood Lane is a suspenseful, fun film thanks to Salva's skill for thrills and McGowan's tough-but-vulnerable performance.

Two-Headed Shark Attack (2012) - 2/4

“Two heads means twice as many teeth!” is the pithy quip of dialogue that sums up the brilliant idea behind Two-Headed Shark Attack, a new sharksploitation motion picture from The Asylum. The Asylum, a production company infamous for blockbuster rip-offs and intentionally hackneyed plots, is, along with the SyFy network, the champion of increasingly preposterous sea monster movies. Sharktopus may be SyFy’s most absurd film so far; Two-Headed Shark Attack is The Asylum’s, a film so abstracted into self-parodical irony, it’s a metaphor for itself alone.

A highly nebulous pretext about a field-trip is intended to explain why a menagerie of d-cup bikini bimbos and ‘roid-guzzling muscle-heads are on a yacht together. Unfortunately the doubtless highly-educational cruise is interrupted by the central plot, namely the two-headed shark’s attack upon the keel, leaving the motley crew stranded on a sinking atoll.

Duality is the leitmotif governing the Two-Headed Shark Attack narrative. The shark has two heads, so there are two survivors, two humongous hooters on each girl, two boats for douchebags to get eaten in. Starring Charlie O’Connell, the film’s duality cries out for the presence of Jerry O’Connell. Few films have done so since Season 5 of Sliders, but this is one. Instead, Charlie is joined by Carmen Electra, whose purpose in the film is to sunbathe the hell out of the deck. Even the shark’s medium of existence is dual, sometimes CGI and sometimes a huge, rubber head whose teeth bend when the flailing actors touch them.

Before nearly everyone is eaten, we are treated to every form of stupid decision, lesbian kissing, a few unleashed melons, terrible acting, and a total waste of whatever talent Charlie O’Connell can lay claim to as his lightly-grazed leg so debilitates him that he is condemned to foreground reaction shots like shouting, “They’re in danger!” whenever a shark eats someone.

The problem with Two-Headed Shark Attack is that, while two-headed sharks are possible, as are Carmel Electra’s leatherette buttocks, the film’s abstractions take us too far beyond the realms of fun, into the realms of pure this-oughta-be-fun ideas. Nevertheless, the farthest realms of shark possibility have yet to be explored and I hope The Asylum is ready to launch that expedition. J.G. Ballard’s The Shark Exhibition, about a cult of shark-attack survivors exploring the sexual possibilities of shark wounds, rows of disordered teeth in flesh, and the notion of being devoured, needs to be adapted. Salman Rushdie’s Islamasharks, in which Muslims train sharks to destroy the Miss America pageant, is a thoroughly cinematic novel waiting to be filmed. And, last but not least, Jose Saramango’s The Sharking, in which all the world’s bankers suddenly become sharks is the non-too-subtle social commentary The Asylum is ideal to carry out. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

The Sleeper (2012) - 1.5/4

I had high praise for filmmaker Justin Russell's previous film, Death Stop Holocaust. Like Death Stop Holocaust, The Sleeper is a throwback, this time to '80s slasher movies instead of '70s grindhouse horror. But what made Death Stop Holocaust so good, what made me praise it, was certainly not the 'grindhouse' style it affected, nor any of the throwback qualities in an of themselves; it was the nightmarishness and the willingness to experiment in an almost Lynchian way with creating terror, quite contrary to anything in the grindhouse style. With The Sleeper, however, Russell does not seem aware of what made his previous film good, as he excises the best parts of Death Stop Holocaust and this time runs with pure throwback.

The Sleeper concerns a maniac who decides to terrorize a sorority with creepy phone calls and, eventually, a hammer jabbed in the eyes. As sisters begin disappearing, the house mother calls the police. Our attentions are focused on a new pledge, who is naturally set to be our final girl. Of course, some subplots involve the horny frat boys who want to bed some of the sorority sisters. If you know your '80s slashers, it's just a waiting game until most of the cast is killed and the final girl escapes and kills her pursuer.

The problem with The Sleeper isn't so much being a full-on homage. I like '80s slashers very much. However, being a lightweight connoisseur of the subgenre, I'm also very well aware that many slashers are bad, not in the good way, but in the very dull way. They're not all indie splatter hits like Maniac! and The Prowler, subtle classics like Halloween and Black Christmas, or even second-tier honourables like American Gothic, Just Before Dawn, Hell Night, or He Knows You're Alone, or even the Halloween sequels. You have a lot of rubbish like Night School and Prey, or, at the very worst, Blood Lake. In fact, even some of the memorable slashers aren't that good. Black Christmas and The Prowler are accorded much more respect than their artistic or entertainment values warrant.

My point is that Russell doesn't make The Sleeper an homage to the really good slashers, but to the bad ones. From the credit graphics onward, it's clear this is one of those made-on-the-cheap Canadian co-production sort of slashers no-one really remembers because they were too banal to be worth the neurons. I could best describe it as He Knows You're Alone meets Black Christmas. The phone calls and sorority house are Black Christmas, albeit not as good, and the killer, whose identity is irrelevant, reminds me of the He Knows You're Alone killer.

The very unfortunate reality is Russell is so incredibly successful at making his homage that it plays exactly like one of those bad '80s slashers. There are already far too many bad '80s slashers as it is, we didn't need one shot on DV. It's an interesting experiment, but one whose success entails its failure. Had Russell veered from his project course, as he did in Death Stop Holocaust, he could have had a very interesting picture. But The Sleeper is just too faithfully a throwback, to a frankly misguided cinematic space, that it's not very interesting at all.