Paranormal Activity 5: The Marked Ones (2013) - 3/4

I never enjoy the Paranormal Activity movies that much. Yet I find myself watching every time a new one comes out. I don’t know why I haven’t given up on the series yet. Probably for the few moments in each movie that’s actually quite good. At any rate, I’m glad I kept watching. Paranormal Activity 5 is the best of the series, mitigating some, though not all, of the series’ flaws. It’s actually a pretty good horror movie.

There are some issues with the Paranormal Activity films that vex me every time. The main issue is that, for the most part, nothing happens. I understand the intention. The films repeat banal, mundane non-events so often—when we know there’s more going on—that we’re supposed to be writhing with suspense during every pointless shot of the backyard pool. I was writhing, alright. And moaning, “Another shot of the pool!” And then, when you least expect it, you get an eruption of the supernatural. It’s a legitimate technique that’s just belabored to an extreme. Most of the movie isn’t movie at all.

The other issue that irritates me is that the protagonists really don’t ‘protag.’ This is worse than the boring non-events. The characters of the Paranormal Activity movies spend most of the time ensuring that something sinister is indeed afoot. Once they receive confirmation, they wait around until they die, tossed like ragdolls by forces they’re powerless against. Whether it’s the demonic entities or the coven that serves them, evil always triumphs over good. Because good doesn’t do jack shit.

I suppose it’s just the Paranormal Activity philosophy that passivity generates more fright for the viewer. The moment the hero or heroine starts fighting back, it’s more adrenaline than fear, more action than terror. I don’t think that’s true—High Tension and Dog Soldiers, amongst others, seem to prove otherwise—but Oren Peli seems to believe it.

Each film in the series does tend to betray Peli more and more, developing plots and vague attempts at action. Paranormal Activity 5 finally escapes the stifling atmosphere before going back into freefall. In this one, some Hispanic teens at an apartment complex get a video camera and decide to record the creepy, old lady downstairs. They find her prancing around a naked girl with big tits. Not long after this, the old lady is murdered and they think their class valedictorian was responsible. Before they can crack the case, one of the teenagers is suddenly gifted with supernatural powers and supernatural roid rage.

The style is a lot more dynamic than the previous Paranormal Activity movies. These kids move around instead of just setting up the camera for still shots of something that may or may not happen around the pool/closet/Playstation. With that comes the most obvious response of, “Why the hell don’t they put down the camera?” It may not make sense, but at least it makes a movie. They try to fight against their supernatural foes. And while it ultimately ends as every Paranormal Activity movie ends, at least one semi-automatic weapon has been fired before it gets there. Moreover, there’s a girl with big tits.

I also enjoyed the fact that the kids are Hispanic apartment dwellers instead of White yuppies with more money and picket fences than common sense. If I had to see another White guy thrown around a tastefully furnished middle class room by an invisible presence, I might’ve been done with the series. I don't think there's any real 'subtext' about apartment life or Hispanic American culture; it just revives the series with more energy and a fresh perspective.

What’s also kinda neat is how every Paranormal Activity movie builds on this mythos they have going on. It’s building at a snail’s pace, but a little more is invented with each movie. This one somehow ties into the previous movies. Rather than sticking in the same ‘family drama,’ the connection is a lot more creative. I actually enjoyed this one as a movie in its own right and as a Paranormal Activity movie.

13 Eerie (2013) - 2/4

When will pompous professors learn to stop dragging their students out to monster-ridden islands in the middle of nowhere? 13 Eerie is another one of those. He’s a professor of criminology, in this case, and he’s staged a series of real corpses around an island with fabricated forensic evidence.  Just happens this island was a prison where human experiments were conducted. That wouldn’t normally be a problem. Might even add atmosphere. Except the experimenters decided to leave their horrible black goo in a poorly-sealed Sunny D jug on the edge of the only useable table within a mile. So when the stuff is swiftly spilled by the bumbling bus driver, only one thing can happen: mutant, undead prisoner attack! 

I toured to this scenic locale because it stars the peculiar and talented Katharine Isabelle. Katharine is a real trouper. She’ll take any script thrown at her. Something brilliant like American Mary (2012) or Ginger Snaps (2000). And she absolutely masters both of those movies: her performance is the real set piece of American Mary and it’s riveting. Or she’ll take secondary roles in movies like Ogre (2008) and Hard Ride to Hell (2010), where the script may have been written by a monkey high on Cap’N Crunch. Even in those movies, her unusual cadences that range from shrill to detached aloofness in the same sentence make her stand out as more interesting than most of what’s happening around her, whether it be a CGI rock troll or Miguel Ferrer as a demonic biker. She seems to devote time and thought into every absurd line she’s fed in these movies, to put in a serious performance in every ridiculous scene. At the same time, she always seems at an ironic distance from the subject, as if she’s watching the movie with us and making sardonic comments. I don’t get her. But I like her. That’s the enigmatic art of Katharine Isabelle. Now if only we can convince her to do nudity.

In 13 Eerie, Isabelle is probably at the most subdued I’ve ever seen her. Probably because she’s saddled with the stalwart role of the ‘final girl.’ She’s the top student in professor A-Hole’s class and doesn’t take kindly to being interrupted by mutant prisoners. Even when her lab partner is having a panic attack that there are zombies on the loose, she just wants to gather forensic evidence and get her A+. Not gonna happen.

The zombies look like alligatormen in orange jump suits. Other than that, they’re just zombies. They crash through walls, grab humans, and begin eating. 13 Eerie is gung-ho about the gore, with some Fulci-throwback slow-eating scenes. I personally find that kind of zombie carnage irritating. Seeing and hearing people eat is unpleasant on the best of occasions. Good thing they’re getting shot in the head by Isabelle and Brenden Fehr.

 
There are very few surprises in this movie. The locale is a very monotonous series of cabins and greenery. The character interactions are either panic, forensic piddling, or arguing with the a-hole professor. The monsters do exactly what you’d expect. They fuck with the best and die like the rest. Survivors go home, mom bakes them a pie—probably. The whole forensics thing has no relevance other than getting them to the island. The best part of the movie is Katharine Isabelle, and even she’s hampered.

Carrion Creativity: The Sources of Evil Dead

Evil Dead (2013) was not a candidate for review on Lair of the Boyg. With 404 external reviews already on Internet Movie Database, mine would be a drop in a lake. Had I written a review, I would have expressed an equivocal appreciation. While I was disappointed with the film as a remake or quasi-sequel to Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981), the film's gushy, violent energy made it a fairly entertaining horror film. In other words, without the Evil Dead label, I would have branded it a decent but unspectacular horror experience.

Instead of writing that review, however, I've decided to reflect on something more difficult to concretize. I started thinking about Sam Raimi's masterpiece, Evil Dead II (1987) and its relationship to its milieu. One hurdle is separating the myth from the reality. ED II is the first horror film I remember watching and it scared the snot out of me. I became certain Henrietta had moved out of her cool, dank fruit cellar into my cramped and toy-bestrewn closet. This film had a huge impact on nearly every horror fan and many cinema buffs, and is now referenced in their films more readily than any of the Hollywood classics. The layer of myth in all this being that Evil Dead II was offering something brand new, a barrage of original ideas this upstart independent filmmaker in the middle of Nowhere, USA invented himself.

The thing about Evil Dead II is, if you really study it and other good horror films made around the same time, you start to see that Sam Raimi's genius is really more synthetic than it is inventive. Rather than make such a statement and move on with a few examples, I would like to really examine the issue.

The first case in point is House (1986), Steve Miner's minor classic of '80s horror, just a step or two short of greatness. House, much like Evil Dead II, is a high-energy assault of rubber monsters, insanity, and goofy humor. House's own psychological seriousness and inability to anchor its insanity with some concrete explanation is what ultimately kept it from greatness. However, the techniques and ideas Steve Miner and Fred Dekker deployed were gleefully absorbed by Raimi. The dexterity of House's monsters, like its winged skull-creature, able to grab and use a shotgun, is mimicked in ED II by Henrietta in her skull-monster form. House also contains the all-important tool shed, where both its protagonist Roger and Evil Dead II's Ash find their shotguns. The scene of animated inanimates in the Evil Dead II cabin is an amplification of House's animated mounted fish and flying garden tools. House even contained an evil severed hand making all sorts of mischief.

The second case in point is Hooper-Spielberg's Poltergeist (1982), a masterpiece of horror filmmaking in its own right, one of the greatest haunted house films if only for throwing everything Spielberg could invent at the characters and audience. Poltergeist's chaotic climax includes an animated tree crashing through the children's bedroom window and grabbing the little boy with a giant tree hand. Evil Dead II's chaotic climax also includes an animated tree, which crashes a giant tree hand through the wall of the cabin to grab Ash. After the tree attacks in Poltergeist, a vortex between worlds opens up, sucking the tree to wherever. In ED II, as Annie finishes reading the incantation, a huge vortex opens, sucking the tree to wherever. The shots of the vortexes are almost identical. As the vortex opens, Carol-Anne is almost pulled to the other side as she grips her bed. Similarly, in ED II, Ash grabs a board as the vortex begins pulling him in. Both end up getting pulled to the other side. The finale of Evil Dead II, where the face of the demon manifests itself in the doorway, also borrows from the moment in Poltergeist where Craig T. Nelson pulls one of the more alarming denizens of the other side through the closet door. Poltergeist also contains flying, animated inanimates that could have provided equal influence on Raimi's animated lamps and chairs in ED II.

Other, smaller elements of Evil Dead II come from all over. The idea for the book and the demons it unleashes comes from the very strange 1970 film, Equinox. The skewed shots Raimi uses, suggesting the cabin being viewed from a presence only partially in our plane of reality, is a development of the technique Robert Wise used to make the house in The Haunting (1963) seem alive. With some effort, I'm sure several more sources could be found, perhaps even one for the famous roving camera movements, or 'demoncam.'

Nearly every element of Evil Dead II comes from some other source. Raimi took every cool technique he saw being effectively used in other horror movies and he made sure to use them in his own movie to thrill, scare, and entertain. This is not to detract from Evil Dead II. The film is a masterpiece, in a very real sense the Citizen Kane of horror movies. Just as Orson Welles had done with Citizen Kane, Sam Raimi took the best elements of style and the best ideas in horror at the time, and he deployed them all together for the first time. They were not used willy-nilly, as the effects in House tend to be, but very deliberately toward crafting a supreme experience of horror intensity.

If we return to Evil Dead (2013), I wonder if it had been made with the same synthetic genius as Evil Dead II, would it have been any better? Perhaps the case could be made that it would be just the same. If the films championed as the best of our time are James Wan's Insidious and Xavier Gens's Frontier(s), we're aesthetically impoverished. Insidious was a fun ghost movie, but it really invents nothing. If we really have become conditioned to see it as our The Haunting, Poltergeist, or even House, our demands on horror filmmakers have become too light. Evil Dead II was possible because of the general fertility of imagination in horror filmmaking at the time. Raimi was borrowing, yes, but he was borrowing fragments of genius.

The best Evil Dead (2013) gets is in the bloody final fifteen minutes, a great deal of which is borrowed from Xavier Gens's Frontier(s) and a little from Paco Plaza's [REC]. Both of these are very good films, but of the two only [REC] can be credited with real inventiveness. Frontier(s) is little more than a Gallic, very bloody Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We need filmmakers to take chances again, to try to come up with new ways of scaring us and disturbing us. We need new techniques, new styles, new camera movements, new sounds, new sights. Then, when another Sam Raimi does come along, he'll be able to steal from the best. Because right now, I don't think another Evil Dead 2 would be possible--we don't have enough good ideas to steal.

Hemlock Grove (2013) - 2.5/4

Hemlock Grove is yet another werewolf-and-vampire-based series, this one peculiar in being produced exclusively for Netflix. The directorial talent featured is primarily Eli Roth (Hostel) and Deran Sarafian (Interzone), two directors I like very much. That bodes well. But with TV or web series, it's not the direction so much as the writing that matters. In Hemlock Grove's case, the very promising content is consistently weakened by its sloppy writing.

Hemlock Grove is the titular small town where some girls are getting murdered by a mysterious animal that eats their genitals, chews them in half, and leaves their parts around town. Just before this starts happening, a gypsy boy and his mom, clearly werewolves of some sort, move to town arousing old enmity with the town's rich-folk, the Godfreys. The Godfreys, for their part, are clearly vampires of some sort and owners of a mysterious medical facility where god-knows-what experiments take place. Over the course of the episodes, these families draw together somewhat against a mutual enemy. Who could it be?

The plot and style of Hemlock Grove perhaps bares some superficial comparison to Twin Peaks. You have an ordinary town in which some murders begin to occur and the oddness of these people become manifest. HG is nowhere near is skillful as TP, however. Rather than slowly drawing us into the mysteries of these people, like you get in Twin Peaks, our face is rubbed into their perversion or oddness in the first episode. Flashbacks come fast and free early on, giving us full family histories. Content that should be meted out over several episodes is dropped wholesale upon us without mystery or intrigue.

The characters, for their part, prove far too mercurial. Some of them, like the Godfreys, begin so unpleasant in the first episode or two that their characters are essentially worthless for the plot. So the writers conveniently ignore all that was set up in the first episode to make them relatively affable people. This is particularly the case with one of the main characters, Roman Godfrey, the troubled badboy who becomes a sweetheart pal of gypsy Peter. Roman's mother, Olivia (Famke Janssen), probably the most heinous character in the series, suddenly becomes just as kind and compassionate. That's bad writing. They needed slow, careful development.

Even worse writing takes over in the final two or three episodes. A climax and resolution are necessary, but the writers have so written themselves into a corner that several uses of a deus ex machina are made to get out. Disappointments ensue as characters never reach the dramatic or ironic conclusions their development suggest--they just kind of evaporate.

The actors chosen are another problem. The veteran cast, namely Famke Janssen, Dougray Scott, and Lili Taylor are all fantastic, bringing to life characters that could have come across as very bland (Peter's mom) or belabored (Roman's mom). Kaniehtiio Horn as the perptually-in-hot-pants fortune-teller Destiny is the only young cast-member to hold her own with the elders. In terms of look and performance, Bill Skarsgard and Calvin-Klein-reject Landon Laboiron are just fine, their accents aside. But they lack chemistry that they really needed to make the buddy aspect of the series work. With the dialogue they had to work with, they aren't entirely to blame. But whomever we blame, without that sense of their fraternal connection, the emotional backbone of the series is an arthritic mess. Peter's and Roman's friendship is really the series core; it's too bad no-one making the series realized this.

These problems aside, there is a lot to like in Hemlock Grove for the horror fan. The werewolf transformation sequence is great. The various subplots introduce a multitude of oddities, from virgin births and mad scientists to intenstine-eating and glowing mutants. There are also some great gore effects. Some fun splashes of perversion. There are, moreover, far more questions than there are ever answers, which the final episode only makes worse. So, if you liked the series so far, there's probably more to come.