The Graves (2010) - 3/4

From the pre-credits sequence and title, in which we're told The Graves is a "Brian Pulido flick," you know from the get-go you're in throwback territory. I'm not sure Pulido himself knew exactly where to throw the film back to: the grittiness of the '70s or the everything-goes excess of the '80s or even some '90s plotting, dialogue and casting. In fact, he almost seems to dedicate each act to a different decade. The dominant aesthetic is certainly blood-soaked grittiness, however. Besides, the hodgepodge of styles only rescues the picture--sorry, flick--from becoming derivative, as so many throwback flicks are.

The titular Graves are not what you might think: they're actually the main characters, two gorgeous young ladies with fantastic and lovingly-photographed cleavage, Abby and Megan Graves, introduced efficiently and slickly in the first act. Abby (Jillian Murray) is the slightly younger sister, more emotional and dependent; Megan (Clare Grant) is the older sister, tough and resourceful. These two ladies are on their way from Arizona to New York when they get lost in a tiny hick village with a secret, a sinister preacher (national treasure Tony Todd), and a tourist trap called Skull Village. Having made the mistake of visiting Skull Village, they find themselves pursued by a mad blacksmith and a sadist with a sickle (Bill Moseley) as well as a soul-eating spiritual force that lurks beneath the old mines.

What really elevates The Graves way beyond what it could have been is Pulido's smart screenplay, particularly in regards to the characters of Megan and Abby. If they don't work, the film doesn't work, because it's titled after them and we're with them the whole time. The first act lets us get to know them and they seem like genuine sisters into punk rock and comic books. Okay, so they are somewhat of a comic book nerd's fantasy. (I did some research and found Pulido is quite well known for his comic books, incidentally. I thought The Graves contained some product placement, but it turns out Pulido was plugging his own books--which is fair.) Moreover, Pulido's obviously seen his fair share of 'flicks' and is clever enough to make Megan really shine as the cool, collected, ass-kicking honey she can be. I think I fell in love with Megan myself. She avoids all of the cliche pitfalls without calling deliberate attention to this fact. At least she does during the first and second acts. Starting near the end of the third act, Pulido has her ask Bill Moseley, "Why are you doing this?" and tells him, "You don't have to do this." Must every girl try that in horror films? I felt Pulido knew better, plus he had developed her character to be so strong up to that point; so it was rather annoying. Then the fourth act nearly smothers the girls' personalties under all the plot.

That said, basically, you already know if you'll like this flick. If you think the idea of Bill Moseley wearing a rubber pig's nose chasing hot girls in tank tops with a sickle sounds awesome, you know you'll like The Graves. If you don't get why that's awesome, The Graves might not be for you. This film--oops, flick--struck me as sort of a combination of Texas Chainsaw Massacre II with While She Was Out topped with some supernatural touches. If you like either one of those films, there's no reason you won't enjoy the heck out of The Graves. I really liked both of those films, so I really like The Graves. I think it works on every level: The Graves offers everything a film of this sort should offer in exactly the way it ought to be offered. Pulido has an interesting and original idea here, which I won't reveal, and he runs with it. Bravo, Pulido!

Town Creek (2009) - 2.5/4

When is a war truly over? It's officially over when either one side has been defeated or a peace is called. But the effects linger; it's not over for the people. Lives have been lost, families torn apart, animosity remains amongst the people. We're still not out of the gravity of World War II. We can look back on the American War of Independence without any real bitterness, without feeling the pain. However, there are still survivors of World War II and the horror of Hitler has never fully died. Black tendrils stretch out from his hateful existence of decades ago all the way to today. In Town Creek, those tendrils take a very concrete form, and that form is an immortal Nazi necromancer named 'Wirth'.

Joel Schumacher directs a tense and efficient picture with Town Creek. After a brief ten-minute prologue that puts all the pieces in place, he pulls is right into the action and it's a non-stop battle for the remaining eighty minutes. We learn a Nazi agent is boarding with a German immigrant family while studying the occult power of a runestone discovered around Town Creek back in the 1920s. And we learn that a young paramedic lost his war-hero brother (a veteran of Iraq) in mysterious circumstances around Town Creek in the 2000s. When that brother suddenly appears again, they arm up and head out to the farmhouse where they do battle with the sinister necromancer by night.

A necromancer is a monster rarely encountered in horror cinema. I'm not sure why, because there are a lot of fascinating avenues with such a monster. For one, each time some living being is killed, the necromancer can raise it from the dead as his puppet. In Town Creek, this leads to a particularly remarkable sequence with a horse. It's one of the most sublime moments of modern horror cinema. We can thank Schumacher for trying out some very interesting ideas using his monster, for exploring the possibilities. Soon, however, it comes time for the protagonists to protag and that's when the possibilities tend to be curtailed for the sake of the plot. This is unfortunate, as I felt Schumacher had more tricks up his sleeves; but the brisk ninety-minute runtime makes this necessarily the case, alas.

The shooting style of the first twenty-minutes or so, with the two brothers invading the farmhouse, will remind anyone who has seen Martyrs of that movie. Where Martyrs then descends into idle philosophical wankery and unpleasant torture, Town Creek at that point becomes a tense, atmospheric battle with supernatural remnants of the Third Reich that threaten to destroy the world.

Schumacher is one of those middle-brow directors who can't quite be called an intellectual, but can't be dismissed as a mere genre director either. He does makes some obvious mainstream moves, like having a girl stare dramatically out of a dingy farmhouse window into the night and say, "It begins." Gee, could that be for the trailer? However, he does have ideas to work with, visually and thematically. There are the past-present relationships I referred to in my first paragraph. But also, this is a film with Nazis, so as you might imagine, guilt and responsibility are major themes. The family keeping the necromancer at bay are also guilty of several torture-murders. How innocent are they? Is Schumacher making a statement in defence of the Bush administration's torture-interrogations? Or is he making a more subtle statement about the moral complexities of such issues? It's something to think about, if merely enjoying a good necromancer-based horror movie isn't enough for you. If however that is enough for you, then you'll find plenty to enjoy. Town Creek is an effective horror picture with some great, original ideas on screen in its third act.

Triangle (2009) - 3/4

A day sailing amongst a group of upper-middle class friends and a lower-class mother (Melissa George, from Mulholland Dr.) of an autistic child is suddenly overwhelmed with a mysterious storm. Thankfully an abandoned cruiser is there to pick them up. Or is it abandoned? We follow Melissa George as she puzzles out the temporal rift they find themselves caught in as her friends start dying around her.

It isn't easy to write a time-loop story. It's like the hare in that classic Tortoise and the Hare parable: it starts strong, then it gets lazy. That's almost always the case and it's not that different with Triangle. The typical time-loop story starts by entering into the mystery and the audience is enrapt trying to puzzle it out, trying to put the pieces together before the film can expose it. This is exciting. Of course it can be handled incompetently, but Triangle certainly doesn't have that problem--it's a very skilled picture. So it is very exciting during the first act or two. The typical time-loop story also starts to lose steam at about the middle. This is because, once you've got the gist of what's going on, you can pretty much predict a lot that's going to happen. The feeling of putting the pieces into place with little effort is not quite as enjoyable as the perplexing first and second acts. So is it with Triangle. There's always a chance for a final few moments of intrigue toward the beginning of the fourth act and then it unravels as a good denouement should. So is it with Triangle. As skilled a time-loop story it is, it remains a pretty typical time-loop story, with bits and pieces culled from a lot of recent horror pictures (from Event Horizon to Population 436).

What Triangle does have to offer, however, is a willingness to show the full implications of the time-loop with powerful visuals. I can't think of a single other time-loop film that shows a pile of bodies that are all of the same person. That's pretty clever. So writer-director Christopher Smith (Creep, Severance) is to be applauded for keeping the script coherent and paying off that script with some great visual ideas; these visuals keep the material fresh and engrossing, even when you've already caught its tail.

There are two big mis-steps Smith makes, and the first is spilling out his theme in as pedestrian a manner possible. It's as though he just couldn't trust the audience to make the connection on their own; he had to spoon-feed us. Upon entering the abandoned ship, the Aeolus, the characters comment that Aeolus in Greek mythology is the father of Sisyphus and that Sisyphus is the rock-pushing guy punished for cheating death. So that gives the whole game away right there at the beginning. It's a stupid, stupid move. Even worse is that it makes you have to accept that symbolism is written into the fabric of the universe rather than just the script. But there you go.

Yes, the whole film is sisyphean; in fact, you could better describe it as autistic. What you have is the obsessive repetition of events that overpower with a sense of futility. Everything must remain exactly the same. Even when Melissa George for a moment believes she's doing things differently and getting somewhere, a moment will come when she's overwhelmed with the futility of her situation: she's done this a hundred times before.

The futility is a powerful punch that the audience feels as well. Smith is to be applauded for that at the same time as chastised for it. You see, you kind of wonder, "Why do I need to see this?" and at the end I found myself wondering, "Why didn't you just start the movie here?" I think the idea is that he did start the movie there. But he'd really have to cheat to reach that conclusion. That's the second mis-step.

A final point I want to note is that Melissa George, who basically has to hold the whole film on her shoulders, does an incredible job. She's on screen 95% of the 98 minutes; we experience the whole film through her. It's as much due to her performance as Smith's script that Triangle works. She can go from dazed to manic in a moment and you believe it. Less importantly, I've never seen her looking so lovely. She's a natural beauty. The make-up she has in Mulholland Dr. worked against her. Here we see her shine with very natural, almost invisible make-up.

The Reflecting Skin (1990)

The Reflecting Skin is a grotesque picture on childhood horror, the terror of being innocent. This is especially the case when one's father is incinerated before one's eyes, one's closest friends are murdered by a gang of bored teens in a shiny car, and the mysterious foreign woman might be a vampire with a taste for one's older brother (a young Viggo Mortensen). The film is told entirely from the point of view of Seth Dove, a fairly typical boy with a strong imagination trapped in a lifeless rural area and surrounded by creepy and/or disturbed adults.

Renowned playwright Philip Ridley wrote and directed with a fine touch for the visual. The hanging jaws decorating the whaler's widow's home threaten to devour the meek Seth as he apologizes for a cruel prank. A dessicated fetus he finds buried and begins speaking to, an exploded frog, a sheriff missing multiple bodyparts (a reference to Lionel Atwill's character in The Son of Frankenstein, I wonder?), amongst other things contribute to the grotesque texture. Visual motifs of contrasting green and yellow grasses, some smooth and some jarring transitions comprise Ridley's visual style.

While Ridley's background as a playwright lends the films many strengths, it also detracts in some ways. Even had I not known Ridley wrote and directed, I would have guessed a playwright wrote the screenplay, simply because it reeks of the modern dramatic style. If you've ever read or seen performed Beckett, Pinter, or Shepard, the mother's muttering about gasoline, the economy of objects (heaven forbid that whaling spear not be used as a weapon!), and the sometimes too-evident linguistic motifs will seem familiar and artificial. And if you haven't read or seen any of those performed, think of the play with which Barton Fink opens.

Overall, The Reflecting Skin is not so heavy on narrative as it is on experience. Ridley's strength is really in recreating for the audience the genuine experience of childhood encountering, even creating, horror with innocence and gradually losing that innocence. A series of interrelated experiences over a single, awful summer in Seth Dove's life serve to steal Seth's innocence away as he ultimately makes a decision that costs someone their life. I could feel Seth's bewilderment and dread at many points, whereas at other points his psychology was alien to me. He's not a normal kid; but with parents like his, how could he be? At times one sympathizes with him and at other times he's a terrible puzzle. I think that's true of most innocent things, particularly children. We've all done odd things as children and experienced things of which we couldn't quite grasp the ramifications.

It's notoriously difficult to direct children, probably even more difficult to capture childhood in a film, let alone a horror film. The Reflecting Skin is second only to Night of the Hunter in accomplishing this. On the one hand, it's much more honest about children and childhood than Night of the Hunter. Lilian Gish's insipid comment that children "abide" is frankly embarrassing. On the other hand, The Reflecting Skin manages to set that childhood in a drastically more perverse landscape.

Zombies: The Beginning (2007) - 2/4

The final film of the great trashmaster, Bruno Mattei, Zombies: The Beginning is a fitting finale to a truly odd cinematic career. If there's anything that characterizes Mattei's approach, it's that anything goes. He comes up with an idea and in it goes. We sometimes say of people that there's no filter between their brain and their mouths; with Mattei, there's no filter between his brain and his script. Never once have I ever had the feeling that Mattei censored himself or even considered, "This idea might be too weird." So was his approach with this shot-on-video Philippine zombie epic that harvests ideas from every corner of Mattei's brain. That's not to say Zombies: The Beginning is a perfect movie or even a good movie. It's riddled with flaws and I'll talk about those too, but first the plot.

Zombies begins with the discovery of a woman on a raft by a rescue team. After recovering, she explains to the biotech company for which she works that her ship encountered an island where the dead are reanimated and everyone else was killed. They don't believe her and she becomes a Buddhist nun. Half a year passes and she's still having nightmares of her experience. The opportunity to be free of these nightmares presents itself in the form of Paul Barker, a bigshot scientist for her former company that wants to take her back to the island for research along with a military team. Off they all go to the island where they find themselves in a zombie trap with days to go until help arrives.

I'll start with the faults. There are some boring stretches, for one. These are dialogue-laden stretches and the actors are mostly dreadful, the dubbing worse than dreadful. Hey, this is a Mattei film! The lead actress (Yvette Yzon) isn't bad at all, but her dubbing does her a disservice. She has to carry a lengthy, indignant speech before the board of directors early on, then she has to debate Barker at the convent, then we see the military team prepping and bantering. These military guys, incidentally, have the worst dubbing of all; one of them has a voice best described as what Homestar Runner would sound like if he were a morbidly obese castrato. Even the rescue mission is played out at length with focus on verisimilitude, when it really adds nothing. I guess you could call it filler until we get to the island. It's a drag, but it's worth slogging through. Yzon is a beautiful lady (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2068456/) and you get to look at her the whole time, so it's not so bad.

While the digital shooting is quite good, Mattei makes the mistake almost all shot-on-digital zombie movies make: slow-motion. Why must they all do this? Close-ups of zombies eating, often in slow motion. Make-up effects are more effective when glimpsed quickly. In fact, several things are shot in slow motion when they needn't be.

Another fault is one that at times is also one of the good points, and that's the use of cliches. The military guys are the same military guys that you've seen in every low-budget action sci-fi/horror of the '80s, except, if possible, even more cardboard and disposable. So you can kind of predict the scientists and the military won't get along, in good Day of the Dead fashion. It's kind of annoying. These guys aren't even as interesting as the morons in Rats: Night of Terror, because at least those guys were weirdos from underground. On the other hand, it can be amusing to see what films he's 'referencing'. The girl saved from the raft is Aliens, her returning to the island to overcome her nightmares is Mountain of the Cannibal God, the military and scientist mix is Day of the Dead, etc.. And I daresay Mattei's been watching horror hentai movies and playing Playstation games, because this movie's got some fricken weird ideas!

Or maybe I do Mattei a discredit. Maybe he really did just come up with this disturbing stuff himself. But disturbing is the word. Once they get to the island, we see Mattei really kick into action. The cinematography is serviceable, but it's the lighting that's excellent. It's always dark and raining on the island, but the way it's lit makes it look like a video game. You'd almost think you were watching a cut scene from some military strategy game. The video game comparison doesn't stop there. Once inside the research compound on the island, we're in Resident Evil territory. Humans have been used for horrendous research, there are fetuses everywhere, zombie women in cages, zombie women pregnant with monster fetuses, a zombie with some strange gadget on his head. And it gets even more incredible, but I dare not spoil the ending. It's really so bonkers, so outrageous, I was in awe. Mattei actually disturbed me. It even outdoes the end of Rats: Night of Terror.

And he frightened me too. The jump scares and suspense moments are quite often very effective. Not so much for the soldiers: I knew they're zombie-fodder from the get go. But the biologist/nun is our worthy protagonist and I sympathized with her. I cared about her fate. It helps, too, that Mattei designed some really interesting creatures and put the effort into good make-up effects.

I don't want to spoil anything further, as much as I would like to say more. I would rather let you discover. There are things in this movie that are just over-the-top weird and brilliant: midget zombies, mutants, apes. Things anyone but Mattei would have said, "Well I'd better have a reason for this." It's great trash and a fitting farewell. Bruno outdid himself.