Upstairs (2009) - 1.5/4

'90s heartthrob Luke Perry costars in Upstairs, a thriller in which he plays a psychotic, uncouth man who takes an apartment at the mansion of a blind woman. The focus of the film is actually on the blind woman, Grace (Kelly Harrison), who rents the place as a means to pay off the mortgage on the mansion she's inherited. Her parents and her eyesight were all lost in a car crash. Perry seems like a nice guy, but he soon starts annoying her with loud music, prostitutes he pays for sadomasochistic games (so screaming), and just being generally creepy by coming into her part of the house and messing with her stuff.

Upstairs is an extremely formulaic film. It is so by-the-numbers that it's really embarrassing to see this film had any writer at all, let alone two screenwriters. If you could make a kit called "Write Your Own Terrorize-a-Blind-Woman Story" Upstairs is precisely what it would produce. Every little detail is mechanically set up for later in a tidy package. For instance, we get a scene of Grace counting her way to the fusebox and sure enough she uses this later to get the advantage of blindness. The whole movie is made up of such moments.

Usually the best part of a terrorize-the-blind-woman movie is the actually terrorizing moments and when she finally decides to get the upper hand. The problem with this film is that Grace is a real bundle of nerves, gittering, always gasping and startled. She's so irritating! As big a jerk as Luke Perry is here, you almost side with him she's such a nuissance. We get it: she's blind. It doesn't mean she's a fricken puppy! She makes so many little gasping and whimpering noises constantly that I wanted to muzzle her. Okay, so maybe that really is supposed to be her character: maybe she's just a jumpy person. But it sure makes her tiresome to be around. The worst thing is, she reminds me of myself in some ways, the way she becomes infuriated by the least inconsiderate behaviour from the tenant and allows it to spoil her day. It's that grey area where he's in his rights but still ought to be more considerate that always infuriates me as an apartment dweller.

The best part of the film is Luke Perry, who is actually extremely creepy as the mannerless psychopath. He just has no sense of shame and that makes him creepy. There's also a little girl, Stella Pejo, who's surprisingly good in her role as Grace's helper/music student. And these cops who become progressively annoyed with Grace's constant calls--they're the most human people in the film. Really, I don't blame them for getting annoyed.

The direction is best described as classy. Robert-Adrian Pejo (any relation to Stella?) directs the utterly trite story with elegance, a certain detached elegance. Why detached? Well, he probably knew how trite the story is himself. Anyhow, if Upstairs passes on television and you have nothing better to do, it's worth leaving on; but don't make an effort to see it.

Knife Edge (2010) - 2.5/4

The second-tier horror auteur who gave us the minor '80s horror classic Waxwork, as well as its sequel and Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat now brings us a supernatural psychological thriller, Knife Edge. I must say, for this kind of film, it's pretty good. It has that convoluted plotting you find in noir, melodrama, and giallo, and frankly it fits well into those genres. As a noir, it resembles Suspicion; as a melodrama, Dragonwyck; as a giallo, Fulci's The Psychic and The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave. It most resembles Evelyn, which isn't high praise, but still praise.

A Wall Street trader who seems to have almost psychic levels of intuition when it comes to trading gives up her high-paying job to move to the English countryside with her new French husband and son from a previous relationship. Turns out she is psychic and she begins getting visions of something awful that happened in her new house, the huge mansion of her husband. Unfortunately her husband can't quite afford the mansion and begins plotting to get her inheritance money. Is she having psychic visions? Is she losing her mind? Is she in danger? How is the house's past connected to her?

There are quite a few characters in this film--from lawyers, to relatives and nannies (Joan Plowright!)--and most of them seem suspicious to us and to each other. You can take guesses and you may end up right, but this is a plot-heavy film that doesn't finish revealing until the very end. It's generous enough not to hit you over the head with some plot points as well, which I found gratifying. While the melodrama was rather dull and difficult to believe--is this Frenchman such a twat he can't just ask his wife to borrow a few bucks for the mortgage?--it's a pretty decent and fun plot if only because it always has so many balls in the air.

I also liked some of the visuals. Hickox uses some digital editing to make fascinating dream sequences with such fantastical imagery as a tree covered in eyes; he also employs a few efficient superimpositions. The rest is competent, with the occasional interesting angle. Hickox has never been weak on visuals.

Knife Edge is an old film made in the present day, a classical psychological horror made with modern style and techniques. In some sense it could have been made in the '80s. It's not a throwback, nor is it particularly innovative; it's just an enjoyable supernatural thriller.

Shutter Island (2010) - 4/4

Shutter Island takes the notion of a psychological thriller to a whole new level: it's downright clinical. It's so easy to see psychiatrists as villains in movies, as though they're all Nurse Ratchett--which is, frankly, bullchett. Most psychiatrists are sincerely desirous of helping their patients. In Shutter Island, Scorsese plays with cinematic preconceptions such as these to pull us into an immersive and highly emotional web of paranoia.

Scorsese works hard to ensure from the beginning of the film til near the very end that we never know more than protagonist Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio). He's a US Marshall, circa 1954, come to Shutter Island with his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) to investigate the escape of a criminally insane woman from a facility for the criminally insane. As Daniels investigates, there seems to be something very wrong with the facility, especially once we meet the evasive Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and his Teutonic colleague, Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow); Daniels begins to suspect a conspiracy involving sinister experiments. There also seems to be something wrong about Daniels himself, as he begins having visions of his dead wife, flashbacks to concentration camp atrocities, and reveals he has ulterior motives for coming to Shutter Island. However, there seems to be something wrong with the whole setup from the beginning. Why would a marshall be required for a single escaped woman on an inescapable island when there are so many armed guards around?

It gets you thinking. And if you think hard enough or perhaps read the wrong review, you might even figure out the gist of what's wrong with this island; but it's unlikely you'll figure the whole thing out. Tracing back over all that happens, I see plenty of clues and that it's consistent all the way through. But figuring out the mystery really isn't the point of the movie.

The point is trauma and healing. Shutter Island is about the psychology, the emotions, the performances. I read that DiCaprio had a mild breakdown making the movie and I would believe him. It's a very demanding role he's playing; it demands he go to emotional extremities not many roles call upon. This is filmmaking in the vein of Ingmar Bergman. You rarely have seen an actor other than Max von Sydow as you see DiCaprio here. The film is engrossing initially, what with its mystery plot; but as the plot comes to a close and is summed up in a heart-rending moment, it's ultimately incredibly moving. It nearly made this grown man cry.

Scorsese's style manages to be both visible and unobstrusive throughout, as though it were resonating with the emotional tones of the scene. An arresting tracking shot of a concentration camp massacre horrifies more than any gore scene I've ever seen. And the most heartbreaking scene in the picture is shot from eagle eye in brief glimpses that somehow intensify the emotion while simultaneously conveying a character's ambivalent attitude toward the event. This meticulous style, which one tends to expect from Scorsese, invites deeper scrutiny.

The Fourth Kind (2009) - 3/4

Y'know, I've always found documentaries on abductions, hauntings, and possessions, with their straight-to-the-point dramatizations, much more frightening than any horror movie. With The Fourth Kind writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi seems to be acutely aware of this, because he aims to provide just that experience. The first minute of the film is Milla Jovovich speaking directly into the camera about how every scene in the film is based on genuine archive material about an event in Nome, Alaska. Not only that, Osunsanmi frequently splits the screen to show us the archive footage (which he also shot, of course; it's not real) running simultaneously with the Jovovich-starring dramatization.

The plot concerns a psychologist, Abbie Tyler (Jovovich), conducting research on a series of related phenomena in Nome, Alaska after having just lost her husband in what she believes to be mysterious circumstances. Her patients all report seeing owls in their rooms, staring at them in the middle of the night; her husband believed UFOs were responsible for the odd occurrences; and she believes an intruder stabbed her husband in the middle of the night. See how it all adds up? As she digs deeper and captures a strange metallic voice on tape, her psychologist friend (Elias Koteas) visits to make sure she remains stable and an expert on the Sumerian language and proponent of the Ancient Astronaut Theory translates the voice for her. Meanwhile, as Abbie's patients start dying, the sheriff threatens to take her children away.

The obvious influence over The Fourth Kind is The Mothman Prophecies. They're both based on true stories. They share the similar subject matter of a small town being terrorized by strange, possibly extra-terrestrial-related events. They share a similar discordant soundtrack. They share Will Patton. They even share a similar shooting style, as Osunsanmi gives us a bewildering series of close-ups of lips and such that could have come right out of The Mothman Prophecies. The difficulty with imitating a great film is that you risk being compared unfavourable. Just based on this movie, I'd say Osunsanmi is a pretty talented guy, but he's clearly no Mark Pellington. The other influence is, surprisingly, E. Elias Merhige. The use of supposed archive footage and its parallel with dramatizations makes a statement about fiction vs reality that bares resemblance to Shadow of the Vampire. But more tellingly, some moments in the archive footage could have come out of Begotten. Well, Osunsanmi's got the right idea: if you're going to be influenced, might as well be influenced by the best.

Now I want to talk a little about this archive footage issue. Because it kind of makes you wonder, "Why?" It sounds good on paper and in one's head, but in realization, it may not have been so wise. What I mean is, while there are some good effects achieved, it does so at a cost. The first point is that it's redundant. Sometimes you're watching two identical scenes playing side-by-side in split screen filmed with two different actors. There's no need to have that. Going into a film like this, we're already willing to suspend our disbelief; we don't need archive footage. It has the opposite effect, in fact. It makes us have to suspend our disbelief on two orders, and this has a distancing effect, as in Brecht's plays. If the archive footage and dramatization were not both well-done, this might be helpful; but actually, Osunsanmi did a great job making both parts very eerie in that Mothman Prophecies way. Another benefit might be in getting this theme of fiction versus reality down. That strikes me as a waste of time. That theme has been around for so long that if you're going to use it, you'd better have something damn profound to say; and Osunsanmi doesn't have much of anything to say. There are still many benefits, such as the way both the archive footage and the dramatization can be very frightening, each in their own unique way. While they never quite complement each other the way Osunsanmi probably intended, they still work very well individually.

There is another issue resulting from this experiment. I don't want to go into it too much. But the fact that the main portion of the story we're witnessing is a dramatization calls far more attention than is beneficial to the style in which it's shot. Dramatizations, let's face it, are supposed to be plain and honest. So when you get crane shots and eagle-eye views, constantly roving cameras, it seems out of place. But maybe I'm just nit-picking at this point.

Despite the slight failure of the experiment, The Fourth Kind is a good horror film. Very good, in fact. It really freaked me out, and I'm not easily freaked. It freaked me out in the way The Mothman Prophecies does. At moments, Osunsanmi pumps the volume up, in that good exploitative genre film way, on some of The Mothman Prophecies' tricks to make it chill-inducing.

Necrosis (2009) - 1/4

A group of friends head out to a cabin in the very mountains of the infamous Donner Party massacre. The creepy stories and/or spiritual energy of the place combined with their friend's failure to take his anti-psychosis medication leads to a murderous rampage.

Necrosis (AKA Blood Snow) is a film that tries to be a character-based drama with lots of build-up until the explosive moment. I like to support the little movies out there and Necrosis can be praised for trying to do something different, but the idea of 'build-up' here is an on-going argument about whether "Matt" will get to bed "Megan" punctuated by a few jumpscares courtesy the hallucinations of "Jerry." That might not be so bad if these people weren't so bland. They are every phony, mugging yuppie you've ever met at a party you really didn't want to be at. It's not even the actors' faults here: they're probably playing their characters right. And y'know what, I sympathise with Jerry. If I had to spend a few days in a cabin with these people, from his shrewish girlfriend to her inauthentic yuppie friends, I might stop taking my medication too.

Jerry, incidentally, is the only non-Caucasian in the cast, making this film seem a tad xenophobic. The role of Jerry is the most complex and the top actor in the cast is Asian James Kyson-Lee (from some TV series called "Heroes"), so it's normal he'd have the role. It still comes off as xenophobic. And that's not even getting to the punishment meted out to the sick Jerry at the end, which we're supposed to cheer, I imagine, as the white survivors embrace.

The editing and cinematography are somewhat subpar, but the writing isn't bad, insofar as flaky yuppies is what the writer wanted to capture. These people are pretty vapid, but they don't deserve to die or anything. And I will admit, since I was expecting a cheesy supernatural thriller, I was surprised by the turnout. It's a worse film than I expected, but a better film than the first thirty minutes led me to believe. Cameos by Michael Berryman and Mickey Jones are nice, but not enough to save the picture from being as vapid as its yuppies. Ultimately, avoid Necrosis, as there are much better 2009/2010 b-movies, like The Graves, which I recently reviewed, and Red Velvet.

Nevertheless, if you wanted to read a theme into Necrosis, the Power of Place would be a fascinating one. Places do resonate with their history, to some extent; the way they're treated influences the way others will come to treat them, and so on, until they develop this aura. The aura is, of course, in the minds of people, but so is the notion of 'place' as opposed to 'space'; placehood is defined by human perceptions of space. The sense of place combined acted as a catalyst to Jerry's psychosis, you see. So there you go. If you've seen the film, the least you can do is read something into it to justify having wasted your time. It's what I do.