Priest (2011) - 2/4

About halfway through Priest it struck me that I was watching The Searchers with alien vampires instead of Comanches and ninja priests instead of cowboys. That's not to say it's as good, interesting, or morally complex as The Searchers--or even as a wrinkle in John Wayne's left one; it's just to say that the writer looked to the most moving western ever made for his narrative structure and then filled it with a lot of sci-fi cliches, like a dogmatically-ruled futuristic city, some specially-trained warriors, a rebellious antihero, slick CGI and slow-motion fight sequences.

Priest is about an old warrior teaming up with a young warrior, a sheriff, to recover his niece, held captive by a pack of vampires. If she's been infected, the old warrior will kill her. The young warrior is in love with her, however, and wants to prevent this turn of events.

So that's The Searchers part of it. Here's the scifi part. Vampires are these alien-like creatures, all teeth and no eyes, and priests are like superhuman ninjas trained to fight them--they kick ass for the lord, yes. Vampires are supposed to have been wiped out. That's what the cardinals are telling everyone. The 'old warrior', a middle-aged priest, wants to kill some vampires, but the cardinals have a problem with him heading out to kill things they claim don't exist.

(There's something curiously insightful about how religion works in that, reflecting somewhat how the Catholic Church--the obviously caricatured institution in Priest--dealt with figures like Galileo. The film's representation of a personal religion apart from an institutional one also shows a level of intellectual maturity not usually welcome in Hollywood. So often the hero in these films must divorce himself from all spirituality. In this film, a few tyrannical men have seized power in the Church; otherwise, religion can be a source of personal strength.)

Meanwhile, the vampires are using this opportunity to launch an attack on the city. Karl Urban plays his villain character very Disney-like throughout this sequence, reeking mayhem and taunting the protagonist whilst striking silhouette poses and flailing his arms to no less than a symphony.

The whole film is, in fact, like second-rate Disney, as morally flat and cartoonish as Aladdin 2: The Return of Jafar. It entertains while it hastens past areas needing more development, insults your intelligence, and leaves you with no concern for the destiny of its characters: you'd hardly believe the writers have seen The Searchers were it not for the obvious borrowing. Priest sadly contains a good many missed opportunities for something more; but sometimes you just have to enjoy your priest-on-alien action in a post-apocalyptic western setting for what it is.

Dark House (2009) - 2/4

So often these mid-budget horror movies have one CGI monster or one guy with freaky make-up, whether ghost, demon, witch, or banshee; and this creature leaves you so underwhelmed, you wonder, "THIS is the terror?!". Dark House doesn't come up with anything better; it just multiplies it. Instead of one CGI monster or one guy with freaky make-up, we get a whole gaggle of them. The result is, actually, effective. While one of these creations underwhelms, the extra effort exerted in creating a horde of different creatures keeps each set-piece of the film novel and allows viewers to wonder what creature will pop up next.

The premise of Dark House is, in fact, built around these creatures. A crazy amusement ride entrepreneur (Jeffrey Combs) has designed his masterpiece, "Dark House", a haunted house using a series of lasers to produce holographic horrors. Each room of the house has some new hologram to freak out customers. The few humans are a class of student actors hired to interact with the holograms and customers. The one catch is that the house used as the "Dark House" really may really be haunted and one of the actors has a hidden past with the house. Naturally, the holograms go ape and folks start dying.

This familiar plot is a generous sampling from William Castle movies. A portion of House on Haunted Hill, a lot of Thirteen Ghosts, and maybe a dash of The Tingler, and you have Dark House's backbone, a loose basis for the various murder set pieces. Castle's films are haunted house rides, designed to give lighthearted, even cheesy, thrills in isolated moments. Dark House inherits that spirit. It even inherits Vincent Price's hamminess from House on Haunted Hill, channeled here by Combs in his eccentric millionaire performance. Copying something good is better than an original bad idea: like any William Castle movie, Dark House is fun.

Unfortunately, the screenwriters get a little too ambitious and try to throw us some unnecessary twists toward the end. As is often the case, these twists are fig leaves over something screenwriters tend to find embarrassing: simplicity. A straightforward haunting or insanity story can be elevated with a twist; but more often than not, as in this case, it's simply confused. Some may enjoy the twists, however, and some may not; but the story's simplicity throughout the majority of the film allows us to enjoy the film's real meat, which is just the inventive creatures and their kills.

The Clinic (2010) - 3/4

There's nothing in and of itself wrong with being derivative. One could call Shakespeare derivative, as he readily cobbled together story elements from other writers. The Clinic, telling the story of a pregnant woman abducted and c-sectioned while her husband frantically tries to find her, is such a cobbling; but the result is so good and nearly the equal of the films it borrows from that it's worth forgiving. But first, let's look at a little history of ideas.

Over two thousand years ago, Plato indicated genetic attachment as one of the biggest problems in society. In The Republic, Plato, in describing his perfect society, does not allow children to know their parents or parents to know their children; the adults care for all children and the children obey all adults. However much we like to dress it up and glamourize it as the moving strength of a parent willing to sacrifice all to save her child, we know now that this impulse is purely selfish: we're hardwired to protect our genetic information and it's in our children that our own genetic information is being passed along. However valuable the family system is for certain social functions, the extremely plausible events in The Clinic makes Plato seem all the more justified.

The Clinic concerns a mad scientist of sorts who arranges to have pregnant women kidnapped from the local motel and brought to the abattoir. The fetuses are there removed by c-section and the mothers are stitched up and left to fend for themselves in the fenced-in compound. They wake up in an ice bath and learn the key to finding their baby may lie in the stitched-up abdomens of their fellow inmates. Mayhem ensues.

The scenario is absurd, of course, but the way it plays out is eminently plausible. While most of the women, including our protagonist, pull together and try to help each other--one of them is even a surgeon, making the solution extremely simple--one of the mothers stalks the others like a panther, dividing and brutally massacring them whenever she can. How can she justify this? For her baby, of course! A mother would do anything for her baby. What about the other mothers? And what about the other babies? Well, they're not as important as HER baby. She doesn't know why. It's just because it's hers. That's the attitude entailed by genetic attachment: anyone or anything can be sacrificed for the sake of your baby. I'm not sure whether it's the pure selfishness of it or the irrationality of such a total lack of empathy that makes it so infuriating. Why should anyone else care about your baby? Out of pure human kindness, one might answer and correctly; and that power to empathize with others equally is precisely what Plato felt would flourish best without genetic attachment.

Of course, the other women want their children just as much as the murderous mother. They just have a much stronger sense of empathy. And perhaps they realize, in this sort of Hobbesian all-against-all scenario the mad scientist has set up, that working together makes one much stronger than physical prowess and weapons. They have a much better chance of finding their own children if they can all find their own children together.

On the other hand, what made Plato's society so chilling is the genetic meritocracy he set up. He wholeheartedly subscribed to a eugenics program that bred and educated some children as leaders, some as warriors, and the rest as servants. Any too weak to even be servants were left to die. This fault of genetic detachment is also represented in the film, then, in the person of the scientist. Her detachment, it's implied, arises from a contempt for her own mentally slow child. I can't go further into either argument, however, without giving spoilers. Suffice to say, the film presents considerable food for thought on these subjects. What's the balance between Mother Bears and Human Cattle?

Despite all this talk of Plato and genetics, The Clinic is by no means an arthouse film. While not striving to be a 'grindhouse' or 'drive-in' picture of any sort, this is still a true exploitation flick--Ozsploitation, to be exact. With women in prison, women fighting each other, abdomens torn open, vicious dogs, nasty Australian hicks, mad scientists, and several other atrocities explicit or implicit, The Clinic provides ample material for a horrorhound seeking a good time. There's no need to have read a lick of Plato.

First-time writer-director James Rabbitts delivers with both adequate direction and a smart script. Though the script is doubtless derived from two successful, recent, horror films, Hostel and Inside, it replicates to some degree the edge of Hostel's social criticism and the disgust-power of Inside. (There's just something about a womb that we feel in our bodies to be sacrosanct.) The series of twists that hit us at the climax are surprising and yet consistent with all we see, which is really all that's asked for in a twist. Hopefully we'll see more from Rabbitts in the future--and hopefully next time with more original material.

Insidious (2010) - 2.5/4

The narrative structure of Insidious is a very familiar one: a family begins experiencing peculiar phenomena in their new home; they do what they can to overcome it on their own; then they have recourse in a medium who takes over the show. This formula was crystalized with Poltergeist and has routinely been the basis for haunting dramas ever since. The Orphanage and Insidious are two of the more distinctive films to make use of the formula, The Orphanage by means of its harrowing conclusion and Insidious through pure spook-show gusto.

The plot concerns a boy, Dalton, who falls into a coma. Afterward, Dalton's mom begins to hear spooky sounds from her infant child's room, see shadowy apparitions in quick glimpses, and generally sense that there's "something wrong with that house." As the trailers have made clear already, it's not the house but the boy who's haunted. His comatosed body is, as a parked car is in the ghetto, a vessel just waiting to be occupied. In come the cavalry--some goofy "ghost-hunters" and a medium who seems to know her stuff--to bring Dalton back into his own body.

The film's invented mythology is simultaneously interesting and silly. The notion we're pitched is that New Agers are right and we can indeed astral project some spiritual body outside of our corporeal body (that's latinate for 'bodily body'). The dead have their spiritual bodies cast into some realm called the 'Further', a gloomy mirror of our world. Any living person projecting can wander out to the Further, but at their own peril. Ghosts, or something worse, will try to take his body. They can even hold your spiritual body captive. It's all rather foolish, but it yields some good fruit.

Wan does extract a lot of spookiness and beauty from his collision of astral and real space. The ghost sequences are frequently effective in producing not jumps but chills. One particularly skillful tracking shot of a house exterior in broad daylight, while a supernatural occurrence is visible through the windows, is one of the most unsettling moments in recent supernatural cinema. This barrage of spookiness that comprises the first half of the film is at times masterful and, had the film continued with such strength, may well have resulted in a masterpiece.

However, a masterpiece was not to be. While the latter half of the film is certainly not without its merits, it is dissipated by overactivity, a need, perhaps from the producers, to make 'things happen' rather than allow the film to have its effects. Instead of unsettling occurrences, Wan gives us a red-faced CGI demon scuttling along the walls, reminding me somewhat of an inferior film, The Frighteners. Wan is clever enough to let us see the demon only in short glimpses, though even these are too much.

Where Wan is at his strongest is in shooting the inanimate. He has a unique talent for imbuing the inanimate with the uncanny. Toys, photographs, a gramophone, a red door, drawings, doll-like ghosts ("doll girls" in the credits) are the materials out of which Wan creates that very distinctive emotional resonance. No number of ghostly jump scares or scuttling demons could equal what he does with his montage of claws, sparks, and toys set to the tune of Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe through the Tulips" or his moody camera arcs up stairs and around buildings. Even as the film begins to weaken toward the climax, these moments punctuate and elevate the film with abstract beauty and mystery.

The weakest part of Insidious is the silly story from Leigh Whannel (who also plays one of the ghost hunters). But how that story fits its formula is in itself interesting and worthy of consideration. Films of this formula have tended to be about domesticity and the family unit in Western society. Any formula in a film genre does tend to address ideological concerns of some sort and this one addresses family. In Insidious, there is only one adult male in the picture. There are, however, several mother figures. Dalton's mother, Dalton's grandmother, the medium, and the old woman ghost. The only other character that could be construed as an adult male is the demon, described as a man with a fiery face. Of all the males in the film, the only one that could be considered a powerful male, or in any way 'alpha', is the demon. The dad is ineffectual and avoids confrontation until the film's climax. The wife runs the family and, as we find out, the grandmother has powerfully influenced her son's life. Her influence has created a man-child who is himself raising three children, two of whom are male.

So what we have in this family is a situation the reflects a contemporary society of feminized, domesticated men: men who frequently assume the role of house-husband and to whom any traditionally female task other than being pregnant is one to be shared. Of course, the situation is not only one of what tasks men do in the home, but an emotional climate of sensitive, mollycoddled boys raised with kidgloves to be wimpy, ineffectual men dominated by their wives.

(Spoilers in the following paragraph.)

The demon that threatens to overtake Dalton, then, seems to reflect a semi-conscious effort to reclaim classical masculinity, a powerful male force that creates its own laws. What threatens to break through and destroy the family unit is a return of the now untenable patriarchal order. What we expect from the father is to be powerful enough not to require that patriarchal order, to be able to resist it and return to a life of equality, now stronger than before. While the father does man up to rescue his son, the film's conclusion of the boy returning to his body, the father being taken over by the powerful old woman ghost, is clearly step in the wrong direction. The conclusion leaves us alarmed and dissatisfied, hoping for the female force to be oppressed and the strong male to return to do it.

(Spoilers end here.)

In the end, Insidious is a visually strong film hampered by a silly, overexplained story. Wan dreams up several inventive means of chilling the audience visually, but the dialogue pulls us back into the uncomfortable world of needless plot. The film nevertheless remains fascinating and worthy of at least one viewing to enjoy the ride and appreciate Wan's talents. With only a single, bloodless murder, the film is also as child-friendly as Joe Dante's Gremlins or The Hole.

May (2002) and the Cult of Weird

Amongst the enlightened, the hip, the intelligent in contemporary society, weirdness is an object of superficial fascination. Latched onto, the weird conveys to its obsessor a feeling of uniqueness. In an age where so many people know so many things and anything unusual can become a 'phenomenon' on the internet, many are desperate to find things with the appearance of weirdness that they might distinguish themselves from the homogeneous pack. But how many can go beyond the superficial obsession with a weird object? How many can truly accept and embrace something genuinely weird? Whatever affected eccentricities and ostentatiously peculiar interests they may adapt, they don't know true weirdness nor, I think, do they really want to.

May, the anti-hero of May, is a genuinely weird person. We all meet people about whom we say, "He's weird!" or "She's pretty strange," but these are merely people who readily display more interesting points of their personality. May is genuinely weird. Her only friend is a doll, who must never, ever be removed from her glass case!; she's amused by stories of suffering animals; she finds parts of people more interesting than the wholes; she likes sticking scalpels into her fingers. These are just a few highlights.

There's really no reason for May to be so weird. What we learn of her upbringing is that her mother was extremely anal-retentive and controlling and that May's lazy eye inhibited her social life. Of course, none of these facts are sufficient to explain May. Many kids have lazy eyes, many kids are picked on for having lazy eyes, many kids have no friends, many kids have anal-retentive mothers, and a few kids even have all of the above; still they don't become as weird and creepy as May. She just is that way. If anything, her upbringing only served to enhance what was already there, including a strain of psychopathy.

At the juncture of May's life into which we enter, May's loneliness has reached a peak. At just this time she encounters a few people who think "weird is cool." Unfortunately for May and, ultimately, for them, they don't know what being weird truly is, nor are they equipped to judge it as 'cool' or otherwise. The first and most important of these is Adam, a college-age man who likes horror movies, smoking, and weird things. He seems secure, comfortable with his level of distinctiveness. May's oddness begins to draw him in, offering an exquisite alternative to the vulgar bimbo he lives with. He enjoys, or thinks he enjoys, her odd manners and interests. When foreplay takes a peculiar turn, however, he rejects her as 'too weird.' A key scene, encapsulating the film's major theme, is when May eavesdrops on Adam's conversation with a roommate: the roommate urges Adam to enjoy the weird girl, while Adam explains she's too much and he's glad he dumped her. Adam has been initiated, given a taste of the truly weird, and discovered himself just a dilettante; his roommate has yet to be so enlightened.

The second is Polly, May's co-worker at the veterinarian clinic. Polly is a punk girl whose brains have been a little scrambled by drugs but whose attraction to whatever's outside the mainstream remains. May's 'far out' ways and physical attractiveness similarly draw Polly in. Polly's case, like Adam's, is that her interest in the weird is superficial; May is a curiosity for her, not a commitment. However, Polly's case isn't so much one of being unable to handle weirdness, but one of being unaware of the dangers of weird people. One of Gary Larson's comic strips featured four pictures, a cat with back arched and claws out, a snake with rattling tale, a spiked puffer fish, and finally a man wearing a trenchcoat and innertube with a hat on his head and a gun in hand. The caption reads, "How nature says, 'Do Not Touch!'" And that is a valid concern. If human weirdness is a deviation from predictable behavioural patterns of action and reaction, then those patterns based around keystone values--like moral, legal, and self-preservatory values--can no longer be depended upon. Someone as weird as May is not necessarily as bound to morals like 'Don't murder anyone' as the rest of us.

A third person drawn to May's weirdness is a dopey punk she finds at a busstop. With his wild hair and tattoos, he seems as likely as anyone else to appreciate May for who she is. Simply discovering a cat in her freezer is too much for him, though, and he rejects her.

In inverse order May kills all of her betrayers, harvesting from them her favourite parts. While there are psychological reasons for May's doing so, stemming from her mother's comment that one can just make a best friend, it's as though Lucky McKee were punishing the characters for their affectations. They display themselves to the world as weird or connoisseurs of the weird, but anything too far outside of society's circumscribed limits they're unwilling to accommodate. The tragedy of the film is, really, that someone as interesting and complex as May ultimately can only find a friend in her own imagination.

The grotesque finale shows us a tortured artist-figure finding joy only in her own creativity. She's too creative to be friended, but creative enough to create her own friend. What makes May such a clever film is that this may just be a happy ending. McKee doesn't give us any cavalier judgments. May is our focus throughout the film; the film is titled after May; her happiness in her project, the hideous doll creature, while perhaps unsatisfactory to us, satisfies her. This happiness, after all, could be a happiness she could never have found in the anxiety-ridden friendships with other people. All of May's experience with friendship was destructive; but her relationships to her doll and her creation are constructive, positive. It is her attempts to escape rather than reconcile with loneliness brought about the film's tragedies.

The film's progress could be seen as one toward May seeing her own weirdness through others' eyes and coming to truly see and embrace herself for who she is; the progress is one of self-knowledge, hence the giving of her own eye to the creation. And May's final happiness, indeed, could be one few of us will ever find in others. In the end, we alone are best able to appreciate our own weirdness. But how many of us have learned to do so unabashedly? how many without affectation?