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.

Red Lights (2012) - 2.5/4

Red Lights is all about fakery and misdirection. Like the best magician, it draws your attention elsewhere while it works its ‘magic.’ In the best cases, this is enjoyable. David Copperfield makes a babe in a bikini appear out of thin air. Where’d she come from? Excellent! In the worse cases, however, you find yourself fleeced by a swift conman. Red Lights both entertains and fleeces.

The first half of the film focuses on the relationship between a professional debunker (Sigourney Weaver) and her assistant (Cilian Murphy). Episodically, they do their job, exchange philosophical discussions, and provide character background. The second half introduces a world-renowned psychic (Robert DeNiro) that no-one has ever been able to debunk. Weaver and Murphy are drawn into the surprisingly dangerous world of trying to debunk to undebunkable DeNiro.

The debunking and philosophical discussions were earnest and intriguing. I was particularly delighted with Weaver’s performance as a debunker so assured of her time-honed principles and techniques that she’s become an atheist guru. One never senses from her a lack of spirituality or depth, an emptiness or apologetic undertone so often accompanying atheist characters in popular media. Murphy’s wide-eyed discipleship is charming if a little confusing. But that’s all part of the ‘magic.’

The fleecing, here, is knowing that almost all of the debunking scenarios, principles, and even some of the philosophical discussions are taken wholesale from the life and opinions of James Randi. The faith healer with the radio transmitter is, in parts, taken word-for-word from Randi’s debunking of Peter Popoff. That’s just one instance; there are more. I know, because I spent my undergrad as a wide-eyed Randi disciple.

Even DeNiro’s character is an embellishment of Randi’s long-time nemesis, Uri Gellar, the infamous spoon-bender. He excited minds in the ‘70s with his one-trick charlatanry that bamboozled genuine scientists, faded from view, tried to make a return on Israeli TV, and ultimately confessed to being a mere magician. The conflict between Randi and Gellar is exaggerated in Red Lights, but obviously the source.

I have a problem with this liberal theft from Randi’s career because, first of all, I think Randi’s life is interesting enough to be dramatized on its own and not cannibalized by fiction. Secondly, I’m furious with the lack of imagination shown by a writer (director Rodrigo Cortes) who really should have been able to invent, rather than steal, the material for his screenplay. This may not literally be plagiarism, but it’s not acceptable from a creative mind.

The conflicts between Weaver and DeNiro, Murphy and DeNiro, and even between Weaver and Murphy over DeNiro, I found mostly plausible and engrossing. DeNiro’s character is a slippery manipulator whose main mode of communication is chewing the scenery—making DeNiro’s task a cakewalk. Often his bombastic speeches are exaggerated to a laughable extent. But the film’s best moment is his philosophical monologue to Murphy. Like any viewer would, I wondered whether DeNiro’s character was genuine or not. I was invested in the conflicts between these characters and interested in how they would be played out.

Cortes’s whole methodology, however, is to fleece the viewer with a sucker-punch conclusion that really deflates a lot of the dramatic power earned up to that point. This is the kind of conclusion that requires a flashback to all the key ‘hints’ throughout the film. The kind of conclusion that the viewer doesn’t think of, not because it’s hard to figure out, but because it’s too tiresome and stupid.

The tension between the authentic, good film that could have been and the plagiarized, sneaky confidence trick it turns out to be leaves me ambivalent toward it. The narrative flaws I could have forgiven seem less venial without the good faith of the creator. The moments of skilful drama, owed primarily to the often wasted acting talent of Weaver, DeNiro, Murphy, and Toby Jones, make Red Lights passable entertainment—just remember, you can’t win a fixed game.

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.

Notes from the Turkeyground II: Another Month of Bad Movies

November is always a month my wife and I look forward to. Sure, for us horror zonks, October is the Halloween month. And we always watch a series of good movies. But sometimes we get bored of quality. We don't take it for granted--we get bored of it. Quality is always the same and all too stable, unless it's accompanied by a genius like Roman Polanski. But 'bad' movies are unpredictable, bubbling over with the unconscious, and capable of achieving greatness even without genius--or perhaps it's just a different kind of genius. That's where the November Turkey Challenge comes in. Hosted by Mr. Zombie CPA on the IMDb horror board, the Turkey Challenge is a race to watch as many 'bad' movies (rated lower than 4.5 on IMDb) as you can in a month.

My wife and I deliberately began the challenge on a risky note. We tried Dying God, a poorly-rated film from a new director. All we knew to expect was Lance Henriksen. What we got was a perverse, gritty detective movie about an Amazonian demon that rapes women to death. All the detective and monster-rape cliches are there in abundance and they come together to make a fairly entertaining SOV movie. As always, we asked ourselves, 'Why is it rated so low?' That our first movie raised that question boded well.

From there, we moved on to some 'turkey' favorites, namely, Roberta Findlay, Fred Olen Ray, and David DeCoteau. Roberta's movies are always bizarre, incoherent, and in a world of their own, but peculiarly entertaining. Blood Sisters, the only of her horror films we hadn't seen, proved her worse, however--and that was the end of our Findlay for the month. The Oracle and Lurkers still come recommended, though.

DeCoteau came to our rescue with his series of made-in-one-day-in-his-personal-mansion-with-a-series-of-moderately-attractive-twinks-in-their-underwear movies, 1313. Cougar Cult was the first. We were dazzled by the resurrection of scream queens Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens, and Michelle Bauer, and asked ourselves, 'Which one aged like fine wine, and which like an abandoned grape in a Frenchman's underpants?' Quigley seemed to have had some work done--I don't recall her canteloupes being quite so...canteloupey. Weren't they more like peaches before? They all looked good. I can't pick. I couldn't--I was distracted by the incredible werecougar transformation sequences. Who needs elaborate practical effets when you can just paste an non-animated gif image on screen, riht? Screw American Werewolf in London. Watch Cougar Cult.

Fred Olen Ray, however, was more our savior. He is every year, really. His Paul Naschy epic, Tomb of the Werewolf (2004) was a delightful fusion of two very different aesthetics, namely Ray's b-movie, T'n'A-fests, and Naschy's bonkers werewolf movies. My wife loved it. I just enjoyed it. I enjoyed Phantom Empire a lot more--a rewatch for me, but a very pure Fred Olen Ray film: it follows likable, goofy characters thrown into a confusing adventure-horror-sci-fi-fantasy plot that they joke their way out of while exposing plenty of tits along the way. Witch Academy followed. While a very enjoyable film, particularly Robert Vaughn's portrayal of the devil, it's one of those films from the end of Ray's really creative movies, closer to Evil Toons than to Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers.

I, however, gave myself a mega-dose of Ray's creative, '80s epics on my own. As my wife slept, I ingested The Tomb (1986), Scalps (1983), Alienator (1990), Bad Girls from Mars (1990), and my favorite, Beverly Hills Vamp (1989). Watching Beverly Hills Vamp, I realized it was one of those few films that gives me true joy--a desert island movie, a cheer-up movie, a watch over-and-over movie. Whether it's Eddie Deezen's flailing-arm approach to emoting, the 'this isn't going to be a habit with you' woman, the bizarre masochistic butler, the sexy vampire babes, or the unique vampire hunting team of Deezen, Robert Quarry, and Jay Richardson, I don't know--but I love it.

I would also be remiss not to note another 'savior' of 'bad' filmmaking, Mr. Jim Wynorski, the truest disciple of Roger Corman. His career followed pretty much the same trajectory as Ray's. I'm convinced Fred Olen Ray's creative arc started downward just when he teamed up with Wynorski, actually. Fred just couldn't do titty movies the way Wynorski could--Wynorski's somehow more convincing. Not of This Earth, a Corman remake, is one of the best b-movies ever made and watching it thrilled me. The made-for-SyFy epics, Bone Eater and Pirahnaconda were just silly fun. Cleavagefield was rubbish, but amusingly so.

What really makes the Turkey Challenge, however, is not revisting old budies like Ray and Wynorski. It's meeting new friends. And if there's one I did make this challenge, it was definitely Jeff Leroy. I knew nothing about this filmmaker before last month--though I had heard of Werewolf in a Woman's Prison--but I gave him a shot entirely on the basis of--well, I liked the title of his movie, Creepies. It's fun to say. Creepies. Creepies turned out to be a fun, ambitious, giant insect movie. Anyone with Leroy's budget wouldn't have tried the giant spider vs tank warfare he went for, but he did--and it works mostly due to his enthusiasm. Creepies 2 was pretty much the same thing, just a lot more, with pretty much the same budget. It's a fantastically fun homage to Harryhausen, Godzilla, and giant insect movies. Werewolf in a Woman's Prison is also an homage to various b-movie subgenres, but is ultimately a much more mature work. Like An American Werewolf in London crossed with Caged Heat, it's every bit as exciting, salacious, and enjoyable as the title promises, with great practical effects and some nice tits--especially on this one Mexican girl. Leroy keeps her in the movie a lot longer than justified, bless him.

Some other interesting acquaintances were Jeffrey Scott Lando, whose Alien Incursion, rated a whopping 1.9, is actually a pretty fun alien-beasts-attacking-idiots-in-the-woods movie. Bill Rebane, the outdoorsman-cum-b-movie auteur who made the apocalyptically boring Monster-a-Go-Go--a film not unlike getting one's face dragged through mud--turns out he made a good movie about an old American town with a haunted past, Demons of Ludlow--check it out. Richard Friedman. We started by watching Dark Wolf, his werewolf epic made in the 2000s. A sensual, arty, and meandering werewolf movie that's overlong and tries hard to create its own mythology. It has its moments. We were plenty surprised to find his career began in the '80s with the extremely goofy Doom Asylum--like a National Lampoon horror movie made for $500. We also watched Phantom of the Mall, which is somewhere between Dark Wolf and Doom Asylum and is every bit as uneven as that sounds. It also contains ample Pauly Shore.

A somewhat less interesting acquaintance is James Nguyen. The kind of acquaintance you snub on the street, because he'll just keep talking to you about his haemorrhoids, even though you just told him you're on your way to your little girl's first dance recital. You might know him as 'the Birdemic guy.' Because he made Birdemic. A very bad boy-meets-girl movie, involving the blandest, most robotic human simulacra, that gets interrupted by some terrible animated gifs of eagles he found on google image search. The movie ends when Adobe Premiere crashed. You can learn all about it in my upcoming interview with Jimmy N., "Nguyen Nowhere: The True Story of Birdemic."

But the excitement of the Turkey Challenge, unfortunately, does peter out about halfway through the month. The unconventional starts to become the norm, I start craving a good western, and my wife insists we play a video game instead. We still enjoyed a few Charles Band movies--The Dead Want Women and Evil Bong II being recommended--and the frustratingly bleak Wrong Turn 4 and 5 movies--why are those damned inbred hicks so invincible? shouldn't they have trouble standing up? They can't learn multiplication tables to save their lives, but they can rig elaborate Saw-esque traps? Shouldn't they spend all day biting the callouses that formed a natural boot over their feet? I dunno, maybe it's just me. But the challenge did end on the pleasant note of Haunted High, a Jeffrey Scott Lando made-for-SyFy haunted highschool movie. Best part of the movie? The fat computer nerd. Can't get enough of that guy.

As always, we come out of the Turkey challenge renewed, refreshed, with a new appreciation for quality, genius, animated gifs, and tits. Anyone who hasn't done the Turkey Challenge yet, I invite you to participate, see with new eyes--it's an education and a fun, unpredictable ride. For those who have participated, thank you for being my Comrades-in-Arms.

Until next November, stay hungry!