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31 Nights of Terror! Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

They say you can’t reinvent the wheel, which would seem to be true when you look at a lot of horror movies; after all there is very little that one can add to an old formula: psycho killer on the loose running about building tension and ultimately knocking off everyone in sight always falling short of complete revenge by being outsmarted by a single and solitary hero who will most likely be forced to relive the horror in subsequent sequels.

It turns out, however, that while you can’t reinvent the wheel, you can add iron and, later in history, rubber to it and create a tire, which is more like altering or upgrading the wheel, a good comparison to how Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon carves its niche into the horror genre. This film was one of those good surprise moments which make all of the bad surprise moments I put myself through on an almost daily basis worthwhile. I wasn’t expecting much from this movie at all; the title is redundant enough: Behind the Mask has been used so many times that it should be officially retired, the woman at the TLA thought I wanted a 2006 documentary about the Animal Liberation Front.

But name calling aside, the film itself is in fact a really interesting trip down familiar paths with a new and intriguing twist. The plot itself is basic enough: a documentary crew has found our new killer, Leslie Vernon, and decides to document his preparation for killing countless teenagers at an upcoming sleep over and it makes about as little sense as I can put up with. Why would they film something like this, why wouldn’t you call the police immediately, how come they are exempt from being guilty by association and how did they even fall on Leslie in the first place and so on and so on and so on.

Perhaps all of my questions can be answered in one sweeping suggestion that the film is making a subtle commentary about a documentary film maker’s role vis à vis the horrors and atrocities they must face in the name of capturing our world: watching the lion gorge a zebra or factions shooting each other in civil wars without ever putting down their camera to help those in need. Perhaps that is the question, and before you roll your eyes at the over-analysis, consider that it might not be so farfetched because that is what a great deal of Behind the Mask does.

Every aspect of the slasher horror film is dissected and analyzed in this movie, from motivations of the killers, to the symbolism of different trademark moments and, perhaps most amusingly, detailed explanations about how exactly the killers can do what they do. Do you remember the masked magician that used to be on TV all the time and showed everyone how to cut a woman in half or escape a straight jacket under water? That is what this movie does for Jason, Freddy and Michael Myers: how did they move from one window to the other so quickly? How did they get behind that guy? How did they survive a shot to the heart and so on down the list, all explained in a way which actually makes a lot of sense.

There were two great dangers with this movie and it escaped both of them beautifully: just when the film might be taking itself a bit too seriously, it has a humorous moment, but without gags- Shakespeare knew the importance of lightening the atmosphere between heavy moments and Behind the Mask does the same. The end could have been terribly boring since not only do we all know how films of this kind end, but we explained in excruciating detail how it would happen here. Luckily, there is a twist, which you can see coming a mile away, which nevertheless keeps the ending fresh and enjoyable.

Behind the Mask is also surprisingly low on the gore factor, much like the first Halloween movie, the blood is there when it logically would be, but never in excess and never more than when would be logical.

Behind the Mask is to the horror genre what The Matrix was to the action genre, the ‘smart’ movie dealing with an age old concept but carrying more weight and depth than predecessors. If you chose not to delve into the intricacies of the story, you don’t need to but if you enjoy having a little a little extra flavor added to your horror sandwich, Behind the Mask is not to be missed.

31 Nights of Terror! Paranormal Activity

When Blair Witch Project came out many people thought it was a real piecing together of film discovered in the woods, a phenomenon largely propagated by marketing surrounding the film which went as far as selling a book case-file of the police investigation following the disappearance of the hikers seen in the film. I know this because being the impressionable teenager I was back then I was one of the many sobs who not only saw the movie, loved it and believed it but also bought the t-shirt, the book and probably some playing cards or coffee mug which I most likely sold at a garage sale later in life. It would appear to me that this was the original marketing scheme that was set up for Paranormal Activity because the movie makes an extreme effort to pull off the same ‘real’ aspect, including no credits, the silly statement at the beginning explaining where the film came from and a quickly written out epilogue at the end.

For reasons unknown, the plug was obviously pulled on stressing this point to the public because for one I have not seen any kind of marketing pretending to be more than it is: a ghost movie and two, no one believes for a second that it is anything more than that anyway. What the marketers went ahead with was filmed reactions of test audiences, showing how nine out of ten people were scared witless by the film, thus promising you the same ride of terror should you dare go see this movie. Well, I took their dare to go see it and I can tell you the scariest thing about it is that it cost me $8.50 at the matinee. What has happened in this economy that I can go to the Ritz and get a good matinee in any day of the week for $6 but the giant corporate googaplexes need $2.50 more to function? Isn’t this supposed to be the other way around?

But I digress.

The test audience videos prove one thing I suppose, which is that people scare easily. This was further confirmed by the people around me who were jumping out of their wits and frankly I don’t understand: it’s just a door people, sure it’s swinging and I know it’s not supposed to do that but nevertheless it’s nothing to get all churned up about. Not to much of a surprise, Paranormal Activity didn’t live up to expectations, or even low expectations- in fact the film is about as boring as can possibly be. I wish I had gone back to the Chemical Heritage Foundation and watch the plants growing on exhibition, that was twice as exciting and it was free.

There is a reason that I don’t buy a hand held camera and live my entire life through it as if it were my eyes and then publish all of my exploits on the internet: it’s because I can safely conclude that a lot of the time I act like an idiot as most human beings do and my day to day mediocrity along with the impoverished humor and in-jokes I employ to keep myself from remembering that life is futile and we are all going to die are only funny to myself and perhaps a select few within my closest circles. I would be foolish to think that anyone else in the world would want to see such things let alone pay $8.50 ($10.50 at night, what’s more) to do so. As a result I am a bit displeased with Paranormal Activity for making me watch the two main characters acting this way for the better part of an hour.

Character development is always important but it also has to be interesting and, believe me, this is not going to be Broken Flowers so the slow paced multilayered action so slow you can see moss growing on it is not going to help a horror movie. The bottom line is that by the time the scares came on the screen I was half asleep and didn’t even care, I didn’t even feel very much in the mood for a scare anymore.

It’s probably for the better that I didn’t want to be frightened anyway because for the most part the film completely botched the creepy moments. The Idiot Plot makes a cameo again, with our hero Micah making foolish decisions throughout the film, he was basically a terrible human being and I can’t understand why anyone would want to be near him for long. If a daemonic evil were trashing my house I wouldn’t be cracking jokes and trying to provoke the spirit, I would be crying like a baby.

While Micah was a bad person, Katie was a bad actress, though I am willing to blame this one more on director Oren Peli than his cast. Everyone seems amazingly calm during certain moments when I would expect people’s minds to snap and never fully return.

Paranormal Activity is also funny at moments, though they certainly didn’t want it to be. There was one moment of serious laugh-out-loud comedy where I am sure I was supposed to feel bad for the characters but my friend and I could do nothing more than crack jokes at the pure stupidity of it all.

There are plenty of examples where the ‘we were filming something when evil arrived’ formula works: Blair Witch Project, REC and even its American remake Quarantine all are good examples but mostly because they are interesting, they have a pace and the acting makes us believe people are terrified, which in turn terrifies us. Paranormal Activity wants to do all of these things but fails miserably at it.

31 Nights of Terror! Repo! The Genetic Opera

I won’t lie, I was a Goth kid and even if I traded in my mascara and dresses for something a bit more traditional since those years of confused adolescence, I enjoy every now and then the occasional stimulation of the Goth gland. That is why on this dark and cold October night with a nor’easter turning Philadelphia into water world I decided it was the perfect moment to rent The Crow… which was rented out already. Frustrated about my defeat at the TLA, I looked onto the new releases in hopes of finding something which would suddenly fulfill my desire for generically dark.

That is how I fell upon Repo: The Genetic Opera and, honestly, if you saw the same DVD cover (shown here) wouldn’t you think you were on the right track? Well, regardless of your answer, I did and for the first fifteen minutes or so of this movie I was blown away into a Goth dork fantasy of the blickity blackest dark of obscurity of my teenage Goth shadowy past.

I seriously thought for a short while that I was looking at the rightful successor to the Rocky Horror Picture Show, a musical which touched me both in the silliest and also most profound way at the same time; until I realized that the film was not going to deliver on either of those aspects and I was going to get a gonzo of all the bad elements from Moulin Rouge, Dr. Horrible, Romeo and Juliet. This is the most frustrating kind of film for me to review because I wanted to like this movie, more than you can imagine, there was so much to like: it was dark, the costumes were amazing, the atmosphere was well set up, the sets were wonderful and the colors were vibrant in their moonlit shades. But this is just like being on the most amazing date you ever went out on who nevertheless continues to get on your nerves by eating with her mouth open, saying ‘like’ all over the place and talking complete nonsense, you cannot deny that it was a complete waste of time.

The film is officially an opera, but it is not and ‘circus’ at times seems to be a better word, what’s more, it is not the same as Rocky because Rocky knows it is not serious, but still pretends it is in a deliciously ironic way that it is, Repo, on the other hand, purposely stays in silly-land trying to be Dr. Horrible, which is a shame because if it had just not been afraid to go over the top it was on its way to greatness. All of the children characters are wrong. I won’t even blame the actors, the direction is clearly off the rocker here: they are one of the many elements which degenerate to clownish activity which I can only describe as disengaging, if not completely separated from the established mood in the beginning. The songs are awful, not a single one I remember, want to remember, want to hum or even think struck me as anything more than exactly what is wrong with musicals when people make fun of them: you can’t just sing dialogue, your dialogue should be a song and if you don’t see the difference between those two, you are most likely one of the writers of this atrocity.

I won’t play the Paris Hilton card because to be honest I wasn’t even aware I was watching her in this movie since she wears so much makeup and in any case is about a generic looking as you’re going to find on the Hollywood circuit. In all fairness to her as an actress, if I am not going to hell for calling her that as it is, her performance is not even the worst in the film- that prize goes to the annoyingly untalented Alexa Vega who should never play in anything else ever again in the history of cinema… ever. It’s not the sound I would expect from this kind of genre, it sounds nothing like kaRIN (yes, I spelled it right) but more like Taylor Swift, which is a problem because her sound has no place in this kind of film. Every time I heard her sing, I thought I was going to get a rendition of Love Story. Seriously, where the heck is Bjiork when you really need her?

This film broke my heart, by the end I found it had degenerate into a worthless photocopy of Moulin Rouge, and believe me, I am restraining myself. Every moment there was something truly beautiful on screen and I thought I might be able to overlook the imperfections, even towards the end when there was clearly a litany of bad acting, terrible songs and practically inexistent plot, I thought maybe the film could rise from the ashes.

Darren Lynn Bousman, I hate you…

31 Nights of Terror! Otto, or Up With Dead People

Let’s get this out of the way first: when I say Otto, I am referring to Otto, or Up With Dead People because I am not writing Otto, or Up With Dead People every time I want to make reference to the movie. Otto is a strange pick for Halloween but I won’t pretend to be surprised by what I got because I had read plenty about it well before I even got to the TLA. Philadelphia is proud host a large GLBT community and so this film is a nice little addition to 31 Nights of Terror featuring gay zombies… sort of.

I have to admit that the very idea of the entire story got my attention because I have some kind of strange sixth sense when movies that go completely batty in terms of subject matter appear on the scene. Otto gets your attention with the combined words gay zombie which certainly looks like a way of getting attention but if Bruce LaBruce’s filmography is anything to go by, it certainly comes across that the man just likes homosexuality… and zombies.

Nevertheless when I rented this film I was warned that not a lot of people had come back likeing it and even I was not waiting for it to be the next winner at the Berlin Film Festival but for the most part, Otto is a good little experimental German film that gets the most important element right: it knows what it is. Otto never gets out of line, overly artsy, preachy or shoving points in your face. In fact, I am not sure if I should take the points it does dish out seriously or not, so well laced with ironic and facetious overtones were they delivered.

The acting is what hold Otto together because all of the characters play their parts well and though for the zombies there isn’t much to say, the living cast was deliciously over the top in a neo-gothic German sort that just brushed me the right way.

The one amazing thing I cannot get over in Otto is the color: I can only assume that this was shot on HD and that is why everything looks so wonderfully beautiful, even for a low budget zombie flick. What makes the color so remarkable is that in a day and age where anything related to horror and/or drama seems to have a brownish/grey-black shade permanently glued to the camera lens, it becomes a rare thing indeed to see such lifelike colors and I thoroughly enjoyed being treated to Berlin and the German countryside in all of its splendor. In the end, Bruce LaBruce might be onto something in that respect because at the end of the day it’s true that blood is, well, red and with high definition it is only redder still, something that is almost by default a good thing in a horror film.

Nevertheless, the film felt overly amateur by the never ending abuse of camera options. I can’t stress enough that in most cases, less is more: certainly this rule might have a few exceptions in what I call the Return of the Jedi phenomenon, but for the most part if you can be simple and subtle, the chances are you should be. Otto should have followed in this suit but instead uses fade outs, filters, black and white shots, split screens and so on down the list, every option you will find on an advanced camera has been used in this movie and it doesn’t seem aesthetic at all, rather more like Bruce LaBruce had just bought the thing and was trying out all of the different things it could do.

The camera abuses were often coupled with a less than stellar soundtrack which one might try to sell off as ‘underground’ but I have heard enough ‘underground’ to know that it doesn’t so very much like that. This music was ‘experimental’ if I want to be nice and, if I don’t want to be nice’ sounds like wires clanking together inside a SEPTA bus being repaired in a tunnel: it’s just noise.

The story was also told in a very cut up manner- the editing is horrible in terms of what-goes-where and the last few end scenes which are supposed to clear up the mess do their job but left me feeling unsatisfied which I suppose could be called anticlimactic though I am not sure I would say this is the kind of film with a climax anyway.

Otto is a film which continues in the great tradition of making German cinema the most bizarre, and to some extent because of that the most interesting, I have ever seen. Ultimately I enjoyed Otto: its quirky, tongue in cheek and just plain fun in that way. That said, if you prefer your zombie movies to be entirely senseless to the nth degree with nothing but irrelevant teenage subplots, go see Zombieland.

Heartbeat Detector

I tell everyone: the best thing I ever did was get married, for all of the obvious reasons: my wife is brilliant, smart and always pushes me to be a better and more thoughtful person and I love her for every moment of it and enjoy every second I get to spend with her on Earth. But aside from that reason, I am also just glad to be married so I don’t have to put up with all of the madness that there is involved in dating: nine times out of ten you find that the person who you met and thought was going to be of amazing interest turns out to be nothing more than dull, boring or in some cases even flat out annoying and this is all the more difficult to swallow when they are dressed to the nines and looking beautiful, which is exactly the problem I had when I rented Heartbreak Detector.

Walking through the TLA is kind of like walking the red light district in Amsterdam where basically you’re judging a book by its cover or, in this case, a film by what the front of the DVD case looks like and though there is a little mumbled film description phrase scribbled on the back of those boxes, they are secondary to once you have been drawn in by the box art itself. Picking up Heartbeat Detector, I thought I had in my hands a masterpiece because the cover, same as the poster posted here, is for me simply stunning: a straight, cold and cubed flash of corporate beauty and simplicity along with one of my favorite French actors, Mathieu Amalric being reflected in a steel table causing an uncomfortable harmony.

The film itself begins exactly as I expected from said cover, within the highest ranks of corporate France where a CEO has unexpectedly lost his mind and our hero, a corporate psychologist, is sent in to find out what has happened. Things play out pretty much as I thought they would until somewhere around the half way point where it would almost seem that Nicolas Klotz put down his director’s megaphone and pulled out a soapbox, deciding that it would be infinitely more interesting to preach to his audience about the evils of capitalism than to tell the rest of the story. I was a bit agitated by this because I was really enjoying the movie up to that point and I thought I had made the right decision to review something from the TLA instead of the new Michael Moore movie but now it turns out that that they are one and the same thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew this was the direction the movie was going to take eventually, the title in French, ‘The Human Question’ told me that much and seeing how it was made in France it wasn’t a terribly shocking moment in my life when the characters living in a country infamous for its political views began discussing the evils of modern capitalism. I have no problem for say with a movie that wants to dabble in that world and by all means a film asking socio-economic issues will always grab my attention but this one goes not only too far but rather drives itself right off a cliff.

It turns out everyone working in the company is formerly associated with the Nazi’s and we begin to get indirect questions about life like ‘is there really any difference between a company that fires alcoholics for the sake of efficiency and what the Nazi’s did?’ and my answer is YES! WHY YES IN FACT THERE IS A DIFFERENCE, AN ENORMOUS DIFFERENCE.

It really gets to me when a film like this is doing so well and then goes off into directions that I simply can’t follow and it bothers me all the more when I want to like the movie: the shots and locations for this film were all perfectly chosen and everything from the simplicity of the costumes to the acting was stellar. I also thoroughly enjoyed the more subtle observances of people working in modern society, the desperate attempts to escape the mundane, the characters’ self-abuse in order to feel something and a bunch of other redundant themes were all well played out.

Sadly it simply isn’t enough to hold the film together, and especially not when it is constantly interrupted with songs, yes songs: there are at least three separate moments in which the film comes to a complete stop and we are submitted to an individual, none of whom are even characters in the movie, singing entire songs for no reason I was ever able to put together though I think that the idea was to show us the softer side of life, that ‘Human Question’ which the French title alludes to. I would certainly hope for the sake of the singers, however, that that isn’t really what was intended because I wasn’t move by them at all, in fact I didn’t like any of the signing and I think that if I were in a position of power and heard someone ruining my moment of peace like that I would be in my right mind to fire them and if they didn’t work for me I would force someone in human resources to get them on the payroll so I could fire them.

The bottom line is that Heartbeat Detector is a film that had a shot at greatness, but got caught up in its own sermon on the evils of living in modern society, focusing far too much on annoyingly simplistic means of story telling like the song scenes and repetitive poetry in order to project and even more vexingly simple message.

31 Nights of Terror! Asian Horror

I like Asia and its culture and though I have never yet had the opportunity to visit the continent I am persuaded by what I see on TV that I would be worshipped in Japan as some kind of deity: I am tall, bug eyed and act like a complete Looney Tune at times which, if I understand manga, fits the bill. The reality, of course, is that I don’t understand manga or really anything about Asisan culture aside from what I can piece together in the films that I watch, which is a shame because I always feel somehow distant with films from a far away culture, as if I am watching things happening through a window but without the real ability to directly associate with the characters.

It is for this reason that to a certain extent I do understand the American desire to remake Asian horror films almost scene by scene to up the chances of their having a box office success in the United States; after all it is hard enough to convince an American audience to watch anything with subtitles as it is and Asian horror might very well be a double edged sword in that sense.

You see the problem is that film is, as I have mentioned before, a visual media and as a consequence relies first and foremost on the accomplishment of its images to touch you in the desired manner, a fact which is slightly hindered by the necessity of reading subtitled text in the case of foreign films which is not a terrible handicap since the mind seems quite able to keep up, but it would appear at least from my point of view that this hic up is slightly more evident in horror. Look at The Eye for example: the mood was there, the set up was original and all of the elements of a good movie were in place, but because everything was in Chinese, the exact millisecond of a moment in which I should be watch the character walking about scared in the dark get jumped by a ghost screaming ‘I’m cold!!!’ I missed the fear factor jump because I was too busy reading to find out what the old hag said.

So there is some justification for the horror remake, albeit not without a consequence because whereas it seems sometimes the Japanese find it hard to make films that speak to anyone who is not Japanese, for example, the Americans seem to find it hard to make a film that can speak to anyone and so the results of ninety per cent of these remakes are terrible. That is to say, they all wanted to be The Ring but most of them were The Grudge.

But on the other hand, if we are to be fair a few trips to the TLA and a careful study of Asian horror will quickly prove Sturgeon’s Law to be very much correct and in reality most of what comes from abroad is just as bad as what we make at home. There almost appears to be some kind of rule where if the Asian film was good, the American one will butcher it but this can also work inversely. The Ring is a prime example of this: I have watched all three of the Japanese films and they are all boring if not flat out terrible- I don’t know if culturally photo negatives are scary and that is why the death scenes were seen to be so effective but someone made a good decision in cutting those in the western version. Inversely, Pulse is amazingly well done with an interesting but subtle commentary on society at large to go along with the freaky atmosphere- the American one felt that would hurt people’s heads and so opted out for a simpler and thus more mundane formula.

Then there are films which simply have never been remade but are worth discovering: the first two Death Note movies come to mind immediately which I won’t praise with all of my admiration here; I want to give those films their own space sometime in the future, each one deserves its own review. The film Battle Royale also comes to mind but I was never quite sure why exactly that counted as horror and I am confused every time I see it in a video store.

The point is that this holiday season we would all do well to get out of the box just a little bit and allow ourselves to be scared in a new and inventive way which we might not otherwise get to experience if we stay in our comfort zone and just Westernize everything we don’t understand. So go down to the TLA and get something different for your scare this evening. Share Halloween with the East: this is a continent that made erotic movies with tentacles for the love of God so imagine what they do when they want to be afraid!