Shocktober Revisited: The V/H/S Series

 editor's note: the following reviews originally appeared during coverage for Horror Fests VII and VIII, along with the 2014 Year End Recap.

 We decided to kick off Horror Fest with something I've been wanting to see for a while now, the "found footage" anthology film V/H/S. Normally the Cap'n isn't a fan of the "found footage" genre - the only two I've really enjoyed were The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield - but I thought the premise sounded interesting and one of the directors involved was Ti West. As you know, as a fan of The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, I'm on board with anything West has a hand in directing. Also, the Cap'n is a sucker for anthologies.

 The film is broken up into five segments, with a wrap around story that actually advances as the film goes on (which isn't often the case in anthology films):

 "Tape 56" - from director Adam Wingard (A Horrible Way to Die), a group of hooligans who like to videotape themselves exposing women and vandalizing property are hired to break into an old man's house and steal a videocassette. The only problem is that once they get there, the old man is dead and they don't know which tape to steal, so they watch the following stories:

 "Amateur Night" - from director Dave Bruckner (The Signal), three friends head out for a night of drunken sex with camera glasses in tow, but when they bring the wrong girl back to their motel room, the party takes a dark and twisted direction.

 "Second Honeymoon" - from Ti West (The Roost), a couple is sightseeing in Colorado and Arizona when a strange woman begins following them around, and eventually visiting them in their motel room, while they sleep...

 "Tuesday the 17th" - from Glenn McQuaid (I Sell the Dead), a young woman brings her friends up to a lake she visited last year, but her plans may not be as innocent as partying and smoking pot...

 "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily when She was Younger" - from Joe Swanberg (LOL), Emily and her husband are separated while he's in medical school, but she's having trouble dealing with noises in her apartment and a strange bump on her arm...

 "10/31/98" - from Radio Silence (Mountain Devil Prank Fails Horribly), a guy dressed as a nannycam bear and his friends arrive at the wrong house for a Halloween party, and instead find something more disturbing in the attic. When they intervene, they realize what they stopped wasn't the worst thing that could happen on Halloween...

 I'd heard positive and negative reactions to V/H/S, and I guess I can understand both. People prone to motion sickness from "found footage" movies may as well steer clear, as you'll be ill from the opening shots and it's not going to get any better. The ways that the stories use videotaped footage are, for the most part, clever, although I'd love to hear anybody's explanation of who would videotape a Skype conversation using a camcorder so that the wraparound story characters could watch it. But, if you're willing to overlook certain logical inconsistencies, I guess that for the most part they work.

 The "video glasses" in "Amateur Night" are probably the most successful because they limit our perspective in such a way that the ending is a surprise and it generally explains the age-old "why don't they just turn the camera off" question. This also works in "Second Honeymoon" and "10/31/98"'s favor, and "Tuesday the 17th" relies on keeping the camera rolling to reveal the killer. It's really just the Skype gimmick in "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She was Younger" that strains logic.

 Like most anthologies, there are a mixture of good segments, weaker sections, and one or two really impressive moments that help others to stand out. The ending of "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily" manages to elevate the story beyond a retread of Paranormal Activity territory. The fact that the characters in "Tape 56" are all loathsome assholes is overcome with the slow realization that watching these tapes are causing them to disappear one by one (although the reason isn't necessarily clear until the end), and great makeup effects and a gonzo ending help "Amateur Night" overcome its otherwise uninteresting protagonists. It will also make you second guess any girl who ever tells you "I like you" after a few drinks...

 I suppose that while I didn't necessarily like how lopsided "Tuesday the 17th" was in setting up the story before becoming an all out gorefest, the way the killer is handled was inventive and made the best use of the "videotaped" gimmick.

 Of all of the segments, "10/31/98" was probably my favorite, which is appropriate as they save it for last, after even "Tape 56" reaches its conclusion. When things move from suggested creepiness to all out special effects bonanza (handled really well considering it needed to be integrated with camcorder level video images), the segment earns the aimless first section, and the conclusion is satisfying and appropriately dark.

 Oddly, while West's "Second Honeymoon" suffers from the least motion-sickness inducing camerawork, it may be the most abrupt story conclusion and compared to the other entries is possibly the least satisfying. The "home invasion" elements are quite creepy, and West builds tension in appropriately slow pace, dropping hints about what's coming, but even more so than in The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, the conclusion is too rushed to be satisfying. I understand what he was trying to do, but the twist comes about so quickly and ends immediately afterward, leaving little time to digest what just happened. It doesn't seem unfair that the guy watching that tape says "what the hell was that?" when it ends.

 Is V/H/S going to be for everybody? Probably not. It is a better-than-average anthology movie, which I count as a plus, and as I said mostly makes the best of the "found footage" gimmick, but not all of the segments are good enough to sustain the runtime, even if some of their conceits help keep audiences engaged. I can't really say that it transcends either the "found footage" or anthology subgenre, and it's going to make some of you feel very queasy well before "Amateur Night" kicks into high gear, so consider this a conditional recommendation.

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V/H/S 2 is a marked improvement on just about every aspect of V/H/S, and this is coming from someone who enjoyed the first film. It’s a weird point of cognitive dissonance for me, because I love anthology films but mostly hate “found footage” films, so V/H/S had to overcome its conceit with interesting segments and succeeded half of the time (I largely prefer the first and last entries in the film – the bat-creature and the haunted house). That said, it was too long, stretched the “frame” story too far, and is something I “liked” more than really “enjoyed.” I haven’t seen it again since last year and don’t know that I will any time soon.

 On the other hand, I've already seen the second film twice this year; V/H/S 2 drops the segments, cuts down on the length, and provides a more satisfying overall experience, which is critical for any anthology. The “frame” story, “Tape 49” is more focused and streamlined while still loosely tying in to the first film, and three out of the four “tapes” are winners, with the other one an inspired effort. Let’s take a look at how the film breaks down:

 “Tape 49” – from Simon Barrett (the writer of You’re Next), follows a dubious private investigator and his assistant as they break into the house of a missing college student, only to find a familiar setup involving VCRs and TVs in the living room. A laptop video from the missing student suggests that playing the tapes “in the right order” will change you, and they seem to be having an odd effect on the investigator’s assistant.

“Phase I Clinical Trials” – Adam Wingard (The ABCs of Death) directs and stars as an accident victim who receives an experimental artificial eye which is, for research purposes, filming everything. Things seem to be going well until he notices strange goings-on in his house, and a stranger turns up to warn him that the longer he can see dead people, the more they can interact with him. How does she know? Her cochlear implant has the same effect, and it may already be too late for both of them…

“A Ride in the Park” – from Eduardo Sánchez and Gregg Hale (The Blair Witch Project), a biker has plans for a nice ride through the woods when he runs into a familiar horror monster, and thanks to his helmet camera, takes us on a first-person journey through the “eyes” of the undead.

“Safe Haven” – from Gareth Evans (The Raid: Redemption) and Timo Tjahjanto (The ABCs of Death), a documentary crew is allowed access to the compound of a cult promising “Paradise on Earth.” Little do they realize that their spy cameras will do more than expose what’s going on behind closed doors – their arrival signals the beginning of the end…

“Alien Abduction Slumber Party” – from Jason Eisener (Hobo with a Shotgun) comes, well, exactly what it promises. Teenagers put up with their obnoxious preteen brothers and friends, until invaders from another world decide they want everybody, including the dog.

 The “frame” story benefits from stripping down the main characters to two (there were too many people in the first film) and keeps the in-between segments shorter and to the point. While you might miss it the first time, there are quite a few references to the first film and the “mythology” behind why somebody would collect these tapes. I would imagine this will expand as the series goes on (it’s hard to see why there wouldn’t be more), so it doesn’t feel intrusive and people who hadn’t seen the first V/H/S didn’t feel lost in the meantime.

 Every one of the entries is an improvement over the first film, not simply because they’re shorter (“Safe Haven” is the longest of the four and deservedly so). While it’s still hard to argue why anybody would transfer this footage tape, let alone circulate bootlegged copies, there’s nothing as credibility straining as the “Skype” segment from V/H/S. “A Ride in the Park” manages to take the overdone (if still wildly popular) zombie story and present it from a perspective you haven’t seen before and mixes in other camera angles in a fairly clever way. “Phase I Clinical Trials” makes good use of a limited perspective “first person” camera and builds some tension with creepy imagery.

 If there’s a weak link in the lot, it’s probably “Alien Abduction Slumber Party”, and mostly because it comes after the truly fantastic “Safe Haven.” Evans and Tjahjanto’s tour-de-force is an almost impossible act to follow, and “Slumber Party” is good, even when you consider that Eisener breaks three cardinal rules of movie-making (don’t work with children, don’t work with animals, and don’t kill either if you do). His novel use of the camera attached to the dog makes the frenetic chases near the end more interesting and explains the “why are they still filming this?” problem inherent to “found footage.”

 The undisputed winner is “Safe Haven,” for reasons I don’t want to spoil for people who haven’t seen V/H/S 2, because you should see the film if for no other reason than this segment. It’s an ominous buildup that turns into a rollercoaster of “holy shit!” with a perfect final line that’ll make you chuckle. I didn’t even realize I’d missed the last line until the second time I saw it, which caps off an already impressive exercise in ratcheting up the stakes for a film crew in far over their heads. The rest of V/H/S 2 is icing on the cake, which is not to diminish Eisener’s effort or the conclusion to “Tape 49,” which is more satisfying than the end of V/H/S.

Before we watched V/H/S 2, the Cap’n screened “Incubator,” a short I saw last year at Nevermore, and “One Last Dive,” another short from Eisener that shows just how much you can do with one minute. While I enjoy Hobo with a Shotgun to a degree, Jason Eisener has to this point really impressed the Cap’n with the short films he’s directed, edited, and produced. Not to bag on his feature length endeavor, but he really knows how to pack a punch in a short film.

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Remember how V/H/S was too long and only had a few good segments, but the frame story was fairly interesting even though why would you tape a Skype conversation and put it on a tape? And then V/H/S 2 was a marked improvement in every way, because it was shorter and the vignettes were more concise and creepier, even if the frame story was kind of a mess? I guess when the time came to make V/H/S Viral - which might as well be "3" based on the end of the movie - everyone involved from the producers to the writers and directors forgot that.

 The wrap around story makes almost no sense until the very end, and aside from an amusing cookout gone wrong, there's nothing but gore for gore's sake until the mysterious van that causes people go turn violent is shoehorned into the V/H/S mythos (such as it is). If clips from the first two films weren't crammed in as cutaways, you wouldn't even know it was supposed to be part of the same series. The "tapes" are abandoned completely, leaving us with a combination documentary / found footage story of a magician whose cape gives him real powers, a trip into another dimension that, initially, looks like ours but really, really isn't, and twenty minutes with the most obnoxious skaters you're likely to meet, who are eventually killed by zombies or eaten by a demon the zombies are summoning.

 Of the segments, the second one - "Parallel Monsters" - by Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes) is the only one worth watching. That said, it's so over the top that you're liable to start laughing at the "reveal" of how the alternate universe is structured. The Day of the Dead / Skater video only gets remotely interesting near the end, when it's clear they can't kill the cult members in Tijuana. Everything else is an absolute waste of time, and I worry that trying to turn the series from a Videodrome-like vibe to a "viral video" ending (think The Signal or Pontypool, but much worse) isn't going to serve V/H/S well.

Shocktober Revisited: Mini-Reviews!

 Sometimes, horror movies get rolled up in other quick reviews, and accordingly can be missed. The following quick takes are from various points over the years, so the quality of the review(s) can vary wildly:

Die, Monster, Die! - Based on H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space in the same way that The Haunted Palace is based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (loosely), this AIP production has some effective imagery, but finds a way to drag on long enough to make 78 minutes feel like two hours. It's not lacking in atmosphere, and Boris Karloff certainly gives as much as he possibly can (which is saying something, as the actor was in poor enough health that he spends most of the film confined to a wheelchair), but I had trouble remembering much about the film hours after finishing it.

 Lovecraft's town of Arkham, Massachusetts, is relocated to England so that American student Stephen Rinehart (Nick Adams) can travel to the Whitley manor on the outskirts of town. Nobody in Arkham wants to talk to him about the Whitleys, nor will they provide him with any means of transportation, so Rinehart has to walk. It gives us the opportunity to see the desolate lands on the outskirts of the manor, and what looks like a huge crater, surrounded by dead trees that crumble to dust when touched. After dodging a bear trap at the gate, he enters the Whitley manor to find himself unwelcome by its patriarch, Nahum Whitley (Karloff), despite having been invited by Nahum's daughter, Susan (Suzan Farmer).

 Something is obviously very wrong at the Whitley house, and Nahum's wife Letitia begs Stephen to take Susan away (they were students at an unnamed university in the U.S.), against Nahum's objections. Letitia is bedridden and refuses to let anyone see her, and Nahum is opposed to taking her to a doctor in town. Their maid went insane and lurks around the grounds under a black veil, and their butler Merwyn (Terence de Marney) is barely capable of lifting silverware without collapsing. A strange glow is coming from the (locked) greenhouse, and it's rumored that Nahum's father, Corbin Whitley, practiced black magic (because, you know, it kind of makes it sound like it's connected to The Haunted Palace, maybe?), which seems to be confirmed from the artwork scrawled in the cellar of the mansion.

 Unfortunately, for all of the mystery surrounding the Whitleys and what writer Jerry Sohl cobbled together from The Colour Out of Space and more topical concerns (circa 1965) about radiation, Die, Monster, Die! is mostly a movie about wandering around a spooky house with candles until something jumps out. Audiences who bemoan "jump" scares in modern horror films will roll their eyes at no less than three such moments in Die, Monster, Die!, all of which have the bad form to continue well after it's clear they aren't scary. There are some nice images - the matte painting of the meteor crash looks very good, and the "zoo" of deformed creatures / aliens (it's never very clear) in the greenhouse "shed" make an impression, but the pacing of the film drags on endlessly.

 Lovecraft fans will, in all likelihood, not enjoy the explanation given to why the meteorite causes strange and horrible things to happen to the vegetation (SPOILER - it's Uranium) or the way that Die, Monster, Die! devolves into a "we have to fight the monster before we escape," wherein Boris Karloff is replaced by a stuntman wearing a glowing prototype of the "Green Man" outfit under his suit. I honestly can't remember if they even explain what happens to the maid after she tries to attack Stephen and falls down, but it's not the kind of plot point I'm even worried about following up on. While I've seen worse adaptations of Lovecraft stories, I'd be hard pressed to say I've seen one that's more of a slog to get through than this one.

Terminal Invasion - Cranpire's love of this film used to vex me. Admittedly, I'd only seen it in pieces on the Sci-Fi Channel and it looked like their run of the mill crap, just with Bruce Campbell. Now that I've watched the whole thing, I can understand why he enjoys it so much. Kind of.

I'll give credit where credit's due: director Sean S. Cunningham (Friday the 13th) is a more competent director than most of the "Sci-Fi Original" stable of no-names. Terminal Invasion is a cross between Pitch Black and John Carpenter's The Thing, with a small dose of Assault on Precinct 13 thrown in for good measure, and Cunningham rises to the occasion. For what's essentially a ripoff of other sci-fi / horror movies, it's pretty good. There's certainly no fat on this movie, so every scene exists to set up something later.

The story takes place on a snowy night while a small band of travelers are trapped in a charter plane lobby. Campbell is a criminal being transferred who ends up in their midst, along with some nasty alien invaders disguised as humans. You can figure out where it goes from there if you've seen any of the movies above.

What I appreciated about Terminal Invasion is the way it sets up twists in the story based on things you assume to be true at the beginning. While I was pretty sure I knew who was an alien and who wasn't (and was mostly right), there's at least one genuine surprise halfway into the movie. Cunningham uses the limited geography of the terminal to telegraph plot points later, which I find to be rare of Sci-Fi Originals.

That being said, this is still a made for TV movie, and it shows. Most sets are over-lit so that shooting can commence from any angle, so even the dark scenes are pretty bright. The cgi, while used sparingly, is still five or six steps below the early Nasonex commercials. At least twice during Terminal Invasion, the movie "Fades to Commercial", and it looks silly without actual commercials.

However, most of these are acceptable if considered in the context of how Terminal Invasion came to be. The unfortunate cost cutting exercise comes during "attack" scenes involving the aliens. The camera is normally pretty stable, but when the aliens attack there's a postproduction "herky-jerky" effect that just looks dirt cheap.

Still, with expectations set properly, Terminal Invasion is pretty good for what it is, and I'd probably watch it again. Bruce is pretty good despite having to play the "stoic" type for most of the movie. Not many wisecracks to be seen here, but there is some decent gore and Terminal Invasion would be good times with a six pack and your buddies.

Dark Shadows and Frankenweenie - Tim Burton continues along his path of "things you recognize, re-imagined by a director you really used to like" by adapting the long running gothic soap opera Dark Shadows and his own short film, Frankenweenie, but this time it's stop-motion animated and three times as long.

Are you ready for the shocker? I actually liked Dark Shadows more than Frankenweenie. Nobody else did, but Dark Shadows isn't nearly as horrible as I expected it to be, and instead of nonstop jokes about the 1970s, it's a surprisingly atmospheric and violent meditation on family ties. That said, it has too many characters, superfluous cameos that really don't move the plot forward (Alice Cooper, I'm looking at you), and while it's better than I was prepared for, that doesn't mean it's even close to the best Tim Burton is capable of. I suppose after being disappointed by Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Corpse Bride, the idea of a marginally entertaining Tim Burton film was refreshing. That said, everybody else seems to hate it, so be warned.

 Frankenweenie could be better if Burton could figure out how to stretch a 30 minute short film into a full narrative, but he didn't. Basically the structure of the original Frankenweenie has been elongated and stitched together with a clever pastiche of Joe Dante-esque "monsters run amok" - including the best (and possibly only) Bambi Meets Godzilla reference I can remember. Unfortunately, the first forty five minutes drag so much that it's more of a relief than a delight when the reanimated pets wreak havoc all over New Holland. I will say it was nice to (hear) Catherine O'Hara, Martin Short, and Winona Ryder return to the Burton-verse, but ultimately Frankenweenie overstays its welcome before it has the chance to be any fun.

 Zombeavers - I didn't go into Zombeavers expecting it to be any good. This sounds counter-intuitive with what I said earlier in the recaps about trying to avoid bad movies, but I didn't watch Sharknado and this seemed like it might be an acceptable substitute. I mean, it couldn't possibly get better than the poster, or the inherently stupid premise, right? It would quickly get lazy and then I would get bored, like I normally do with Syfy Originals or movies that look like that (*coughTheAsylumreleasescough*).

 So imagine my surprise to discover that Zombeavers is a (slightly) higher budgeted version of a movie like Blood Car or Rise of the Animals. True, this is not a scrappy, home made production - how could it be with a "From the Producers of American Pie, Cabin Fever, and The Ring" on the poster? - but it has the same anarchic spirit of those movies. At times, it's actually as bad as those can be, but what helps Zombeavers (a lot, actually) is that every time you think it's not worth sticking through, something you wouldn't expect either happens or comes out of someone's mouth. Either the film takes a truly unexpected turn - which it does - or one of the characters has a line that evokes a "wait, what?" and you don't mind sticking around.

 I felt like I was in pretty good hands during the prologue, which features Bill Burr and an unrecognizable John Mayer (yep, "Your Body is a Wonderland"'s John Mayer) as drivers hauling around chemical waste and shooting the shit, often in increasingly strange ways. They eventually hit a deer, which leads to a barrel of said chemicals rolling down into a stream and to (dun dun DUUUUNNN) a beaver dam. Because, yes, this is a movie about zombie beavers. Or Zombeavers, if you will. Also, there are three college students: Mary (Rachel Melvin), Zoe (Courtney Palm), and Jenn (Lexi Atkins), who are having a "girls' weekend" in order to forget about Mary's boyfriend Sam (Hutch Dano) cheating on her. But he shows up anyway, with Tommy (Jake Weary) and Buck (Peter Gilroy) in tow, so it becomes a slightly uncomfortable couples weekend. With Zombeavers.

 You might struggle through the "set up" part of the film, and I nearly turned it off while the girls were on the way to the cabin, but some of the lines are so out of left field that I stuck with it. The tone is borderline surreal, from the "is this serious" hunter (Rex Linn) that they run into, to the neighbors near the cabin (Brent Briscoe and Phyllis Katz), who turn out to be way more savvy about kids than you'd expect. And there's a bear, but mostly, it's the Zombeavers. Which look like nothing more than marginally articulated puppets and are hilarious. You see, sometimes a cheap looking monster can elevate a B-Movie from "that was okay" to "that was amazing," and the titular zombified beavers are worth the price of admission. It doesn't hurt that Zombeavers gets even weirder when the "rules of infection" kick in, but the monsters are the stars of the show. Stick around after the credits - which include a song about the movie that puts Richard Cheese to shame - for an even better zombie related pun. If it sets up a sequel, I could be onboard with that, but if not, well played, Jordan Rubin...

 John Dies at the End -This is a faithful adaptation of David Wong's novel by Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Bubba Ho-Tep), at least for the first half. The film gets to about the halfway point in the book, and then realizes it has thirty minutes to wrap up the rest of the story, so liberties are taken. Honestly, I didn't mind them, because I knew what was being condensed and most of the spirit is kept intact.

 That said, I totally understand why people who haven't read John Dies at the End don't like the movie. There's a sense of context that's missing from the film as it hurtles towards its conclusion that further confuses the comedy / horror tone and probably loses a lot of people. If you haven't read the book, I wouldn't watch the movie at all. You're going to hate it because of how it collapses in the last thirty minutes. If you have read the book, know Coscarelli mostly made sensible changes (not going to Vegas, diminishing Amy's role in the overall story, dropping certain elements of Korrok's plan), and made at least one I don't really understand (changing Molly's name), and two I don't know how I feel about (no Fred Durst and John's band doesn't sound nearly as bad as I thought it would). I dig John Dies at the End, and if it ever happens, I'd watch This Book (Movie?) is Filled with Spiders, although with what they had to do on a low budget here, I can't imagine that ever happening. That's a shame.

 World War Z - One could suppose that if Warm Bodies was a zombie movie for teenage girls, then World War Z is a zombie movie for people who vaguely know the word "zombie" in popular culture. It's not even really a horror movie - more of an action / disaster hybrid with a redesigned third act that inches towards suspense but still ends up like a tamer 28 Days Later. And I watched the "unrated" version, for the record. I can only imagine how toothless World War Z must have been in theaters. Still, it has a scrappy, amiable charm for a big budgeted blockbuster studio "tent pole" movie.

 Based almost not at all on the book of the same name by Max Brooks, World War Z is the story of Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), a retired UN investigator living with his family, until the zombie outbreak begins, that is. Then the Deputy Secretary General Thierry Umutoni (Fana Mokoena) brings him back in to travel around the world and see what caused the outbreak, from South Korea to Israel and eventually to a World Health Organization research center in Ireland. Separated from his family, and with continually dwindling support, Gerry finds that the zombie outbreak is capable of overcoming even the most fortified of cities, and unless they can find a cure, humanity is doomed.


 World War Z is essentially a travelogue designed to show off various big action set pieces, which director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Quantum of Solace) does fairly well, and which Brad Pitt responds to with a reasonable sense of urgency. The zombies are sometimes people in makeup but are usually great swaths of CGI mayhem, particularly during the siege of Jerusalem. The movie makes an abrupt turn in the section in Ireland, due in large part because the delay in World War Z's release had everything to do with the third act not working, so they scrapped the original ending in Russia and went with a more sparse, claustrophobic ending. It works, although you can see loose threads of plot line in the film as a result - the main example is Matthew Fox's UN soldier who doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose other than to help move Gerry's family around, but who in the original version "takes" his wife and daughter as his own. Now it just seems like an oddly high profile casting choice for a minor role at best. Doctor Who fans already know the prescient casting of Peter Capaldi as the WHO Doctor (that IS how he appears in the credits).

 There's not really much else to say about the movie. I thought it was watchable, if mostly average. The story behind the movie is more interesting than the finished product. The survival bits near the beginning and towards the end are good, but have been done better before. All of the big action sequences are bombastic and if you like explosions and zombies and some degree of violence, the unrated cut is certainly worth your time. It's popcorn fare through and through, which is fine and dandy every now and then, but I can't imagine that I'd be all that enthused for World War Z 2.

The ABCs of Death 2 - is like V/H/S 2 in that it takes everything that worked about the first film, jettisoned most of what didn't, and was more fun to watch. The premise is still the same: twenty six directors each receive a letter from the alphabet, and have free reign to come up with a 2-3 minute short film that conveys a word and, in some form or fashion, death. The ABCs of Death had some interesting entries ("Unearthed" was a good one), but leaned heavily on scatological humor ("F is for Fart" was the tip of the iceberg, it turned out), and then there were the "oh, I didn't need to see that, not ever" letters. Like "Libido" and "Pressure." It turns out there are things you might want to un-see, and several of them are in The ABCs of Death.

The ABCs of Death 2, by comparison, has nothing as traumatic, and I would suspect it would play a lot better with an audience than the first one did. Watching that one at Nevermore, there was a lot of... shall I say, stunned silence as the film went on. There are certainly some "what the hell was that?" parts in the sequel, but nothing you're going to apologize for exposing someone to. The only thing that comes close is the last segment, "Z is for Zygote," which is centered around an already unforgettable image that closes on an even more disturbing note. I know that people don't like "P is for P-P-P-P-Scary!" but I thought it had an unhinged quality, somewhere between the weirder Betty Boop cartoons and Black Lodge-era David Lynch, that worked for me.

 As with the first film, you'll find highlights ("A is for Amateur") and lowlights ("V is for Vacation"), but there's nothing in The ABCs of Death that comes close to 2's "M is for Masticate," a slow motion gross out with a wicked joke at the end. There's also "D is for Deloused," which reminded me a bit of a Brothers Quay short. I'll leave most of the discovery for you, but if you kind of liked the first film, I strongly suspect you'll enjoy this one more.

 Horns - I feel like there's a better movie somewhere in Alexandre Aja's Horns. Maybe it got lost in the editing, or maybe it's just inherent in the adaptation of Joe Hill's novel, but the finished product just don't quite work. It's as though Aja made a bitterly funny, black comedy, and also made a more generic, teen-friendly story of good and evil, and then smashed them together at the worst possible junctures. For the opening twenty minutes of Horns, you're probably going to think the movie is great: it has a wicked mean streak, Daniel Radcliffe is spot on as a guy everyone thinks is a murderer, that embraces the horns he grows and the power that comes with it. The way people react, first telling him their darkest fantasies and then acting on them when he says they should, is often hilarious.


 And then we hit the first of what turn out to be several, lengthy, flashbacks, giving us the backstory of Ig (Radcliffe) and Merrin (Juno Temple), leading up to her death - the one everyone assumes Ig is responsible for. Everyone, including his family - played by James Remar, Kathleen Quinlan, and Joe Anderson - is positive he did it and that he's lying, with the exception of his friend, Lee (Max Minghella). The "whodunit" is pretty easy to work out for yourself, even if Aja, Hill, and screenwriter Keith Bunin throw in a number of red herrings. I bet, without telling you anything else, you can guess who the real killer is. That's not the problem, so much as the flashbacks that put the mystery together. There's a massive tonal shift from black comedy to slightly tragic story of temptation and of good and evil (on a biblical scale), and for some reason, ne'er the twain shall meet in Horns.

 I can understand how it might have worked in Hill's novel - which I haven't yet read, but plan to - but as a film, the structure of the story is at times jarring and disruptive. Maybe there was no way to properly balance the two in a film, because Horns alternates between wicked and bland, between clever and obvious, without ever finding a good middle ground. There are some fantastic moments sprinkled throughout the film, and the cast is game for anything, playing both the best and worst versions of themselves as they encounter "evil" Ig, but Horns gets away from them. It's never quite the movie that it could be, so I'm left feeling ambivalent with the end result.

 The Innkeepers - From Ti West, the director of The House of the Devil, comes another slow burn horror film where tension continues mounting and the sense of dread is palpable. Instead of replicating the horror of the early 1980s, West's "haunted hotel" follow-up is set squarely in the present, and he's just as adept at creeping you out with slow tracking shots, suggested noises, and believable characters you relate to. Sara Paxton's Claire is a young woman without much of a clue what she want to do or be, who becomes way too interested in Luke (Pat Healy)'s hobby: ghost hunting. She's fixated on finding the spirit of Madeline O'Malley, a bride who killed herself in the hotel in the 1890s.

 On the last weekend that the Yankee Padler hotel is open, Luke and Claire trade off shifts, watching over the last remaining hotel tenants - former actress / new age guru Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis) and a mysterious Old Man (George Riddle) - while they hunt for evidence of O'Malley's presence. West doles out the scares slowly but surely, and only towards the very end do things go the way most horror films go. In fact, if there's any fault to be found in The Innkeepers, it's that what comes before and after the climax of the film are undermined ever so slightly by what we know HAS to happen, even if the subtle clues of why it happens don't always add up. Without spoiling too much, I can say that the film is an example of the kind of movie 1408 could have been, one that eschews cheap histrionics and trickery and deliberately ratchets up the "willies" factor.

 Fans of The House of the Devil are going to find a lot to love about The Inkeepers, but if you like your horror fast and relentless, this may seem a little slow for your tastes. For me? Let's just say I had to watch something else after I finished it, because I wasn't going to bed.

Blogorium Review: The Sacrament

 On the off chance you haven't heard about The Sacrament, it's the newest film from Ti West (The House of the Devil) - his first feature in the three years since The Innkeepers. If you've been keeping up with him, watching his features and contributions of V/H/S and The ABCs of Death, this is exciting news. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to temper it a bit for you, because The Sacrament might have been a tense thriller, but it isn't. Instead, it's fraught with bad decisions in the narrative structure, in adapting its source material, and most of all, its central conceit: the dreaded "found footage" subgenre.

 Patrick (Kentucker Audley, Ain't Them Bodies Saints) is a fashion photographer in New York who hasn't seen his sister in a long time. She had serious drug problems, and while cleaning up, she joined a religious community in rural Mississippi. While relaying the story to friends, Sam (AJ Bowen, The Signal), a reporter for an online news site, gets the idea to film their reunion for a story. Patrick's sister Caroline (Amy Seimetz, Upstream Color) sent a letter explaining that they've left the country to create "heaven on Earth" without interference, so Patrick, Sam, and cameraman Jake (Joe Swanberg, Drinking Buddies) land outside of their undisclosed location. After passing through a heavily guarded entrance, they find themselves in Eden Parish, a community that seems too good to be true, where everyone is happy and self sufficient, under the protective watch of Father (Gene Jones, Oz the Great and Powerful). But all is not what it seems in Eden Parish - Caroline is behaving... strangely, and Father has his own plans for the journalists.

 If you know anything about Jim Jones or the Jonestown Massacre*, not only does this synopsis sound very familiar, but I'm sorry to say that you already know exactly how The Sacrament is going to play out. Other than changing the names and moving the time period from the 1970s to the present, there's very little variation on the basic story of what happened to that religious sect, all the way down to their paranoia about the government and even the method by which the Massacre ends. There are hints that something else might be afoot earlier in the film, but those plot threads are abandoned quickly or given more mundane explanations (in particular what Caroline wants with Patrick). If you don't know anything about Jonestown, you might be a little less tuned in to where things are going (unless you watch the trailer, which gives everything away), but the disappointment that West didn't do anything interesting at all with the story is still going to dull the experience.

 West reunites with some of his fellow cast members from You're Next (he has a cameo in the film and SPOILER a pretty good death scene): Bowen, Seimetz, and Swanberg. Beyond the main characters, there isn't much in the way of Eden Parish's faithful that make much of an impression beyond basic "types": the nurse, the old lady, the teenage boys, the little girl who doesn't talk, the suspicious mother. They don't enhance the world West is building, but instead just serve a purpose in moving the story along to its inevitable conclusion. It's a shame, because one of the things I've really enjoyed about West's films are the characters, who you sympathize with and want to spend time around.

 Maybe it makes up for it that The Sacrament is not what we've come to know as a "Ti West" film, at least based on his last two (and generally, much enjoyed) efforts. The hand-held, shaky camerawork brings a sense of immediacy that's a stark contrast to the tracking shots and long takes he employed to such great effect in The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers. It's an admirable step away from what he's known for, an extension of his segment in V/H/S (admittedly, one of my least favorite sections of that anthology), so in some sense it's commendable West is stepping outside of what he's known for in the horror genre. That said, "found footage" may not have been the best choice to branch out into.

 To West's credit, he finds a way to avoid most of the problems with "found footage" by appropriating Vice News (with their permission, I would gather), a media organization that goes into areas of conflict or otherwise "verboten" places to cover news stories that wouldn't be featured otherwise. Their handheld style works well within the "found footage" tropes, and it explains why someone would continue filming well past the point they should. But it's a double-edged sword, because The Sacrament isn't strictly "found footage" - early in the film, it's clear that the footage we're seeing has already been professionally edited with informational text overlaid on the image. While it may not be immediately apparent, you slowly realize that whatever happens to the protagonists, somebody made it out and cobbled this footage into a Vice "report," which robs the second half of the film of much of its tension.

 It also creates a massive plot hole later in the film, when Patrick loses his camera (that he's been shooting B-Roll on) and Father asks Caroline to continue filming ("this is important"). At this point, Jake has been separated from Sam and Patrick, so he has one camera and Caroline now has the other. And yet, as Father begins talking to the people of Eden Parish about their dire circumstances, West begins switching to a shot / reverse shot editing style that Caroline couldn't possibly be filming. Even if she somehow filmed all of Father's speech and then turned around and filmed the community long enough for Jake to later edit it together, it doesn't make sense that she would think to do that in the moment.

 Honestly, I began to wonder if The Sacrament had switched over from "found footage" to a traditional film, because there was no rational explanation for the editing in the last thirty minutes of the film, and that isn't even the biggest plot hole. By necessity, I'm going to have to go into SPOILER territory, but if you already know how the Jonestown Massacre turned out, it's not going to surprise you much. Jake finds Sam, still alive, in Father's cabin, and Patrick's camera is on a table, filming (for some reason). Sam is tied up and Father is blaming them for his decision to kill everybody with the poisoned Kool-Aid, and then Father kills himself. Jake unties Sam, and they leave - without picking up Patrick's camera. Half of the movie was filmed on Patrick's camera - footage we've already seen, and they just leave it there.

 Now, you could argue that they came back to Eden Parish and the camera wasn't somehow confiscated by local authorities or the FBI and that Jake and Sam managed to edit it back together, if not for the fact that the guard who saves them by shooting another guard promises he's going to "burn the whole thing down" once they've left. Since the office is already on fire after Caroline's self-immolation (Jake makes a point of filming the burning building), there's no reason not to take the guard at his word, and the final text on-screen indicates that "Sam and Jake are the only known survivors." So how, exactly, did we watch everything Patrick filmed from the interview with Father until the end of the movie?

 I don't want you to leave this review with an entirely sour taste in your mouth, and it is worth pointing out that West does generate some palpable tension in the middle of The Sacrament. It's largely due to the appearance of Gene Jones - the other half of No Country for Old Men's "friend-o" scene - as Father: he embodies the presence and charisma needed for a "cult leader," one you can feel immediately, and Sam's interview quickly turns into Father's critique of their presence. There's a sense of menace in that sequence that West excels at, and if he could have infused more of The Sacrament with that unease, it might have overcome some of the structural deficiencies. Bowen and Swanberg are pretty good in what are mostly reactive roles, and Seimetz does a good job at masking Caroline's intentions early in the film. It's just that most of it collapses as the story enters its third act.

 The Sacrament isn't my least favorite Ti West movie (that would still be Cabin Fever 2, which I doubt a "director's cut" could salvage), but it's the one I'm the least likely to revisit. That's a shame, because I had high hopes for it, and I'm still a big fan of The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers. It should be interesting to see where he heads next, stylistically and from a narrative perspective, but as somebody who studied Jonestown extensively in college, The Sacrament just didn't work for me. I'm not sure that it will for other West fans, but you might give it a shot if no other new movie sounds appealing. Not much of a recommendation, I know, but it's the best I can give you for this one.



* I'm deliberately not linking to anything related to Jonestown on the off-chance you have no idea what that is and want to watch The Sacrament. I'm starting to think it's the only way this movie might be interesting, from a narrative perspective.

Shocktober Review Revisited: The Innkeepers

 

  (2013 note: So I didn't realize that I never reviewed The Innkeepers, but only included it during a year-end list. It pretty much covers how I feel about the film - it's not quite on par with The House of the Devil, but I do still like it a lot and I think the characters are better developed.) 

 

The Innkeepers - From Ti West, the director of The House of the Devil, comes another slow burn horror film where tension continues mounting and the sense of dread is palpable. Instead of replicating the horror of the early 1980s, West's "haunted hotel" follow-up is set squarely in the present, and he's just as adept at creeping you out with slow tracking shots, suggested noises, and believable characters you relate to. Sara Paxton's Claire is a young woman without much of a clue what she want to do or be, who becomes way too interested in Luke (Pat Healy)'s hobby: ghost hunting. She's fixated on finding the spirit of Madeline O'Malley, a bride who killed herself in the hotel in the 1890s.

 

 On the last weekend that the Yankee Padler hotel is open, Luke and Claire trade off shifts, watching over the last remaining hotel tenants - former actress / new age guru Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis) and a mysterious Old Man (George Riddle) - while they hunt for evidence of O'Malley's presence. West doles out the scares slowly but surely, and only towards the very end do things go the way most horror films go. In fact, if there's any fault to be found in The Innkeepers, it's that what comes before and after the climax of the film are undermined ever so slightly by what we know HAS to happen, even if the subtle clues of why it happens don't always add up. Without spoiling too much, I can say that the film is an example of the kind of movie 1408 could have been, one that eschews cheap histrionics and trickery and deliberately ratchets up the "willies" factor.

 Fans of The House of the Devil are going to find a lot to love about The Inkeepers, but if you like your horror fast and relentless, this may seem a little slow for your tastes. For me? Let's just say I had to watch something else after I finished it, because I wasn't going to bed.

Shocktober Review Revisited: The House of the Devil

Closing out our week of horror (and of horrors involving rolling blackouts), I finally watched The House of the Devil, and I'm glad I did. Alternately, I wish I hadn't. Allow me to explain.

The House of the Devil is a great horror film. It's the kind of film that from moment one fills you with a pervasive dread for the horrible thing you know is coming. Writer / Director / Editor Ti West does such a great job of milking that tension, of letting it build and build that at a certain point I found myself saying "no, don't go up there. just don't do it.", because that's how great this movie is at preparing you for the worst. Nothing good can happen in this film, no matter how innocuous it seems at times.

I love that there are no "jump" scares. Not one. And there are plenty of opportunities for them. There are two that come close, but both of them are "jumps" for characters, because by the time you realize what it is they're reacting to, the dread's kicked back in. I have to think that part of this is because of the "gimmick" of The House of the Devil, if you want to call it that.

The film is a throwback to the very early 80s, like before all the neon day-glo colors were pervasive and when it seemed reasonable to still have feathered hair and jean jackets. If it helps, think Friday the 13th part 2 instead of Part 4. But Ti West isn't making a "wink wink" movie set in the 1980s; The House of the Devil plays it straight. The creepy music, the camera angles, set design, lighting, a perfectly constructed montage in the middle of the film. Even the grain, which I must assume was at least partially digitally added, is reminiscent of low budget movies of the era (like Splatter University).

More importantly, West understands that The House of the Devil needs to look like a film of that period, so he films it appropriately. Long takes, slow push ins and pull outs, trickery with lighting. Beyond that, The House of the Devil does what The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake failed to do: the cast looks like they belong in the period. There's nothing about Jessica Biel and Eric Balfour tooling around in bell bottoms that says "oh, it's actually the 1970s and not just let's play dress up," but West manages to get it spot on in casting.

Central to this is Jocelin Donahue as Samantha; there's something about her that's reminiscent of a young Karen Allen (or even Jessica Harper in Suspiria), but she looks like she lives and breathes in that time period. It doesn't look like the A&F models dropped into horror films that I mentioned the other day. Donahue's Samantha is a character that feels organic to the film, and not imposed on a time frame. It doesn't hurt that she's not very well known, nor a most of the small cast (save for three, and I'll get to them in a second), but nobody sticks out like "oh, 2009 playing dress up in 1982."

Samantha is a college student in a nondescript northeastern town in a not specific early 80s setting. She's trying to get an apartment, but can't afford to pay the first month's rent, and decides to respond to an ad that says "Baby $itter Wanted." The house is out in the middle of the country, and Mr. and Mrs. Ulman aren't exactly forthright about what they want her to do, but the money is too good to pass up. All she has to do is stay in the house until midnight with an old woman who is (mostly) unseen. But then little inconsistencies start adding up, and before too long, it's very clear to Samantha that something is very wrong in this house...

If there's anything that wouldn't clearly fool audiences into thinking The House of the Devil wasn't a "lost" film from the 1980s, it's the presence of Mr. and Mrs. Ulman, played by Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov. You may not recognize the names, but check out their filmographies and you'll see more than a few movies you've watched. (To a lesser degree, Dee Wallace appears very early in the film, but it's possible that you might catch it on tv after the title sequence and miss her entirely) That Noonan was in Wolfen in 1981 and Woronov in Eating Raoul in 1982 would make it a little tricky to reconcile the clear age differences in The House of the Devil, but it doesn't matter because they're so creepy in the film.

And that's a big component here. It's exactly why I wish I hadn't seen The House of the Devil alone and late at night. Seriously, not since The Haunting have I been so unnerved by watching a film by myself. The film is just creepy, because you just know something awful is coming, but West is so good at drawing it out, slowly, patiently, that the audience is freaking out long before things get twisted. And make no mistake, they do; the camera style switches to a much more fluid, hand held approach for that point, but I wouldn't dream of spoiling the last ten minutes of the film. It's pitch perfect, including the ending, which restores dread in a way that carries on well after the credits finish rolling.

I guess there might be some nitpickers in the IMDB "Goofs" page that'll go after a few tiny anachronisms early in the movie (yes, I noticed the very 2007 SUV in the background too, get over it), but once the film really gets going at the Ulman's house, you stop caring about little crap like that. The story is too unnerving, as you sit anticipating the awful thing that happens when the lunar eclipse finally comes, to bother with things like "that phone wouldn't blah blah."

Horror fans looking for an honest to goodness creepy film that builds atmosphere over cheap trickery and avoids gore for as long as it possibly can should run - not walk - to buy The House of the Devil. That's right, I said BUY it. You don't need to waffle around and rent it, because if you're the kind of person that reacted when I compared this film to The Haunting, you know I mean business. I wish that somehow The House of the Devil could have traded places with Paranormal Activity, so that it did crazy business and ushered in an era of really good serious horror films, instead of more "found footage" garbage.

Hopefully, this movie is going to have a crazy good life as a "cult" film on cable, where viewers will come in sometime in the first twenty minutes or so and think they're watching a movie from the 80s. It does its job well enough that you could.

Watch The House of the Devil. Post haste. I'll be giving away a copy of the dvd at the Oscar party. Sorry, the VHS copy is mine. And for the record, I had the same kind of walkman that Samantha uses in the film. It only fast-forwarded, never rewound, and the tape usually got stuck, even if you pressed the "Stop/Eject" button hard enough. I also had those earphones. Man, I miss those earphones...

Horro Fest VII Day One: V/H/S

 We decided to kick off Horror Fest with something I've been wanting to see for a while now, the "found footage" anthology film V/H/S. Normally the Cap'n isn't a fan of the "found footage" genre - the only two I've really enjoyed were The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield - but I thought the premise sounded interesting and one of the directors involved was Ti West. As you know, as a fan of The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, I'm on board with anything West has a hand in directing. Also, the Cap'n is a sucker for anthologies.

 The film is broken up into five segments, with a wrap around story that actually advances as the film goes on (which isn't often the case in anthology films):

 "Tape 56" - from director Adam Wingard (A Horrible Way to Die), a group of hooligans who like to videotape themselves exposing women and vandalizing property are hired to break into an old man's house and steal a videocassette. The only problem is that once they get there, the old man is dead and they don't know which tape to steal, so they watch the following stories:

 "Amateur Night" - from director Dave Bruckner (The Signal), three friends head out for a night of drunken sex with camera glasses in tow, but when they bring the wrong girl back to their motel room, the party takes a dark and twisted direction.

 "Second Honeymoon" - from Ti West (The Roost), a couple is sightseeing in Colorado and Arizona when a strange woman begins following them around, and eventually visiting them in their motel room, while they sleep...

 "Tuesday the 17th" - from Glenn McQuaid (I Sell the Dead), a young woman brings her friends up to a lake she visited last year, but her plans may not be as innocent as partying and smoking pot...

 "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily when She was Younger" - from Joe Swanberg (LOL), Emily and her husband are separated while he's in medical school, but she's having trouble dealing with noises in her apartment and a strange bump on her arm...

 "10/31/98" - from Radio Silence (Mountain Devil Prank Fails Horribly), a guy dressed as a nannycam bear and his friends arrive at the wrong house for a Halloween party, and instead find something more disturbing in the attic. When they intervene, they realize what they stopped wasn't the worst thing that could happen on Halloween...

 I'd heard positive and negative reactions to V/H/S, and I guess I can understand both. People prone to motion sickness from "found footage" movies may as well steer clear, as you'll be ill from the opening shots and it's not going to get any better. The ways that the stories use videotaped footage are, for the most part, clever, although I'd love to hear anybody's explanation of who would videotape a Skype conversation using a camcorder so that the wraparound story characters could watch it. But, if you're willing to overlook certain logical inconsistencies, I guess that for the most part they work.

 The "video glasses" in "Amateur Night" are probably the most successful because they limit our perspective in such a way that the ending is a surprise and it generally explains the age-old "why don't they just turn the camera off" question. This also works in "Second Honeymoon" and "10/31/98"'s favor, and "Tuesday the 17th" relies on keeping the camera rolling to reveal the killer. It's really just the Skype gimmick in "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She was Younger" that strains logic.

 Like most anthologies, there are a mixture of good segments, weaker sections, and one or two really impressive moments that help others to stand out. The ending of "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily" manages to elevate the story beyond a retread of Paranormal Activity territory. The fact that the characters in "Tape 56" are all loathsome assholes is overcome with the slow realization that watching these tapes are causing them to disappear one by one (although the reason isn't necessarily clear until the end), and great makeup effects and a gonzo ending help "Amateur Night" overcome its otherwise uninteresting protagonists. It will also make you second guess any girl who ever tells you "I like you" after a few drinks...

 I suppose that while I didn't necessarily like how lopsided "Tuesday the 17th" was in setting up the story before becoming an all out gorefest, the way the killer is handled was inventive and made the best use of the "videotaped" gimmick.

 Of all of the segments, "10/31/98" was probably my favorite, which is appropriate as they save it for last, after even "Tape 56" reaches its conclusion. When things move from suggested creepiness to all out special effects bonanza (handled really well considering it needed to be integrated with camcorder level video images), the segment earns the aimless first section, and the conclusion is satisfying and appropriately dark.

 Oddly, while West's "Second Honeymoon" suffers from the least motion-sickness inducing camerawork, it may be the most abrupt story conclusion and compared to the other entries is possibly the least satisfying. The "home invasion" elements are quite creepy, and West builds tension in appropriately slow pace, dropping hints about what's coming, but even more so than in The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, the conclusion is too rushed to be satisfying. I understand what he was trying to do, but the twist comes about so quickly and ends immediately afterward, leaving little time to digest what just happened. It doesn't seem unfair that the guy watching that tape says "what the hell was that?" when it ends.

 Is V/H/S going to be for everybody? Probably not. It is a better-than-average anthology movie, which I count as a plus, and as I said mostly makes the best of the "found footage" gimmick, but not all of the segments are good enough to sustain the runtime, even if some of their conceits help keep audiences engaged. I can't really say that it transcends either the "found footage" or anthology subgenre, and it's going to make some of you feel very queasy well before "Amateur Night" kicks into high gear, so consider this a conditional recommendation.

So You Won't Have To: Cabin Fever 2 - Spring Fever

 Despite the title in question, I didn't actually approach Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever with the intention of tearing it a new one. It is true that I haven't heard a kind word about what could at best be called a "really unnecessary sequel," but the film was directed by Ti West, who made two films I really enjoyed (The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers) and one I'm still looking forward to watching (The Roost). The version of Spring Fever released on DVD may not represent West's vision for the film (more on that in a bit), but I thought that there might be enough of his style left in Cabin Fever 2 that it could overcome the negative buzz.

 Boy howdy does it not. Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever just sucks. I'm not saying that Eli Roth's Cabin Fever is some kind of classic, but it's uneven tone is helped by some impressive gore and mounting tension in the mid-section. Cabin Fever 2, on the other hand, takes all of the offbeat comedic moments, removes all of the tension, and replaces disturbing makeup effects for an onslaught of gore and projectile blood vomit. It's a movie trying really hard to be funny and gross at the same time and feels like it desperately wants to be a throwback to 80s splatter flicks. That would be fine, but there's this fidelity to the first film (in particular, the goofy parts of Cabin Fever that don't work) that leaves the film a jumbled mess.

 Top billed Rider Strong (returning from the first film) is smashed by a bus before the opening credits roll, for reasons unknown. It turns out that the fact he sort-of survived the end of Cabin Fever and is hit by a school bus heading away from the middle of nowhere, North Carolina* to Springfield, where Spring Fever is set. His infected blood and guts being spilled all over the front of the bus is irrelevant because the water source his body was floating in at the end of Cabin Fever was the source for Down Home Water, a bottling company that delivers tainted product to the same school in question.

 We learn all of this in an animated section during the opening credits, just in case audiences a) didn't see Cabin Fever or b) weren't paying attention to the beginning of Cabin Fever 2. Seriously, while Deputy Winston (Giuseppe Andrews, also returning) is being a goofball and insisting the bus driver killed a deer (one wearing a watch and shoes), the Down Home Water truck drives by right before the animated sequence starts, and then flashes back to the same scene just in case we didn't get it the first two times. Later in the film, Deputy Winston watches the truck driver (Larry Fessenden) start spewing blood and there's a flashback to the first Cabin Fever so that we're clear that Winston went through all of this in the first movie. That's 30 minutes into Spring Fever, by the way.

 Anyway, so we've moved away from the discomfort in juxtaposing city college students against dubious hillbillies (something Roth toyed with in Cabin Fever) and to generic "small town USA" with a high school prom, some outcasts, a jerk, his ex-girlfriend, and a few caricatures disguised as school faculty (no, seriously: the biology teacher [Angela Oberer] has a harelip and yells all of her lines). Now, Cabin Fever certainly had its share of stereotypical characters, but at least Roth played around a little bit with our expectations. Not only are the characters in Spring Fever barely more than "types" but they aren't the least bit interesting. It's hard to care about someone, let alone feel invested in their living or dying, when there's no one interesting on screen. Every opportunity to do something fun with them is squandered repeatedly.

 For example, there's an 80s styled montage of high school students going to a Disco-themed Prom that continues setting up that the villainous ex-boyfriend (Marc Senter) has a black belt by having him practice in his make-shift dojo (shades of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4). So we should expect some kung fu action right? It's set up not once but twice that he's into the martial arts, but instead he just beats one guy to death with a fire extinguisher and smashes his ex-girlfriend Cassie (Aliexi Wasser) in the head with a hammer. His idea of "fighting" the protagonist, John (Noah Segan), is to shove him around. Total waste of setup there, gang.

 In deference to West, Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever was taken away from him by the producers and Lionsgate and was subject to reshoots and re-editing without his involvement. He asked to have his named removed from the film (in order to make Spring Fever an "Alan Smithee" joint), but since West wasn't in the DGA, his request was denied. How much of Spring Fever is West's and how much is the producers' is up for debate, but there are certainly chunks of the film that look like The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers.

 Okay, so I'll give him a bit of a pass for not being involved in the final product, but I'm not seeing much of the movie that worked in the first place either. Even the West-ian tracking shots happen during scenes where characters aren't doing anything engaging, and there's zero tension in the film. This is coming from a director who excels at setting up tension. Instead there's non-stop gross out moments: a janitor pees blood into the punchbowl, the sidekick Alex (Rusty Kelly) gets a blowjob from a girl with braces and mouth sores and then later squeezes bloody pus out of his dick, and the aforementioned girl with sores is also a stripper with boils all over her breasts. By the time a biohazard team swoops in, The Crazies-style, to lock everyone in the school, I didn't care that the prom turned into a bloody vomit spewing chaos. That's supposed to be the major set piece of the film, I think.

 There are two moments in Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever that surprised me, and I don't know they it can be attributed to West or not, but they are the rare moments were the goofy tone helped instead of hurt. After Deputy Winston gets Toby (Judah Friedlander), the night guard at Down Home Water, killed, he decides he no longer wants to be a cop and runs away with his cousin Herman (American Movie's Mark Borchardt). While nothing that Winston does in the movie makes any sense, there is a moment where Herman is trying to bribe a police officer into letting them drive through a restricted area. He drops some money on the ground, and as the cop bends down to get it, Herman drops the silliest looking elbow drop you're likely to see and knocks the officer out. I will admit that it was so out of left field that I laughed.

 The other moment comes from something that doesn't serve any purpose in the story but is weird enough to mention: so it's set up in biology class that Frederica (Amanda Jelks), the "fat" girl, has a crush on presumptive Prom King Rick (Thomas Blake Jr.). Rick seems to be making fun of her in class, so when he invites her to come skinny dipping with her in the pool, we expect some high school humiliation of the "fat" girl by the "popular" kids. Nope; it turns out that Rick does want to have sex with her but then the flesh eating disease starts doing its thing on her and he's killed when he accidentally falls into the pool trying to fish her out. It doesn't have any bearing on the narrative (unless you count a quick moment when Cassie sees Frederica's corpse in the pool later) but was unexpected.

 Still, two moments do not a watchable movie make. Ti West fans are best of avoiding Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, as are fans of Cabin Fever and, well, most horror fans. DTV horror aficionados are going to have more fun with the Wrong Turn sequels than this, and its reputation as a forgettable unnecessary sequel is deserved. There's nothing you're going to get from watching this movie, and in all likelihood we'll never get the third film a superfluous animated epilogue promises (during Mardi Gras, no less). West moved on to better films, and Eli Roth has the satisfaction of knowing that for all of its faults, his Cabin Fever could be much, much worse. The proof is in the sequel.

 P.S. It's worth mentioning that Rider Strong (Cabin Fever), Larry Fessenden (I Sell the Dead), and Judah Friedlander (Feast) have a combined screen time of seven minutes in an 86 minute movie. Giuseppe Andrews is in and out of the narrative, Mark Borchardt has a slightly extended cameo, and Michael Bowen (Lost, Walking Tall) has a pointless role as the "gay for no good reason" Principal who also yells all of his lines. Don't let their names fool you in the opening credits.


 * I'm not positive it's ever made clear in Cabin Fever that the film takes place in North Carolina, or that I just know that it was filmed here. Cabin Fever 2 was also filmed in NC, but on the opposite side of the state in Wilmington.

Year End Recap Part Two

 Welcome back! Today the Cap'n is continuing my Year End Recap, and we're in rarefied air here. We're on our way to the top, and if yesterday's movie came with recommendations, today's movies are "add these to your queue / get to the store this weekend" kinds of movies. The only thing that separates tonight's list from tomorrow's "Best of the Year" is maybe one teeny tiny transcendent moment. That's it. These are as good as anything there is to offer as entertainment goes, and I don't think you're going to do anything but sit back and have a good time.

 There's still no Your Highness on this list. Again, we'll get to Your Highness, but not just yet.

 Presented in no particular order, say hello to your next few weekends and evenings' entertainment.

Attack the Block - This movie was so close to making the "best of the year", and I still debate with myself about whether I should put it up there or keep it here. The only difference between Attack the Block and the very best of 2011 is that it embraces the pulpy fun of early John Carpenter, which is a really good thing. I have no doubt in my mind you're going to have a great time watching Attack the Block, so maybe I'm hesitating because I feel like I've mentioned it so many times in the last six months that it doesn't need anymore heightened expectations. Joe Cornish does well enough on his own that he doesn't need Cap'n Howdy and Major Tom to toot his horn for him... wow, that sounded worse than I mean to it to.

  The Muppets - It's a testament to the quality of this film - which features none of the actual Muppets for the first fifteen minutes - that I saw it with friends who had already seen the film and didn't
hesitate to see it again. You'll leave with a big smile on your face, satisfied that the Muppets can still be in fine movies.

 Rise of the Planet of the Apes - It takes a really good movie to overcome wafer thin characters, but this film belongs to Andy Serkis' Caesar, and the apes are fantastic. You're not even going to notice the fact that the cgi apes are more believable than the human cast.

  Horrible Bosses - The movie I laughed at the second hardest this year is everything The Change-Up is not: it's certainly not "PC" or even generally in good taste, but the gross out is at a minimum. Better still, the cheap jokes sit this one out for better character-related humor, and the three leads (Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day, and Jason Bateman) are more than matched by the title characters (Colin Farrell, Jennifer Aniston, and the "where have you been all this time" Kevin Spacey). Throw in Jamie Foxx as a more interesting than advertised criminal, and you're going to laugh hard.

 The Innkeepers - From Ti West, the director of The House of the Devil, comes another slow burn horror film where tension continues mounting and the sense of dread is palpable. Instead of replicating the horror of the early 1980s, West's "haunted hotel" follow-up is set squarely in the present, and he's just as adept at creeping you out with slow tracking shots, suggested noises, and believable characters you relate to. Sara Paxton's Claire is a young woman without much of a clue what she want to do or be, who becomes way too interested in Luke (Pat Healy)'s hobby: ghost hunting. She's fixated on finding the spirit of Madeline O'Malley, a bride who killed herself in the hotel in the 1890s.

 On the last weekend that the Yankee Padler hotel is open, Luke and Claire trade off shifts, watching over the last remaining hotel tenants - former actress / new age guru Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis) and a mysterious Old Man (George Riddle) - while they hunt for evidence of O'Malley's presence. West doles out the scares slowly but surely, and only towards the very end do things go the way most horror films go. In fact, if there's any fault to be found in The Innkeepers, it's that what comes before and after the climax of the film are undermined ever so slightly by what we know HAS to happen, even if the subtle clues of why it happens don't always add up. Without spoiling too much, I can say that the film is an example of the kind of movie 1408 could have been, one that eschews cheap histrionics and trickery and deliberately ratchets up the "willies" factor.

 Fans of The House of the Devil are going to find a lot to love about The Inkeepers, but if you like your horror fast and relentless, this may seem a little slow for your tastes. For me? Let's just say I had to watch something else after I finished it, because I wasn't going to bed.

Fast Five - Let's put it this way: I had never seen one of the Fast and the Furious films and really had no intention to until I started hearing the genuinely positive reviews for this film. It didn't hurt that Dwayne Johnson was joining the cast as the guy determined to make Vin Diesel's life a living hell, but I watched Fast & Furious (which ends the way that Fast Five begins) in order to come in with some sense of context on a franchise I'd never once considered before. And I'll be damned if it wasn't entertaining, amusing, with good action, strong car chases, decent characters, and a better "action movie" plot than I was expecting. It's more "Ocean's Eleven" than racing movie, which didn't hurt things. At the beginning of 2011 I don't think you'd have ever heard me saying this, but I'm on board for Fast Six and beyond if they keep this level of quality up.

Bridesmaids - The movie I laughed at the hardest this year. Not since The Sweetest Thing has a film so unmistakably designed as a "chick flick" has a movie been willing to mix the scatalogical with the slapstick and quirk of character. Anchored by Kristen Wiig and bolstered by a strong supporting cast, it doesn't surprise me that the clever, lewd Bridesmaids made its way onto so many critics' lists for 2011. It's a comedy that doesn't pull punches, and not just with the jokes - the way that Annie (Wiig) and Nathan (Chris O'Dowd) come in and out of each other's lives is at times painful. And funny. The important part is that you're going to laugh, so much so that you can convince your guy friends that a movie that ends with Wilson Phillips performing live at a wedding is "cool" for them to watch too.

 Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop - This is a candid, warts and all portrait of the comedian as an insecure middle-aged-man. Conan O'Brien brought director Rodman Fletcher along for his "Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on TV" tour after the fallout of leaving The Tonight Show, and the results are side-splitting, revealing, and at times uncomfortable. O'Brien's rage is bottled up but he often lashes out in passive-aggressive but cruel ways towards his assistant, his writers, friends, and most of all, himself. It's refreshingly candid and also quite funny, just laced with a bitter sense of regret and self doubt from the man in the title.

 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two - I can't imagine how this film could have been made in a way that would satisfy every Potter fanatic, but from the opening shots of Alan Rickman's Severus Snape to the final flash forward, it did the finale of the series justice. If I had to point out just one moment that stuck with me (again), it's Helena Bonham Carter playing Emma Watson pretending to be Helena Bonham Carter's sadistic Bellatrix Lestrange. Did the "battle of Hogwarts" deliver in the ways I hoped it would? Maybe not totally, but the tone of the film is pitch perfect and I look forward to watching parts one and two as one uninterrupted film.

 Super - Of all the movies on this list, I sense Super will divide friends the most. I'll tell you from the get-go that James Gunn's take on the "normal guy becomes vigilante to horrible results" isn't for everyone. Then again, this is a movie from the writer / director of Slither. If you've seen Slither, then you aren't even finishing this review - you're on your way to getting Super. Forget the indie / hipster friendly posters, because Super is the Troma version of Kick-Ass, in all the offensive, violent, and just bizarre ways you'd expect that mashing of styles to be. It's funnier than Kick-Ass, more subversive than Kick-Ass, more wantonly cruel, and stranger than it has any right to be. I was aghast almost as often as I was amused, and if you think that's up your alley, then give Super a shot. If nothing else, you'll never see Ellen Page the same way again.

 Come back tomorrow for the final list - the best of the best that I saw for 2011. It's a strong list, if I may say so myself.