The Tall

When her child goes missing, a mother looks to unravel the legend of the Tall Man, an entity who allegedly abducts children. Alternate Link :

The Last House

After kidnapping and brutally assaulting two young women, a gang unknowingly finds refuge at a vacation home belonging to the parents of one of the victims: a mother and father who devise an increasingly gruesome series of revenge tactics.
 

The L@st Witch Hunter

The last witch hunter is all that stands between humanity and the combined forces of the most horrifying witches in history.

Stalker

Jack is pushed past the brink of his stalking obsession when he decides to break into Emily's home to take what he wants by force.

H0rns

In the aftermath of his girlfriend's mysterious death, a young man awakens to find strange horns sprouting from his temples.

Carrie

A reimagining of the classic horror tale about Carrie White, a shy girl outcast by her peers and sheltered by her deeply religious mother, who unleashes telekinetic terror on her small town after being pushed too far at her senior prom. Alternate Link

Riding Hood

For years, the old woman in the woods has secretly kept the wolves of the forest at bay. But when the woman dies, the creatures suddenly attack the residents of a nearby small town. As more and more people turn up dead, the townsfolk discover something far more sinister than wolves lurking in the backwoods and fight to save their home from evil by waging a bloody battle against the ruthless creatures. But as the wolves begin to overpower the town, only the woman's granddaughter may have the key to stopping the bloodbath before it's too late.

Creatures

Ethan longs to escape his small Southern town. He meets a mysterious new girl, Lena. Together, they uncover dark secrets about their respective families, their history and their town.

Hill

A woman goes in search for her daughter, within the confines of a strange, desolate town called Silent Hill. Based on the video game.
 

Chernobyl

Six tourists hire an extreme tour guide who takes them to the abandoned city Pripyat, the former home to the workers of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. During their exploration, they soon discover they are not alone.
 

Death 2

Another 26-chapter anthology that showcases death in all its vicious wonder and brutal beauty.

Grimm

Will and Jake Grimm are traveling con-artists who encounter a genuine fairy-tale curse which requires true courage instead of their usual bogus exorcisms.

C0nstantine

Constantine tells the story of irreverent supernatural detective John Constantine, who has literally been to hell and back.

Big Zombie

House Of Wax

A group of unwitting teens are stranded near a strange wax museum and soon must fight to survive and keep from becoming the next exhibit.
 

Cult Movie Review: Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

Historically-speaking, I have not been the biggest fan of the Paranormal Activity franchise. 

I disliked the first film for its lack of subtlety and nuance.  Paranormal Activity’s (2007) final reveal of a demonic close-up was a capitulation to lowest common denominator-style filmmaking, and an undercutting of the very “found footage” paradigm the film exploited.

I warmed a little (just a little…) to the second entry.  Some moments in the drama worked moderately well, whereas some effects -- exposed in too-revealing long shot -- actually played as funny.

I was surprised and impressed with the third film in the franchise, however, which I found, by-and-large, scary.   There’s a highly-effective sequence in Paranormal Activity 3 wherein a man (with video-camera) and a young girl seek shelter in a bathroom as an angry spirit attempts to break in. The scene escalates and escalates, and is as impressive as any “big” horror movie moment produced in the last few years.

So color me ambivalent about the franchise as whole.

But recently I had a reader here on the blog help me contextualize the PA movies in terms of horror movie history.  When I reviewed the found-footage genre for high-points in a recent Ask JKM post, Trent wrote the following in a comment:

“I still think that you have to recommend 'Paranormal Activity' as a top tier found footage film. If ‘The Blair Witch Project'is to the found-footage craze of the 2000's as 'Halloween' was to the slasher film craze of 1980s, (which I think is fair) then 'Paranormal Activity' is analogous to 'Friday the 13^th.”

I suspect Trent’s point is spot-on regarding the comparison (if not the quality of Paranormal Activity).  Halloween and The Blair Witch Projectare the gold standards of their respective genre formats, and demonstrate a zenith in terms of artistry and effect. The Friday the 13^thfilms and The Paranormal Activity movies are much more mainstream and commercially calculated. 

Likewise, these series share in common the fact that they seem to vacillate wildly in terms of quality from entry to entry.  Furthermore, the next chapter seems to come out every year, without fail.

To continue the comparison, Paranormal Activity 3 may be the Friday the 13^th (1980), or Friday the 13^th Part II (1981) of the PA saga… a relatively “good” or strong outing.

But unfortunately, this comparison also means that the recent Paranormal Activity 4 (2012) is the Jason Takes Manhattan of the PA franchise, meaning, simply, that it is pretty dreadful.

In fact, Paranormal Activity 4 is so bad that it reinforces many of the common misperceptions about the found footage format: that the acting is bad; that the films are dull and pointless; and that the movies don’t make a lot of sense from a narrative or thematic standpoint.

 Paranormal Activity 4continues the story of the demonically-possessed Katie (Katie Featherston) and the nephew she stole from his crib, Hunter.  The story is set in 2011 as Katie and a child named Robbie (Brady Allen) move into the house across the street from a tech-savvy teenager named Alex (Kathryn Newton).  Almost immediately, Alex and her buddy Ben (Matt Shively) suspect something weird is going on, and grow alarmed as Robbie befriends Alex’s little brother, Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp).

When Robbie comes to stay in Alex’s house for a few weeks (while his mom is ostensibly in the hospital), weird disturbances occur at night, and Alex begins to suspect that someone or something wants her dead.  With Ben’s help, she sets up cameras all over the house, and monitors the footage, at least for a time, from her computer.

The first thing one might notice about Paranormal Activity 4 is that this is the only franchise entry not to focus on adults, but teenagers instead.  Unlike the Friday the 13^th films, however, the characters who are supposed to be teenagers are actually played by teenagers, rather than by twenty-somethings.  And for all the film’s abundant flaws, the actress who plays Alex, Kathryn Newton is pretty strong.  At the very least, she’s better than the material she is asked to carry. 

But the important point is an underlying one. The franchise’s shift to teenage concerns suggests recognition on the part of the producers that the franchise is now aging. Therefore attracting certain demographic groups has become crucial.

Secondly, this is the first Paranormal Activity film that is girded with specific tributes or homages to the horror genre, which again suggests that the franchise’s appeal is narrowing, and that filmmakers are hoping to target some demographics more directly.

I don’t know how many general audiences will recognize the re-staging of a famous and scary sequence from Peter Medak’s The Changeling (1980), or another moment that echoes Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), for example.  There’s even a moment here that deliberately recalls Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). I recognized these allusions, but they don’t add up to anything meaningful in terms of Paranormal Activity 4’s narrative or themes.

My biggest concern with the film is that it features almost no scares.  Even the jump scares are mild.  And because this film is longer in duration (nearly 100 minutes) than the other Paranormal Activity films, the almost total absence of frightening material is noteworthy and troublesome.  This film is a long, hard slog -- Paranormal Inactivity -- and with the possible exception of a visual gimmick regarding Kinect, there are precious few innovations in format.

In addition, Paranormal Activity 4’s finale violates a cardinal rule of the found footage sub-genre: we don’t know what kind of device Alex is recording on during her fateful, night-vision journey into the neighbor’s dark and sinister house.  She doesn’t seem to be using her laptop, and there’s little indication she picked up Ben’s video camera.  Instead, the entire final scene plays like a coda tacked on in post-production, after audience focus groups found the third act uninspiring or disappointing.  One minute, Alexa is in her own house, being attacked by an invisible demon, and in the next, she’s crossing the street, using an unknown device, and probing into the dark house alone.  Almost all the supernatural “action” of the film, at least in terms of effects, occurs in this brief denouement.

Further, Paranormal Activity 4 falls prey to a problem that has become increasingly common in the found-footage genre.  Specifically, cameras record overt, undeniable, dangerous supernatural activity, but the dramatis personae mysteriously don’t review that important footage.  Here, Alex is levitated above her bed one night.  Several days later, she still hasn’t reviewed the footage and witnessed what occurred.

If she did watch that footage, it would be evidence for her doubting Thomas parents, of course.  And yes, there’s a lame excuse in the movie that Alex can’t access the footage because she’s forgotten the password that enables viewing.  But if you really believed a malevolent entity was after you, would you wait days and days before attempting even a basic password recovery?  Most password encoded programs have a prompt that reads: forgot password? Click here. 

Secondly, Ben also has access to the footage.  That footage includes his hot, would-be girlfriend going to bed every night in her skimpy jammies and shorts.  So wouldn’t he at least check in for lascivious purposes?

Basically, the entire last act of Paranormal Activity 4 is predicated on the ridiculous notion that Alex is filming tons of footage (so we in the audience can see it), but not watching a lick of it (so she can remain in danger).  It’s contrived in the extreme. 

Of all the Paranormal Activity movies, I would count this one as the worst, and also the most disappointing given the surprising quality of the third film.  There’s not even one good scare moment in this sequel, or one legitimately great visual composition, or scene set up. It’s all a slow, meandering trip to nowhere, with a tacked-on ending that exists only to grease the wheels for the inevitable sequel next year.

Perhaps that no-doubt-upcoming effort will be more Jason Lives! or The Final Chapter than a A New Beginning.  One can hope.

Movie Review: Warm Bodies

Warm Bodies
Directed by: Jonathan Levine.
Written by: Jonathan Levine based on the novel by Isaac Marion.
Starring: Nicholas Hoult (R), Teresa Palmer (Julie), Analeigh Tipton (Nora), Rob Corddry (M), Dave Franco (Perry), John Malkovich (Grigio), Cory Hardrict (Kevin).

The biggest problem I always had with the Twilight books and movies is that I always thought it was silly for a vampire and a human to fall in love. After all, vampires are predators, and human are their prey, so it’s kind of like a lion falling in love with an antelope. And vampires, of course, are not alive, but “undead” – so they are essentially walking, talking, killing corpses. How could someone fall in love with a corpse? And why is it that people fall in love with vampires so easy, but never fall in love with a zombie?

As if in answer to my query comes Warm Bodies – a funny teen romance where a zombie and a human really do fall in love. Yes, the premise is as ridiculous as Twilight, but one of the many charms of Warm Bodies is that it knows full well that the premise is ridiculous – and has some fun with it. The movie plays with the conventions not only of the zombie genre, but also romantic comedies. It isn’t trying to be a “generation defining love story” as some have ridiculously claimed Twilight is – but rather just a fun zombie comedy. And while it is no Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland, I had a hell of a lot of fun watching it.

The movie stars Nicholas Hoult as R, who also narrates his adventure. He doesn’t remember his real name – but thinks it started with a R – and doesn’t remember what he did for a living (although, as he states, judging on his hoodie, he was unemployed). He doesn’t even remember how he became a zombie, just that he is, and although he feels guilty about eating people, he does so anyway. The “new hunger” is too strong for him to ignore. Like many other zombies, he lives at an airport. He has made his home in an old passenger plane that he has filled with whatever he comes across and likes. He loves vinyl records for example, but has a lot of other stuff. One day he and a group of zombies come across a group of survivors, and one thing leads to another, and R is soon eating someone’s brains. This is when we learn that when a zombie eats the brain of somehow, he gets to see their memories. I’m sure some purists of the genre will argue this goes against well-established genre rules, but considering I haven’t really seen another movie from the point of view of a zombie, I cannot say it really does. Anyway, what he learns is that the guy whose brain he is eating is in love with Julie (Teresa Palmer), also at that raid. When R sees her, he is instantly flooded with love – and rather than eat her, he saves her life and brings her back to his plane. Obviously, this is not the way to start a healthy relationship, but R doesn’t really have another option. And once Julie realizes that R means her no harm, she starts to relax around him, and open up. And gradually, R starts becoming more and more human.

Warm Bodies owes much of its charm to its two stars. Hoult, who first came to audience’s attention 10 years ago in About a Boy, has grown up a lot, and turned into quite a good actor. The role requires him to be funny under a lot of zombie makeup for much of its running time, and for the most part, he succeeds wonderfully. Perhaps even better is Teresa Palmer who really did remind me of a sunnier, less mopey, Kristen Stewart, and who is quite charming. They get good support for Annaleigh Tipton as Julie’s best friend (who picks a perfect song for a makeover montage), John Malkovich, who is clearly doing this for a paycheck, but it is still fine, and especially Rob Corddry, who steals his scenes as R’s best friend M.

The film was written and directed by Jonathan Levine, and even though it is quite different from his last film – the cancer dramedy 50/50 – he shows once again a gift for comic timing behind the camera. Warm Bodies may not be a great movie, but it is great fun to watch.

Cult-Movie Review: The Possession (2012)

The Possession(2012), from producer Sam Raimi and Nightwatch director Ole Bornedal utilizes a “true story” scenario as the basis for its horrifying tale of demonic possession.  In particular, the story of a diabolical “dibbuk” (demon) box came to light some years ago when the owner of the box attempted to sell it on E-Bay, apparently fearing for his safety and life. 

The dibbuk box (or wine cabinet, actually…) has since been the subject of TV specials and a book, and the tale certainly makes for some good copy in relation to The Possession.  As I’ve written before, the old horror gimmick of intimating that a story is true increases considerably a production’s sense of immediacy and urgency.

What interests me most about this “true” story is the manner in which we allow items such as the “cursed” dibbuk box gain traction or power over our imaginations.  While I was writing this review, for instance, the computer cord to my wife’s computer, half-way across the office, fell suddenly from her desk and hit the wood floor.  And when I looked back at my computer keyboard, five ants were crawling on it...something that has never happened to me in my life.  Then just now, as I proofread this review, my laptop’s screen went black for a moment for no apparent reason.

Did these strange events occur because I was daring to write a review of The Possession?  Or did they occur because my cat Lila, unseen by me but present in the room, knocked down the wire?  Because I had finished eating my lunch a few minutes earlier and left some crumbs near the keyboard?  Because I’m writing on Microsoft software and hell, it’s always glitchy?

My only point here is that once you become convinced that something sinister boasts an influence over you and the events around you, it’s really easy to gaze at all succeeding facts as evidence of that theory.  Is the dibbuk box actually cursed with some kind of ancient malevolent power?  Or do we create the negative vibe from our own fearful imaginations and blame the box?

I only wish The Possession would have tread more deeply into this idea instead of going for a kind of boiler-plate demonic possession narrative and structure.  The movie would have been a lot scarier, actually, had it attempted some level of ambiguity about what was really to blame for the dark events in the lives of the central characters.

But because The Possession is so straight-forward, horror lovers may be disappointed with the film.  It is relatively tame in terms of action and violence, so much so that is rated PG-13, not R.  And if one is familiar at all with the general outline of demon possession films, The Possession follows that pattern with relatively little variation, surprise, or ingenuity.

That structure goes something like this. A nice family is shocked and horrified when a child begins acting strangely. The behavior worsens, and science can’t help, so religious authority is brought in to exorcise the demon inside.  The exorcism succeeds one way or another (by vanquishing the demon and/or directing the demon to another body), and then the young person is restored, and the family healed too.

Certainly, that’s the pattern of The Exorcist, and just because The Possession involves Hebrew spirits and religious material, that doesn’t differentiate the material to a substantial or meaningful degree.  Therefore, The Possession is relatively safe in terms of the scares it presents, and since the horror genre is about pushing decorum and boundaries, that’s a problem. 

The Possessionstars Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Clyde, a man who has recently divorced, but who doesn’t want to be divorced.  His wife Stephanie (Kyra Sedgewick) has left him in favor of a smarmy dentist, Brett, played as if a closet sociopath by Grant Show.  Clyde moves into his lonely new house, and sees his two daughters, Emily (Natasha Calis) and Hannah (Madison Davenport) only on the weekends.

One weekend, Clyde and the girls visit a yard sale, and Emily buys the aforementioned dibbuk box.  After the strange box is opened and strange relics -- including a human tooth, a ring and a moth -- are found inside, Emily begins to act strangely.  She reports at one point that she doesn’t even feel like herself anymore. 

At first, Clyde and Stephanie blame their divorce for Emily’s increasingly anti-social behavior.  But before long, Clyde is certain that the strange Hebrew box has released a demon, one that is possessing his youngest daughter.  Clyde enlists the help of a Jewish rabbi’s son, Tzadok (Matisyahu) to expel the demon.

When he can’t do so immediately, Clyde invites the demon to take him and release Emily…

The Possessionstrikes upon a workable metaphor or sub-text involving the family and demonic possession, and in some sense, that’s the most intriguing aspect of this horror film.  In particular, The Possession really concerns divorce, and the impact of divorce upon young children. 

Emily is deeply depressed by her parents’ separation, and though her violent, anti-social behavior is ultimately attributed to the exorcism, it could clearly be attributed to her unsettled family life as well.  At one point, her high-school principal comments on how Emily no longer finds joy in learning, and has grown distant from her friends.  That doesn’t sound like demonic possession so much as it does depression.  

Viewed in this light, The Possession is about a splintered family that learns to act as a unit again, and save one of their own from darkness.

The problem, of course, is that this metaphor clearly has no merit in terms of the film’s presentation.  The audience has no doubts about Emily’s problem, given the ridiculous prologue, which features the dibbux box pounding and abusing an old woman. 

The relative predictability of the character responses, especially the obligatory disbelief of the mother, who would rather believe that her husband is beating her daughter than countenance the prospect of something supernatural, also poses a problem in terms of predictability.  Even the film’s final sting in the tail/tale -- which allows room for the dibbuk box to return and haunt another family in the inevitable sequel -- seems familiar to horror movies from here to eternity. It’s all just a bit pro-forma, or pre-packaged.

The scariest scene in The Possession is not the exorcism itself, which fails to improve on the gold standard, dramatized in Friedkin’s 1973 film, but rather an apparently routine visit to the hospital.  While Emily undergoes an MRI scan, Stephanie and Hannah see visual evidence of the demon lodged inside her, living in her chest.  There’s actually a demonic creature hiding in there, and it looks absolutely terrifying. 

The scene is so effective because we all, perhaps secretly, long for science to provide us concrete proof of things that go bump in the night.  Here, even science backs up the tale of demonic possession.  Of course, there’s no narrative follow-up.  The MRI pictures aren’t presented to the world to prove the existence of demons.

For every mildly effective moment like the MRI scan sequence, The Possession features several that don’t work.  For instance, at one point Brett is struck with the dibbuk box curse.  His mouth begins to bleed and his teeth suddenly fall out.  He staggers to his car and drives away, conveniently never to be seen again. 

What happened to him? Where did he go?  What does he believe now? The film doesn’t even feature a throwaway line indicating that “Brett is gone, and not coming back.”   In other words, he’s a convenient foil for Clyde early in the story, when the patriarch is separated from his family and forced to endure Brett’s presence at the head of his dinner table.  But once the family is back together, Brett is just a superfluous loose end, not to be seen or heard from again.

Also, Tzadok reveals in the third act the method by which to make the dibbuk leave Emily and return to the box.  Its name must be spoken aloud.  Yet during the actual exorcism, Tzadok fails to speak that name for a terribly long time, thus allowing the possessed Em to escape custody, and setting up a jump-scare scene of Clyde wandering in the dark, in search of her (in a morgue, of all places).

Given the real-life particulars of the dibbuk box, the story in The Possession just isn’t terribly interesting, stimulating, or surprising.  The film is well-made, well-acted and well-scored, but also almost completely lacking in scares and invention.   In the final analysis, The Possession just can’t exorcise the searing memory of Friedkin and Blatty’s The Exorcist, which even forty years later remains a landmark film in the genre.

The Casebook of Eddie Brewer

The best kind of horror is always the unseen, the mystery of the unknown, and to top it all, a sense of feeling that a foreign presence is somewhere near you. The Casebook of Eddie Brewer does exactly that as its protagonist Eddie Brewer, a paranormal expert, goes out and about attending to calls all the while being followed by a camera crew.

Ian Brooker as Eddie Brewer gives an outstanding performance as a man who not only has the task of figuring out whether the supernatural incidents he is called for are hoaxes or not, but also simultaneously has to continuously fight to explain his stand on the entire phenomenon as accusations are made on how genuine is the paranormal field.

The Casebook of Eddie Brewer places the audience in a much more knowing situation. They are able to see things that the character aren't, still the feeling of dread, suspense, and the slowly rising tension is good enough to give a few jumps and scares even to the ardent horror fan.

The filming is done primarily through handheld cameras, that of the camera crew, with instances when the view point changes to either stable cameras installed by the paranormal research teams or at times the scenes run just like a normal film. Although different techniques are used throughout the film be it in the editing, the cuts, the camera work, it all comes together smoothly with continuous transitions.

While the acting by almost the entire cast is the strongest aspect of the film, the story manages to remain complex enough to keep the audience interested. Unfortunately, the climax proves to be a huge let down as it comes rather close to imitating the Blair Witch Project's ending scenes, albeit in a somewhat modern setting.

The film is a wonderful approach to the horror genre with a complex character at the very core of the story that brings about a humane aspect to the entire paranormal proceedings. The Casebook of Eddie Brewer is especially recommended if you like your scares but want to avoid the blood and gore. It emphasizes more on the story and the sounds rather than the visuals when it comes to the frights, and that is where is succeeds.            

Rating 3.5/5

Curse

Curse is a Singaporean horror film that although has a low-budget feel to it, manages to entertain with good enough characters and an interesting storyline.

Using the concept of Singapore's reserve army, six individuals from various aspects of life are grouped together and sent to an island, supposed to be cursed, to find three AWOL soldiers. Although the premise of the story gives ample opportunity for each character, ranging from a historian and a reflexologist to a socialite and a career soldier, to showcase individual personality traits, the film never really capitalizes on this keeping the story more about the cursed island and the evil spirits of a mother and daughter that are the cause of all the mayhem and murder.

There is though a sense of mystery to the entire story with the events being told in flashback by one survivor who isn't disclosed till the very end. Moreover, within the flashback story there are other mysterious and surprising elements thrown in for good measure. With the setting being a deserted island and the film being primarily filmed in wooded areas, there is a continuous feel of dread throughout and the makers use the settings well enough to incorporate a few jumps and scares for the audience.     

The most disappointing aspect of the film has to be the choppy acting and dialogue delivery. The spoken language is mainly English and at times it is clear that the actors are struggling with the pronunciations. Nevertheless, it isn't horrific acting, just not of the level that could and would have taken the film to the next level.

Curse makes for a fun watch with a descent story concept, but with a higher budget and a stronger cast, it could have achieved much more than it already has.

Rating 3/5

DVD Info:

Region:          2

Country:       Singapore

Language:     English & Malay

Subtitles:       English

Certificate:   15

Running Time:        91 minutes