31 Days of Horror: Week 1

I'll be honest: I'm not really a horror guy. I've never done well with blood and guts and gore, and when I was a highly nightmare-prone kid I had MAJOR issues with anything even remotely scary.

So I stayed away from horror films for a long time. Creepy, I could deal with okay, but anything really scary was a hard pass, especially if it was a slasher movie. But eventually, I grew up and got smarter about movies and started to enjoy the ones that were good at scaring you. I appreciated the roller coaster ride those films can take you on, the way they build and release tension. I started to "get" the idea of watching them and enjoying the adrenaline rush and the catharsis good horror films can bring about. And I've been trying to watch more of them.

This year, I finally decided to try to commit to the whole "31 Days of Horror" thing that many in the film blogosphere do. My schedule makes it a bit tough, but I'm doing okay so far, and I plan to, if not watch exactly one film a day, then to at least get very close to it. And I plan on doing weekly round-ups of the films I watch, since I REALLY don't have the time for full-length reviews.

Here's what I've been watching in the first week of my 2018 31 Days of Horror, in order of my watching them (titles are linked to trailers where I could find them).

The House With a Clock in its Walls (Eli Roth, 2018) I remember really enjoying this book (illustrated by the famous Edward Gorey) when I was a kid, and this doesn't quite capture the gothic grandeur of it, but it seems to be going for more of the magic/fantasy angle than the horror one. The story takes place in the '50s, where young orphan Lewis Barnavelt is moving in with his estranged uncle, Jonathan. Turns out, Jonathan and his neighbor Florence Zimmerman, are magic users, and Lewis's new home used to belong to a very, very bad warlock, who magically placed a clock somewhere in the walls of the house. That clock is counting down to something not good, and Lewis, Jonathan, and Ms. Zimmerman may be the only ones who can stop it. Aside from the delicious production design, and genial approximation of the feel of great kiddie horror flicks from the '80s, the main reason to see this is the chemistry between Jack Black and Cate Blanchett, who are having an infectious good time with this. It's enjoyable, and has some good kiddie-sized scares, but that's about as far as it goes.

The Invitation (Karyn Kusama, 2016) Eden and her husband David are having a dinner party. Among the invitees are her ex Will and his girlfriend Kira, and their whole former friend group, none of whom have seen much of Eden or Will in the two years since their son died and they split up. Long-simmering resentments and private hang-ups eventually explode as two new people show up, who are Eden and David's friends from some retreat called "The Invitation". And from there, things just get weirder and weirder. The tension simmers for the first three-quarters and boils over spectacularly in the last fifteen minutes or so. The careful character work of the actors (and the vicious screenplay) twists our allegiances to different characters every few minutes, never knowing who is more reasonable or trustworthy. It's not even really horror for most of it, just a taut, twisted character study. But when that last act hits... MAN does it deliver the goods.

Creep (Patrick Brice, 2015) Aaron, in desperate need of cash, answers an online ad for a day-long filming job that only requires him to drive a long way and bring his camera. But when he meets Josef, the man who placed the ad, it slowly becomes clear that something isn't right. Another one where for the majority of the running time it's more of a character study than anything else, Bryce effectively weaponizes the first-person camera to stage some terrific jump scares, and he and Mark Duplass have a great dynamic together. The end is truly horrifying, but the film doesn't utilize the cat-and-mouse games that are its best asset nearly enough. More of that and this would have been truly amazing. As it is, it's just a pretty neat idea, pretty well-executed.

Dressed to Kill (Brian DePalma, 1980) NOW we're talking! The opening sequence of this, featuring Angie Dickinson in a museum, is just stellar - a nearly nine-minute sequence with almost no dialogue. And then that woman with the razor shows up and slashes the movie into high gear. It's all a pretty overt Hitchcock homage (so overt that Hitch himself called it "fromage" instead), but it's a damn good one, updating Hitch's pet themes and tricks to a current setting and going even more dark and twisted. I don't want to give away too much of the film's plot, because it's a really fun ride that is best experienced as cold as possible. It's a nasty piece of work, and isn't exactly good for LGBTQ issues (especially at the time), but as with most of DePalma's films, it's super stylish and a hell of a ride.

Boo! A Madea Halloween (Tyler Perry, 2016) In case it wasn't already clear, yes, I'm working my way up to the scarier stuff. This one is MUCH more of a comedy than I was expecting, focusing mainly on putting the core group of old people together and letting them bounce off of each other. And I'll admit: I laughed. I laughed more than I probably should have. There's more than a hint of minstrelsy to Perry's Madea, but... when they have an extended conversation about literally beating some sense into today's teenagers, their commitment to the bit and how far they go over the top is HILARIOUS. The basic story is that one Halloween night, Madea has been called upon by her nephew to keep an eye on his seventeen year-old daughter Tiffany, to make sure she doesn't go to a local frat party. Naturally, Madea brings along her best friend Bam, her brother Joe, and their friend Hattie. Tiffany sneaks out, but when Madea calls the cops on the frat party, Tiffany enlists her friends and the fraternity brothers to play some good old-fashioned Halloween fright pranks on the old folks. It's not great. The horror elements are well-done but bland, and Madea freaking out and punching the thing that scares her in the face can only save it so many times (although to be fair, it works FAR more often than it should). It's nice to have a horror-comedy that leans more on the comedy side, but a few more legit scares would have gone a long way.

House of Usher (Roger Corman, 1960) The first of eight films Roger Corman made adapting the works of Edgar Allen Poe, this one based on the short story "The Fall of the House of Usher". It is about a brother and sister who are the last of the Usher family. Brother Roderick believes the family bloodline to be cursed, and will not let sister Madeline marry her betrothed, who has come to the Usher estate to bring her home with him. I love a good Gothic, and HOO BOY this is one. Heavy with atmosphere, gorgeous production and costume design, with lies and secrets as thick as the fog that chokes the crumbling house where the action takes place. It's never more deliriously over the top than in a mid-film dream sequence that just knocks everything out of the park. This is the most subdued I've ever seen Vincent Price, and the thing often does feel as airless as that house surely must, but this sort of thing is so right up my alley that I didn't much care.

Thursday Movie Picks - Home Invasion

Written as part of the weekly blogathon series hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Come join us by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!

Thankfully, I have never had my home broken in to. Knock on wood, of course, as I don't want to ever have such a thing happen. It's a truly terrible thing to have happen, a deep, personal invasion that can leave lasting effects. Thankfully, we have movies that allow us to get catharsis in watching others go through this horror, and also perhaps give us some lessons on what to do - or, more likely, what NOT to do - should we ever find ourselves in this trying situation.

The Strangers (Bryan Bertino, 2008) From the simplest of set-ups (a couple in crisis, a house in a remote location, three masked assailants), Bertino creates a masterpiece of creeping dread and steadily-mounting terror. There are jump scares in The Strangers, but the things that stay with you aren't the things that make you scream. Instead, it's the moments of quiet, where a masked figure appears deep in the background, or other moments where the tension is so thick that you just want to yell at the characters to TURN AROUND or move to the left instead of the right... so many moments where safety is just inches, seconds away, but there's nothing to be done. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, as the couple whose home gets invaded, are so believable as a couple on the verge of breaking up that you're even more invested in them as people when things start to go south and they come closer together. Which makes the whole thing even sadder in the end.

Panic Room (David Fincher, 2002) Sure, some of the visual effects haven't exactly aged well, but everything else about Fincher's crackerjack thriller works like gangbusters. When Mom Jodie Foster and diabetic Daughter Kristen Stewart move into a Manhattan brownstone, they don't even get one night's rest before they find themselves trapped in the house's panic room, a steel-and-concrete-reinforced room that should protect them in the event of a home invasion... but the three thieves who show up include an employee of the security company that built and installed the panic room... and the separate phone line in the room hasn't been activated yet. Originally slated to star Nicole Kidman, who aggravated an injury from Moulin Rouge! and had to drop out, causing Foster to step in. Naturally, with Foster involved, her part was rewritten to emphasize the character's strength and similarities to her daughter. I can't help but think that this was all for the best, despite wanting very much to see what the Kidman version would have looked like.

When a Stranger Calls (Fred Walton, 1979) By far one of the best (and scariest) opening sequences in all cinema, Carol Kane's babysitter finds herself terrorized by increasingly threatening phone calls asking if she has "checked the children". That's it, but this scene is brutally terrifying in the best way, a brilliant combination of lighting, editing, sound, and score. To say nothing of Kane's performance, brilliantly showing a smart, resourceful woman slowly fraying at the seams. The rest of the film is a bit dull, as it turns into a police procedural... until the terrifying conclusion!

Thursday Movie Picks - TV Edition: Anthology Series

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!

This week, we interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you a special TMP TV Edition. Anthology series have grown in popularity in recent years thanks to the success of American Horror Story, which changed up the formula a bit: Instead of having every episode be completely stand-alone, as in traditional anthology series, now each season is its own story (except that it's not so stand-alone, since Ryan Murphy, et al. decided that the whole thing ACTUALLY takes place in the same universe and characters have crossed over between seasons, but WHATEVER).

But for the purposes of this week's pickings, I'm going with the more traditional, "a bunch of stand-alone episodes unified around a central theme but with no real connection to each other" definition.

The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) Not the first anthology series, but certainly the one that cast the longest shadow, Rod Serling's exploration of paranoia in mid-century America could be anything from episode to episode, and while there was often a touch of the supernatural, many episodes (including series best "Time Enough At Last") were perfectly quotidian. Often remembered as a horror series, and with good reason, it's worth noting that were comedic ("Mr. Bevis") and straight dramatic episodes ("I Sing The Body Electric") as well. More than anything, The Twilight Zone is science fiction, taking American fears about new technology and space exploration and placing them in a funhouse mirror. What's reflected back at us isn't always pretty.
Favorite Episodes: "The After Hours", "Mirror Image", "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", "Miniature", "The Invaders"

Faerie Tale Theatre (1982-1987) One of the first examples of original cable TV programming, Shelley Duvall produced this series that focused on one fairy tale per episode, with big stars acting in parts big and small. The design of the sets and backdrops were often inspired by famous artists like Gustav Klimt, Norman Rockwell, Pieter Brueghel, and even Jean Cocteau. My sister and I would take these videos out from the library so often as kids that we practically had some of the episodes memorized. There is a charm to Faerie Tale Theatre, cultivated by Duvall herself, that is lacking in a lot of children's entertainment, but gives the episodes a timeless quality, and the opportunity to see such stars as Robin Williams, Eric Idle, Anjelica Huston, Eve Arden, Teri Garr, Ned Beatty, Jeff Bridges, Gena Rowlands, Bernadette Peters, Carrie Fisher, and Christopher Reeve, among MANY others, perform in the glorified children's theater setting is a delight (favorite random casting: Klaus Kinski as the Beast in "Beauty & the Beast" opposite Susan Sarandon's Beauty).
Favorite Episodes: "The Frog Prince", "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Princess and the Pea"

Black Mirror (2011-Present) If ever there was a true heir to The Twilight Zone, Charlie Brooker's screed against the modern world and its technology is it. Science fiction that feels like either our current world gone sideways or far-too-possible futures, Black Mirror is far bleaker and more pessimistic than Twilight Zone ever was, but it is powerful and thought-provoking. I mean, when the first episode is about the British Prime Minister being forced by cyberterrorists to have sex with a pig on live TV, you get a pretty good idea about what the series thinks about the world. Some of the episodes are genuinely difficult to watch, but others are just ridiculously entertaining, and they are all executed with great care and craft at every level. It's maybe the most essential TV show about our current moment, and that's saying something.
Favorite Episodes: "White Bear", "Be Right Back", "Nosedive", "San Junipero", "U.S.S. Callister"

Thursday Movie Picks - Farms

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!

This week on Thursday Movie Picks, we're going to the country, to visit some farms!

I grew up in the suburb state of Connecticut, where seasonal apple-picking orchards and corn mazes are plentiful. One of my grade-school friends actually lived on a family farm, and while I know we went there a couple of times on field trips, I do not remember anything about those trips. But these farm-based movies, now these I remember really well.

Cold Comfort Farm (John Schlesinger, 1995) This hilarious send-up of British narrative tropes is an underseen delight. Kate Beckinsale, in her film debut, is a perfectly prim (and vaguely lesbionic) Londoner author who goes out to the country in search of "real life", and some long-estranged relatives, and ends up bringing a bit of big city flair to the drab country farm and its inhabitants. If you are a fan of British literature and/or film, there is much to enjoy here, including Ian McKellen as a countryside fire-and-brimstone preacher and Joanna Lumley as Beckinsale's even more lesbionic friend from London.

Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995) "That'll do, pig." This gentle bedtime story of a movie, about a farmer who adopts a runt-of-a-litter pig who becomes a "sheeppig" when the farm's mother sheepdog takes him under her wing, is one of my all-time favorites. The real live talking animal visual effects hold up spectacularly, the performances are all perfection, the production design is lovely, and on top of all that is a message extolling the virtues of kindness and acceptance that plays well to anyone from ages 1 to 101.

Chicken Run (Nick Park, 2000) I am a huge fan of Nick Park's Wallace & Gromit shorts, and this, his first feature, combines a lot of the things that I love about those shorts into one full-length feature-sized package: the fun, endearing characters, the clever and hilarious Rube Goldberg-esque machines, and the ever-so-slightly dark, ever-so-British humor. And a delightfully twisted story: The chickens on Tweedy's farm come up with a plan to escape the POW-camp-like existence with the help of a circus-performer American rooster, as Mr and Mrs. Tweedy develop a new plan to increase production of their chicken pies. The whole film is funny and clever, and endlessly delightful.

Thursday Movie Picks - Good Remakes

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them.

Look, as much as I hate to admit it, every once in a while Hollywood remakes one of its own movies and it's... not... bad. And on rare occasions, it even improves on the original.

Shocking, I know. But true! Granted, it doesn't happen very much these days, but by the sound of it, A Star Is Born, of all things, is at the very least as good as the 30s and 50s versions, and better than the 70s version. I remain skeptical, but perhaps it will indeed join the ranks of these great remakes!

The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956) As Hitch himself said, the original 1934 version with Peter Lorre is "the work of a talented amateur," while this remake "was made by a professional." Granted, the original is very good. But this one has Jimmy Stewart, Doris Day, "Que Sera, Sera", and of course the Albert Hall sequence, one of the best, most thrilling scenes in all of Hitchcock's filmography. Accuse it of being overwrought all you want, but this is one of my favorite Hitchcock films, often because its too much-ness is truly exciting.

The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956) And as long as we're talking about too much-ness, this film pretty much defines it. But in the best possible way. They don't make movies like this anymore, truly epic in every way. Every performance (Charlton Heston! Anne Baxter! Yul Brynner! Yvonne de Carlo! Judith Anderson! John Derek! DeMille himself!) is iconic, and the special effects sequences capture the kind of grandeur that you wouldn't have thought possible in 1956. It may be over three and a half hours long, but it's so entertaining that you don't even notice. DeMille's own silent version of this story is still worth seeing, but it's got nothing on this, one of the biggest spectacles the cinema has ever seen.

Ocean's Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001) Yeah, sure, The Rat Pack, and all that, but even that classic brand of cool ain't got nothin' on what Soderbergh, Clooney, and Pitt cooked up here. Everything about this remake of Ocean's Eleven feels effortless, from the easy charisma and chemistry of the stars, to the slick cinematography, the playful editing, and most importantly, that iconic jazzy score. This is Hollywood product at its slickest, providing one hell of a good time that you can't replicate anywhere else. It's pure movie magic, with a twist that more than holds up to multiple viewings. Neat trick, that.

Thursday Movie Picks - A Discovery/Exploration

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!

This week on Thursday Movie Picks, we're going exploring! Let's see what we can find, shall we?

The Lost City of Z (James Gray, 2017) One of the most beautiful films of 2017, The Lost City of Z is based on the true story of explorer Percy Fawcett, a British officer tasked with surveying the border between Bolivia and Bravil in 1905. While on his journey, he hears tell of a mythical city covered in gold, and finds some artifacts that make him believe it. He returns to South America over and over again in his life trying to find it, eventually bringing his eldest son with him. Dealing as much with the home lives of British Imperialism as with the exploration of the South American rain forest, Gray's film is often fascinating, if a bit frustrating. But the cinematography is stunning, and the performances, from Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, Angus McFadyen, and even Sienna Miller, as Fawcett's wife.

Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2016) Yes, it seems almost cruel to shoot a film about the glorious scenery of the Amazon in black and white, but just wait until you see this. The cinematography becomes utterly hypnotic, which is appropriate for the tale of two white explorers, thirty years apart, searching for a rare sacred plant with hallucinogenic powers. The stories are connected by one Amazonian native, Karamakate, and the film has a lot of very wise things to say about aging and regret, as well as imperialism and the nature of man to explore and his desire to rule. One of my all-time favorite cinema experiences, I remember being so stunned when I left the theater that I had to keep my phone off and just wander the streets for a good couple of hours while I digested this.

Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014) A bit of a change of pace here, to outer space exploration. Nolan's grand epic offers (again) astonishing cinematography (although the constantly-shifting aspect ratios in IMAX 70mm drive me absolutely insane) and wonderful performances from its all-star cast, but it doesn't quite hold together. The bloated run-time and grandiose ambitions don't help, but what's really at fault here is the somewhat meandering screenplay, which is a really good second or third draft but needed some editing and a polish in order to become the best version of itself. It's a tremendous visual experience, but ultimately an almost-but-not-quite for me.

Thursday Movie Picks - Non-English Language Movies

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join our motley crew by picking three movies that fit the theme of the week and writing a bit about them!

Hello all! I'M BACK! It's been a busy few weeks here at Chez Dan, but I'm finally over the hump and ready to start picking films again.

And what a week to do it! The theme is the wonderfully broad Non-English Language Movies, and oh my word there are such a wealth of options that I almost don't know what to do with myself! While it would be very easy to go classic here, I'm choosing instead to go modern. So many great foreign films get buried these days for a million reasons, and they really shouldn't. So trust me on these: Deal with the subtitles and watch them. You won't be disappointed.

The Mermaid (Stephen Chow, 2016) It's not surprising that this bizarre rom-com/fantasy/sci-fi/musical/comedy/drama didn't make one tenth of what it made at home in the US. Like I said, it's a pretty bizarre movie. But it's our loss, really, because this is one of the most entertaining films of the aughts. Effortlessly shifting tones and blending together just about every genre under the sun, The Mermaid is a delight from beginning to end. The basic plot is this: A playboy business tycoon buys an area of ocean called the Green Gulf. It's a wildlife reserve, but his company has placed sonar devices in the water to push all the aquatic life out, so that they can use it for other things. Unbeknownst to him, that happens to be the home of a clan of merpeople, and after many of them begin to get sick and die from the sonar, they decide to send one of their own, who can walk and dance on her fins, to seduce and kill him in revenge. But of course, the two end up falling in love. I can't accurately describe what happens from there without just listing off all the funny, crazy, and wonderful things that happen along the way, but suffice it to say, I had a better time watching The Mermaid than I did most American blockbusters.

The Handmaiden (Park Chan-Wook, 2016) If you've been reading my blog for a while, you may remember that The Handmaiden was all over my personal awards for 2016, and I stand by every single one of them. Park Chan-Wook took Sarah Waters's Victorian England-set crime novel and dialed everything up to eleven, making one of the most beautiful, brilliant, thrilling films in recent memory. Moving the setting to 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, The Handmaiden follows the story of a pickpocket named Sook-hee, plucked from a makeshift family of thieves by a con-man posing as "Count Fujiwara" to help him seduce a Japanese heiress named Lady Hideko (Kim Min-Hee, giving an incredibly complex performance). But as she becomes Lady Hideko's handmaiden, Sook-hee starts to fall for her mistress. And that's just the film's opening act. The film is broken into three parts, each told from a different character's perspective, each one more twisted and jaw-dropping than the last. A total feast for the eyes and ears, The Handmaiden is a sensual ravishment unlike anything you've ever seen. You won't be able to look away as it just gets crazier and crazier.

Neomanila (Mikhail Red, 2017) If you can find a way to watch this, DO IT. Much lower profile than the other two films I mentioned (I only saw it by chance with a friend at this year's Asian Film Festival at Lincoln Center), this is a really well-done, character-driven thriller set in the heart of the drug war in the Philippines. It's about Toto, a young teenage orphan whose brother is in jail. The local drug gang his brother was a part of pledges to help Toto raise bail money, but only tortures the poor kid. He then gets taken under the wing of Irma, a leader of one of Manila's most notorious death squads that target drug dealers. The pace is on the slower side in between the terrifically-directed thriller scenes, but it offers a great window on what life is like in this part of the world, as well as some wonderfully moving character beats. Eula Valdez, who plays Irma, gives a fantastic performance that (in a just world) should get her tons of even better roles across the globe. Irma is a complex, complicated character, and Valdez isn't afraid to dig in to even the ugliest places in her psyche. She makes a fateful decision near the end of the film that took my breath away, and is even more impactful for just how she plays it. A gem of a film that I'm glad to have seen, and am happy to spread the word about.