The Crazies Review

Radha Mitchell in The Crazies

Breck Eisner’s The Crazies is a film that makes no bones about what it is. I had expected another run-of-the-mill horror film going in, but left the theatre pleasantly surprised. The Crazies is a tightly wound ball of suspense that will manage to unsettle and entertain you. The film is loosely based on George Romero’s 1973 movie of the same name; that film focused on both the civilian and military response to a deadly outbreak in a small town. Like Romero’s other work the film contained timely social commentary, in this case the film was a satire of the Vietnam War. The 2010 version of The Crazies is a little different, with the focus on squarely on the civilians, their dealings with the infected and the brutal military containment of the town. Now I’m sure you could draw out some kind of analogy relating to the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, but if there is any underlying message it doesn’t feel nearly as ham-handed as some of Romero’s efforts. The Crazies is a rare example of a Hollywood horror film that is not only a good genre film, but a pretty decent flick period. Unlike many other horror films, you’ll feel invested in the movie and actually root for the characters to survive.

Spoilers to follow.

Welcome to picture perfect Ogden Marsh, an ordinary farming community in rural Iowa. This is a town where nothing really exciting ever happens, and that’s just the way the residents like it. Here we meet the local Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) and his pregnant wife Judy (Radha Mitchell), the town doctor. When a local man unexpectedly shows up to a high school baseball game wielding a shotgun, Sheriff Dutton is forced to shoot him in self-defense. In the wake of this incident, more townsfolk begin to acting strangely; what was another painfully normal Spring in Ogdgen Marsh slowly begins turning into a nightmare for the residents. As things spiral out of control, Dutton and his Deputy (Joe Anderson) discover that a military aircraft containing a biological weapon recently crashed into the reservoir, contaminating the local water supply. Before the two are able to warn the residents the military cordons off the town and begin rounding up the infected families with brutal efficiency.

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Saw: The Video Game: The Review

Editor’s Note: This review was originally intended for publication late last year, but was misplaced by yours truly. My apologies to Zack – Will

Do I want to play a game? Yeah sure, why not? I’m always down for a good bout of Tetris, but with Fall winds rattling my bones, scary games are definitely on the menu. Saw? The game? A game of Saw? Now I know the high brow savant in me wants to slide this concept away and move on to something… European, I need to honestly admit that Saw, the obnoxiously successful torture porn series of films that have a new entry annually if only to prove how much thought and effort is needed for the next installment, is not nearly as offensive as a video game. In fact I find that most things that tend to make you groan in films are usually the very same things you’ll fist pump for in a video game. So perhaps, conceptually, Saw: The Video Game may have something going for it. Thus begging the question, do you want to play THIS game?

You are Detective Tapp, one of the detectives aggressively hounding Jigsaw, the main antagonist of the franchise. Tapp was apparently shot in the first Saw film, though I’m no expert on the subject. So instead I have come to the conclusion that Detective Tapp was on his way to his buddy’s Bill Cosby dress up party when he was shot and kidnapped by the Jigsaw killer then awoken in a house o’ nightmares. If I have to give the writing team one medal it is for coming up with a great reason for complete strangers to want to tear Tapp a new one. You discover that Jigsaw has surgically implanted a key somewhere in Tapp’s body, and it is this key that so happens to be the path freedom for every other victim in the building. The way the encountered enemies incorporate Jigsaw’s lore is also fairly clever, from blinded brawlers who have steel boxes mounted to their head, to some with their hands bound to a stick of dynamite. Things descend into dumb pretty quickly though. To every victim of Jigsaw’s torture is some kind of justification, though they are really stretching it with this one. Tapp’s moral failing is that he’s just too obsessed with Jigsaw, and so Jigsaw decided to punish him. It just feels like the needle wagging its finger at the junkie. I guess the obvious cure for Tapp would be for Jigsaw to stop, y’know, killing people, but Jigsaw acts above it, and in this game especially rubs off as more hypocritical and smug than interesting. Tapp’s carrot on a string is to use this opportunity to figure out who Jigsaw is once and for all, though since the films have already treaded on that ground, it’s not nearly as tantalizing for the player.

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Girl Number 9 Review

To slightly skew Marshall MacLuhan’s famous saying “the medium is the message”, I think it’s also fair to say that art should be designed for the medium for which it was intended. For example, a film like Where the Wild Things Are is meant to be seen on a big screen, where it is arguable that a movie such as Love Happens has no real big-screen advantage. I’ve always considered it plus when a story comes to be through whatever medium by utilizing that medium to the story’s advantage. And such a story is Girl Number 9, that latest work by Dan Turner and James Moran (writer of various Doctor Who and Torchwood episodes, as well the brilliant horror-comedy Severance).

According to an interview with Scott Weinberg, Moran and Turner decided on the format first and built the story around it. They built it around the internet, which was a good move considering the viral marketing that can get your work seen by millions in the blink of an eye. Girl Number 9 is told in six episodes coming to a total of a little under thirty minutes. So about the length of a TV show, or a longish short film. Gareth David-Lloyd (who played Ianto Jones on Torchwood) is Detective Matheson; he and the police has finally caught a serial killer they believe is responsible for the horrible deaths of seven girls. Apparently the killer only wants to talk to Matheson, for reasons that turn out to be core-chillingly frightening. I won’t give away any  more of the plot, considering the length of the film. The key to writing for the internet seems to be to keep it tight, keep it fresh, keep it to the point and don’t meander, lest you loose the attention of your audience. And keep that attention tightly in your grasp.

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Revisiting the High Nineties: Cannibal Double Feature

It seems that I slept through all those timely Halloween horror film recommendations last month. However, this double feature is just is applicable now as it was then, which is why I’m making these my Yanksgiving (what us Canadians call American Thanksgiving, or at least should start) family viewing picks. Because nothing says ‘Thank You’ to your fellow man more than seeing to it that his leftovers don’t go to waste.

The 70’s and 80’s saw cannibal films become a big horror sub-genre popular with the cult crowds. The early 90’s had the subject break into mainstream movies with the Best Picture winning Silence of the Lambs, though most would agree this movie has little in common with the aforementioned underground movement. A couple years later Alive was released, which was a true story with an awesome plane crash and a stranded soccer team doing what needed to be done to survive. It would be almost a decade before Hollywood returned to Thomas Harris novels for subsequent Hannibal Lecter sequels, re-makes and prequels, leaving a period in between where I can think of few man-eats-man movies other than these two often overlooked treats: Cannibal: The Musical and Ravenous.

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Cronenberg looks under King’s Dome

This past Thursday night I was treated to a very special surprise: last minute tickets to an evening with Stephen King. I estimate that no one has written a larger portion of my lifetime’s reading than this man. And as an added bonus, he was interviewed by my favourite Canadian filmmaker, David Cronenberg. I didn’t even know this event was happening in here in Toronto, where I pride myself in usually being ‘in the know’ about this kind of thing.   I’m not sure where they advertised it, but I suppose not much publicity was needed to sell out the 2200 seat Canon Theatre for this once in a lifetime opportunity.

After being introduced by George Stroumboulopoulos (this guy’s everywhere!), King came out in a typical dressed-down writer’s attire which included white running shoes, a red t-shirt and faded blue jeans that were a little too short. He then expressed his nervousness caused by having to read excerpts from his new book to a bigger audience than he had ever read to before. It’s ironic that the author who has written about nearly every supernatural fear you can think of is still subject to the most common fear of all: public speaking. Perhaps this was an attempt to make himself more relatable after entering a stage on which the cover art of over 30 bestselling novels had just been projected one at a time to continually growing applause. He then mentioned that he had dropped his pages while they were putting his wireless mic on, and then proceeded to read them out of order, as he had feared… the horror! I felt a certain poetic justice in watching the man squirm a bit after my experiences reading It when I was 13 years old. Under the Dome is a return to those 1000-plus page yarns he was spinning in the 80’s, it’s been flying off thankful bookshelves for about two weeks now.

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Sitges ‘09 Reviews Part Two: Doghouse, Macabre, Heartless

To see Shelagh’s first batch of  reviews from the 2009 Sitges Film Festival, including Splice, Amer, Cargo and TiMER be sure to click here.

Probably the best night I had at Sitges was not at a film, but at a party (like all good festivals, the parties are great). This one was set up by the Film Festival Mafia, a group of film festival hounds of which I am now a proud member. But this was no ordinary party – it was karaoke. You have not lived until you’ve seen the guys from Fantastic Fest in Austin tear their shirts off and rock some Guns ‘n Roses. Oh, such memories. But back to the movies.

Doghouse – Directed by Jake West. Starring Danny Dyer, Noel Clarke

The British have a knack for combining horror and comedy. And while this zom-rom-com is not in the same league as Shaun of the Dead, it certainly adds a fun new twist to the becoming-tired-at-lightning-speed zombie subgenre. A group of male friends, in an effort to cheer up one of their lot as he heads for a painful divorce, go to a small town in rural England where the population is 75% female. But as they arrive, it turns out that that 75% have turned into zombie-like creature who will attack anyone with an excess of testosterone.  Politically correct, this film is not; but that’s a good thing. Indeed, it makes as much fun of the way men stereotype and generalize female behavior as much as exposing some of that behavior, which I can say as a woman, is accurate and embarrassing. While the film strays into certain cliches (all the men represent a type, and you couldn’t see these varying types actually hanging out together for example), there are enough laughs and originality to sustain the 90 minutes.  Apparently there’s a “cathouse” script in the works. Now that I will see.

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Sitges ‘09 Reviews Part One: Splice, Amer, Cargo, TiMER

Last February when on holiday in Spain, I was fortunate enough to meet Mike Hostench, co-director of Sitges Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic de Catalunya, the largest fantastic film festival of Europe and one of the largest and most important in the world. His enthusiasm convinced me to attend the festival last month. Believe me, when you’re sitting on a resort restaurant patio surrounded by some of the biggest names in genre cinema it can be hard to motivate yourself to go to a movie; but it was not hard at Sitges considering the plethora of offerings.

Europeans have a very different attitude towards genre film (by genre I mean science fiction, horror and fantasy). Rather than being a niche market that caters to a certain type of individual, genre film is welcomed and watched by a hefty portion of the population. It is not cult; it is (almost) mainstream. This also leaves the field of what is considered genre very wide open. This can be detrimental, but in Sitges case it works very well. Here is a sampling of some of the strange and wonderful (though not always both) films I saw.

Splice – Directed by Vincenzo Natali. Starring Adrian Brody, Sarah Polley

One of the most anticipated films of the year, Splice definitely does not disappoint. In fact, it dares to go places no American film would – but of course, it’s written and directed by a Canadian, filmed in Canada with a Canadian star. And it’s about genetic manipulation. Brody and Polley are a husband and wife scientific mastermind team who specialize in mixing up the DNA of various animals in order to create new pharmaceutical products to cure humanity’s ailments. In order to maintain funding, they secretly combine the DNA of several animals with human DNA; low and behold their experiment works and an artificial womb gives birth to Dren, a human-bird-horse-I don’t know what else hybrid. The scientists hide her, educate her and ultimately imprison her.  They bond with her as parents, but in the end they are not her parents, but her creators – and there is a world of difference between these two roles. The former is nurturing in order to allow the offspring to survive on its own; the latter is controlling, wanting their own vision to supercede any independence of the creation. Perhaps this is why Nietzsche said that God is dead; creations are more trouble than they are worth (creators too). How can you separate your emotions from your work when the thing you create is alive and sentient? How can you hope to control it? Are there things that science simply should not do? While Polley is her usual boring self (sorry, her acting has never impressed me), Brody gives a fantastic performance as a man caught between his work and his heart (and occasionally his libido). This is Natali’s best film since Cube.

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TIFF Review: [Rec] 2

The past few years have seen Spanish horror burst onto screens around the world thanks to some fairly high-profile Spanish directors making films in Hollywood, and Spanish films being remade for US audiences.  [REC] was remade into Quarantine, though there is no news on whether Quarantine 2 will be made (I haven’t seen it, preferring my horror in its original packaging).  While perhaps not quite as frightening as the original, [REC] 2 still had the audience jumping out of its seat fairly frequently.

Picking up a mere 15 minutes after the first film left off, a SWAT team goes into the quarantined apartment building with a health official to try and assess the situation.  They make their way to the penthouse, the source of the outbreak.  And there it turns out that the health official is really a priest, and that the contagion is the devil, and the devil is spreading.

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Paranormal Activity Trailer

Odd things start occurring shortly after a young couple moves into a seemingly typical suburban home.  A mysterious presence is in the house, keeping them up at night.  In an effort to get to the bottom of these disturbing events, the couple setup a camera to record the bedroom as they sleep.  Things get scary from there.

Paranormal Activity is by all accounts a truly scary film.  Thanks to numerous test screenings this summer the movie is getting extremely strong buzz.  Paranormal Activity is set for a limited release on September 25th.

Toronto After Dark Review: The Forbidden Door

The Forbidden Door’s protagonist is not a starving artist, but a prosperous one learning that success can be just as torturous.  The film opens on him sipping champagne while denying an art collector one of his gallery pieces, as it has already sold.  The first few shots inside the art gallery give an initial impression that this may be a visually uninteresting film.  This perception is shattered after Gambir and his wife leave the gallery, a crane shot swoops up and away, past a blazing marquee before we’re thrown into one of the coolest opening credit sequences ever (think James Bond meets Roman Polanski) and we see that director Joko Anwar has some flair to share.

I won’t try to summarize the plot which, like so many ambitious horror films, starts out strong, becomes a little convoluted, ultimately leaves the viewer thinking ‘wtf?’.  The titular forbidden door that Gambir can’t enter actually has very little to do with the plot, but is just one of several catalysts that contribute to his insanity and paranoia.  I will say that the gory moments were squirm-worthy but not gratuitous and evoked cheers from the After Dark audience.

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Toronto After Dark Review: Strigoi

The Toronto After Dark Film Festival wrapped up this past Friday, the fest played some of the best genre films from around the world.  One film in particular seems poised to become the sleeper hit of the fest: Strigoi, the debut film from director Faye Jackson.  An eccentric and extremely black comedy, Strigoi is set against the backdrop of a small town in post-communist Romania.  If you’re like me, and you’ve always found something unsettling about small towns or the country, then Strigoi will definitely strike a chord with you.

For all intents and purposes, Strigoi is a movie about vampires; however, don’t expect the typical vampire fare.  Never has the term morbid humour been more appropriate for a film.  The movie takes the vampire mythos back to basics, to its roots based in Romanian folklore.  Strigoi are something between a zombie and a vampire.  They are the undead; drinking the blood of the living by night.  And, as the film’s protagonist Vlad quickly begins to realize, they’re also your neighbours. 

Spoilers to follow.

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20th Anniversary Screening of Troll 2 at The Bloor

If you were lucky enough to see the documentary Best Worst Movie at the Hot Docs Film Festival this past week then you know all about the movie Troll 2.

Considered by many as possibly the worst film ever made, Troll 2 was filmed by an Italian director who barely spoke any English and was shot in small town Utah using mostly local actors. The film features a completely nonsensical story, terrible special effects and acting that would make a local elementary school play look like the Royal Shakespeare Company. Troll 2 definitely falls into the so bad it’s good category.

Rue Morgue and the Toronto After Dark Film Fest are presenting a very special 20th anniversary screening of Troll 2 in 35mm on May 12th at The Bloor.

I highly recommend seeing this, you haven’t seen a bad movie until you’ve seen Troll 2. If you don’t believe the movie could be as bad as I’m saying it is, just check out a sampling of Troll 2 after the jump.

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