Having been through a certain amount of medically inevitable pain and discomfort involving some bloodletting, I decided to catch up on some horror movies that would provide me with some sort of catharsis. It was a mostly misguided attempt, driven by a weakness for the genre, even though I’ve sworn off most horrors on the basis of their exploitative dynamics and lack of taste – consider the creatively bankrupt torture porn movies. The first film reviewed below runs close to the depravities the latter offers.
Darren Lynn Bousman’s Mother’s Day is another unsuccessful and completely unnecessary remake of a 1980s cult favourite (I hesitate to use “classic”). Starring a fierce-eyed Rebecca De Mornay as the titular character, the film provides her with a follow-up performance to her 1990s domestic threat film The Hand That Rocks The Cradle. Sadly, Mother’s Day is a waste of time for all involved, and its overall and ever present badness is probably the main reason why the film hasn’t found an American distributor yet, at least not to my knowledge.
As bad weather threatens a small American town, a group of friends (including Shawn Ashmore, Briana Evigan and Kandyse McClure) gather in Beth (Jaime King) and Daniel Sohapi's (Frank Grillo) house to have a party in the couple’s outfitted cellar, which provides liquor, pool and music. While the party kicks off, three brothers break into the house. Having just pulled of a robbery, one of the brothers is slowly and painfully dying from a gunshot wound. The elder brother, Ike (Patrick John Flueger), phones their sister to tell their mother to come on over to the house. It doesn’t take long for someone to realise that the noises upstairs aren’t just mating raccoons, and before you know it, the friends are all hostages in an increasingly bloody and boring situation. Cue multiple opportunities for many characters to be tortured, humiliated and murdered.
We’ve seen it all before, and better. Mother’s Day is a dull, over populated film that would have benefited from a better screenplay and fewer characters. Characters do things that do not flow naturally from a given situation, and instead of being shocked by what I saw, I was left scratching my chin as to how anyone would believe that an audience would buy into certain scenes. For example, there is a scene that involves an ATM, Ike and two teenage girls. Ike gives them certain instructions to carry out, or risk certain death. It’s a terrible scene, indicative of the poverty of the writing and vision of the film, that uses a familiarity with moral choice horrors (Saw, WAZ) as a cheap and unjustifiable thrill.
Meanwhile, De Mornay’s mother is menacing at first until she too collapses under the weight of bad dialogue, flat one-liners and unimaginative plotting. Mother finds out all sorts of stuff about the friends all the time – people she’s only just met – on the basis of her being so perceptive and intelligent, I guess. But it gets so convoluted that I kept waiting for her to quote Horatio Cane’s tired ‘witticisms’ from CSI about people, murder, betrayal and suffering.
Don’t be fooled by the drooling, wide-eyed festival responses to Mother. She’s over the hill, tired and barren.
On the other hand, I was surprised at how good Scream 4 was. To qualify: I heard that it was a horrible film, a tedious and predictable cash-in on a franchise that, in movie economics, is considered long forgotten. I found it to not be that bad, although admittedly it’s faint praise. One of the film’s main marketing points was that it bought back the original trilogy’s director and screenwriter, Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson. While Scream 4 isn’t at all a waste of time, it’s possible that a different creative team could’ve delivered a more inventive film overall.
Set many years after the initial murders, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) returns to her hometown of Woodsboro to visit with some family (Emma Roberts) and for the launch of her first book. The book, she says, is her way to finally lay the past to rest. But familiar faces are all around her to remind her of what had happened, such as Sheriff Riley (David Arquette) and his wife, former celebrity reporter Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox). There are also new characters that (1) see Sidney as a celebrity and (2) were put in place to help drive what the producers hoped would be a new franchise. (The film was seen as a box-office disappointment, so a sequel is unlikely). Soon people are dying left and right as clearly Sidney’s homecoming has triggered some sort of imitation killer. Of course, the infamous mask featuring the elongated white face is back, as is the franchise’s self-awareness.
Whereas the previous Screams were both effective genre films as well as playfully self-aware meta-movies, Scream 4 wants to be too clever for its own good, and shoots itself in the foot. The knowing nodding and winking in the direction of the audience gets tired while you wait for the next murder. The film explicitly references Shaun of the Dead, which simply makes you want to watch a top-notch self-aware horror comedy instead of the film you’re currently viewing – it’s never a good idea to invite comparisons between your film and a superior genre classic.
To be sure, the opening scene works: it makes you very aware of the fact that you’ve entered a cultural contract with a horror film while foregrounding the first films and simultaneously setting up some suspenseful scenes with well known actresses. Scream 4 sustains continuity with the previous films, which I liked, and manages to deliver more or less what’s to be expected from a Scream sequel. It doesn’t do any more than that, but really, the vitriol spewed at the film is unnecessary. Stab 4 looks better though.
To matters of a more manifestly 'spiritual' nature: Mikael Hafstrom’s The Rite is a well crafted if predictable and limited exorcism movie featuring Anthony Hopkins in a performance tailor made for him, and that he never should’ve committed to. In The Rite, a doubting young priest, Michael Kovak (Colin O'Donoghue) is sent to Rome to attend on a course in exorcisms. You know these classes are to be taken seriously because the lecturer is played by serious-faced Cirian Hinds, who recognises that Kovak might need more evidence of the existence of the devil than class notes and slides can provide. (No, the students are not shown Devil.) So the young priest ends up with Father Lucas Trevant (Hopkins), a Welsh expat and something of an exorcism expert, the type of person that could make for an interesting guest on Sunday night 702 Talk Radio. Fr Levant is also well liked by the local feline community. If you’ve seen the trailer, you know what happens next, and it’s here where Hopkins goes off the rails and drives head-on into self-parody.
The Rite is very different from the father of the subgenre, The Exorcist, and it is as unfair as it is inevitable to compare any exorcism film to the iconic 1970 pioneer. The Rite has many of the same aspects, including the priest who is uncertain of what is real and what can be believed in, as well as prolonged exorcism scenes. But William Friedkin’s film is much more successful in not only demonstrating the dynamics of possession but also the anguish of those who falter in faith while ostensibly in service of it. Come to think of it, the more recent Exorcism of Emily Rose was also better at playing with the ambiguities of truth and reality, leaving it to the viewer to decide whether Emily was possessed by the devil or in need of psychological intervention.
The Rite is a decent supernatural horror with some beautiful shots of Hungary, where it was filmed, but it tackles complex issues with too much narrative and thematic simplicity.
One of the horror genre’s stalwarts is the haunted house trope. Consider the success of the most recent ultimate haunting movie, Paranormal Activity, as well as the seminal 1970s haunted house-in-space horror of Alien. A haunted house turns the idea of houses as a signifiers of safety and familial stability on its head and to a great extent James Wan’s Insidious, written by Saw front man Leigh Whannell, makes the most of dark corners, doors closing and opening and movements behind the window. Indeed, the first hour of the film makes for a suspenseful horror experience that understands the power of suggestion.
The Lamberts, mother and songwriter Renai (Rose Byrne) and father and teacher Josh (Patrick Wilson), live in a large suburban house with their family. One day, their son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) climbs up into the attic where he hurts himself; soon after, he falls into a deep coma. Three months later, there’s no improvement on his condition and a series of increasingly bizarre happenings terrorise the family, especially Renai who works from home. The film details the parents’ attempts to save their son while dealing with presumably supernatural presences.
Insidious’s problems manifest in the film’s second half, which I cannot discuss in detail; some scenes and locations look cheap (the film did have a tiny budget) and clichéd instead of sombre and scary, with some Alan Wake thrown in. Here the film’s debt to Poltergeist also becomes too clear, and anyone who has seen Insidious but not Tobe Hooper’s outstanding haunting classic is advised to seek it out. Last year I reviewed a Spanish film called The Orphanage, which approaches a specific scene with greater sophistication and sensitivity than Insidious demonstrates. After the first half of the film, the feeling of terror crawling from beyond the film frame makes way for some spooky candyfloss.
For some reason, many horror movies feel that they must end with an unexpected open ending that opens up sequel possibilities and gives the audience a final jolt. There is too little back story to validate how Insidious pulls this off, and you get the feeling that if you start pulling at one loose end, the whole film will unravel. Still, if other options aren’t available, you could do worse than Insidious. Then again, you could do better. Have I mentioned Poltergeist?
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