I Love Splatter!

I really wanted to like Jennifer’s Body. Like, really, really, REALLY wanted to like it. Why? Because I think Diablo Cody is great. I loved Juno. She seems witty on Twitter. She’s fierce and independent and beautiful and clever - and she’s a woman writer making it in Hollywood. Sadly, I was as bored as the girls are in this photo…for, oh, almost the entire film.

I recognize that comedy & horror are a very hard combo - but there are a few films out there that have done it right. Jackson’s Dead Alive, Raimi’s Army of Darkness and Drag Me To Hell for example - but look, if you’re going to inject humor into a splatter-flick, you’ve either gotta cut out any seriously reflective “we used to be so close” moments, or it’s got to have A LOT of splatter. Like, ridiculous, over-the-top amounts of splatter. And you have to kill more than 3 people, ok?And it would help to cast someone who could actually act. Megan Fox’s breathy recitations and heaving breast did not make for a good performance.

I only really enjoyed the bookends of the movie, because Seyfried can actually act (and in my opinion, is also hot, even in her “homely best friend” costume) - and because they finally got to some good slaughtering at the end, sadly over the credits. Plus, the Lance Henrickson cameo thrilled me, even though he really didn’t do anything.

To put things into perspective:when Seyfried’s character Needy says “the dance will be like an all-you-can-eat buffet for her!”, I thought WELL THANK GOD. Finally! We’ll get to see tons of boys running in terror from Megan Fox’s demony self! There will be blood! SO MUCH BLOOD!!! It’ll be like Carrie with more entrails! And then…that didn’t happen.

Add in some signature Cody dialog and you’ve got a disaster on your hands. Here’s the thing - I didn’t mind the lines in Juno as much as some people did, because I felt like Ellen Page and Olivia Thrilby could pull off shit like “honest to blog”. It was like their own cute, secret teenager language (ignoring Rainn Wilson’s homeskillet nonsense, that is). But, but, BUT.

Am I to believe that teenage girls calling each other “Monistat” and “Vagisil” would actually fly? Does every joke about blood have to revolve around tampons and plugging? Is it REALLY neccesary for every single line uttered by Fox to have a witty Cody-esque punchline? “You’re so totally Green Jell-o”. Um. What? Sorry, Diablo. You lost me. I’m sure this is the kind of thing that looks HILARIOUS when it’s written down, but when it’s actually said out loud is just…fucking ridiculous - as was the completely and totally gratutious girl-on-girl makeout session. Look, I’m all for watching that kind of action, but it made absoutely no. sense.

I cry for the few wasted gallons of corn-syrup and the work of the special F/X guys on this thing. It just wasn’t worth it.

“I thought it might be frustrating for someone who loves music as much as you do to have a son who isn’t interested in it at all, and a daughter who can’t hear it…”

Okay, here it goes: Orphan has no business being as good as it is. I went in expecting a super-cheese fest that might be mildly entertaining, and while I admit that the reveal (AKA: Why Esther has something wrong with her) felt a little hacked together, the rest was quite a ride.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra gets started immediately with a disturbing hospital sequence full of lots of blood, and then just doesn’t stop. There’s virtually no lag time between clueless parents Kate & John Coleman (Vera Farminga & Peter Sarsgaard - playing what might be the most believable married couple ever seen in a horror film) adopting Esther and her starting to cause chaos, from pushing a snotty girl at school off a slide to terrorizing the Coleman’s birth kids with knives and guns…and it only gets worse from there.

And man. Whoever cast these kids got it dead on. Isabelle Fuhrman is simply amazing as Esther - and Aryana Engineer (who plays the youngest) has the best facial expressions I’ve ever seen.

No matter what your expectations are, if you’re a fan of horror, I definitely recommend you see this. It’s a whole lot of bloody, creepy fun.

How I found out I loved Horror films (AKA: how a nightmare led to a Nightmare)

Sometime when I was around 8 or 9, the flashy new cable channel my dad had ordered kept playing previews for Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill. I was fascinated by the scene in the elevator with the flash of a straight razor. I BEGGED my parents to let me watch it. “Let me watch it! Please please please ohpleasepleasepleaseplease pleasesssseeeeeeee”. They both told me I’d get nightmares and I was too old to sleep with them when I got scared, NO WAY. But I did not relent! Finally, they gave in.

Guess what? I had nightmares and ended up in my parent’s bed around 3am. “WE TOLD YOU SO! No more scary movies until you’re….13”.

Unfortunately for me, before I turned 13 - Friday the 13^th Part 3 became a hot topic amongst my 6^th grade friends,  to the point where we were passing around the book adaptation on the bus, taking turns staring at the gruesome film stills in the middle and reading the grossest murder descriptions. Yes, middle school kids are sick. I know this.

In any case, even MORE unfortunate for me, 2 years later A Nightmare On Elm Street came out, but since I was only TWELVE, I was not allowed to see it, even though everysinglefrickinotherkid in school was. So I had to endure a year of comments like this:

“Oh man! When his tongue came out of the phone! SO GROSS! I’m your boyfriend now Nancy! I’m your boyfriend now!”

In short, my parents SUCK. Not really, but in my 12-year-old brain they so did. To make it up to me later, my dad rented it for me (VHS baby!) after I turned 13, and my mom set up a viewing party to which I invited my neighborhood friends: 2 girls and 3 guys. Please note: all friends were a few years older than me, and the guys were on the High School Football team.

The above is an important detail, because about 20 minutes into the movie, my dad put on a disguise, plugged a chainsaw into an outlet in the stairwell (we lived in a split-level) and ran up the stairs revving the hell out of it while laughing maniacally - and every single one of those tough football players screamed as loud as us girls and scrambled over each other to run to safety.

True story. I’m not kidding.  My dad tried to scare me & my friends to death using a real chainsaw. And I’m not saying this is “the” reason I started really loving horror films, but I bet it did enhance the thrill-factor of Elm Street, and I sure couldn’t get enough of scares & gore after that.

And before you ask: no, I didn’t have more nightmares that night, and I most definitely did not climb into my parent’s bed when I was 13.

Jennifer Carpenter: Actually a decent Scream Queen - who knew? 

Say, here’s a movie that took me completely by surprise: Quarantine. I remember seeing the previews for this last year and loudly dismissing it as total crap. But back then, I mistakenly thought it was some kind of extension of the Saw franchise. Still, even at the beginning of our On Demand purchase, I was skeptical - is that The Schaech I see? With a bad mustache? Why yes, yes it is. Man, that guy gets around the bad B-movies (or so I thought). 

But almost as soon as the hot guy (Jay Hernandez, of course), the douchebag (Schaech) and our intrepid reporter (Carpenter) get locked in a creepy old apartment building with a cast of other character actors, things get interesting. And by interesting, I mean zombies. And by zombies, I mean enough splatter, exposed bones, brains and other grossness to keep me more than happy. Seriously - I don’t know who this John Erik Dowdle character is, but I’m paying attention now. You did Romero proud, son. 

Of course, I have no idea how much of this brilliance is due to [REC], the Spanish film on which this was based on, but at the very least: good job on translating something without ruining it. I thought I’d at least be disappointed in Carpenter, as her character on Dexter bugs - but nope. She’s got a set of lungs on her, and definitely knows how to act terrified. 

And - I don’t want to spoil anything but: BEST ENDING. EVER. 

The Right One??

Thanks to this month’s DVD releases, I finally got a chance to see Let the Right One In (Lat den ratte komma in) - a movie that every one of my filmgeek friends has been talking about since FOREVER. All I heard was “it’s fantastic” and “it’s amazing” and “it’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen! YOU HAVE TO GO SEE IT NOW”. And you know what? They were right. I messed up by not getting off my lazy ass and seeing this in the theater.

To be cliche, “this is not your mother’s vampire movie”. Hell, it’s not even my vampire movie, and I’m only approaching 40. This thing makes me think I might be missing out on some kind of super-cool secret Swedish Vampire genre. But, I digress.

Allow me to simplify:

“Aw, this is such a sweet story about these two misfit kids forming a bond…HOLY CRAP SOMETHINGISREALLYREALLYWRONGWITHTHATONE Look out! Augggh! Gross! WHOAAAAAA….what??? Awwww.”

Only 100x cooler than that. Is there splatter? Oh yes, there’s splatter. Along with some shots that are so beautiful I can barely breathe and an effectively creepy CGI’d gang of cats (trust me on this one, guys - it’s not as cheesy as it sounds).

In any case, it’s not like every scene is soaked in blood - the murders are actually timed out quite nicely to the pace of the film - but when they do happen, they sure make an impression.

Also, make sure you watch it subtitled. It makes it even creepier, somehow - and the English dubbing is way too jarring to enjoy.

“We’ve got to be willing to do ANYTHING”

The story is virtually identical, so anyone who’s seen Craven’s original The Last House on the Left pretty much knows what’s going to happen in the remake. For anyone who’s not seen it: it’s more of a “terror” film than a horror film, with the bulk of the gore predicated on revenge.

That said, at least the terror shown in the 1972 version is tainted a bit by being severely dated…this film, obviously, didn’t suffer from that. The torture and rape of Mari Collingwood seems so real, so devastating, that even *I* was traumatized. And that’s saying a lot.

All this traumatizing works well later on, when the Collingwoods realize their houseguests are the ones who’ve left their daughter for dead. While this version makes a point (at first) of the violence being strictly a means of survival, it does definitely reach a state of pure revenge.

The audience, dead silent during the scene in the woods where the criminals have their ‘party’ were shouting “hell yeah” and “get ‘em” while the parents went to town with knives, hammers and wine bottles on the perpetrators. Usually I would not embrace this kind of reaction, but I have to be honest: I was glad to experience it in this instance. As far as I’m concerned, any activity that pulled me out of the realism of the previous scenes and into fantasy land was welcome.

This one is definitely not for the faint of heart – and it has almost nothing to do with the gore involved.