David Dubrow's Blog, page 53

Analysis: Event Horizon

On the heels of my analysis of Omen III: The Final Conflict , I have decided to write a little bit about another Sam Neill film: Event Horizon .

Despite it being 18 years old, the movie holds up well.  It uses gore, shocks, and a genuinely disturbing idea to produce a combination of good science fiction and great horror.  The defining theme of the film is perception, specifically sight, and uses a gothic palette to paint a gloomy, almost steampunk aesthetic.

What Philip Eisner the screenwriter didn't count on was the direction modern culture took between 1997 and 2015, focusing inward rather than outward.  After the credits, the first words we see on the screen are: "2015 - First permanent colony established on Moon."  We are nowhere near that now, and not likely to be there within the next several decades.  The drive toward risk and exploration is gone, unfortunately, and can only be found among a few wealthy entrepreneurs.  While this takes us out of the film a bit, it's a temporary departure: we're immediately thrown into Dr. Weir's nightmare of the Event Horizon afterward.  Grim, derelict, with a floating, eyeless corpse.  The camera takes us through the corpse's screaming mouth and into Weir's eye.  In fact, it's the first we see of Weir: an extreme close-up of his eye.

The Event Horizon itself has become possessed by Hell, literally, and everything we see of it shows how it's been poisoned.  The viscera splattered about the interior from the bizarre orgy captured in bits and pieces by the ship's log is disturbing, more so because nobody from the Lewis and Clark  bothers to clean it up or even mentions it.  From the ship's cruciform shape to its head-shaped bridge, we're meant to know that the Event Horizon's possession represents the fall of both God and Man.

Spiked, opening and closing like a massive, fearsome eye, the heart of the Event Horizon is the gravity drive, a device that folds space.  It's only accessible through a long hallway rigged with explosives and a shorter corridor that spins in a disorienting fashion.  Hell, literal Hell is in that gravity drive, waiting to be released.  From the spikes inside the chamber to the bizarre engraving on the drive itself, there's no mistaking that this thing is evil incarnate, which is one of the film's weaknesses: didn't anyone take a look at this thing during the architecture phase of the FTL project and go, "Yeah, that's messed up."?  Are the humans of the future that blase?  The crew of the Lewis and Clark was appropriately disquieted, at least.

Most effectively, the film's theme, sight, puts the viewer in the role of an honorary crewmember of the Lewis and Clark.  After all, what do you do with a movie except watch it?  The villains all had their eyes ripped out, from the doomed captain of the Event Horizon to Weir, who blinded himself.   Weir's wife Claire, when we see her outside of flashbacks, is also missing her eyes.  Justin, who had been briefly swallowed up by the Hell beyond the gate, made an unsuccessful suicide attempt by jettisoning out into space without a suit and lost his eyes as a result (the blood squirting from his face in zero-gravity).  Peters falls to her death as a result of following a ghost that only she could see; her own vision killed her.  When Miller asks Weir, "What happened to your eyes, doctor?" Weir responds, "Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see."  And at the end, when the possessed Weir has Miller at his mercy, he shows Miller horrible visions of grotesque brutality, all the while asking him, "Do you see?  Do you see?"  Perception, in Event Horizon, is reality.  The possessed ship can make you see what it wants you to, and when it's finished with you, it takes away your eyes so that you'll see nothing else except the appalling torment it has in store.

Obviously, the film isn't perfect.  The Lewis and Clark suffers from the unimaginatively grungy look that many seem to think future spacecraft will invariably possess, and the characters play to type without developing in any way, shape, or form.  Nevertheless, it's a great way to spend 96 minutes, and it's currently available on Netflix.  Watch it (again).

Friday Links: Frog-Gigging, Snowdon on Laymon, and Betty and Barney Hill

It's Friday, so let's hit the links:
Nev Murray discussed the difficulty of being a book reviewer at Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "So, where was I……yeah, people started to like my reviews. The most important thing for me was the fact that people started to tell me they were buying books purely from my reviews. This was a turning point for me as well. I was thinking right I really like this book, and the author is a pretty damned nice chap or chapess as well so, it would be nice to help them out and give them an honest review and hopefully someone else would pick their stuff up."Zombos' Closet of Horror scanned Chilling Tales of Horror and Suspense Vol.1 No.1, May 1969.  It's all in picture form, so go there to feast your eyes.At the eminently incisive R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton continued his batrachian series with Part 2: The Hazards of Frog-Gigging: "H.P. Lovecraft’s venture into batrachian horror, The Moon-Bog (1926), employs the fairy tale device of humans being transformed into frogs, though the mechanism and purpose is unclear.  In the story, a wealthy landowner contrives to drain a swamp on some ancestral land he has inherited.  This provokes the local genius loci with disastrous results.  The Moon-Bog is a fascinating story on many levels, and worth reading in the context of Lovecraft’s later “Yog-Sothothery”—his term for work that was later categorized as part of the Cthulhu Mythos.  The Moon-Bog was discussed at length in a previous post.  (See also A Horror of the Amphibious.)"  Part One of this series can be found here.At Ginger Nuts of Horror, Neil Snowdon was kind enough to reprint an interview he'd done with horror master Richard Laymon in 1995: "I think the reason that my books always retain a ‘weirdness, a nastiness, brutality etc’ is that I like writing about that sort of stuff. I find myself drawn to it. Give me the most innocent situation, and I’ll start imagining ways to turn it ugly.  Fortunately, there is a market for that sort of thing.  In a recent review of QUAKE that appeared in the HUDDERSFIELD DAILY EXAMINER, a Hilarie Stelfox wrote that I am ‘obviously writing books with one eye firmly fixed on the till, knowing that the public’s appetite for the mean, nasty and repulsive seems unending’."Horror Movie a Day reviewed  The Houses October Built : "But the huge cast is also part of the problem - there are just too many damn cameras, and our main group is too interchangeable for the movie's own good. It's hard enough to distinguish the four guys (one has a beard, that helps) at its center, but it makes it even harder when they're seemingly always running two cameras but not necessarily showing everyone else in the frame (and camera #1 never picks up camera #2, I don't think). Sometimes you can figure it out pretty quickly, other times the scene will nearly be over by the time you realize who is holding the camera, which is a pretty big issue, I think."At Ghost Hunting Theories, the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill was discussed: "At the suggestion for regression hypnosis, the couple agreed. They both reported bald-headed alien beings that had slanted large eyes and grey skin and pear-shaped heads. They both also reported some kind of gynecological testing and sperm sampling."  It is not known if the Hills' respective anuses were probed, but it's likely, knowing the Grays' proclivities.Here, I reviewed the movie Devil's Pass and offered some reminiscence about and analysis of The Omen III: The Final Conflict.Illustration by Earl Geier, taken from Call of Cthulhu's Fatal Experiments supplement.  

Reminiscence and Analysis: Omen III

I must've been twelve or thirteen when I first saw Omen III: The Final Conflict .  I watched it with my older brother (the same brother with whom I'd watched Kolchak: The Night Stalker when I was too young staying up too late on Friday nights) on a Sunday evening.  We'd recently gotten cable TV, and my dad had sprung for subscriptions to both HBO and a local cable channel called Prism.  I think it must have been a package deal to get both, because Dad wasn't into movies very much.  He liked baseball, and Prism broadcast all the Philadelphia Phillies games that the local TV stations didn't or couldn't due to blackouts.

We loved Prism, not least because, unlike HBO, it showed rated R movies during the day.

I can't remember if I'd seen The Omen before watching Omen III.  Probably not, but it didn't matter at the time.  The synopsis in the cable guide told us everything we needed to know: Adult Situations, Adult Language, Violence.  (Horror, 108 mins.)  I also can't recall if my younger brother watched it with us or not.  I hope not, because it had some pretty disturbing stuff for an adult, let alone a kid.  Now that I'm the parent of a little boy, media management has become a concern.

The beginning of the film was brilliant: they wrote and filmed a commercial for Thorn Enterprises that Damien didn't even like.  He poked holes in it.  It was a great way to show Damien's intelligence, power, and amorality.  The previous ambassador's bizarre suicide was another great piece of moviemaking: how many people shoot themselves under the nose?  I assume the effects guys measured the angle of the bullet to determine where it would go from the gun under the desk and said, "Well, it should go here."  Truly disgusting brain splatter.  Very shocking.

Harvey Dean's character had some depth.  Rather than have him just ignorant of his boss's true nature, he knows that Damien Thorn is the Antichrist.  Consider the kind of person who knowingly works for the personification of evil.  He's conflicted about ordering the deaths of the potential Christ-child babies, but does it anyway.  And when it comes time for him to pay the piper and have his own son killed, he refuses.  It's all too much for him.  He wasn't a sniggering caricature of an evil henchman, but a man who'd chosen the wrong side and paid for it with his life.  And soul.  There's an unexpectedly poignant moment late in the film when his wife learns what he's been doing and who his boss truly is.  She confronts him, holding his own baby son, with a monstrous series of crimes.  She's broken and horrified and scared for her baby, and we feel for her.

There is still a part of the film that I can't watch: the burned face of Dean's baby when Damien uses the hell hound to implant horrible suggestions into Dean's wife's mind.  It showed the true, unadulterated evil of Damien Thorn in a way the other scenes did not.  His foiling of the monks' plan to kill him was self-defense, but the baby-killing went way too far.  The method of the baby's death was no accident; Damien had quoted Genesis 22:2 when telling the shocked Harvey to kill his own son, saying, "Then God said, 'Take your son, your only son, whom you love--Isaac--and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you'[emphasis mine]."

The screaming monk swinging from the cable, swathed in burning plastic, was also disturbing.  As a youngster, the sex scene seemed more brutal than in later viewings of the film.  What was worse was that they killed the kid.  They wrote that the monk, a good guy, should accidentally stab a child to death.  Very brutal.  The kid was doomed, an apostate of Hell, but still, how often do boys get murdered in movies?

Damien praying to his own father Lucifer and cursing Jesus Christ was an extraordinary soliloquy.  It combined fury and loathing and even self-pity as he, the son of the Devil himself, describes the glory of suffering.  This insight into true evil was riveting and imaginative, making you understand Damien, if not sympathize.  Later, the juxtaposition of the monks' exaltation at the star alignment heralding the rebirth of Christ with scenes of Damien in agony over the same event show us that in the end, Damien isn't a man.  He is a figure, a supernatural creature.  A thing born of a jackal.

Note also that Damien only once or twice refers to Jesus Christ by His title: Christ.  He speaks to and of Him often, but uses the term "Nazarene," denying Him His kingship as the Messiah.  In Damien's mouth, Nazarene is a pejorative.  It works.

As Jews, we knew that demonic and vampiric bad guys in the movies could be turned by crosses (
Looking back, it's easy to see how different the film is from today's efforts.  Even though the monks were bumbling and even foolish at times, they were the good guys.  And they represented the return of Jesus Christ.  No bones about it.  No pedophile priests, no new chapters of the Bible revealed to show how evil the Catholic church is.  Damien was the son of the Devil, and the priests, as incompetent as they were, fought to save the Christ child.  The religious iconography was relevant and poignant, including the vision of Christ at the end.  Even Jews could be moved.

The end was rushed, especially the last confrontation.  It didn't make sense.  I'm not sure if some elements had been edited out for time constraints or if it was written that way in the beginning, but getting Damien to the place where he'd be killed should have been a lot more difficult than it was.

Despite its flaws, the 80's hairstyles and terrible grating American accent Neill was obliged to adopt, The Final Conflict still holds up today.  If you haven't seen it in a while, give it a look.

Movie Review: Devil's Pass

Devil's Pass is a movie that fictionalizes the infamous Dyatlov Pass incident, where nine Russian skiers died under mysterious circumstances in the Ural Mountains.  The premise is that five college students retrace the skiers' steps decades later, armed with GPS devices and cameras, to determine exactly what happened in Dyatlov Pass.

In general, the movie was very silly, with a twist ending that was insufficiently teased and an utterly charmless cast that did nothing to elevate a tedious, pedestrian story.
Characters: All of the typical horror tropes were represented: the Good Girl, the Bad Girl, the Geek, the Player, the Hippie.  All were adequate.  At no point did any of them break character to be anything other than archetypes or get the viewer to care about what happened to them,Scares: None.  It wasn't even the least bit disturbing.  The teleporting zombie creatures were too shaky-cammed to see what they were doing, so it was hard to be afraid of them.  The bigfoot footprints in the snow were silly, not frightening.  An abortive trip to a mental hospital failed to provide the ominous foreboding that was intended.  Found Footage-Style: I suppose we'll just have to ride out the found footage-style of horror/sci-fi movies until it's over and we can return to movie production that doesn't involve gimmicks to get us to feel as though the action's really happening.  There was no good reason to do this movie in found footage-style, as it added nothing to the immediacy of the story; in fact, it made the film less believable.  I couldn't believe they filmed some of the things they did the way they did, especially during dangerous moments.  The Twist: In an effort to solve the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass incident in the most bizarre way possible, they included a time-traveling wormhole that turns idiots into zombies.  Do you really need to know any more?  Across the board, this film is a must-miss.  One star out of five.

Friday Links: The Kill Riff, the Booth Brothers, and Men of Stone

It's been a long week.  So what happened?
At Sean Eaton's extremely readable R'lyeh Tribune, he deconstructed Lovecraft's shudder pulp effort The Man of Stone: "The allusion to ‘Damon and Pythias’ occurs in various literary works over time as metaphor for male bonding.  Lovecraft’s The Tree (1921) is also a reflection of Lovecraft’s interest in the ancient Greek conceptualization of male friendship.  (See also Under the Olive Tree.) In the context of The Man of Stone, it is an odd reference.  Neither Jack nor Ben endure any self-sacrifice for the other, and are primarily observers at the scene of a crime.  In fact, they disappear entirely from the story when attention shifts to passages in the diary of the villain.  The phrase ‘Damon and Pythias’ serves mainly as code describing their close male friendship."The Kill Riff was the subject of some analysis at Too Much Horror Fiction: "There is no horror as fans know and love it in David J. Schow's 1988 novel The Kill Riff (Tor paperback published May 1989), despite it bearing the icon of Tor's horror line; this is a suspense thriller through and through. The most accurate blurb about is from Penthouse, that bastion of literary acumen, and it states the novel's high-concept succinctly: 'Gives us the nightmarish psychology behind the systematic murders of a heavy-metal band.'"Taliesin Meets the Vampires reviewed the 1958 film  El Castillo de los Monstruos : "Now, I mentioned that the film becomes highly offensive and it is when Clavillazo books into a hotel and the owner’s son (Arturo Cobo) has a mental health impairment. The fact that they make him nothing more than the foil of a joke for Clavillazo along with the generally massively unsympathetic portrayal just wouldn’t cut the mustard today in what was otherwise family level entertainment. It was uncomfortable watching. However, things get back on track after that scene and Clavillazo and Beatrice start to fall in love but she has attracted the attention of the sinister Dr Sputnik."The Lovecraft E-Zine listed some Lovecraftian movies available on Netflix, including Oculus.  I think it's a stretch for Oculus to be listed, but "Lovecraftian" can be pretty subjective.  Pontypool, a really awesome film, also made the list.Ginger Nuts of Horror scored a tremendous interview with the Booth Brothers: "'GNoH: Dead Still' uses subtle CGI for enhancement but a lot of 'Old School' effects too which to my mind at least really worked and harked back to the good old days of horror movies. What was the decision process behind using traditional techniques?  PAB: We wanted gritty, we wanted 1970's horror like Hammer films. Old school is a lot more disturbing and graphic than wall to wall CGI."In a non-horror but weird turn, House of Self-Indulgence analyzed The Passion of Darkly Noon, a somewhat obscure film starring Ashley Judd and Brendan Fraser: "The writer-director of this film, (The Reflecting Skin), seems like an intelligent guy, but if he expects us to believe that Ashley Judd can enkindle the junk of others with just her winning smile, he's in for a nasty surprise. Of course, anyone who's vaguely familiar with this deeply weird, yet highly rewarding  motion picture knows, I'm being a tad facetious."Here, I reviewed the movie Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead and pointed you to a review I wrote of Matt Kurtz's Monkey's Box of Horrors - Tales of Terror: Volume 1 at Ginger Nuts of Horror, the UK's premiere horror website.(Illustration from Call of Cthulhu's The Great Old Ones supplement.)

GNoH Book Review: Monkey's Box of Horrors

At Jim Mcleod's Ginger Nuts of Horror, I reviewed Matt Kurtz's Monkey's Box of Horrors - Tales of Terror: Volume 1:

"Some of the stories evoke childhood fears, such as The Man and Within the Closet, while others go further afield into invasive alien horrors: Piggyback and Finger Cuffs."

Are his dark imaginings worth your time and attention?  Click to find out!

Movie Review: Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead

A brief review of Dead Snow is available here.

There were very few surprises in Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead , and that's one of the film's greatest strengths.  At least as gory as its predecessor and a lot funnier, it's a sequel that didn't have to be made, but I'm glad it was.  Horror comedy often goes terribly wrong, veering into bland, unfunny spectacle, but it did not happen here.  Between a hysterical script and some very inspired physical comedy, it's a fun movie all on its own.
The Cast: Vegar Hoel returned as Martin, who survived Dead Snow and ended up getting his arch-enemy Herzog's arm grafted to his stump.  The transplanted limb has a life (or unlife) all its own, and creates not only some hysterical moments, but important plot advancement. The film's writer, Stig Frode Henriksen has a great role as Martin's reluctant friend/assistant, and Hallvard Holmen was very funny as an entirely incompetent cop.  Zombie Squad: Three members of the Zombie Squad arrive in the nick of time to help Martin deal with Herzog's new invasion of Norway.  The writers handled them deftly, making them funny but not (too) pathetic.  Language: It's going to mark me as unsophisticated and provincial, but I appreciated that the movie was filmed in English.  Reading subtitles tends to take me out of the experience and divides my attention, so that didn't happen for me here.  Gore: It's all here.  More intestine jokes, more blood, more disgusting scenes across the board.  It doesn't let up.  Ever.  Some parts, even the funny ones, were a little hard to watch.The End: There's a scene at the end that had me saying, "No, stop it, this shouldn't be happening, just stop, stop, stop."  Few movies can do that to me.If you like funny, gross-out zombie movies, you'll love Dead Snow 2.  Four out of five stars.

Friday Links: Kane's Wings, A Small Press, and Rock Salt as Glass

It doesn't quite feel like Friday when Monday was a holiday, but a win's a win.  What's been going on?
At the remarkably incisive R'lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton deconstructed the Robert E. Howard story Wings in the Night: "In Wings in the Night, Howard reimagines the Harpies as bloodthirsty, flying humanoids who may share a branch of the evolutionary tree with humans.  Kane encounters them not far from the Slave Coast of Africa, where he has been on the run from some hungry cannibals.  He comes upon a ruined village, and later discovers an African man, tied to a stake, who has been horribly mutilated."  (Note: I have had wings in the night, and have gastrically regretted it the next morning.)A guest post at Ginger Nuts of Horror introduced us to the life of a small horror press: "Now I've hit my two year anniversary Feb 15 of running the horror press, I've decided to share what I call 'the life of a book' or as my friend Steve would put it, 'from tree to leaf'.  Back in the day as a civil servant, I was a Lean Practioner, which is a form of project management.  With every project I undertake, I now, after two years of trial and error, use a Master Schedule, a spreadsheet that lists every task involved in producing a book from start to finish including projected timelines."Castle Vardulon pointed out a production flaw in Scream Park: "If you're wondering why that looks so strange, not unlike an FMV game from the mid-90s, it's because that's some truly iffy bluescreen you're looking at. Its seems that a condition placed on the filmmakers was that they not damage the amusement park's property at all, so this scene proved something of a challenge."Unflinching Eye looked at the movie ABCs of Death 2: "Whether by accident or not, ABCs of Death 2 is an improvement on the first (not to denigrate the first, it's excellent in its own right). Perhaps for the filmmakers involved the original served as a blueprint, allowing them to establish what works and doesn't in what is essentially an experimental format. Whatever the case, ABCs 2 seems to have ironed out some of the kinks that were present in the first."Zombos' Closet of Horror reviewed Snowpiercer: "Snowpiercer (both the train and the movie) can be viewed in many ways: it is a self-sustaining ecosystem; it is an an analog for the perennial polemic of [insert whatever country you like here] social classes pitted against each other; it is a bold statement about humankind's propensity for always turning dire situations into an US or THEM algorithm; it is simply a damn good yarn filled with crazy action, desperate, morally corrupt characters, and a wild visual flair you don't see very often."  (Note: my review of Snowpiercer can be found here for comparison.)There was an update about the horrible Slender Man stabbing: "A private detective working for the defense testified he discovered more than 60 drawings of Slender Man in the girl's bedroom. Many of the sketches included notes such as "not safe even in your house" and 'he is here always.' One drawing depicted a girl lying on the ground and a person standing over her with the message 'I love killing people' written over the figure."Here, I pointed you to a review I wrote of Matthew Weber's A Dark and Winding Road for Ginger Nuts of Horror and reviewed the movie I, Frankenstein .(Illustration by Earl Geier from Call of Cthulhu's At Your Door supplement.)

Movie Review: I, Frankenstein

Simply put, I, Frankenstein is an absolutely terrible movie.

But it doesn't mean you shouldn't see it.  If you modify your expectations, knowing at the outset that you're going to see a terrible movie, you can have fun with it.  You just have to stop cringing first.  The plot is a confusing, terrible muddle involving Frankenstein's monster (named Adam), demons from Hell, and gargoyles who exist to protect mankind from the demons (but they're not angels).  Thematically, it's an appalling mishmash further confused by awful dialogue and a silly backstory.  Despite all that, I was entertained.  I'd see a sequel if they made one (which they won't).
Aaron Eckhart: A fine actor, he was completely wasted in this film.  We'll ignore the strange scars his character Adam was forced to bear other than to suggest that Doctor Frankenstein was an unbelievably incompetent stitcher and couldn't find a single clean face to put on his creation.  Eckhart tried, he really did, but he was given such terrible lines that not even he could save them.  To his dubious credit, Eckhart never once descended into the smart-alecky humor that made him so watchable in Thank You for Smoking .  The film was far too earnest and grim for that.Everyone Else: Miranda Otto (Eowyn) was the Gargoyle Queen.  She was also schizophrenic to the point of making no sense at all.  Bill Nighy did his usual sinister upper-class Brit schtick.  Yvonne Strahovski added no charm at all to an entirely useless role.  The only stand-out was as Gideon, the mean gargoyle.  He did a great job and added actual depth to his role; a Heavenly miracle, of sorts.  It helped that he was such a cool character from Spartacus: that just sort of bled over.The Script: Ignore it.  Everything everyone says is extremely silly, but they say it with such gravity.  If at any point you think somebody's going to say something interesting, you're wrong.  Recalibrate your expectations.  When it isn't cliche, it's stupid.  The thing is, they believe it's meaningful, even if you don't.  So don't worry about it.  This goes double for the plot.  It's hopeless.  Imagine if Mary Shelley wrote a sequel to Frankenstein while high on opium.  Then someone photocopied a mirror image of it and threw it in a wood chipper with a copy of the Bible.  Finally, a chimpanzee scotch-taped the bits together larger than a thumbnail, and that's your plot.Fight, Fight, Fight: This is the real reason to see this film.  If you liked the fight scenes from Blade , you'll dig this movie.  I practiced serrada escrima several years ago, just enough to get some sinawali patterns and flow drills down, and the Kali-style fighting Adam did in the movie was a real treat to watch.  They even did some punyo-work in the fight scenes.  You know where the special effects budget went, and they squeezed every nickel out of it to great effect.It's terrible.  See it anyway.

GNoH Book Review: A Dark and Winding Road

At Jim Mcleod's Ginger Nuts of Horror, I reviewed Matthew Weber's short story collection A Dark and Winding Road:

"Good short stories are like a slap in the face: something snappy to get your attention.  A short story happens to you.  A novel’s more like a dance: you go along with the writer, let him lead you where he wants you to go."

Does A Dark and Winding Road do that?  Click to find out!