Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Darth Maul’s weird little brother… AKA Insidious

The opening shot of Insidious promises lame visuals the likes of numerous online websites purporting to have evidence of ghosts, you know blurry shapes in the background of photos, shadows in windows (except the opening shot of the film doesn’t bother to let us know that there’s no one there to cast this shadow, so this is in no way scary or even necessarily interesting), an old grandfather clock at the end of a hallway… because clocks are so scary (and, SPOILER alert: the clock is never relevant to the plot in any way).

The opening titles, and the music cues (with screeching violins that someone thought would be reminiscent of old gothic horror films but which in practice was taken too far) are lame. For no reason other than maybe the director thinks older horror films are cool, the shots during the title sequence are in black and white, with red smoky titles, you know the kinda stuff that would be cool to add to your homemade video maybe but that was silly anywhere else for at least a couple decades now… if not forever.

And then, the story begins. Mother and son have matching pajamas… no reason, and she never wears them again, it’s just something to make cute a scene that isn’t already, shouldn’t be, and really still isn’t even with the matching pajamas. Insert Chekhov’s photo album—for those who don’t get the reference, Chekhov’s gun, aka the gun on the mantle, is a fairly basic trick of drama. You introduce the gun in the first act, it goes off in the final act. Of course, the real trick is to not make the gun so obvious, but oh, no, there are no photos of your father as a child, at all, is such a silly detail that there’s absolutely no way that won’t come up later.

But, anyway, on with the story. Seems, a couple who seem to be barely middle class—he’s a high school teacher and she, well, briefly it seems like she’s a songwriter, but that is a useless detail inserted to add some depth or something (and to have one of their boxes go missing and have it matter to these characters… except she barely seems concerned, finds it like one scene after she’s noticed it’s missing and husband can’t be bothered to care it’s gone, so I guess he doesn’t care much for her songwriting… except there’s an attempt at a “cute” bedroom scene in which she asks which of her songs is his favorite, he suggest she write a song about him, laughter ensues and if there’d been a cinematically appropriate sex scene to follow, maybe there would have been something good in this film…

Anyway, backtracking, there are boxes (one of which went missing and shows up in the attic) because husband and wife and three kids, one named Dalton, and the other two named extraneous and superfluous, have just moved into a new house. And, despite random box from moving showing up in attic, the attic is in no way scary. Still, Dalton  finds his way up there when the door opens itself, which really doesn’t jibe with the rest of the film, as the spirits don’t need him up there, and his going in the attic serves no actual plot purpose… seriously, though he falls off the broken ladder (another Chekhov’s gun set up maybe two scenes earlier when wife ventured into the attic and found her box of sheet music, even though she will only be seen near the piano once and that is probably just because the filmmaker thought it would be more interesting than her doing something housewife-ish) and hits his head—somehow hurting the front of his head even though he obviously hits the back of it, by the way—this ISN’T the cause of his coma… oh wait, “it’s not a coma, they don’t know what to call it,” as the line in the trailer goes, except yeah, it’s a coma, the doctor says it’s a coma, he just doesn’t know what’s caused Dalton to go all comatose. But, “not a coma” is so much more mysterious than “coma of unknown origin” I guess.

Anyway, Dalton into coma, jump ahead a few months, wife is all depressed—maybe that’s why she isn’t wearing her pajamas anymore, except such a detail of characterization seems far too complicated for this script; it’s more likely the costume department lost them. But, she’s sitting at the piano, writing a song and hears a voice over the baby monitor. So, she heads up to baby superfluous’ room and there’s no one there. And, the scares begin… (at this point, I wish that “not” line from Wayne’s World hadn’t gotten old, because that is exactly the lame joke I need)

Some other stuff happens, husband stays late at work (and there’s a drawing of the clown from Saw (a much better film that I now must assume was entirely because of the script, because James Wan is an awful director) just to make us hope Jigsaw will show up, or maybe this film is actually our Jigsaw trap, and we have to chew through our own eyes so we don’t have to see anymore of this) for no reason except wife is annoying, extraneous says he doesn’t like how Dalton walks around at night—oh, forgot to mention, Dalton is now at home, with medical stuff hooked up to him and everything; there’s even a brief scene in which the nurse shows wife how to insert a breathing tube in his nose, and there’s some cheesy line in there, the nurse telling the wife that the universe messed with the wrong woman, or something like that, even though we have no reason to a) think the nurse knows anything about wife, b) believe that wife is at all capable of caring for her comatose kid or c) care.

There are some ghosts, a kid who changes the song on the turntable—yes, wife has a turntable to go with the grandfather clock, because in this film there is nothing new, no new ideas and no new technology—and laughs and runs around, which doesn’t make him scary so much as a) potentially cute and b) mildly annoying. There’s also some large man in a trenchcoat who paces on the balcony then shows up in bedroom to lunge at wife and… well, not make contact because… well, I’m not sure why. Several times in the film, these spirits, be they ghosts or demons are simply scared away by the light being turned on—which really means there’s an easy way to protect Dalton, just turn on the lights in his room, but that’s too obvious—but in this instance, I think he just went away. And, eventually, there’s also the titular (well, Darth Maul’s Retarded Little Brother should’ve been the title at least) Junior Sith Lord,  who’s a demon, who likes to paint half his face red, sharpen his fingers on an old grinding wheel and listen to “tiptoe through the tulips” mostly because, apparently, the filmmaker thinks that song is creepy. Except, combined with Junior Sith Lord, it’s just good for a laugh at how pathetic this film has gotten.

Enter husband’s mother, who tells us about a dream she had with Junior Sith Lord hanging out in Dalton’s room, and she tells us his voice is scary and unforgettable, but we don’t actually get to hear it. But, anyway, husband’s mother calls psychic lady, who is preceded by her comic sidekick investigators, who check out the house… oh, and this is another new house, because husband believed wife just enough to move out of the other house but not enough to trust psychic lady later—his scale of appropriate responses to wife hallucinating is a bit mixed up. There’s still a grandfather clock, which serves no purpose (well, possibly to tell the time, but that is hardly relevant to the plot), and there are still ghosts and demons and whatnot. Turns out—another classic line from the trailer—“it’s not the house that’s haunted, it’s your son” or rather it’s loser couple-that-are-trying-to-act-way-too-much-for-such-a-bad-film’s son. Enter psychic exposition lady to explain the plot. SPOILER ALERT, if anyone cares: Dalton can astral project when he sleeps, but he’s gone too far away this time into a place psychic lady calls “the further.” It’s this dark place where the souls of the dead are, all scary and tormented, but I guess “hell” was trademarked, so they couldn’t use that name. And, all these ghosts and Junior Sith Lord are hanging around to take Dalton’s soul’s place in his body. Now, this is a little weird in the case of Junior Sith Lord because, well, what good is it to be in some little kid’s body when you could instead be a demon? A demon can freak people out, maybe even whisper in their ears and get them to make really bad horror films to, you know, ruin the world. A little boy—he tries something and you just gotta smack him around a bit. But, apparently, Dalton’s body is a good place to be… but there’s more. Chekhov’s gun come home to roost, to mix metaphors—seems husband has no childhood photos because his mother stopped taking pictures of him and hid away the few photos she has because there’s some old woman that kept showing up in them; see he was just like Dalton, and this old woman ghost kept hanging out trying to get inside his body when he was young, and so psychic exposition lady made him forget he could astral project and apparently made him forget that normal kids sometimes get their pictures taken.

Husband rightly thinks psychic exposition lady is crazy and kicks her out of the house, but changes his mind like a scene later when he realizes that the same Junior Sith Lord psychic lady’s comic sidekick has scribbled is in Dalton’s drawings on the wall. So, then there’s a séance, with an inappropriately funny gasmask, and some lines about innards being torn out, and I’m wishing these people had their innards torn out, just to make things interesting, but no.

So… the climax: Husband has to astral project all over again, go to Hell, I mean, “The Further” to rescue Dalton. And, Hell is mostly dark and empty, except for a scene with some girl who apparently shot her family to death and they all have smiles on their faces—because smiles are scary—and there’s Darth Maul’s retarded little brother sharpening his fingers and listening to “tiptoe through the tulips” and I’m wishing he was listening to “jeepers creepers” because even in their worst scenes, those two films were far better than this one. So, husband grabs Dalton and runs, because anyone who’s seen any of the Hellraiser films knows that is how one gets away from demons… and how much better would this have been if Pinhead showed up? But I digress. Dalton wakes up, everything is fine…

SPOILER ALERT, but if you’ve read this far, what do you care? Husband seems all normal until psychic lady looks at him weird then takes his photo. He strangles her, but wife and husband’s mother and Dalton can’t hear from the next room because Dalton is gorging on spaghetti, because that is what one needs after a good coma, to fill one’s stomach as fast as possible. Anyway, wife finally hears… something, finds psychic lady dead—which means no more exposition, so wife has no idea what’s going on, until she picks up psychic lady’s camera, because, you know, getting that camera off the floor is more important than, say, calling the police. She sees photo of husband, rather, photo of old woman from his childhood photos, and husband comes up behind her as she’s looking at the camera, and cut to the INSIDIOUS title and screeching violins again and finally, we’re free.

Friday, April 15, 2011

SCRE4M

So, SCRE4M continues the deconstruction of horror films that began with the first Scream film. Craven and Williamson approach this one as a deconstruction/reconstruction of the remake/reboot. For the record, the first one went at the slasher subgenre specifically and the modern horror film in general, the second went at sequels, and the third at trilogies, each of them coming right out with the “rules” of whatever it was, and while some of the basics made for amusing banter, some of them seemed at first like they were being made up on the spot simply to then subvert them afterward. This one has a bit of that in the party scene, suggesting the film has to end at the party, when really, no slasher film that wasn’t specifically built around a party, had that climax. But, Williamson’s script makes it sound sensible, and Craven’s direction makes it work structurally.

The great thing about the Scream films is that, aside from the genre discussion that makes a movie nerd (and horror film fan) like me happy, real actors (though not necessarily huge or great actors) are in the cast. This isn’t just a bunch of random teenagers who will never show up in anything ever again, or will only get cast in a series of increasingly lesser horror films. There are a few actors from the earlier films, of course, Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courtney Cox (and there’s a nice meta scene discussing the likelihood that those last two would have lasted as a couple that was quite amusing). And, there’s the cameos on par with Drew Barrymore’s or Jada Pinkett’s –Anna Paquin, Kristen Bell. But, the various “teenage” roles are filled by relatively familiar (especially if you watch the CW or pay any attention to tv) actors and actresses that all do quite well with Williamson’s script—Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, Lucy Hale, Aimee Teegarden, Brittany Robinson, Alison Brie, Anthony Anderson, Adam Brody, Rory Culkin, Erik Knudsen. The only real false note in the film comes from Marley Shelton who—SPOILERY WATERS AHEAD—plays Deputy Hix like she really wanted her character to be the killer, so much so that when she shows up in the final hospital showdown it might’ve made sense if she came in not to save the day but to help the film continue what could have been a grand case of the bad guy winning.  Hix is a red herring so overtly played and so subtly written that her character ends up serving very little purpose in the end.

Back to the bad guy winning, before the hospital, there was potential for a serious reconstrucionist reinvention of the genre in combining the slasher film’s tendency to favor the villain even though he always loses and something more modern, say the Saw films’ villain focus in that essentially he always wins and really isn’t necessarily the villain as much as society is—if you can get past the grossout so-called “torture-porn” aspects of the Saw films, or even the Hostel films (well, at least the first one), they come across as morality plays even more than most any slasher film does, even though the slasher subgenre clearly carries within it conventions and tropes that, in the past, reward the good characters by letting them survive. In SCRE4M, there is actually direct commentary on that when Robbie, Cinema Club nerd (and representative of what the script suggests is the next step in horror, with his POV camera), says the only way to survive in a horror film nowadays is to be gay, the implied subtext being that just being virginal isn’t enough anymore.

Speaking of virginal, it’s worth noting that the Scream films have remained quite chaste as far as sexual content goes, and seemingly deliberately so, another subversion of the genre. But, this subversion comes at a time when more mainstream films are having more explicit sexual content, so it almost seems a move backward rather than further commentary on the old conventions of the genre.

All in all, the film is quite good, a fitting continuation of the series, and containing some great commentary on the notions of rebooting/remaking horror films. One must wonder if there’s a fifth film possible here, a deconstruction/reconstruction of the endless franchise—maybe a jump ahead to the future, a space station (like Hellraiser Bloodline or Jason X) or a deliberate play on the more repetitive, forgettable aspects of, say, Friday the 13th VI to VIII. But, Sidney Prescott is running out of relatives.

A final note: something that was missing from this film, given its take of reality versus the fiction of the Stab film-series-within-the-film-series was real brutality. SPOILERS AHEAD Until Jill’s injuries at the climax of the film, there is little harshness to the violence, though is occasionally a lot of blood and briefly some intestines. I think this plotline would have been better served drawing a distinction between the more showy violence of the Stab series and some more brutal violence like that exhibited in the better half (i.e. not that bits with the mother and the horse) of Rob Zombie’s recent Halloween II remake. But, then again, such brutality would diminish a lot of the enjoyment in the Scream series, which can still get away with playing for laughs even in the midst of scenes involving a spree killer slaughtering teenagers.

Still, it would be nice to have a horror film, especially a slasher film, that takes itself seriously on all levels, playing with the brutality, with the real-life horror of having everyone you know killed in front of you (Sidney’s isolation early in Scream 3 hinted at the psychological damage, but didn’t really explore it)… of course the larger audience wants to enjoy this stuff. Any serious exploration is left to lower budget stuff like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (if you love the genre, see the film if you haven’t already), but even that film, in the end, drops its serious psychological exploration for a bit of chase and death. The recent Trick ‘r Treat actually comes at the brutality of the violence pretty well, but also has some quite funny moments, and some quite creepy moments.

Anyway, a paragraph or two past my “final note,” I must say for those who enjoyed the Scream films, SCRE4M should be a great followup. For fans of slasher films, it should also do quite well. For movie nerds who like deconstructionism and reconstructionism, like the earlier films (especially Scream 2, which I think is the best of the four), it should be awesome.