Saw Week: Part III

Last time I watched Saw III, I hated it. This time, I … actually rather enjoyed it. I think there are several reasons for my different reaction this time, but it all boils down to context. Since Saw III was released, horror movies have become even more gory and even more incoherent. At the time, Saw III seemed offensively badly structured, filled with pointless torture and nastiness. Now? It seems almost tame. Also, when I saw Saw III at the cinema, it’d been a year since I’d seen Saw II; this time, I’ve watched Saw and Saw II over the last two days, and I’ve already seen V and VI, so the character development seemed a lot better thought through. In particular, I enjoyed seeing Det. Hoffman lurking creepily in the background at the beginning … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

In Saw III, Jigsaw tests three different people in a series of interlinked tests: Jeff, a grieving father whose desire for vengeance on the man who accidentally killed his son is preventing him from living his life; Lynn, a doctor who’s been sleepwalking through her career, spending more time with dead and dying people than her own family; and Amanda, whose efforts to help Jigsaw have become weirdly twisted. While Jeff fights his way through a maze of people he hates and has to learn forgiveness, Lynn must work to keep Jigsaw alive, or risk losing her own life in the process. And Amanda? Well, she has to learn what Jigsaw’s methods are really all about: according to him, it’s all about giving people choices and forcing them to appreciate their lives more fully. It’s a warped philosophy to begin with, and Jigsaw’s tests are rarely fair anyway, but through a series of flashbacks, we see that Amanda has taken it upon herself to murder all the test subjects who survived their trials anyway, leaving herself as the sole survivor of Jigsaw’s games.

Saw III doesn’t really work properly as a standalone movie. It’s not structured well enough, and concerns itself mainly with explaining what happened behind the scenes of the previous movies as well as setting things up for those that’ll follow, and as a result the main narrative suffers from underdevelopment. Jeff is ultimately kind of pointless, and the traps he has to rescue people from aren’t very inspired. The first time I watched it, this meant I considered the film a failure. But this time, having spent time with some of these characters, it worked a lot better. Det Kerry’s fate seemed genuinely upsetting, having had her around for two movies, and Jigsaw’s final trap for Jeff is really rather nasty.

In fact, Saw III ends on just about the most downbeat note imaginable. Jeff fails his test. Lynn passes, but then Amanda fails it for her. And Amanda fails her test. Adam from Saw and Eric Mathews from Saw II are brought back and tortured some more; Adam is killed off. At the end of the movie, almost everyone we know from the previous movies is dead or dying. The body count in Saw III is sky high: Amanda’s unwinnable traps finish off several victims, Jeff fails to save anyone from his maze, including himself, and Jigsaw and Amanda are also killed. None of Jigsaw’s lessons have been learned, so there’s not even that perverted silver lining to cling to; really, Jigsaw turns out to be a really, really bad teacher. His protégé completely fails him, on every level: Amanda betrays him by going behind his back to kill people; she secretly self-harms, one of the things that led Jigsaw to test her in the first place; and before she dies, she denounces him, shouting “Nobody changes, it’s all a lie!” and “I’m just a pawn in your stupid games.”

It’s almost a shame to say goodbye to Amanda, in the same way it’s a shame to say goodbye to Kerry. Both of them felt like interesting characters who weren’t quite developed enough – Kerry more than Amanda, since the more screentime they gave Amanda, the more ridiculous she seemed. And that’s a shame, too. As the first person to survive a Jigsaw trap, she was in a unique position, and she was the only possible example he, or we, could point to to show that his techniques were effective. If Amanda lived through a Jigsaw trap and found a renewed enthusiasm for life, changing her junkie ways and doing something worthwhile with her life, then there’d be some fascinating ambiguity there; she’d be a powerful argument that Jigsaw isn’t just a psychopathic murderer, but some kind of ultra-violent vigilante. (okay, it wouldn’t be a great argument, but it’d be something). Instead, Amanda attaches herself, like a baby duck imprinting on a cat instead of its mother, to Jigsaw, and becomes his accomplice. She helps him kidnap people, helps him devise and build his traps, and guides people to their doom inside the poisoned house in Saw II. Which, if she really had changed her attitude to life, would make sense; she could argue that she’s helping other people come to the same realization she’d had.

But no. No, poor, stupid Amanda doesn’t get Jigsaw’s masterplan at all. She’s just a nasty piece of work who enjoys inflicting suffering on people she doesn’t like, including Lynn. She spends most of Saw III weeping uncontrollably at the prospect of losing John – someone who views her emotions as a weakness. It’s a disturbing, twisted relationship the two of them have, and surely even she couldn’t really consider herself his equal. On second thought, maybe it’s better that she doesn’t live to see another sequel (except, inevitably, in flashbacks). Saw III took away her reason for existing when it introduced Detective Hoffman.

Kerry, on the other hand, I’ll truly mourn. Only one of Amanda’s cheating, unwinnable traps could have conquered Kerry, because Kerry learned the rules early. She figured out the rules: do what Jigsaw tells you, and you’ll live. Try to outwit him, and you’ll lose, because Jigsaw always has another trap up his sleeve. Unlike Amanda, though, Kerry was a force for good, not evil; and, so, inevitably, she got killed. Of the original investigating team, only Det Rigg remains.
Bring on Saw IV!

Saw Week: Part II

Well, that didn't take long. After being strangely impressed with the first Saw movie, I found that Saw II is just as bad as I remembered.

It opens with a trap: a police informant wakes up in a room with a kind of variant on the bear trap on his head. But while last time, Amanda had to cut her key out of someone else's body to win her freedom, this guy needs to retrieve his key from behind his own eye. The editing goes crazy as he attempts to do so, and the lighting is garish yellow and green, a colour scheme the film won't let go of for the rest of its runtime. The soundtrack has some quiet shrieks built into it, so as our nameless snitch takes a razor to his own face, the music screams for him. It's already far more extreme and gory than the first Saw movie, but sadly, that extra edge comes at a price. Saw II is nowhere near so clever or well written as the first one.

The main story, in this case, is about Detective Eric Matthews (played, amazingly, by Donnie Wahlberg, who never quite seems comfortable unless he's fiddling with a cigarette). Jigsaw has kidnapped his teenage son and locked him in a house with a selection of decidedly unsavoury characters, including - dun dun dun! - Amanda herself. Again, it's tough to watch this movie without remembering what's to come, and knowing the end of the film killed pretty much all the tension for me. While the criminals inside the house battle against time (and nerve gas) to win their freedom through a series of increasingly nasty traps, Det. Matthews is asked to just sit and talk to Jigsaw, watching what's going on in the house via a series of monitors and letting the timer in Jigsaw's lair tick down to zero.

Since it's pretty well established that Matthews is a dirty cop who gets his results by planting evidence and beating up witnesses, he's incapable of doing so, and ends up walking into his own trap. When the timer hits zero, he's chained to a wall in the bathroom from the first movie, while a safe in Jigsaw's house pops open to reveal that Matthews Jnr was "safe" all along. The monitors weren't showing a live stream at all, but rather events that happened several hours ago. It's a fairly neat trick that's spoiled by the lack of action outside the house: all Jigsaw wants is to sit and chat, spouting off about how most people don't deserve to live because they don't appreciate their lives (and, bizarrely, recounting an accident he had after he was diagnosed with cancer where he drove his car off a cliff and survived despite being impaled on a pole). And that's spoiled by the fact that already, Jigsaw doesn't really make sense. According to him, he never really kills anyone, he lets them make a choice. But in Saw II, most of the choices aren't choices at all.

The trap that I really remembered from this movie is the pit of needles. It's a wonderfully nasty idea, but it's sort of nonsensical. The first few traps are labelled with the names of the people in the house (Obi, apparently pronounced "Abi", and Xavier, pronounced like Professor Xavier; either Whannell or Bousman is apparently a massive nerd). The traps are supposed to relate to their particular weaknesses, like the way the informant at the beginning is forced to destroy his eye, or the way the wristcutter from the first movie has to fight through razorwire. But this time round, they don't really work. Who's supposed to go into the oven, and why? What's the deal with the wrist trap that Addison gets herself caught in? The idea that the only way through the maze is co-operation is one that'll recur in the later Saw movies, but it's not properly developed here.

What's weird is that I remember there being a lot more explanation and characterisation in this movie than there actually is. The film doesn't explain, for instance, why most of the characters were in jail; it establishes that that's what they have in common, but not why, beyond the fact that they were framed by Matthews. It's also not really clear why Amanda decides to put herself in harm's way; she's almost killed several times in the course of the film, and for no real benefit. She reveals herself at the end as Jigsaw's accomplice, but her only motivation in getting involved is, apparently, to trick the audience watching at home. Which is a bit silly, really.

The one bonus is that the acting isn't quite as bad in Saw II as it was in Saw. The script, unfortunately, is worse, though, and the concept is messier. It doesn't bode well for Saw III.

Saw Week: Part I

The final Saw movie is released this Friday, and to mark the, um, occasion, I'm going to watch the six previous instalments this week, and then go and see the final one on the weekend. (It's gonna be a long week.) The mythology has become so elaborate and tangled that I want to be able to see Saw 3D in context; whether you love or hate the franchise, it's become an institution, as influential as any of the other long-running franchises, and I feel a strange obligation to see it out properly.

The first one is both better and worse than I remember it being. The main setup - two men are chained up in a disgusting underground bathroom somewhere and have to figure out a way to escape before their time runs out - is pretty effective, and the script is full of twists and turns. Initially, Dr Lawrence Gordon seems like the villain: he acts suspicious and creepy and generally seems like a complete asshole, but as the film progresses, it seems like the other man, Adam, has something to hide too. Through a series of flashbacks, we slowly start to piece things together. There's a sort-of serial killer on the loose who hates people wasting their lives and wants to force them to recognise their blessings via a series of elaborate and extremely violent traps; his habit of carving a jigsaw-shaped piece of skin out of his victims' bodies has led to the media dubbing him "Jigsaw". There's a creepy hospital orderly (played by Michael Emerson, aka Ben from Lost) who's got something to do with it; there's an obsessed ex-cop who's convinced Gordon is Jigsaw; and there's a corpse on the floor of the bathroom that might not be as dead as it seems...

Saw also introduces us to Amanda, a drug addict who finds a new purpose in life through her encounter with Jigsaw. She's only in a handful of scenes, and it's difficult to watch them without remembering everything that's to come. The Saw theme also makes its debut in this movie, sounding instantly iconic, as creepy and evocative as the Halloween theme, or Tubular Bells. The Saw mythology has grown so much since this movie that it's difficult to really see it for what it is, or what it was then; everything seems imbued with extra significance.

In 2004, Saw seemed like the scariest, most disgusting, most extreme film imaginable. I actually didn't see it in cinemas because I'd heard so much about the extreme torture in the movie, but now, looking back, it seems almost tame. There's not very much gore after all: and not counting the main chained-by-the-ankles trap at the centre of the film, we only see three of Jigsaw's elaborate mantraps. (There's the reverse beartrap, there's the room of razor wire, and there's a prototype of the drill chair that we'll see more of later.) All of them rely more on the audience's imagination than on showing too much too clearly (although Amanda pawing through a man's intestines to find the key to her trap is a little much). Saw does a lot with a little; Jigsaw's traps are horrifying because they play on your mind and make you wonder what you'd do if you had to face one of them, but there's very little actual torture going on. There's none of the prolonged suffering that will characterise some of the later movies in this series, or some of the later torture porn movies that cashed in on Saw's phenomenal success. And a lot of the scares (mostly to do with Gordon's wife and child, but also the sequence in Adam's apartment lit entirely by camera flash) really work. The writing and structure of Saw is a lot better than I think I ever gave it credit for.

But, and there had to be a but, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Mainly, the acting is appalling. Cary Elwes, in particular, is awful. He's overly sinister to begin with, but it's when he's forced to show some emotion that everything falls apart. He's utterly unconvincing as a man afraid for his family; he's utterly unconvincing as a man afraid for his own life; and he's ... oh, he's just useless, really. Gordon's bizarre backstory, where he may or may not be having an affair with someone he works with, makes very little sense, and Elwes fails to sell any part of his emotional journey. Leigh Whannell isn't a particularly good actor, either (he demonstrates any kind of heightened emotion by getting really high-pitched) but he's passable, whereas Elwes almost ruins the film on more than one occasion by turning what should be a touching or frightening moment into squealing melodrama.

The editing, too, is horrible. The film's aesthetic is overdone now, but works nicely here; it's just the crazy quick-cutting that threatens to spoil it. There's a car chase near the end that consists of quick cuts between the two drivers' faces - it's presumably because car chases are difficult and expensive to shoot, but this weird cobbled together mess is just comical. The film is full of overly stylised quick cuts; it aims for slick but lands somewhere around "amateurish" instead. But it's forgiveable in a film as cheap and inventive as this one.

Saw is certainly a flawed film, and it's flawed in frustrating ways, because there's a fantastic idea at the heart of it, and lots of clever and creepy ideas packed into it. It could so easily have been brilliant, but instead it's just pretty good. Horror films have changed a lot since Saw's release, partly as a result of the success of Saw and Hostel, and it hasn't been for the better. It's difficult to see Saw with fresh eyes, without seeing the zillions of imitators that have used and reused every part of this movie. But if you can forget all that (and somehow ignore Elwes's inability to act) it's really pretty decent. I feel like I owe Saw an apology ... for now, anyway. At least until I get as far as Saw III.

Buried (2010)

The central conceit of Buried is daring, to say the least. Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds), a truck driver delivering supplies to a community centre in Iraq, is captured by insurgents (or terrorists, or someone) and buried alive in a box with only a mobile phone and a Zippo lighter for company. The entire film is set inside the box with Paul while he negotiates with his captors, his employers, and the head of a hostage rescue organisation. With such an unconventional premise, the movie could only ever be amazing or terrible.

And sadly, it’s terrible.

It starts off strongly, with a few minutes of complete darkness and silence before we hear Conroy’s laboured breathing. He finds his lighter and the inside of the crude wooden box is illuminated; using the end of a nail, he saws through the restraints on his wrists and removes his gag. Then a phone rings, down at the bottom of his makeshift coffin. What follows is 90-odd minutes of increasing ridiculousness.

Conroy calls 911 and finds the super-calm operator little help. He calls his family but only gets through to voicemail. He calls the State Department, calls his employers, calls everyone, and has a series of awkward, expository conversations with dead voiced people. The point, then, is that no-one cares about what’s going on out in Iraq; that the US military is pretty useless; and that big corporations are more interested in protecting themselves from bad publicity than looking after their employees. A conversation with his aged mother attempts to wring some pathos out of the proceedings; a subplot involving one of Conroy’s colleagues hammers home the fact that his captors mean business, in case the whole being-buried-alive-in-a-box thing wasn’t enough to convince us. Ryan Reynolds does an admirable job of trying to carry the movie – since he’s the only person we see for the entire film, everything rests on his reactions – but the script is too upsettingly awful for him to succeed.

It’s just not plausible that none of the people he speaks to would get even slightly emotional. There’s no urgency in any of their voices, so the outcome of the movie is a forgone conclusion from the very beginning. No-one seems to disbelieve him when he screams that he’s buried in a box in Iraq, despite being on a very clear mobile line to a phone operator in Ohio, but no-one seems to be interested either. The dialogue is awkward, stagey; the conversation Conroy has with Dan Brenner at the hostage rescue organisation about other hostages who have previously been rescued is like no conversation two human beings have had with one another, ever. And the editing is painfully amateurish. There’s a scene where the camera zooms ominously and distractingly in on Conroy’s face while he talks; later, there’s an upwards zoom where the camera moves further and further away from Paul’s prone body, wooden box walls on either side of him, until we’re a good 20ft above him … but somehow still inside the box, still in the dark, still penned in by that box which is now inexplicably, for onscreen effect, twenty times the size it was earlier. It’s a weird thing to do, destroying your audience’s suspension of disbelief – we know Ryan Reynolds isn’t really alone in a box, we know there’s a camera crew there and after this scene he’s gonna get out and stretch his legs, but for the purpose of watching the film, we choose to forget that. By /actually showing us/ something that couldn’t possibly exist in the film, the filmmakers throw the artificiality of it all in our faces, and for no good reason.

The problem is that, having come up with the concept for a movie that’s all about dialogue and claustrophobia, the writers weren’t up to delivering: they weren’t seem capable of writing that dialogue, nor holding the audience’s attention. Thus we’re treated to a scene in which Conroy suddenly discovers that there’s a snake /inside his trousers/ and, when it slithers out and hisses at him from the bottom of his coffin, he douses it in alcohol from his hip flask, then sets it on fire with his Zippo. The snake slithers out of a hole in the side of the box, never to be seen again – the snake, or the hole. Conroy doesn’t even seem to register it, and somehow, that scene makes the casting of Ryan Reynolds seem bizarre.

Conroy, we’re told, has less than $700 to his name, which is why he took this awful job driving a truck in Iraq. He’s not a soldier, and he’s not much of anything, really; he’s not particularly clever, not particularly interesting, and his only other distinguishing feature is that he has to take pills to ward off anxiety. He doesn’t try to break out of the box, and after the initial wriggling around to cut off the ties on his wrists, he doesn’t do anything except lie in the box and make phone calls. So why cast someone as famously muscular and athletic and attractive as Reynolds? It seems like it would have made more sense to cast someone who looked less capable; someone who didn’t look like they could punch their way through the crappy wooden box. (Alright, depending on how deeply he was buried, the weight of the sand on top of the box might have caused that effort to fail, but we know he’s not that deep because his phone still works.) Towards the end of the film, the box starts to collapse anyway, and Conroy still doesn’t try to get out, instead wasting his last few breaths on stupid conversations with his ex-employers.

Nothing about Buried really works. Conroy is drawn with the broadest of strokes (his mum’s ill! He’s got a young son! He takes anxiety pills!). The dialogue is stilted. The pacing of the film is off – it’s far too long for what it is – and there’s no structure to speak of. The awkward attempt at turning Conroy’s captors into sympathetic, if desperate, people rather than monstrous terrorists utterly fails. And the ending is brainmeltingly stupid. Come on. This is nonsense. This is satire for morons. It’s first draft, badly written, poorly conceived crap designed to give people without any political awareness something to talk about.

IMDB link

The Last Exorcism (2010)

The Last Exorcism is yet another in a long string of recent movies dressed up to look like cheap documentaries or found footage: the conceit here is that Rev Cotton Marcus, a preacher popular for his showmanship, wants to expose exorcism as the massive scam that it is. He's got a young son and is disturbed by the stories of children being killed mid-exorcism by the people supposedly trying to "save" them. So, with a small documentary crew in tow, he sets off to an isolated farm where the Sweetzer family is battling all kinds of demons, determined to show the world that exorcism is nonsense.

Of course, it all goes horribly wrong.

The first half an hour of The Last Exorcism works pretty well: one of the challenges for this kind of movie is setting up why things are being filmed, and Rev Marcus's motivations for wanting to get out of the exorcism game are believable enough. The point where it all starts to fall apart is when the crew arrive at the Sweetzer's farm, and the father of the family, Louis, tells him to turn off his camera. There are several minutes of argument in the film, including the screen fading to black for a little while, and a conversation we can't hear between Marcus and Louis Sweetzer being filmed from behind glass. But the film we're watching is supposed to be a documentary, and it's been edited - it's not continuous found footage like in Cloverfield, there are cuts and captions and music added in - so why has this scene been left in? It's awkward, and it's the first sign that the filmmakers haven't entirely got a handle on what exactly they're creating here. And it only gets worse as the film progresses.

The Last Exorcism is, at least, reasonably careful not to commit itself to any one explanation for the weirdness that's going on at the farm: Nell Sweetzer, the supposedly possessed girl, appears to be sweet and innocent, while her brother is sullen and obnoxious, and her father is a scarily over-protective religious zealot who drinks too much and, possibly, sexually abuses his daughter. The film offers us two explanations for all the violence and spookiness that's going on: either Nell is really possessed by a demon, or she's a damaged girl who's been unbalanced by the death of her mother, extreme isolation, religion, and abuse. Because the initial premise of the film is that Rev Marcus wants to prove that exorcism isn't real, though, it seems fairly reasonable to expect that the film will show us that sometimes, demons are real - otherwise, what's the point? In that case, The Last Exorcism would join the ranks of horror films where young girls are abused by their parents for their own good (and the good of everyone else) because they're evil/demonic/possessed, a trend that uncomfortably appropriates the hallmarks of abuse and justifies them. If the demon isn't real, then it's a sad story of a girl punished by her community for imaginary sins and mental illness in a way that feels too medieval to be happening in 2010, a condemnation of small town zealotry.

But the film can't seem to make up its mind, and rather than commit itself either way, it concocts an ending that makes gibberish of the whole endeavour. After conducting a second exorcism, during which Nell contorts herself into all sorts of painful positions (something that might have been a little more shocking if it wasn't used in the marketing campaign) it emerges that Nell is pregnant by a local boy, and the shame and fear of punishment from her puritanical father, combined with everything else she's had to go through, seems to explain her mental breakdown. A self-satisfied Marcus and crew prepare to leave town, but when they realise that Nell's story doesn't hold up, they decide to return to the farmhouse (instead of, at this point, calling the police, or some kind of social services) and ... it's difficult to explain what they find, it's so utterly nonsensical. When the crew get to the Sweetzer's farmhouse, they discover that the place is covered in pentagrams and other arcane symbols, daubed on the walls in blood. Outside, they discover some kind of Satanic ritual is in progress, with Nell screaming on an altar as she gives birth to something or other and Louis lashed to a pole. Among the hooded figures standing around the pyre is a local priest, who tosses the newborn baby into the fire. For a moment the film threatens to become The Wicker Man as Marcus musters what's left of his long-dead faith to break up the ritual. Brandishing a crucifix, he walks into the flames, a symbol we've already seen represented in Nell's primitive artwork. And the documentary crew, despite protesting numerous times about wanting to leave because things are getting too dangerous, hang around long enough to film all of this before finally, finally, turning tail and running, only to get murdered in the woods themselves.

And that's the end. It doesn't work. Nothing about the film works. Was Nell possessed? Who was the father of her baby - and why did the townsfolk kill it? An effective twist ending makes you reconsider everything else that happened in the film, viewing everything through the lens of the new information you've been given. The ending of The Last Exorcism is nonsense; it doesn't add anything, it actually makes the film even more incoherent. If Marcus and the crew were all killed that night, who put the documentary together? How did they get hold of the footage? And why did they edit it so badly? The structure of the film is a mess. If you're going to use sound as a plot element - Marcus rigs up speakers to emit demonic grunting during his fake exorcisms, Nell plays the recorder discordantly and creepily from inside her locked bedroom - then adding in extra sound cues during tense scenes ruins all of that. If you're going to try to make the film feel naturalistic, including moments where the camera is switched off and back on again, then you can't use quick cuts or multiple cameras to cover both sides of a conversation. If you're going to have your camera held by an actual character in the story (not that poor cameraman Daniel really got to have much in the way of characterisation or screentime) then you need to give them a convincing reason to keep filming when things get dangerous or difficult, and you can't use multiple angles on the same scene, or you destroy your audience's willing suspension of disbelief. It's just sloppy to mash up elements of traditional horror movie filmmaking with documentary making and figure no-one will notice - it's disrespectful to your audience. That faux documentary style gimmick is over-used already, and while The Last Exorcism initially seemed to have a pretty decent reason for employing it, it wasn't well thought through enough to work. The best thing about the movie is the acting, but while all the actors are great, they're let down by a weak script and a badly executed concept. Less of this kind of crap, please.

IMDb link

F (2010)

Every generation thinks the one after it is doing it wrong. The kids of today are always more irresponsible, more violent, less educated, and generally less civilised than the generation who went before them. Johannes Roberts’s F crystallises that attitude, with the added bonus that this time, the kids actually aren’t alright.

Robert Anderson is an English teacher whose life effectively fell apart when he was attacked by one of his students. He gave the kid a failing grade, handed out with a dollop of verbal abuse, and got a bloody nose for his troubles. When the school took the student’s side, suspending Anderson until the end of term and forbidding him to give out “F” grades anymore, Anderson lost his confidence – and, apparently, everything else. Separated from his wife and unable to keep control in the classroom, Anderson turns to drink. He’s paranoid, calling the police so regularly that they recognise his voice, and he’s one mistake away from getting the sack.

Anderson’s daughter, Kate, is a typical teenager: she rolls up her school skirt, smokes in the toilets, and sends text messages during class. She’s distanced herself from her father, leaving her mother to carry messages between them, and even in his classroom she barely acknowledges him. It’s a familiar situation; she’s not a bad kid, but she’s rebelling against his overly strict rules in every way she can, and the more he tries to rein her in, the further he pushes her away.

One winter evening, Anderson keeps Kate back after school, giving her a detention on spurious grounds – mostly just so that he can spend time with her – but even then, he can’t communicate with her. He confiscates her mobile phone, sparking yet another argument, but this time things go too far. His relationship with Kate – and with his wife – may never recover. The two of them are so effectively pushed apart from one another that they’re completely isolated when the killing starts.

The deserted school provides a great setting for some stalk ‘n’ slash action: it’s big enough that the few people who are still there are too far apart to hear or help one another, but connected enough that the killers can move from one area to another quickly and easily. There are plenty of places to hide, and, like any location that’s usually filled with people, an empty school is inherently creepy.

The killers are the embodiment of Anderson’s worst fears: youths in hoodies who have no respect for authority. There’s no apparent motive behind their killings, and none of the hoodies ever show their faces; whether they’re even human is up for debate. They move quickly and silently through the school, climbing the walls, running along shelves, hiding above eye level only to drop down and kill. The violence they perpetrate is random, and quick: they don’t linger over their victims, and they don’t appear to take any pleasure in their work. They just strike and kill, in a series of increasingly nasty ways. F holds back a lot of its gore; most of the killing is done off screen, with only sound effects or blood spatter to feed the audience’s imagination. The one moment in which we’re allowed to see what they’ve done to one of their victims, it’s shocking, almost incomprehensibly awful. These are some scary baddies.

The fact that the hoodies aren’t given names, faces, or motives makes them blanks onto which the audience can project their fears. They’re, literally, just hoodies; they’ve become dehumanised, not characters but symbols. There’s no need for them to have back stories or motives; just the fact that they’re wearing hoodies makes them frightening. And the relationship between Anderson and Kate makes us care: Anderson is far from being a hero, but F makes us feel for him, makes us experience his desperation to save Kate. To not to fuck up again. After all, the only reason she’s even in danger is because of him.

F is a film with almost no fat on its bones: there are only a few characters, even fewer who really matter, and it doesn’t linger over explanations. After the unrelenting tension of the previous scenes, the ending seems rather abrupt, but give it a moment: let it sink in. There’s maybe something slightly off with the pacing, but that ending seems to work better the further away you get from it. Downbeat, no-win endings are common among a certain strain of modern horror movies, and F couldn’t have ended any other way. This isn’t a gung ho revenge flick. F is a film about loss of control; a film about the breakdown of relationships; a film about the unbridgeable gap between one generation and the next. It’s a film about choices, and sometimes, there is no right answer.

IMDb link

Zombieland (2009)

You probably already got the memo, but zombies are cool now. A lot of the most painful hipster nonsense surrounding the undead can be blamed on Max Brooks, who wrote both the fake instructional Zombie Survival Guide and the novel World War Z. Probably some of the blame can also be laid on Zack Snyder's head, for directing the dire remake of Dawn of the Dead. And quite a lot of it attaches to Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright for the wonderful Shaun of the Dead. Whoever's fault it is, though, the fact remains that zombies are cool. Zombie-related merchandise is everywhere and, since zombie movies are virtually guaranteed successes, they're being cranked out at a rate of knots. The revival started in 2004 and, somehow, it hasn't ended yet.

But if there was any justice in the world, the release of Zombieland would mark the exact moment everyone realised how incredibly stale this genre has become. Because it's not a zombie movie, nor is it a horror movie. It's one of those sub-Apatow films about a neurotic misogynist nerd who, somehow, incredibly, ends up with a beautiful woman on his arm for no good reason. The zombies -- who, actually, aren't even zombies, despite the film's insistence on using that word constantly throughout -- are never a credible threat. They're just backdrop. They could be anything. They're just there because it's cool. Zombieland takes the most basic, superficial elements of zombie movies, and a stack of the most tired cliches, and jams them into a story about an awful manchild who never had any friends or understanding of how to relate to another human being eventually learns to get over himself. Sort of.

What's really difficult to work out is whether we're ever supposed to like or empathise with "Columbus". Given that he's the main character and also narrates most of the film, it'd be nice if he had some redeeming qualities, but he doesn't. In place of a character, he has a string of cliched quirks: he plays WoW, he doesn't like going out, he's a bit germphobic, he's scared of clowns, and he doesn't understand that "hot girls" are actually people. And he's the most fully developed character in the movie. Zombieland also gives us "Tallahassee", the obligatory hardman with a heart of goo and a sad backstory about a dead son we'll only bother to hear about for five minutes; "Witchita", the love interest for Columbus who, we're told, is smart and independent but barely acts like it; and "Little Rock", Witchita's kid sister who's just there to remark on how she doesn't get the cultural references everyone else insists on making.

(In case it's not blindingly obvious, I find it intensely irritating that the characters in Zombieland aren't given actual names, just places they're trying to get to. It's not cute.)

None of these characters really develop over the course of the movie. Columbus does a little bit, just enough to provide a sickening closing monologue on the nature of humanity, but that's no hero's journey. And he's no hero. His motivation for most of the film seems to be finding a girl who'll let him touch her, and that's when he can bring himself to stop referring to women as bitches. The film's low point is either when Columbus describes Witchita as "not your typical hot stuck-up bitch" or when she refers to the girls who didn't ask him to the dance in eighth grade as "those bitches," outraged that anyone could ever have found his awful, immature whinging anything less than irresistible. The film's tagline, "nut up or shut up", pretty much sums up the movie's attitude towards women. They're either evil or helpless and in need of rescue.

It's not the worst offender in the sexism stakes, but it's pretty bad. And since Zombieland doesn't have any redeeming qualities, it's hard to ignore. Structurally, the film is all over the place. It has no beginning-middle-end. It has no real conflict, since it utterly fails to ever put any of the characters in any kind of danger. It doesn't even have the good grace to be funny, although it tries desperately, with recurring "jokes" about Tallahassee's love for Twinkies, and the excruciatingly awful Bill Murray cameo. Nothing happens in this movie. It's difficult to summarise the plot, because there wasn't one. Some movies can make that work, but usually only when they have strong characters, relationships, and themes to play with instead. Zombieland has none of the above. It doesn't even have a solid central premise, because the "zombies" in the movie aren't zombies, and "Zombieland", which is used to refer to the post-apocalypse America, is a false conceit because the whole world is overrun with the infected.

The thing is, I wasn't even expecting it to be good. I was expecting it to be your typical post-2004 lazy zombie movie where forgettable characters battle the usual zombie horde and end up saving the day, somehow (or at least surviving to live another one). It's not even that. It's a horrible mess that uses the trappings of zombie movies to disguise an utter lack of ideas, story, or intelligence. It's a waste of time, life, and celluloid.

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The Graves (2010)

During the Great Plague of London in 1665, holding a bunch of flowers to your nose was thought to protect against the disease. In 2010, covering your nose to avoid a bad smell can apparently prevent you from becoming possessed by a demon. Well done, everyone.

The Graves was part of the After Dark Horrorfest 2010, a now annual celebration of low-budget, low-quality horror movies. Virtually all of these movies are unwatchably shit (the exception being The Hamiltons, which is rather good) so, in order to market this low-end slop, they've been bundled together and called a festival. Since there have now been four After Darks, it's apparently a tactic that works. It's just depressing, really, because the fact that there's a market for these films means they'll keep getting made, and the existence of The Hamiltons means that I'll keep watching them, forever hoping to find another diamond amongst the shit.

So, The Graves. The "Graves" of the title aren't holes for burying dead people in, but rather a pair of sisters, Meg and Abby. We're introduced to them filming one another in a Forbidden Planet style comics and memorabilia shop: they live in Arizona, but Meg is about to move to New York, so the sisters decide to take a road trip together, as one last hurrah. Amusingly, they decide to go and see the world's largest thermometer but get lost and end up in Skull City, a mining ghost town.

(Googling facts about this film is actually way, way more entertaining than watching it. Apparently the world's largest thermometer is located in Baker, California. And the Skull City of the movie is actually Vulture City, a real ghost town in Arizona. The Vulture gold mine was discovered in 1863, and at its peak, the city was home to nearly five thousand people. The hanging tree - shown in the movie - was used to hang at least 18 men. The mine was closed in 1942, and the town became a ghost town. A quick Flickr search shows up dozens of photographs o the ghost town - which, incredibly, you really can arrange a self-guided tour of. Googling Vulture City has actually killed the one thing I enjoyed about the film, which was its location and set details, because all of those things were in situ when the film crew showed up. It's testament to the incredible ineptitude of the filmmakers that, despite the wonderful location, they still managed to make a film this bad. But I digress.)

Meg decides that taking a tour of the ghost town would be an awesome way to make the best of getting lost, and so the sisters set off to look around. But almost immediately, they discover that something's horribly wrong: trapped in a tumbledown hut, they're forced to listen as another tourist is brutally murdered by a hammer-wielding, bearded man in dungarees and dark goggles. Bizarrely, after the murder, there's a horrible, deafening, weird noise - but there's no time to dwell on that, because now the goggle-wearing madmen is coming after the Graveses.

Right, and here's the major problem with this movie: its structure is all over the place. The girls manage to dispatch the first killer only for another one to show up, and then another one. Random characters show up just to increase the body count, with no indication of where they might have come from. Plot elements are introduced and then forgotten about for no apparent reason. It's impossible to gauge how long the film might be while you're watching it, or how far through you might be, because there's no structure to events, there's no sense of escalation or an approaching climax. It's just a string of events that don't even entirely make sense. Meg cuts her forearm open to make a fake trail of blood to distract the killer, but her wound is gone in the following scene. Abby seems to have died (off screen) but her lifeless body gets up again after a little while. The townspeople appear to be part of some bizarre cult, but the religious imagery doesn't go anywhere. Horror movie icons Bill Moseley and Tony Todd show up, but while Moseley gamely gives it a go, strapping on a plastic pig's snout (for no apparent reason), Todd is clearly just phoning it in. The film is just a succession of stuff, with very little thought given to what any of this stuff has to do with any of the other stuff in the movie. Characterisation is virtually non-existent: the girls, at the beginning of the movie, are unconvincing goths who are obsessed with comics (if you've not done so yet, have a close look at the movie poster, and try not to punch anything once you've read it) but that lasts for five minutes and is then irrelevant.

The other main issue is that the acting is dreadful. Just dreadful. The two girls are passable to begin with, when they're just messing around and hanging out, but as soon as the tension attempts to ratchet up, it all falls apart. They stand awkwardly, deliver their lines awkwardly, and generally aren't believeable in the slightest. When anyone gets possessed (by inhaling the stench of, er, oh, I dunno, something) they demonstrate that they're possessed by tossing their heads about and gnashing their teeth. The first time Meg becomes possessed, it isn't even clear that that's what happening. She's just ... snapping at the air with her teeth, and going "raaaaarrrghh" a bit. It's ridiculous.

And then there's the CGI. Oh, the CGI. It's ugly stuff. The ghosts look ridiculous, and the flies look worse. The only thing that looks good in this movie is the location and, as previously discussed, that's got nothing to do with the filmmakers. There's nothing clever about this movie, nothing inspired, nothing interesting. There's just no point in it existing. And to add insult to injury, there's a fucking sequel in production.

IMDb link

It's behind youuuuu!

This is aces. Thanks to many of the movies in this video, I am actually permanently afraid of bathroom mirrors.

The House of the Devil (2009)

There's a lot of debate about The House of the Devil online: some people claim it's an arty, intelligent, slow-burning exercise in tension that goes a little awry at the end, while others claim it's so dull they fell asleep halfway through.

The second camp is right.

The House of the Devil starts out promisingly: it's a pitch perfect imitation of 80s horror movies, right down to the font used in the credits. It really does look great. There's been so much care and effort put into making the film look fantastic that, it seems, there was nothing left to make it, y'know, actually good.

The plot, such as it is, is familiar enough: Samantha is a poor student who urgently needs to find the means to move into her own apartment, and a babysitting job for the admittedly creepy Mr Ulman seems like a great way to generate some cash. There's something seriously off about his house when she arrives, and when it emerges that this isn't actually a babysitting job at all - there is no baby, only an elderly woman - Sam's ready to leave. But Ulman makes her an offer she can't refuse (an outrageously over-the-top $400 for an evening's work) and she agrees to stay. Naturally, it turns out that the elderly woman she's there to take care of is, well, some kind of scary mutated thing, and the Ulmans don't want a babysitter so much as a vessel for the devil.

It's tediously predictable, but many widely acknowledged horror classics don't offer much more than that. Suspiria, for example, doesn't have much more of a plot than that. But Suspiria had brilliant visuals and interesting set-pieces along the way, while The House of the Devil has, um, a scene where Samantha has a very long conversation with a pizza place, one in which she breaks and subsequently clears up a vase, and one in which she talks to a goldfish. Beyond that, nothing happens for the entire first 70 minutes of the film, and it's achingly boring.

If the payoff was worth it, I might have been able to forgive the film's utter inability to create a character with any depth, or a believeable situation to put her in, or any actual tension. But it isn't. For one shining moment, it looked like The House of the Devil might actually have some guts; like it might actually stray off the well-trodden path it had been mindlessly wandering along all the way through. In the film's final moments, after escaping from an uninspired Satanic ritual, Samantha realises that there's no way for her to win. Ulman chases her down in a nearby graveyard, and it becomes clear that it's too late for her now; she's thoroughly infected with evil. She turns the gun on herself and blows her brains out.

... Except that she doesn't. It would be better if she had; it's the first time she shows any kind of intelligence or strength of character or ... well, anything, really, and it was the first time the film got close to being shocking. It's not a happy ending, sure, but when you're battling the Devil, things don't often turn out rosy. Instead, the film went for a much more predictable ending, leaving a bandaged Samantha resting comfortably in a hospital bed, having somehow miraculously survived, with her devil-baby intact. It's a cop out, and worse, it's a predictable cop out, and even worse than that, it's a boring predictable cop out that thinks it's clever.

There is absolutely no depth to this movie. It has nothing to say, nothing to contribute to the genre, nothing to offer the viewer except some flickering lights to stare blankly at. The central female character is a complete blank canvas; the film is never scary because you can't invest in her, you can't believe in her, she's nothing but an actress walking around and saying words. She's offered dozens of ways out of the situation we're supposed to believe is hopeless, and she takes none of them. She doesn't trust her own instincts, or those of her friend who's trying desperately to get her to see that the babysitting job is creepy as all hell, but there's no sense of an inner struggle, any sense that she's doing this out of desperation, or anything other than ennui. Although even that would make more sense than what the film presents us with. This film is so dull that you'd almost want to find a Satanic cult to hook up with just to shake off the crushing boredom.

I've actually had the misfortune of watching -- or trying to watch -- another of Ti West's movies: Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. That one is unwatchable shit in a whole different way than The House of the Devil: it's lowest-common-denominator toilet humour, and I couldn't sit through it. I'm afraid I've just added another director to the list of filmmakers whose films I just won't watch. I value my time and sanity far too highly for that.

IMDB link