MIRRORS (2008)

Director:

Alexandre Aja

Cast:

Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Amy Smart, Jason Flemyng

GHOUL RATING:

**(*) 3-

Story: A burnt-out ex-cop turned night guard (Kiefer Sutherland) works in a burnt-out shopping centre with strangely preserved mirrors. There is something in them – some force which turns the reflections against their originals. If you’re killed in the mirror, the wounds appear on your own flesh and you die. Ghosts from the past need to be appeased, and Jack Bauer must find the truth about a certain girl before it’s too late for his family...

Review: Alexandre Aja burst onto the horror scene with his furiously ingenious apotheosis of slasher, HIGH TENSION (Haute Tension, 2003). His gloriously gory and gloomily romantic horror debut made him look like a messiah of this genre. Two remakes later, this role becomes highly questionable.

His re-imagining of Craven’s classic THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977), made in 2006, upped the brutality and stylization, but dulled the satiric and intellectual edge of the potent story, in his version reduced to a mere Grand Guignol. In his third horror outing, Aja wrestles with the South Korean spook fest INTO THE MIRROR (Geoul Sokeuro, 2003) directed by Sung-ho Kim. In this case there’s no aura of a classic to be afraid of, but the expectations of horror fans are understandably high. Alas, his MIRRORS have more than a few cracks.

INTO THE MIRROR is your average Korean horror flick: a good concept that’s, eventually, half-baked; a memorable opening scene that is never to be matched by anything later in the film; and a strong social criticism added so that the dull thrills and non-horrific scary scenes at least have SOME kind of ’weight’. There’s too much meandering between the solid opening and a fine closing scene, too many missed opportunities and a completely unnecessary subplot which ultimately reduces the scare factor to zero once you realize the whole thing is a revenge-from-beyond-the-grave aimed at very specific bad guys.

In his version, Aja wisely keeps only the start and finish, together with the essential premise, but changes all the rest, mostly for the better. From the very beginning of the USA version it’s obvious that this won’t be a carbon copy of the Korean: an elegant cut on the neck in the original produced a gentle trickle on a woman’s skin; in the remake, a gush on a man’s neck spouts gushes of blood all over the place. The opening credits are also borrowed from Korea, but made more dynamic and show-offy, and accompanied by the bombastic, impressive score by Javier Navarrete (TESIS, DEVIL’S BACKBONE, PAN’S LABYRINTH...). So much about subtlety.

Essentially, MIRRORS follows the trend of Americanizing the Asian horror films: Eastern subtlety, slow rhythm and suggestiveness are replaced by the faster, more aggressive and spectacular effects – but, at least in this case, such an approach improves the original. It is a more visceral, but also scarier film with a clever use of the elaborate set of the burnt-out department store, shadows, sounds, music and visual effects.

However, the problems begin and end with the lazily written screenplay, with clichés that are neither overcome nor masked well enough: a tortured, pill-popping ex-cop with a trauma and guilty consciousness, his annoyingly mistrustful ex-wife (who still loves him!) and their sugar-sweet kiddies (ugh!) are too stale to swallow, additionally so due to Aja’s still imperfect English which reduces the dialogues to the cut & paste phrases from deja vu films. It doesn’t help that Kiefer Sutherland’s one-note acting is too reminiscent of his 24 role: too often he looks and sounds exactly like Jack Bauer, which makes the would-be scary scenes more laughable. It is more entertaining and eye-pleasing to replace the brightly-lit and dull-white setting of the freshly-reopened department from the Korean version with the blackened ruin in the American version, but even this triumph of set design, with its half-melted mannequins, becomes boring once you see that the characters roaming the film are not much livelier than the said mannequins.

The uninspired script abandons the satire and social criticism of the original, but can’t think of anything better to replace them with than yet another RING-circle: the hero must investigate the past of a certain female ghost; he goes to the rural backwoods to find her family (why are they always in the rural regions?); he discovers the history of abuse against her (mad scientist included!) and must literally wrestle with her embodied spirit in the store’s basement in the end. This whole thing is well directed: Aja knows how to stage an inventive gore set-piece, he’s good with suspense too, but the one-dimensional and unoriginal script prevents him from making a truly scary film. What we’re left with are two memorable scenes (the opening one, and the one with the jaw, seen in the trailers) an improved ending scene, excellent score, camera and effects and... that’s all folks! 

As a remake of an Asian horror MIRRORS stands pretty well above most of the other attempts, and –even without comparisons with the original- it is a perfectly watchable horror flick. The trouble is that it doesn’t bother to extract more visual and connotative potentials from the potent archetypal motifs of mirrors and doppelgangers than it has to. The final score is in accordance with the lowered ambitions. Crack!

KOMA (2004)

Country: China

Genre: Thriller / Horror

Running Time: 85'

Director:

Chi-Leung Law

Cast:

Karena Lam, Angelica Lee, Andy Hui

GHOUL RATING:

**

2

Story: An annoyingly noisy, drunk girl leaves a wedding party only to stumble upon a 'steal the kidney and run' victim. Instead of being cut up for her obnoxious ways, this broad becomes the lead character (her name is Ching). When sober, she's equally irritating, what with her pathetic whining about her illness (kidney failure) and uncontrollable bursts of anger. Then she's stalked by Ling (notice the rhyme there?), the main suspect in the kidney-case, who just happens to be her doctor-boyfriend's one night stand.  But, is Ching stalked by Ling? Perhaps Ling means well? Oh, the suspense! Who will survive and how many kidneys will be left of them?

Review: The publicity for KOMA is based on the fame of its two female 'stars' whose faces are blown over posters and DVD covers as the film's chief draw. Both of them became famous for seeing ghosts: Angelica saw them after THE EYE operation, while Karena was helped (or cursed) by her INNER SENSES. Both of these films were ludicrously overrated: if you believed the hype that surrounded them, you'd bee fooled to expect at least something above average. While decently directed (at least as far as slick visuals pass for good filmmaking these days), they both suffer from unbearably shallow drama, uninvolving characters and infantile, unimaginative 'scares'. In short, they are both dull attempts of Hong Kong and Thailand cinema to jump the bandwagon of Japan's and Korea's serious horror, leaving the obligatory Chinese comic reliefs and action scenes behind them, and embracing 'drama'. Nice ambition – slightly undermined by the lack of any purpose more serious than a pure economic one. The end results are mere aping of the approach mastered by the modern Japanese and Korean horror, but – they were both immensely crowd-pleasing, and therefore commercial.

And now they are joined by KOMA, a new flick by Lawrence Cheng, the perpetrator of INNER NONSENSE. The supernatural paraphernalia is left behind, but what his screenwriter, Susan Chen, has come up with is an even more unimaginative affair. Basically, what you get is a silly and utterly contrived soap opera 'enriched' by even sillier exploitation of the trite urban legend (a laced drink from a stranger in a bar, after which you wake in a tub filled with ice: the opposite wall offers a friendly advice to 'Call the police if you want to live!', the mirror reveals a nasty cut on your side, and you realize you're one kidney short). The above-described situation is responsible for KOMA's single exceptional scene, and you get it in the very first 10 minutes. After that, you're left with characters you'd rather see as victims in some elaborate slasher horror than as people you're supposed to care about and fear for. What's worse, there's not even a decent villain to root for!

 

Let me spoil the movie for you – if a turd can spoiled, that is. In a surprising twist at the end, it is discovered that the villain is – Ling, who's been the main suspect all along. She was also the ONLY suspect! Susan Chen's amateurish script did not even bother to provide a red herring or two so as to create a half-decent whodunit. No, ladies and gentlemen: what you see in the very beginning is what you get in the end (unless you fall asleep by then). Let me tell you how amateurish the script is. In case you don't get the nuanced relationships between these people, you're helped by the dialogues along the lines of (and I quote here): 'I hate you.' 'Why?' 'I'm jealous!' For the more profound psychology, Ching & Ling (who, unconvincingly, become friends for a while) at one instance go to some pseudo-self-help-rebirthing-whatnot group, where they sit on the floor and follow the advice to 'look deep into each other's subconscious'. After approximately 6 seconds of meditation, they manage to see their innermost secrets, and spell them out to the inattentive viewer: Ching is insecure because of her illness, while Ling is lonely because her mommy is in a coma. Somewhere in the background of it all is Ching's boyfriend, a zero character who's barely more than a plot device to have Ching & Ling meet and interrelate. This questionable type oscillates between faithfully protecting his sick girlfriend Ching and violently banging Ling (who's unable to pay her mom's hospital bills but the kind doc is willing to oblige); at least we're treated to his nice demise (involving an unexpected scalpel in the eye), which is more than could be said for the hateful leading ladies.

 

KOMA's inconsistencies, contrivances, strains of logic, suspensions of disbelief, psycho-babble and plot holes would require an essay to enumerate and analyze – but they're not worth the trouble. The despise it has for its audience's intelligence is most obvious in the following exchange. Ching: 'Did the woman have one kidney removed, or two?' The police inspector: 'One. Is there any difference?' Ching: 'With one left she won't die.' The police inspector has a look saying: 'Now is that so? Damn, every day on this job a man learns something new!' And this from an 'inspector' working on the kidney-case for 5 months now! Yes, dear viewer: this is the kind of film that treats you to the most basic Psychology 101, Medicine 101, etc. without having covered its bases in Screenwriting 101. Direction, on the other hand, gives its best to elevate this mess. The pace is OK, excellent cinematography makes the most of the good production values, and there are a couple of decent gore sequences. Nothing innovative, mind you: it's strictly 'been there, done that (much better), got a T-shirt' material. The stalk'n'scare scenes are created through the usual 'subjective camera' moves, and the action is overscored by the over-melodramatic music. Any self-respecting horror fan may expect only the mildest kicks out of this (say, on a dull wet afternoon), but otherwise – stay clean off KOMA. This is soap-horror directed towards the lowest common denominator.

A SERBIAN FILM PHOTOS

 Here are some exclusive behind the scenes photos from the making of the notorious shocker you may have heard of, called A SERBIAN FILM.  

As can be seen, the making of the film was not as grim as the final product appears to be. From my visits to the set I can vouch that the atmosphere was rather usual: the crew people were in their usual professional, but also fun-loving & cheerful attitude.

The photos below show the EFX crew, led by Miroslav Lakobrija; the sculpture and the puppet of the baby from the infamous "baby scene" (aka "newborn porn"); the director Srdjan Spasojevic with a decapitated head and various details from the film's probably most gruesome splatter set-piece – and so on.

If you like the pics, but still haven't seen the film – what are you waiting for?!

--- click on each pic to see it larger ---

 

NIGHTMARE MOVIES by Kim Newman – Book Review

NIGHTMARE MOVIES

Kim Newman

Bloomsbery, 2011

Trade Paperback

650 pages

Review by Dejan Ognjanovic

originally published on TWITCH

At one point in this book its author admits: "I'm well aware that the vogue for remakes, reimaginings and reduxes extends to books like Nightmare Movies." But there is no reason to fear: this is not one of those cash-in products with dollar signs in their evil eyes. The new, extended edition of Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s is clearly a labor of equal amounts of love and understanding bestowed upon a genre which few writers take this seriously. This book needed to happen: the cult original (in its three editions: 1985, 1988, 1989) has long been out of print, and the new developments in horror after its publication practically begged for an update from an author whose judgements have already been proven right.

When they announced the updated version, it was reasonable to expect some 20-25% of new material to fill us in on the movies made in the two decades after the original Nightmare Movies. What no one expected was a whole new book added to the old one, equal in size and even better in quality! Yes, folks, this humongous volume – 634 pages in large format (+16 pages with photos) – contains the good old Nightmare Movies we all know and love on its first 293 pages, followed by more than 300 pages of entirely new material + index of titles, fully updated. The result is, plain and simple, just the best and most reliable study of modern horror film you can find! You want one book to tell you all you need to know about horrors made between Night of the Living Dead and A Serbian Film? This is it!   

And why is that? Simply because Kim Newman is the Man. As he said in the original introduction: "I was around to gauge the impact of Shivers, Carrie, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween and The Evil Dead on their original releases. My first professionally published piece was a review of Last House on the Left in 1982." He's been around. And he's been watching, it seems, even the unwatchable: in this huge book you will find references not only to unknown gems (the Russian Jekyll and Hyde from 1985!) but also, occasionally, to unbelievable trash. 

 

Who else but Newman would notice that Coppola's Dracula (1992) has a set-up which is "surprisingly close to the way Dracula (Jamie Gillis) becomes a vampire in the porn movie Dracula Exotica (1980)"?! Who else but Newman has seen this many low budget flicks few people have even heard of? Let me rephrase this: yes, there may be horror freaks out there with nothing better to do who have seen all this, and more, but how many of them are able to see through them, to analyze them with such wit and precision, and to draw comparisons with their nobler, better known brethreen?

Newman's knowledge of horror sometimes seems scary, but it's never dry, dusty nor burdened with the tiresome "discourse" of the post-structuralist-feminist-Marxist-Freudian-Lacanian-Žižekian claptrap which passes for horror theory these days. His insights are penetrating and profound, but always clearly put, in a finely wrought language of a good writer (Newman is equally known for his novels and short stories) – language which most theoreticians of horror can only dream of. Here is just one example, in dealing with Branagh's Frankenstein (1994): "Few Frankenstein films are as reactionary, with the punchline coming when Walton learns his lesson from Victor's awful example, deciding that all his science is a bad thing and turns his ship away from the ice floes to return to a civilisation where surgery is performed without anaesthetic and the natural process of birth is as bloody and doomed as the unnatural activities of mad scientists."

It certainly helps that Nightmare Movies is the result of a life-long devotion, instead of a hasty "research" conducted by some stuffy professor on his/her black sabbatical. Newman gets his names, titles and facts right; okay, there are about a dozen misspelt names in the new volume, but that's almost unavoidable in this "encyclopaedia of evil", as Robert Bloch calls it in his blurb. Even more preciously, his analyses are uncannily right, too. When one covers such a vast field, with hundreds of titles overviewed, a certain percentage of disagreement seems inevitable. Not so here. In this particular instance I can't think of any major issues of that kind (well, I wouldn't call Dead & Buried "disappointing" but I cannot entirely disagree with the complaints Newman has to it). His evaluation is always well-supported and convincingly argued, and this surpasses the matter of "taste".  

The thing is that Newman approaches his films as parts of a bigger whole: the oeuvre of a particular director, the period, the cycle, the sub-genre... No horror is an island, and Newman is at his best when it comes to pointing to connections and influences and trends beneath the trends. After all, that's how the book is organized – in chapters devoted to particular dominant categories of modern horror. The original Nightmare Movies has chapters on zombie films, British horror revival, neo-Gothic, Devil movies, slashers, paranoia (about the horrors of nature, machines, disasters, conspiracies and apocalypse), psychos, auteurs (Argento, Cohen, Cronenberg, DePalma), ghost stories, Italian zombies and cannibals, post-Romero living dead, post-modern horror, and even on the weirdo horror film (cult, kitsch, camp, sick, punk, porno).  

The New Nightmares addition contains chapters on serial psycho-killer films after Silence of the Lambs, classical monsters in modern guise (vampires, werewolves, mummies etc), Scream and its po-mo slasher clones, modern ghost stories (including, inevitably, Ringu and other J-horrors), virtual reality, "torture porn", more fresh zombies and more auteurs (Burton, del Toro, Fessenden, Lynch). Always with a bigger picture in mind, Newman puts modern horror in a perspective and explains its numerous phenomena so effortlessly it may seem deceptively easy – until you try it yourself.

And this is what makes Nightmare Movies a pleasure and a treasure: it covers the most flourishing period of horror cinema – the past 40 years – but its vast ambition and scope are perfectly matched by the knowledge, taste, authority and insight unrivaled among the contemporary critics. In plain English this means merely that the new, mammoth two-books-for-the-price-of-one edition of Nightmare Movies is your ultimate guide to modern horror cinema. Kim Newman has explained it!

Before someone starts screaming: "Plant!" I feel obliged to find some fault with the book. Even a small one. Well, I tried, but I couldn't think of anything bigger than the following two: 1) Alexandre Aja's Haute Tension (2004) is only briefly mentioned, and the basics of its plot recounted, but there's not a hint of analysis or even evaluation of this remarkable film. 2) I must complain about the selection of photos. This edition, apparently, doesn't want to alienate the modern reading public with occasionally gruesome images that adorned the original version (rotting Fulci zombies, face falling apart in Amityville II, Edith Massey being messy…); those are now replaced by more wholesome and generic stills. And that's all. Everything else about Nightmare Movies is just perfect. If you care about horror film this is definitely a must-have!

 

H. P. Lovecraft's ARKHAM SANITARIUM - Script Review

All concept art for this film is done by Dave Wood

(click on images to see bigger versions)

This text originally published on TWITCH

Lovecraft's fiction is notoriously difficult to translate to cinema, for several reasons. The main one has to do with his reliance on mood, atmosphere, subtlety, hints and vague suggestions of unspeakable horrors. This doesn't mean that his stories are entirely lacking in action or memorable set-pieces, but their scarcity and brevity have usually caused filmmakers to resort to padding the brief tales with all kinds of conventional (romantic, detective, slasher, monster) elements, usually dilluting and betraying the original. Lovecraft's cosmic horror was, more often than not, turned into (unintentionally) comic horror. This author has written only two novels: one of those, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward was filmed twice, as Roger Corman's lame flick The Haunted Palace in 1963 and as a much better, but still lacking The Resurrected in 1992 by Dan O'Bannon. The other, SF-horror epic At the Mountains of Madness, was almost greenlighted to be directed by Guillermo Del Toro, but Universal eventually backed-out.

It seems that anthology format is better suited for Lovecraft's shorter fiction: three short sharp shocks in a row are better than a single one padded for feature legth. This, at least, must be the rationale behind the script written by Andrew G. Morgan based on "The Haunter of the Dark", "The Shunned House" and "The Thing on the Doorstep". His anthology H. P. Lovecraft's Arkham Sanitarium is produced by Survivor Films, an independent film production company based in London, as their first feature-film. The filming of this low budget venture begins in May 2011 (on Friday the 13th!), with the movie planned for release in October 2011. What follows are my impressions of the screenplay.

Briefly and simply put, this is a very, very good script. It is pretty faithful to the stories and the changes are made mostly for dramatic and cinematic purposes. Love and understanding of Lovecraft's stories are evident (no "teens in peril" here), the structure is tight and no time is wasted on unnecessary or extraneous elements. There is no tongue-in-cheek nor wink-wink nudge-nudge nonsense here: just straight horror, in tone and approach similar to the superior anthology Necronomicon (1994). If they come anywhere near it, we should be happy. If they manage to surpass it, we'll have a new modern classic on our hands.

It is not specific about the period, but it's certainly not contemporary: a character is seen driving a 1950s Sedan, which means this is moved up in time from Lovecraft's 1920s and 1930s, but not enough for our cell-phone, video-cameras and internet age. The wraparound segment deals with a lady reporter who comes to an asylum called Arkham Sanitarium and has a meeting with a dr West (Howard, not Herbert). The following three stories depict the gruesome events which brought three of its inmates to the brink of insanity – and beyond.

All three segments take place in Arkham, fictional New England town based on Lovecraft's Providence. "The Haunter of the Dark" is about a spooky deserted church (or is it?) and a creature which dwells in the darkness. The story is faithfully adapted, except the ending is more elaborate. Whereas Lovecraft liked to confine his most epxlicit horror for the final paragraph, or even sentence – leaving most of it to the imagination – the script shows us not only the story's concluding image of "the three-lobed burning eye" but also the face and jaws of the haunter of the dark, and what they do to an unfortunate character.

"The Shunned House" is one of Lovecraft's best earlier tales, a uniquely creepy tale about a house haunted not by a ghost but by something much, much worse – a malevolent, parasitic entity which sucks out life out of the unsuspecting inhabitants. After numerous deaths the house becomes deserted, when a student and his uncle decide to spend the night in its basement and see if there is anything supernatural behind the strange fungi and yellowish miasma on its floor... This segment is excellent until the end, when the screenplay discards the uncanny and original non-human entity and replaces it with a disappointingly conventional all-too-human element. It's a pity, because it is precisely Lovecraft's ingeniously devised concept that distinguished this particular story from hundreds of similar "haunted house" stories. This change, to my mind, is the only big and serious lapse in the entire script, especially since it brings the conclusion closer to a Tales from the Crypt episode than to genuinely Lovecraftian terror. 

"The Thing on the Doorstep" is another story previously not filmed, although there were rumors that Stuart Gordon wanted to do it as a feature. It is the only instance of a Lovecraft tale with a prominent female character, although there's a twist to that, too. To put it vaguely, it deals with a marriage gone horribly wrong due to the influence of the bride's father. Who, by the way, happens to be dead. But, as HPL put it, "that is not dead which can eternal lie, and in strange aeons even death may die." So, as can be seen from these examples, church is hell, family house is hell, marriage is hell, and, obviously, insane asylum is hell. Which all leads to a nice and cheerful ending, Lovecraft style.

It is difficult to predict how this script will turn out: this is the first film from Andrew G. Morgan, the writer and director, his cast is made of mostly unknown actors, and the budget is relatively low for the ambitious concepts which will be done blending CGI and practical make-up EFX. A lot will depend on the DP's (and production designer's) ability to capture the atmosphere that the script provides opportunities for in spades. Also, they're gonna need really good EFX artists for some rather complex visual and make-up effects (and thankfully, the script is not stingy when it comes to Lovecraft's trade-mark body-horror). Anyway, the script, if filmed as written, promises to be a basis for one of the better HPL adaptations out there. Good luck, folks!