Sounding Off About Silent House

Remakes are a hot button topic with horror fans. Even though remakes have been a part of the fabric of genre filmmaking for forever and a day, the announcement of another remake typically provokes a heated response. And it's not just about classic being remade - some of the most heated reactions happen when Hollywood remakes a foreign film within a year or so of the original's release. The main point of contention being that remaking a foreign film right out of the gate rather than giving the original a chance to find an audience on its own in the US sends the message that studios cater to lazy American audiences who can't be bothered to read subtitles.

For some reason, though, any fanboy outrage over remaking the 2010 Uruguayan film La Casa Muda has been minimal. Maybe because the original has not caught on as a fan favorite in the way that, say, [REC] had by the time its US remake Quarantine was put into production. It's not a badge of coolness to like Silent House so there's not much consternation over the remake.

I haven't watched the original Silent House and, honestly, having watched the remake I don't plan on making the time to do so (another complaint against remakes, by the way - they discourage viewers from discovering the original). It's not that I hated Silent House, just that I suspect that the remake didn't veer from from the source material and another trip through the same story just doesn't appeal to me.

The main hook of Silent House is that it's presented in one continuous take. Of course there are edits throughout the film but they're invisible, done in moments where the film is in black. It's a stunt that's been done before - most famously in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) and genre fans might also remember the Bruce Campbell starring Running Time (1997), directed by Evil Dead alumni Josh Becker - but whenever it's done, it's always an impressive technical feat. Not just for the coordinated efforts of the behind the scenes crew but for any actor who has to stay on screen for the duration of the film.

Whatever faults might be found in Silent House (and we'll get to them momentarily), the central performance of Elizabeth Olsen as Sarah isn't one of them. Olsen recently received a heap of praise for her role in last year's Martha Marcy May Marlene and while that film has been on my "to see" list for awhile, it's now rocketed to the top of my "must see" list thanks to seeing her in action in Silent House.

Olsen really gives an impressive performance here in a role that is short on dialogue but requires her to run the gamut of emotion. It's a classic Scream Queen performance in that the film resembles the Final Chase of a slasher movie with Olsen almost continually on the run from an unknown assailant stalking her and her father (Adam Trese) and uncle (Eric Sheffer Stevens) within the walls of her family's old lakeside home as they prep the long neglected property for sale.

As Olsen's Sarah screams, runs, and fights for her survival, it's the same kind of scenario that horror fans have seen Jamie Lee Curtis, Adrienne King, Amy Steel, or any number of other Final Girls run through. Only instead of occupying the last twenty minutes of the film, Olsen really gets a workout as she has to sustain this level of terror for the majority of Silent House's eighty eight minute running time.

Some would say that the lack of build-up to Sarah's plight works against creating audience sympathy for the character. We don't really know much at all about Sarah before we're asked to root for her survival. I don't agree with that complaint myself as I think it's fairly easy to feel sympathetic towards someone under attack. I don't really need to know what their life story is to care. Getting to know more about a character is always good but the lack of backstory is not an insurmountable obstacle to audience sympathy.

Whatever level of sympathy viewers may or may not feel for Sarah, though, their feelings for the overall movie will be tested by Silent House's concluding moments as the reason for Sarah's ordeal comes to light. I won't go into details but I will say it's not going to please everybody. In fact, it'll probably be a deal breaker for most. Me, I thought it was fine. I didn't love the resolution but I didn't feel like it betrayed my investment in the film. Ultimately, Silent House is a shoulder shrug sort of film - it's not awful but I'd never revisit it and I'd only recommend it on the strength of Olsen's performance.

This is the second film from the filmmaking couple of Chris Kentis and Laura Lau who first drew acclaim for their 2003 debut Open Water. The fact that it's taken the duo nearly ten years to deliver a follow up is a discouraging reminder of just how difficult it is to get movies made - even with a success to your name. Sadly, Silent House isn't as impressive as Open Water was but neither is it a disaster. Hopefully Kentis and Lau won't have to wait nearly another decade to add another film to their resume.

The Delusion Of A Disordered Mind

Call me crazy (or slow on the draw) but I noticed something new while recently rewatching Phantasm II. While Reggie and Mike are driving through a Tall Man-ravaged small town, one shot of the debris-strewn streets and boarded up store fronts suddenly jumped out at me as being not an actual location, as I always assumed it to be, but in fact a miniature set.

This detail has probably been completely obvious to everyone all along but it's taken me I don't know how many viewings for my eye to detect telltale signs of artifice in this shot.

But rather than ruin the moment, spying the fakery instead put a big smile on my face. This is the kind of unexpected discovery that the digital age has robbed us of now that moviemakers no longer have to use a variety of practical methods to pull off their illusions.

This moment amounts to just a brief few seconds of screen time and it's not any kind of pivotal scene - it's just there to give a sense of the Tall Man's path of destruction. But yet it required some craftsman on the crew (perhaps Ken Tarallo, credited as model maker in the film's credits) to spend what was likely weeks to construct a cool little miniature full of finely acheived detail which then had to be lit and photographed just right to make it convincing. Or...perhaps I'm just seeing things.

Either way, Phantasm II continues to be damn cool.

An All-Star Tribute To Terror

For the first time since I've been old enough to care about and/or stay up for the Oscars, I skipped this year's ceremony entirely. It wasn't any deliberate decision to boycott but rather an admission of total apathy. Even though I've often scoffed at the Oscars in years past, I've always felt connected enough to watch - if only to goof on them. This year, I didn't even care enough to do that.

On the upside, the occasion of the Oscars did inspire a couple of blog posts I that I really enjoyed from Kindertrauma and Freddy in Space, both coincidentally involving events that occurred twenty years ago.

Over at Kindertrauma, Unkle Lancifer waxed nostalgic about Silence of the Lambs' 1992 Oscar sweep while Freddy in Space posted the same year's genre's answer to the Oscars - 1992's broadcast of The Horror Hall of Fame, enthusiastically hosted by Robert Englund and billed as "an all-star tribute to terror."

Lambs' big night ought to have signaled a change in how horror was perceived by critics and studios but instead it just led - at least in the short term - to studios cashing in on the public's appetite for horror while labeling their films "psychological thrillers." Over time, Lambs' standing as a genre picture has become more widely acknowledged and studios have become less embarrassed to call their horror films horror but in '92, the perception of "horror" was closer to what was seen in '92's Horror Hall of Fame - the third and final outing for the annual ceremony that began in 1990.



Oscar hasn't been generous to the genre since '92 and as far as publicly honoring the genre goes, we now have the Scream Awards rather than the HHoF but the Scream Awards aren't exclusive to horror and also they're a little too "cool" for my taste. It's hip to be a geek now - sometimes obnoxiously so - and the Scream Awards reflect that. But in '92, being a genre fan was still regarded as dorky and The Horror Hall of Fame was, in turn, a little dorky itself - which exactly is why it's still endearing to watch.

In a way, 1992 was the best of both worlds. The genre achieved real prestige with Silence but was still off in its own private nerd corner with The Horror Hall of Fame. A year like that is worth its weight in (Oscar) gold.

The Horror Of A Long Time Ago

Early on in the 1981 slasher fave My Bloody Valentine, after the sheriff and the mayor of Valentine Bluffs have gotten the heads-up that crazed ex-coal miner Harry Warden might be back in town to resume the killing spree he started in 1960, an administrator from the mental hospital that Warden was committed to two decades earlier comes up empty in the search for Harry's files and tells the exasperated sheriff "Look, in twenty years any number of things could've happened!" as though she'd been asked to exhume records from the 1800's.

For all the times that I've watched MBV, I never gave this scene any notice - it's simply meant to drag out the mystery of whether Warden is alive, dead, or still institutionalized - but watching it recently, the suggestion that twenty years is such an enormous span of time made me more aware that I was watching a movie that was now over thirty years old.

As Richard Harland Smith pointed out in an interview with Final Girl's Stacie Ponder, the slasher cycle of the late '70s/early '80s is now approaching middle age. It doesn't seem possible that so much time has passed by and yet it has. And it doesn't seem possible that those films are so old now and yet they are. If you went back thirty years from the early '80s, you'd be talking about the stuff my mom watched as a kid, Atomic Age favorites such as Tarantula and Them! - movies that were percieved as cornball by most kids of my time (the first generation of Fangoria readers). It makes me wonder how kids today regard the slasher films from my day. For today's twelve and thirteen year olds, even the first Hostel is probably starting to look old.

The folksy ballad that plays over MBV's end credits sings about Warden's original 1960 murder spree as "the horror of a long time ago" but yet going back twenty years from today would be 1992. Would we refer to that as being "a long time ago?" No...we wouldn't, would we?

But when you realize that Dr. Giggles was released in '92 and that it turns (choke!) twenty this year, the answer is "yes." A sad, bitter "yes." That was a long time ago. Somehow knowing that Dr. Giggles is a twenty year old film makes me feel even older than knowing that Happy Birthday to Me celebrates its thirty-first birthday this year. At least I was a kid during the era of Happy Birthday to Me and the rest of that slasher cycle. But I was an adult when Dr. Giggles came out.

And, as it turns out, in twenty years time any number of things can happen - before in fact you even realize that twenty years have gone by.

Blaze Of Glory

Despite the critical slagging it got, the first Ghost Rider film wasn't all the way awful - at least not in my book. I liked the fact that it was almost slanted as a macabre kid's film. Sure, GR is a guy with a flaming skull for a head but that scary imagery aside, director and screenwriter Mark Steven Johnson gave his Ghost Rider movie a benign soul and a surplus of cornball one-liners. It was a silly, sweet natured film (Johnny Blaze's most prominent vice was a love of jelly beans) that just never, if you pardon the expression, caught on fire.

This reboot from the directing duo of Neveldine/Taylor (previously responsible for the Crank films) isn't nearly the same kind of softball effort. It's still PG-13 but it's an aggressive PG-13 that rides right on the border of being an R. The script, credited to Scott Gimple, Seth Hoffman, and David Goyer (assumedly some remnants of Goyer's old script from back when he and Blade director Stephen Norrington were working on a GR film are present in this version) is bare bones and just seems to have been used as a basic guideline by Neveldine and Taylor to get from one action scene to another. And I'd be surprised if Nicholas Cage was given any scripted dialogue because damn near everything that comes out of his mouth here sounds improvised.

This movie got some scorchingly negative word of mouth last December coming out of the Butt-Numb-Athon in Austin, TX, but maybe being screened amid a clutter of other (and, frankly, probably better) films wasn't an ideal showcase for it because this has "geek favorite" written all over it. It isn't in the upper echelon of comic book adaptations, like X: Men: First Class - instead it's a much scrappier, looser piece of work but taken on its own terms it's a lot of fun. Even though ex-stunt biker Johnny Blaze's vehicle of choice is a motorcycle, this movie is like some pimped-out jalopy - moving at improbable speeds, threatening to explode at any moment.

Neveldine and Taylor are famous for their death-defying shooting methods and Spirit of Vengeance is full of shots accomplished by means not to be duplicated at home. Their chaotic style isn't the most ideal fit for 3-D but I was surprised to find that it wasn't nearly as jarring as I expected. I still suspect that 2-D would be the better option in this case but I wasn't put off by the 3-D presentation.

Encoring as Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider, Nicholas Cage really tears into his dual role this time around. In the first film, the actor's natural eccentricity gave a welcome bit of color to an otherwise dull character but his performance here is destined to be legendary within the Cult of Cage. Given a second chance to bring this character to life, Cage doesn't hold a single quirky impulse back. He also really tears into the Jekyll/Hyde nature of Blaze and some of the film's best moments involve Blaze trying to keep the demon inside him from bursting free.

Not only is Cage playing Blaze again but he's also playing the Ghost Rider himself. In the first film, GR was a strictly CG creation but here it's Cage who is providing the movements for GR and it really makes a difference. If nothing else, this GR would've looked better to begin with because Neveldine and Taylor and their FX crew dispensed with the shiny, too-clean (as well as too tiny to my eyes) skull of Johnson's film as well as with the cartoony CG flames and really delivered a GR that looks 100% intense. Here the skull is charred and scuffed and the flames look convincing with plumes of thick black smoke coming off them. But as good as GR looks from an FX standpoint, it's really Cage's performance that sells it. His body language is great, giving GR a repertoire of distinctive movements that show that this character isn't just something belched out of a computer. The Ghost Rider is depicted as much more of a classic movie monster this time around rather than as a superhero and Cage clearly relished the chance to play that end of the part. As great as some of his lines as Blaze are, I loved some of his wordless bits as GR just as much.

This movie certainly isn't going to be an across the board crowd pleaser but then, brimstone bikers aren't for everyone. Nor is Nicholas Cage's acting nor is Neveldine/Taylor's style of filmmaking. So what you've got with Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is a movie that will inspire either admiration or confusion. Comic book adaptations are the stuff of mainstream blockbusters these days but Spirit of Vengeance is one film that puts the cult crowd first.

Back In Black

It's ironic that the new Hammer Studios production The Woman In Black is being hailed by most as a return to classic Hammer horror. Not because it isn't a fine film but because its ghostly narrative resembles nothing in the classic Hammer catalog. Hammer was always about very physical threats. When you think Hammer you think of Christopher Lee's face dripping blood as Dracula, or his ravaged visage as Frankenstein's Monster, or him violently smashing his way through the French doors of Peter Cushing's study as The Mummy. Hammer wasn't about intangible, spectral chills, it was about Dracula spectacularly disintegrating to dust in the sunlight.

But because The Woman In Black is an old timey period piece, that's enough to make it classic Hammer in the minds of many. Whether it really fits the Hammer mold or not, it seems like today's Hammer has finally found the movie to put them back on the map after their remake of Let The Right One In landed with a disappointing thud in 2010 (even though that grisly vampire tale had more in common with classic Hammer than The Woman In Black does).

An adaptation of a 1983 novel by Susan Hill (which I haven't read) which has been previously adapted into both a long running play and a 1989 BBC TV movie (neither of which I've seen), The Woman In Black is a studious attempt at creating a classic English ghost story. Not being able to compare it to its predecessors, I can't say how well it works as an adaptation but as a newcomer to the material I thought it was great, spooky fun.

With all the terrible tragedy that the story encompasses, "fun" might not be the best word for it but for anyone looking for an eerie tale well told, The Woman In Black fits the bill nicely. Director James Watkins (who previously directed the grim Eden Lake) and screenwriter Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class) clearly have an affection for genre fare and they make The Woman In Black into a sure-footed yarn. It doesn't deliver anything cutting edge but it has the instant vibe of a comfort food sort of film as well as one that's ideal for younger viewers just starting to explore the genre.

Watkins goes for more than his share of jump scares but I think that's fine for a movie like this that's looking to elicit a few fun shrieks. A lot of fans look down on jump scares but I enjoy them as a genre staple and Watkins pulls off a few very effective ones here.

I had read that Daniel Radcliffe comes off as too young to play a widower with a young son but his performance as solicitor Arthur Kipps didn't strike me as being off at all. Yes, he looks young but not to the point of distraction. I've also read some complaints that the ending is a little too treacly or sentimental but I found it satisfying.

At heart it maintains the story's grim tone while at the same time providing the kind of "up" moment that only a supernatural film can allow. For me, it worked (apparently every prior version of WIB - the novel, the play, and the TV movie - have sported different endings). Without spoiling anything I will say that given what transpires, I find it funny that anyone would claim that it was too cheery!

That said, I did leave the theater with a smile on my face. I took my six year old son to see it as his first horror movie in the theaters and it turned out to be a perfect choice (although I will say it wouldn't be perfect for every six year old - parents approach with caution). The Paranormal Activity films have shown that there's a big audience looking for supernatural scares but The Woman In Black proves that these scares don't have to be of the "found footage" variety - that there's still room for traditional storytelling and old fashioned craftsmanship. It might not quite be the kind of Hammer film that the studio originally made its name on but it still manages to feel like the return of an old favorite.

The Man Show

If you survived a plane crash only to find yourself stranded in a hostile, frozen environment with no signs of civilization or rescue and with a pack of wolves stalking your every move, what would you do? For myself, I know I would never be in that situation because I have a deep - and I don't think unreasonable - fear of flying so I would not be in the air in the first place. If by chance I were, though, I know for a fact that my survival prospects would be very, very dim. Curling into a ball and sobbing is not the best way to dissuade wolves from eating you.

The seven men in The Grey who initially survive the sudden crash of their plane (including Liam Nesson as John Ottway, a man hired by oil companies to keep wolves away from their drilling teams) are a little more equipped to cope than I would be. Immediately after emerging from the wreckage, they seek out heat, food, and shelter. Besides Ottway, all these guys are members of the drill team so these dudes aren't soft but just because they're more gruff outdoorsmen than pencil pushers doesn't mean they're qualified to survive their present predicament.

Besides the harsh natural elements, the real issue is the pack of wolves that come upon them. Because it's his job to kill wolves, Ottway knows a thing or two about these animals and he knows that if they're close to the wolves' den, then their collective gooses are pretty much cooked so he suggests that the men make their way from the crash site to the woods where they can better defend themselves and hopefully get further from the wolves turf.

Speaking of wolves, even though the advertising for The Grey has centered on the sight of Nesson taping broken bottles to his fists and charging a wolf, in the interest of helping you enjoy the film, I have to say that this movie contains no actual wolf-punching. I won't go too deep into it for fear of spoilers but I can tell you that the ads are incredibly misleading and really do the film wrong. I usually hold the audience responsible for reacting in stupid ways, like hating Drive because it isn't more like a Fast and Furious film. But based on the marketing, it's hard to fault anyone for calling bullshit on The Grey. Which is a shame because once you get past the deceptive way it was sold, it's actually a very good film.

Written and directed by Joe Carnahan, The Grey is a survivalist horror film rather than an action film. This film has gotten advance attention in the genre press and it really does belong under the horror umbrella. For one, you've got the wolf attacks. The many scenes of the survivors being stalked and suddenly attacked by these merciless predators are staged for maximum terror. Secondly, an action film would be about perseverance where these guys MacGuyver their way out of an impossible situation (MacGuyver actually does get a shout-out in one scene) but The Grey is much more grim than that.

I was really struck, in fact, by just how cruel and unsparing this movie is. Characters call to God for help or for some kind of sign, they rationalize that there must be some reason they survived the crash when so many others didn't - that they weren't meant to live through something so catastrophic only to perish in even more brutal ways afterwards - but Carnahan repeatedly slaps down these fleeting bids for spiritually. He always brings it back to physical reality and shitty luck. I doubt if I would give The Grey a second viewing and to be honest, my initial viewing left me feeling somewhat half-hearted towards it, but reflecting back on Carnahan's film I have to say my respect for it has grown.

I just wish that the marketing had represented the film more accurately. Then again, if it had the tagline would've probably have to have been changed from "Live Or Die On This Day" to "You're Fucked." Anything less blunt would leave too many shades of grey.