Prison

The first burden of anyone telling a haunted house story is to invent some excuse for their characters not to haul ass out the door at the first demonic whisper heard coming from the cellar or the first time black ooze churns up from the toilet and, for the most part, these are always lame contrivances. You know 'em all - bad weather, physical instability, sometimes just stubborn disbelief. Director Renny Harlin's Prison, however, hits on the perfect rationale - all its characters are locked in.

Based on a story by producer Irwin Yablans (Halloween) with reliable Empire and Full Moon scribe C. Courtney Joyner penning the screenplay (Joyner's name will be familiar to fans of '90s direct-to-video fare, with Trancers III, Lurking Fear, Doctor Mordrid as well as many of the Puppet Master sequels all to his credit), Prison is best described as The Shawshank Redemption meets The Shining, replete with an array of pre-CG splatter FX.

When a prisoner named Charlie Forsythe is wrongly executed in the Wyoming State Penitentiary in 1968, the facility is closed for years. But when overcrowding in surrounding prisons force it to be re-opened to relieve congested conditions, merciless warden Ethan Sharpe (Lane Smith) - a man who was intimately involved with that unjust death in '68 - finds that bars and cells can't keep old ghosts at bay. The new crop of arriving inmates, sent to the prison early to serve as a work crew to ready the prison for its official re-opening, will have to contend with both Sharpe's sadism and the malevolent force that haunts the prison grounds.

Representing one of the best 'guy' casts to be found in a genre film (along with Carpenter's The Thing and 1999's predominantly male cannibal opus Ravenous), Prison is stocked with seasoned character actors. The late Lane Smith is a stand-out as Sharpe, as is Lincoln Kilpatrick (familiar from hours of episodic TV in the '70s an '80s) as longtime inmate Cresus. Tom Everett of Texas Chainsaw III is the wily, escape-bound Rabbit; '80s wrestling superstar Tommy 'Tiny' Lister plays the hulking but good-intentioned Tiny; and Viggo Mortensen is Prison's lead in an early role as the brooding, newly incarcerated car thief Burke (even horror fave Kane Hodder is here under heavy make-up as the resurrected form of Charlie Forsythe).

Chelsea Field (Dust Devil) appears as the lone female of the cast, in a superfluous role as an official advocating penal reform. Field does the best she can with her part but whenever Harlin cuts away from events at the prison to continue her character's subplot, the film's tension is undermined. Harlin and co. should've stuck strictly to their male roster and kept the audience behind bars for the duration of the film.

Harlin foreshadows his work on the fourth Nightmare on Elm Street film here (an assignment which this film landed him) by staging a number of elaborate supernatural set-pieces, slaying characters by a variety of surreal, inventive means. One character finds himself impaled multiple times by steel rods that emerge from the walls of a shaft the hopeful escapee is crawling through. Another is burned alive when the cell he's in suddenly becomes a red-hot death trap; yet another victim is dispatched when yards of barbed wire wraps itself around them.

These gruesome deaths are all vivid and unpredictable - enough to mostly distract from the fact that Joyner's screenplay leaves too much unexplained to ever gel as a story. The vengeful spirit goes after prisoners as well as guards - but why is that? Why would it not just go directly for Sharpe? Joyner also suggests that Burke might be the reincarnation of the wrongly executed man but drops that possibility just as quickly. And for all its loose-ends, the film ends on a frustratingly abrupt note.

But yet Joyner's script supplies Harlin with the necessary framework to make Prison an effectively stylish work, filled with enough blue backlighting to rival Michael Mann's 1983 The Keep (ironically, Harlin's new film, 12 Rounds, opened this past weekend against the staunch competition of another ghost tale, The Haunting in Connecticut). Empire Productions wasn't known for its high success rate (outside of their collaborations with Stuart Gordon - though I will admit to having an affection for 1986's Zone Troopers) but thanks to its unique location, Harlin's artsy direction (that balances gloss and grit), bursts of grisly, garish FX and an appealing cast, this jailhouse rocks. It's just a crime that Prison hasn't been released to DVD yet.

The Haunting In Connecticut

The phrase 'based on true events' has been so overused in the name of hyping horror movies for so long now that I believe it needs to be permanently banned. And what's really galling is that few, if any, of these films are ever actually based on true events. I mean, there might be a germ of truth in there (as with Texas Chainsaw Massacre) but to these jaded, unbelieving eyes, when the claim 'based on true events' is used in conjunction with a tale of the supernatural, it shouldn't be taken as anything but a fabrication. People can tell all the stories they want about how ghosts chased them out of their house but I can't buy it as real. However, as a movie-goer, my skepticism doesn't prevent me from enjoying a good haunted house yarn. In fact, sometimes I even kind of like the lousy ones, like The Haunting in Connecticut.

Directed by Peter Cornwell (his first feature), The Haunting in Connecticut purports to be the real-life tale of, well, something involving ghosts. When a family starts renting a house in Connecticut in order to be closer to the hospital where their oldest son's cancer treatments are being administered, it isn't long before they realize - in true haunted house movie fashion - why the rent was so cheap on this property. As it happens, long ago this house was once a funeral home. Not just that, but seances were held there as well. If ever a house was likely to be haunted, it's this.

At first it's only Matt, the sick teen (Kyle Gallner), that witnesses the apparitions that populate his family's new home, and it's suggested that it's his treatments that are leading to vivid hallucinations. But pretty soon even the non-cancer patients in the house are in on the fun, too. Outside of his mother Sara (Virginia Madsen), though, the other residents of the house are on the forgettable side. They're so forgettable, in fact, that they may slip from your mind even while you're looking at them. For the record, the rest of the haunted clan are Martin Donovan as Peter Campbell, the overworked dad who may or may not be tempted to fall off the wagon; Amanda Crews as Wendy, the Campbell's teenaged niece, and Sophi Knight and Ty Wood as Mary and Billy Campbell, Matt's younger siblings. Even though this may reflect the make-up of the real family in question, for the purposes of the film, it makes the story feel overloaded with undistinguished characters who have no real function to the plot other than to stand around. Even Matt's fellow cancer patient, Reverend Popescu (Elias Koteas), who eventually gets roped in to put the restless spirits to bed doesn't really serve the story as much as he might initially appear to.

In Haunting's favor, Cornwell has enough of a feel for horror to create a mood of menace that offsets the clunkiness of the screenplay by Tim Metcalfe and Adam Simon. The cinematography of Adam Swica and production design by Alicia Keywan are ace contributions to the film and Haunting avoids the slickness of most modern horror without purposely affecting a retro look. For older horror fans, raised on '70s fear fare, the muted, washed-out frames of this film will feel a lot like, well, home.

Fans will also feel right at home with all the cliches included in the screenplay. Even casual horror fans will easily spot influences ranging from The Amityville Horror to Poltergeist to The Exorcist, among others. But what The Haunting in Connecticut lacks in originality or surprises, it makes up for in, well, it really doesn't make up for much (it has some great ghouls walking around, though, with blank eyes and writing inscribed on their ashen skin). But yet even though I wasn't that enthusiastic about The Haunting in Connecticut, I didn't mind this movie. One specific thing that endeared it to me is that this is the rare horror movie to feature a middle-to-lower class family. Horror used to be a genre that, as a rule, would align itself with the working class, blue-collar audience. In recent years, that's changed drastically.

I first noticed this with the 2006 remake of When A Stranger Calls in which instead of being set in a common suburban neighborhood, the new film took place in a remote home that few people outside of Bill Gates could possibly afford. Too many American horror films lately are set in homes of enormous wealth and I think that's an alienating trend. I don't know about you, but most of the people I know live pretty modestly - even the home owners I know don't live in anything close to being described as palatial. And judging by the economy, I think it's safe to say that most people are in the same boat. The characters in films like The Haunting of Molly Hartley, The Unborn, The Uninvited, and The Last House on the Left, however, all seem to be living awfully prosperous lives. Even the recent Friday the 13th remake had one of its characters putting his buddies up for the weekend at his rich family's pad. And the upcoming killer kid flick Orphan features a family living in an impossibly gorgeous home as well. It's become a real distraction to me so I appreciated seeing a more financially strapped American family represented in The Haunting in Connecticut. Obviously big, lavish homes are more cinematic to look at but what happened to the days of Halloween, Poltergeist, or A Nightmare on Elm Street where the characters in horror movies could be seen in homes and neighborhoods that looked like the ones you were familiar with? Horror ideally should hit us where we live, not be a window into a world that's out of our reach.

Maybe that's the saving grace of The Haunting in Connecticut being based on a 'true' story - even with its supernatural baggage, it can't run too far from reality.

Knowing

Director Alex Proyas' latest genre foray doesn't follow the usual math, displaying an appreciable non-conformist streak. Maybe what's most unusual about Knowing is that Proyas affords his outlandish premise such serious consideration. There's no attempt to use irony to acknowledge or deflect the ludicrousness of the material. If anything, there's a real message that Proyas is preaching here. Whether you agree with that message or not is irrelevant - the fact that it evidences a point of view separates Knowing from what, say, Michael Bay might've done with this same story. Knowing feels personal in a way that big budget genre pieces seldom do.

The story that Knowing offers, passed through a succession of screenwriters and finally rewritten by the team of Stiles White and Juliet Snowden, is an equation for the End Times. When a time capsule filled with the drawings of elementary school children in the '50s is unearthed today, one entry falls into the hands of young Caleb Koestler (Chandler Canterbury), son to John Koestler (Nicholas Cage), a MIT professor and Astrophysicist. Unlike all the other capsule entries, which are all drawings, this one is a series of seemingly unrelated numbers. When John believes that he's divined a startling purpose to these numbers, the movie becomes a race against time to stop the disastrous events that they predict.

Along the way, Proyas puts Cage's character in the middle of two spectacular disasters that, even with his foreknowledge, he can't avert. Most notable of the two being an airplane crashing on a crowded highway that's stunningly staged by Proyas and, in its fiery aftermath, belies Knowing's PG-13 rating. For a modern science fiction film, though, Knowing is far from being heavy on action or special effects and when such elements are employed here they don't seem there to spike the audiences' attention - they just seem there because the story demanded it. While Knowing is a visually stunning movie, Proyas doesn't go for cool shots that only serve to distract - he takes an assured, straight-forward approach that is unfashionable today. Even most dramas have more jittery camerawork than this does. Knowing seems cut from a cloth of an earlier age of filmmaking (even down to the wonderful score by Marco Beltrami, which harkens back to Bernard Herrmann).

In the later half of Knowing, as events escalate, the overriding question is as much how to accept the inevitable as to how to avert it. Do we choose our time or is the end already an immutable event? Is everything that happens in the universe part of an intelligent design or is it random occurrence? The threat of doomsday always looms in genre films - from The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) to Armageddon (1998) - but no matter how dire the situation is, no matter how huge a rock is headed through space to pummel us, most are quick to end on the up note that our cards came up lucky and the Earth is safe again for another day. More brazen films, like Miracle Mile (1988) and The Rapture (1991) give their protagonists no recourse - except in their ideologies and in their dying dreams.

The beliefs in regards to our purpose on this planet and our place in the cosmic order that Knowing expresses are not universally shared - what beliefs are? - but even though they don't jibe with my personal philosophies, I appreciated the earnest presentation that Proyas gives them. Some might find the conclusion of Knowing too corny for words but putting my cynicism aside, I thought it was satisfying and true to itself. I think it's also true that any other resolution wouldn't have gone through in a movie of this size (reported budget: $50 million). But what some might perceive as a compromise feels like a genuine nod to spirituality to me. The epiphanies of the final stretch of Knowing would be come across as unbearable if they weren't played with the proper sincerity - and Proyas is successful in making a film with a certain set of convictions that is able to bear the merits of speculative entertainment rather than propoganda.

I don't know what kind of audience Knowing will find but I think it's a genre film worth attention and a confirmation of Proyas as director who possesses his own uncommon knowledge of how to avoid artistic catastrophes.

2009: Year Of the Tire Iron

If the kick-ass trailer for the remake of 1983's House on Sorority Row is a fair indication of the movie's quality, then 2009 will be the year the tire iron will become the weapon that slasher fans can't stop talking about. It's the new machete!

Seriously, though, I'm shocked at how promising this looks. I understand that to some it might look like a formula slasher picture, not worth getting excited over. But if you're the type of person who gets excited about slasher films in the first place, then this trailer is more than likely going to give you a new reason to live. I didn't expect that the remake of House on Sorority Row would look capable of blowing the remakes of My Bloody Valentine and Friday the 13th out of the water but I think we've got a real contender on our hands. The only thing that could tank my enthusiasm is if it wasn't R. PG-13 is fine for some projects but slasher films should always be R, otherwise they're a waste of time. And in the eyes of this old-school slasher fanatic, this looks like anything but a waste of time.

SORORITY ROW trailer in HD

The Last House on The Left (2009)

There's something undeniably odd in seeing the most notorious horror films of the '70s - films that were once controversial staples of drive-ins and grindhouse theaters - brought back decades later as slick entertainment for the multiplexes. It's difficult for horror to be transgressive when films that were once examples of entertainment going beyond the pale are now regarded as venerable brands to be exploited and I belive Last House on the Left is hands-down the strangest choice of a remake so far. Dawn of the Dead, The Hills Have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween...while I questioned the wisdom in trying to give any of these films a contemporary make-over, at least I could understand the commercial potential in each case. If you want to immediately have an audience for your zombie film, your slasher film, or your survivalist horror film...those titles are the ones you'd want to go after. Last House, however, is such an ugly tale that I have to wonder why Wes Craven and his fellow producers thought that the world was clamoring to see an updated tale of rape and revenge with better production values. You know, was this really the kind of thrill ride that was worth recreating? It was a milestone for its time, yes, but does the audience of 2009 need their own version? Based on the new film and its initial box office reception, I guess the answer is 'kind of'.

I'll be explictly discussing the ending of this film later in this review so if that's something you care to avoid, you should stop reading after this paragraph. The short answer for me on Last House '09 is that it was generally about as good as a remake of Craven's classic could be. It doesn't do much to try and improve on what Craven and Sean Cunningham did (except for making the film's tone more consistent - there's no moments of awkward comic relief here), it just tells the same age-old story with minor alterations (courtesy of writer Carl Ellsworth). A pair of girls still run afoul of heinous criminals, they're still cruelly violated, and although one girl lives through this ordeal where her character did not in the '72 version, the gang of dirtbags still unknowingly seek refuge in the household of the girl's parents and by the end of the night, the truth of their deeds is out and a vicious payback is served. It's a storyline that's hard to fuck up as long as it's played with conviction and director Dennis Iliadis and his cast don't disappoint on that count.

Among the cast of Last House '09, Garret Dillahunt is a real standout as the despicable Krug. The original film's David Hess left a lasting impression as a scumbag for the ages but Dillahunt is a memorable Krug in his own right. All the performances here are strong and this is easily the best ensemble cast for a horror film in some time - definitely since Frank Darabont's adaptation of The Mist (2007). As the daughter who survives Krug and co.'s abuse, Sara Paxton is very good, showing a sense of resiliency even when she's been as degraded by her attackers as she can get. There's been some consternation in fan circles about having this character live but I think for the purposes of this film it works and the dramatic way that Monica Potter and Tony Goldwyn play their reactions to their daughter's condition and their urgent need not just to avenge her violation but to protect her from further harm and safely get her medical attention adds a layer of drama and suspense missing from the original.

As a director, Iliadis goes in the opposite direction of Craven's raw approach. This is a much more polished production - befitting its $10 million budget - and I think that was a wise move. It'd be disingenuous to try and purposely recreate the grainy, guerrilla filmmaking vibe of the first film. In tandem with cinematographer Sharone Meir, Iliadis creates many strikingly pretty moments amid the nasty events that unfold. But when the violence comes in, it's full-on.

My main complaint with the new Last House as it moves into its second half and the gang of criminals receive their comeuppance one-by-one is that I thought there could've been more thought into how these characters are dispatched. I missed the sense of planning and preparation that went into the parent's revenge in the original film. Here, it just seems like a lot a flailing around as the parents get into prolonged struggles with the individual gang members and that isn't as impactful as seeing the parents showing some cunning. I also think that an opportunity to make this film more troubling and morally complicated was forfeited. The presence of Krug's teenaged son Justin (Spencer Treat Clark) offered a chance to have a character who wasn't evil and who committed no crime himself have to suffer for his inaction. Although Justin never does anything to harm Mari or her friend Paige (Martha MacIsaac), I thought it would've been dramatic to have him be included in the parent's retribution - that the parents are so enraged to know that this character did nothing to intervene while their daughter was being raped (and while her friend was killed) that this would be enough to make them unload on him. To kill Justin in cold blood would be something that the Collingwood's would surely instantly regret, but it would be an act that was committed out of pure anger and instinct - just a gut impulse to cleanse the world of everyone who was involved in what was done to their daughter. I believe that should've been the last scene, rather than the microwave kill which is prominently featured in the film's ads (not that I don't appreciate a film closing on a shot of a head exploding!). To see Emma Collingwood suddenly shoot Justin point blank just as the audience thinks the movie's over as the surviving characters are all on their way to safety wouldn't be an act of revenge that everyone in the audience would agree on (and it might even be one that the father would've been surprised by) but I think that's an element this film needed - some moral ambiguity and a chance to question how far the audience believes these parents are allowed to go. It would've allowed the ending of the film to resonate, rather than just go out on a crowd-pleasing moment.

As is, this is well acted, well directed, but uncomplicated - making the parent's revenge out to be unambiguously gratifying. For what it is, though, it's good. I'm not sure who I'd recommend it to but if you have to see one movie this year where a young girl suffers a prolonged rape and the people responsible for this crime are made to pay the ultimate price for it, then Last House on the Left is second to none.

There's Something Wrong With Esther

I love killer kid movies (my long-standing favorite being 1993's The Good Son starring Macaulay Culkin) and the new trailer for Dark Castle's Orphan makes this upcoming film (due July 24th) look like a winner in that category. I had high hopes for Joshua (2007) but that one didn't do much for me. Orphan was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who's last film was 2005's House of Wax remake, also for Dark Castle.

I loved the job Collet-Serra did on House of Wax and although it underperformed at the box office in May '05, I think it's a better 'body count' film than either the new My Bloody Valentine or Friday the 13th (and it boasted a genuinely spectacular climax as its surviving characters fought to escape a literal house of wax as it was consumed by flames). Since House of Wax I've been eagerly waiting for Collet-Serra to follow up on his debut and, at first glance, it looks like Orphan will be worth the wait.

ORPHAN trailer in HD

The Return of True Horror

I love the trailer for Sam Raimi's upcoming supernatural thriller Drag Me To Hell (click here to see it). Besides the fact that visually it looks like classic Raimi, I like the fable-like vibe its story carries wherein a young bank employee (Alison Lohman) looking to prove to herself to her boss denies a loan extension to a wizened old lady and subsequently finds herself on the receiving end of a gypsy curse - destined to be dragged to hell by "the most feared of all demons."

I suspect, though, that some fans will take umbrage to the trailer's boast that this is "the return of true horror". One, because fans like to take umbrage at everything. And also because of Drag Me To Hell's PG-13 rating, some will believe it can't really be "true" horror. Why anyone would have that perception baffles me - aren't Carnival of Souls, Robert Wise's The Haunting, The Others, or The Sixth Sense much more deserving of being referred to as "true horror" than the likes of Hostel or Saw? But besides the issue of gore, I think what Drag Me To Hell is promising to bring back to the genre is the spirit of supernatural fun and that would be a welcome move to me. This has been described by Raimi and producer Robert Tapert as a "spook-a-blast" and judging by the sight of a scary old gypsy, demonic apparitions, a seance-gone-wrong, and a nighttime trip to a graveyard during a rainstorm, it looks like Drag Me To Hell looks to be stoked with tried and true horror elements.

Advanced word has been extremely positive so I hope that come May 29th, Raimi's return to horror will prove to be cause for celebration.