Insidious

Today’s horror film was recent, promising and full of jumps, but as it developed got increasingly silly by making the crucial mistake of showing its monsters too clearly and too often. 

Candyman

I must say, watching a film that you found enjoyable, modern and creepy in the 90s probably isn’t going to have stood up as well as you expected. I remembered a much more chilling, atmospheric and scary film. Ah well. Still worth revisiting! 

Paranormal Activity 4

Rather like the Saw films, the Paranormal Activity series is the result of taking a very simple first film made on a low budget but with a compelling idea, and spinning it out into more and more films with a more and more convoluted premise. And like the Saw films, even though the sequels all totally lose the vision of that first grim story, some might actually be decent narratives in their own rights. But crucially, where I thought the first Saw was clever in its visceral, realistic and fundamentally quite feasible set-up, Paranormal Activity was a protracted set-up to a single jump, making it ultimately quite dull.

The second film I skipped, which meant I was a little ill-prepared for the backstory here featuring Hunter, though it seems a lot of blanks weren’t filled in anyway. The third was a flashback, and so absurd I found it primarily dull – bereft of atmosphere and good scares – and then at the end absolutely hilarious with its random old ladies in a shed.

This one was another sequel, and actually told a neat little scare story, a kind of modern Poltergeist with the usual gimmick of being recorded by the characters themselves still lingering on and letting the filmmakers save a fortune. Not a lot happens and if you hope the series’ mythology will be advanced, you’re going to be disappointed, but there are some good creepy moments and as ever, it all kicks off at the end, this time in a more effective way than its predecessor. It’s not a good film by any means, but its young leads are likeable, there are moments of good tension – especially with the knife, though I don’t think most of the audience even remembered it was there in the scene it fell – and the usual good cheap jump moments, some of which, like the one with the cat, made for some very funny surprised sounds from the audience.

Other than that, though, I have to say I found myself getting quite annoyed by a lot of people in the theatre. It’s my view that if you have to chatter, joke, shout and groan through the still moments of a horror film meant to build suspense, you’re a big wuss because those are all techniques to build up tension. And however else this film failed, it succeeded at those long, slow moments that get the audience on edge before a scare or a fake-out. But the theatre was full of wusses today, trying to show they weren’t scared in the one way that most clearly signals that they are – the release of their nervous tension by making a lot of comforting noise. The trouble is, the film would have been far, far more enjoyable had they let themselves get worked up and then let it out after the scares. I suppose that doesn’t give the veneer of indifference, which equates to bravery. But of course, it doesn’t. It actually very obviously equates to wanting to distance yourself from the fictional world because you’re finding it too difficult to engage with it. And that was what seemed like half the crowd. Ah well! Such is the experience of seeing a horror film. Most people are wussy!

A throwaway film, then, bringing nothing new to the fold, but doing most of what it did very well. And I loved the Kinect motion dots. 

The Perks of Being a Wallflower – film adaptation

I’m not sure it’s ever been done before. A film where I wish to punch every single speaking character in the whole piece. Or at the very least watch them fail dismally and have their smug illusions shattered.

When I read the book in 2002 or 2003, I hated it. So it was no surprise that I was going to dislike this adaptation, coming in the wake of hipsters becoming a ‘thing’. But I expected to find it enjoyably bad, with its cute cast members trying really, really hard and coming over as adorably useless. In fact, their strong performances were the best thing here – but that only meant the sheer horror of the dialogue and plot came through.

I’m just going to make a list of things that got under my skin. First, the use of mental issues as a tacked-on, glamorous substitute for actual character depth or likeability. Second, the tokenism in the portrayal of the openly gay character, who is an insufferable and insulting caricature. Third, the way a film supposedly about being a calm observer has at a key moment violence solving problems without the obvious US high school consequences. Fourth, the way none of the kids recognised one of Bowie’s most well-known songs, and the prevalence of that most false of posers Morrisey. Fifth, the presentation of the most obvious, godawful books as worthy literature someone of superior taste would enjoy – notably On the Road and Catcher in the Rye. Sixth, making light of serious eating disorders to show edginess. Seventh, also using child abuse, death in the family and homosexuality as further substitutes for character development, and even suggesting them to be glamorous for they make for an appealing fucked-up character. Eighth, drugs making people likeable and silly, and the oh-so-daring juxtaposition of Holy Communion and dropping a tab. Ninth, Emma Watson’s dodgy accent. Tenth, the endless, endless smugness – we’re so alternative; we’re so individualistic even though we do all these clichéd things; we’re going to top universities because we’re effortlessly smart; we’re into all this stuff you’ve probably never heard of even though it all feeds into a stereotype.

Even the things I liked in the book are gone. I recall the observations on Mary Elizabeth as wry, subtle and cutting. Here she is an absurd comedy figure that looks like an apologist inclusion for the people sickened by the left-wing fantasies. Gone was the scene where Charlie actually gets called on how his submissive behaviour is harming those around him who are in vulnerable situations. And of course there can be no attempts at literary pastiche.

I remember the slight shock to the system when I joined bands with this sort of person in it, and realized that I was deluded to think myself left-wing as I was actually only moderately left of centre. And I remember how when it came down to it, these people didn’t lead charmed lives where people notice their awesome qualities and rely on them in their troubled times – they were mostly lonely, unhappy souls who craved a dramatic life and never got it. So they complained, and sought attention, and purposely got into abusive relationships. Or wrote about it. And one in a billion of them managed to get published and even asked to direct film adaptations. Why oh why this resonates with anyone and gets critically acclaimed I cannot comprehend.  

Resident Evil Retribution

Resident Evil seems to have completely lost its way. I don’t just mean these incredibly iffy movie adaptations – I mean the games as well. I played the first one when it was the only one out – importing the NTSC version because PAL regions got a version with big borders and censored cutscenes (though I don’t think eve the US one had the proper zombie introduction CG movie). It was a creepy, atmospheric game with shuffling zombies, claustrophobic fixed cameras and jump-scares, building to an action climax involving a rocket launcher. Now it seems to be running around mowing down hundreds of screaming zombies and ever-more-goofy mutant enemies – all-out action with nothing in the way of horror atmospherics.

And the Hollywood movies are even further removed. I’ve missed…probably 3 of them, from what I can remember, but I don’t think continuity means anything here. In an absurdly silly plot, Milla Jovovich’s Alice character gets captured by Umbrella, and they imprison her in a daft containment facility deep under Siberian ice, in what looks like a recycled Inception set. In a ploy to market their virus as a weapon, Umbrella have recreated Moscow, Tokyo, Shanghai and suburban American in order to simulate what their biohazards can do. Absurdly, they create and use artificial humans based on people like Alice for this, leading to the team picking up a little girl for Ripley-and-Newt-derived substitutions for character motives.

The film is terrible, and knows it. It barely even tries, and for that – it becomes enjoyable. It’s terrible, but it’s good fun to laugh along. Introducing Ada Wong allows for the film’s one interesting development, but poor ole Barry gets the shaft again, and what part of ‘Leon is a prettyboy’ translated to the casting of someone one in our party charitably said looked like Woody Harrelson in The Hunger Games but in my eyes looked like Gary Busey I really don’t know. Jill Valentine being brainwashed is absurd, the cast of The Curse of Fenric dealing with a super-pumped-up adversary was absurd and the final sequence was mainly joyous because I’d been teasing a friend about Wesker all day and whispered ‘Wesker’s the President!!’ moments before he came on and was indeed effectively the president – which I feel no compunction whatsoever about spoiling for anyone who may be reading because it was so very stupid. Fun, yes, but only because it was so stupid.  

Looper – minor spoilers

Looper asks a lot of its audience. It asks them to accept its strong central premise – that in the future, a machine is invented to send things back in time, but outlawed and used only by criminals to send back men they want murdered, which becomes the job of ‘loopers’ in a gritty near-future. It then asks them to believe that someone in that future thinks it’s a good idea to make loopers execute themselves to ‘close the loop’ rather than, y’know, sending them to one of numerous other loopers to do the job as any sensible person would. It then sneaks in the idea of telekinetic mutants, which is a good bit harder to swallow, and by the end presents us with a very muddled sense of time travel, where you have to accept elements of both linear and multi-world possibilities, Back To The Future-style ways for actions in the present to affect a person from the future, and a mind-boggling final scenario in which the only way the mysterious Rainmaker comes into being is if main character Joe goes back in time, but his going back in time sets into motion events that mean there will be no Rainmaker. Part of this is the conception of a time-traveller faced with contradictions from his past self having his memories gradually reshaped – which means that at the end of the film, when Joe has the revelation he does, really there should have been no need to do what he did, and everyone should have just dropped their guns and maybe initiated the awesome adventure of going around in a crime-fighting gang making sure the kid was brought up right. That would definitely have made for a better film that what we got, which was largely two people with a fascinating relationship staying very far away from one another.

Looper isn’t really for picking apart the intricacies of the timelines, though. It’s mostly for enjoying as an action flick, and in that, it mostly works – other than one very far-fetched scene where Bruce Willis takes out an entire crime syndicate by shooting through a doorway at something offscreen – amongst the worst such action shots I’ve ever seen. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is likeable even though his character is so unappealing, which makes the film work, and it’s astonishing that it becomes believable that little Tommy Solomon could grow up to be Bruce Willis. Some moments have Levitt look very odd, like his eyebrows have been badly darkened, but others – especially when he is being interrogated by his boss, or face-to-face with him in the diner – have him look uncannily like Willis. The former may be all angles, hair and the way he holds his face, but the latter looks like some digital manipulation of noses and chins has gone on. Either way, it works far better than I expected.

On a final tangential note, the D-Box moving chairs are hilarious to sit behind. The little synchronised wobbles were funny, but when a series of explosions happened, the chairs did a brilliantly funny synchronised dance together. Distracting but fun!