Thanks to the Red Sox' progress through the playoffs (and a little time under the weather), Haunter is extremely likely to be the only in the Somerville Theatre's "Boston Terror Thon" program I see outside the actual marathon. That's kind of a shame, because I would really like to support genre film festivals like this, although on the other hand, Haunter certainly seems like it was the best of the bunch. That's why I put Game 4 of the World Series on the DVR and experienced it an hour or two behind everybody else.
Hopefully the attendance has been good enough that the Somerville Theatre and Zoetrope Productions folks (who I believe are involved, although no mention was made of them at the events I attended) aren't too discouraged; It would be quite disappointing if this went the way of the Boston Fantastic Film Festival, which debuted in October 2004 with an impressive line-up but was not going to draw a lot of people from the Baseball Ragnarok of the ALCS. I occasionally imagine a parallel universe where the BFFF is the fall's big genre film event while Fantastic Fest is kind of nice if you can't get to the Brattle, but in that reality the Sox traded Nomar away for nothing and the drought is approaching a century, and that sounds terribly sad.
At any rate, this particular movie is fun. If you've seen it or don't mind being spoiled, come back after the eFilmCritic review for a little talk about the ending and themes where I sort of contradict some of my usual horror movie stances. Heck, watch it now; as of late October 2013, it's available to watch on Amazon.
Haunter
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 October 2013 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Terror Thon, digital)
Haunter is the kind of horror movie that is in many ways so well-built that it almost gets in its own way when someone sees it, likes it, and wants to recommend it: The film has a hook that does its job of intriguing an audience as well as one might hope, but one of its early delights is just how nicely it reveals what's going on. It's good enough to not just be a gimmick movie, though, but quite the nifty ghost story.
It's a Sunday night in mid-1980s Ontario, the day before Lisa Johnson's sixteenth birthday, and Lisa (Abigail Breslin) has just started to realize that this has been the case for quite a while: Every day is a repetition of the one before, from her brother Robbie (Peter DaCunha) playing Pac-Man to her father Bruce (Peter Outerbridge) struggling to fix the car and her mother Carol (Michelle Nolden) asking about clothes missing from the laundry. The phone is out and the house is shrouded in fog, and when the routine breaks one day, it's so that a creepy-looking man (Stephen McHattie) can ask Lisa how long she's been awake and warn her not to rock the boat.
The basics of what's going on is pretty clear, if only from the name of the movie and how malicious poltergeists have by and large fallen out of favor compared to unknowing emotional scars on a location, but director Vincenzo Natali and writer Brian King let the movie get to roughly the half-hour mark before spelling it out. Both the lead to and follow from that moment are filled with nuggets that build the story and a mythology that seems reasonably common-sensical compared to many supernatural stories. It's a nice set-up, with just enough scale and complication to give Lisa something to worry about beside herself, and while the story gets a bit messy toward the end, it seldom falls into the trap many horror movies do where the scares seem randomly assembled. There is at least an emotional foundation to what's going on.
Full review at EFC.
SPOILERS!
So, everybody reading this knows that Lisa's a ghost, right? Well, you probably can get that from the previews and synopses, but I felt like being extra careful for some reason. This is going to be a less-spoilery discussion of the ending than usual, but I don't want to tick anybody off.
So, anyway, I'm usually a big how-things-work guy, and I do kind of like that Haunter is fairly clear on its mechanism - Olivia connects to Lisa, and Lisa to Frances, by touching something important to the dead (or more dead) girl. In fact, it's something that identifies her in both cases, although Natali and King don't necessarily make that distinction explicit (nor do they put much emphasis on the parallel situations being important, although maybe that's just a given). I think one of the movie's weaknesses is that this is a little bit more mechanical than need be; the scene I mention in the review that could be a little more rousing is Lisa going through Edgar's trophies casually. The idea of Lisa doing this to summon an army is right, and my disappointment is that it could have been given a lot more thematic and dramatic heft - imagine if she's doing this and reading off the names of the victims and what the trophy tells her about them, and each one arriving starts to do the same. It would become a rebuke to Lisa's feelings about being alone and forgotten.
The other thing about the story winding up relatively rule-based is that there's a neat coming-of-age theme that winds up getting somewhat buried or negated. There are a lot of mentions of it being Lisa's birthday the next day, and I initially thought that was important, that maybe Lisa woke up because she was a teenager: She isn't trusting the way her younger brother is, or settled down the way her parents are. Plus, being a teenager is inherently a transitional state, and maybe something in her recognizes that it's not supposed to last.
To a certain extent, that's still there, but I think it's diminished a bit. I think it also speaks to how difficult it is to make this sort of horror movie today; it's a more skeptical and well-informed time, and we naturally expect a certain amount of logic and consistency that people initially didn't need in their scary stories, but we also still want it either somewhat irrational or purely emotional. Haunter does a better job than a lot of movies, but in doing so it demonstrates just how difficult it can be to appeal to both hemispheres of the audience's collective brain.
!SRELIOPS
Showing posts with label Terrorthon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Terrorthon. Show all posts
Monday, October 28, 2013
Friday, October 08, 2010
This Week In Tickets: 27 September 2010 to 3 October 2010
Work and wanting to catch the last weekend of Red Sox baseball, even though the loss in Yankee Stadium on the 26th more or less killed any postseason delusions kept it kind of light:
Stubless: Last Red Sox game of the season
I actually do have the printout from StubHub for that game, but it's huge, my printer was balking at printing certain colors, etc., so we'll pretend otherwise. It was, at least, a pretty darn good game for the last one of the season. It's somewhat unusual for those games to play out like real, honest-to-good regular-season major league baseball games (usually, after getting an at bat or two, the starters will be pulled to applause, making it feel like a spring training exhibition). Some fun and unusual things did happen: David Ortiz went 3-3, with the last being an amusing bunt against the shift for a base hit. He was removed for a pinch-runner, and it was sort of a cool thing, because it let the crowd applaud the oddness of the play rather than the fact that this could be his last game. There was a bit of a surprise retirement party feel to the game for Jason Veritek, who started and caught most of the game before being lifted in the ninth; that applause did feel like it was saying goodbye.
And, most surprisingly, John Lackey pitched a pretty good, non-frustrating game. Naturally, Jonathan Papelbon made an effort to give it away in the 9th, but the six run lead was too much for him. Still, they let us go on the field and run the bases afterward, which was pretty darn cool - the line took us out by the wall, around the field, to the first base bag and then around the bases, exiting near the visitor's dugout. Pretty cool.
Especially considering that Fenway played a big part in the week's only non-festival film...
The Town
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 October 2010 at AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run)
The opening heist in this movie takes place in Harvard Square, fairly close to where I live and where I spend a lot of my time. For a moment I wondered how long ago they filmed it, as the Alpha Omega watch shop that has been empty for a couple of years looked like a going concern. I guess the set decorators just put some stuff in the windows (which was more than they did for Surrogates last year). The other end takes place in and around Fenway Park, much more than the usual "show them in the park to remind folks we're in Boston".
In between, it's a pretty darn good crime/romance movie. I've never been close to being as down on Affleck as some folks have - the man does have an Oscar for writing, and when you get him on a project he loves or with a director who can bring out his best, he's always been pretty good (which isn't very different from most actors). Here, he's in his wheelhouse, giving us a career criminal as likable as they believably come. He and his cast make their characters real enough that we instinctively understand the relationships between them well before the specifics are spelled out. Jeremy Renner is pretty great, too, playing Affleck's partner-in-crime as a psycho you might meet on the street, with the violence just below the surface.
And he does action pretty well. The opening heist is as smooth and assured on film as it is when the FBI breaks it down later, and while the final shootout gets a bit out of hand, it's thrilling and suspenseful. I think the ending is a little bit of a cop-out (some folks seem to get too clean a resolution), but not nearly enough to damage what leads up to it.
Stubless: Last Red Sox game of the season
I actually do have the printout from StubHub for that game, but it's huge, my printer was balking at printing certain colors, etc., so we'll pretend otherwise. It was, at least, a pretty darn good game for the last one of the season. It's somewhat unusual for those games to play out like real, honest-to-good regular-season major league baseball games (usually, after getting an at bat or two, the starters will be pulled to applause, making it feel like a spring training exhibition). Some fun and unusual things did happen: David Ortiz went 3-3, with the last being an amusing bunt against the shift for a base hit. He was removed for a pinch-runner, and it was sort of a cool thing, because it let the crowd applaud the oddness of the play rather than the fact that this could be his last game. There was a bit of a surprise retirement party feel to the game for Jason Veritek, who started and caught most of the game before being lifted in the ninth; that applause did feel like it was saying goodbye.
And, most surprisingly, John Lackey pitched a pretty good, non-frustrating game. Naturally, Jonathan Papelbon made an effort to give it away in the 9th, but the six run lead was too much for him. Still, they let us go on the field and run the bases afterward, which was pretty darn cool - the line took us out by the wall, around the field, to the first base bag and then around the bases, exiting near the visitor's dugout. Pretty cool.
Especially considering that Fenway played a big part in the week's only non-festival film...
The Town
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 October 2010 at AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run)
The opening heist in this movie takes place in Harvard Square, fairly close to where I live and where I spend a lot of my time. For a moment I wondered how long ago they filmed it, as the Alpha Omega watch shop that has been empty for a couple of years looked like a going concern. I guess the set decorators just put some stuff in the windows (which was more than they did for Surrogates last year). The other end takes place in and around Fenway Park, much more than the usual "show them in the park to remind folks we're in Boston".
In between, it's a pretty darn good crime/romance movie. I've never been close to being as down on Affleck as some folks have - the man does have an Oscar for writing, and when you get him on a project he loves or with a director who can bring out his best, he's always been pretty good (which isn't very different from most actors). Here, he's in his wheelhouse, giving us a career criminal as likable as they believably come. He and his cast make their characters real enough that we instinctively understand the relationships between them well before the specifics are spelled out. Jeremy Renner is pretty great, too, playing Affleck's partner-in-crime as a psycho you might meet on the street, with the violence just below the surface.
And he does action pretty well. The opening heist is as smooth and assured on film as it is when the FBI breaks it down later, and while the final shootout gets a bit out of hand, it's thrilling and suspenseful. I think the ending is a little bit of a cop-out (some folks seem to get too clean a resolution), but not nearly enough to damage what leads up to it.
TerrorThon '10: The Horde and Tucker & Dale vs. Evil
Another week, another film festival. TerrorThon is a co-production between J. Cannibal and the folks behind the long-standing Boston Science Fiction Film Festival, and while it's got a few kinks to work out, I think it's one that has real potential to grow. Both Cannibal and SF/xx's Garen Daley have been at this for a while, so they had dedicated audiences to jump-start attendance with, good theater relations, and the contacts to get some pretty good indie horror on the schedule.
Of course, I do wish that they had cast their net a little wider, but I'm almost always going to wish that. The Human Centipede: First Sequence has been playing off and on at the Coolidge all year, Dead Snow is kind of last year's news, and The Horde is currently playing on demand. Then again, there's nothing in the definition that says a festival has to be all unreleased films. Also, both this and the February sci-fi festival (as opposed to the long-established marathon) are new for 2010; considering that both got pretty good attendance, I wouldn't be surprised if next year, they were able to go to distributors with photos of the audience and attendance figures and maybe get some more stuff that had been at Sundance or Fantasia a couple months earlier. Heck, this one had already earned a promotion from the video room to the upstairs cinemas at Somerville.
However, one thing that did frustrate me was the projection. La Horde wasn't bad, but I always wonder about the look of the film with Blu-ray projection; I know I can mess with the sharpness and contrast on my TV, and The Horde had a very pronounced video look. Tucker & Dale, meanwhile, was projected on DVD, and though I'd saved a couple bucks by purchasing my ticket ahead of time, the idea of dropping $12 to watch something on DVD irritates the heck out of me. I accept that film is becoming a more and more rare beast at festivals - prints are expensive for the producers, shipping them is expensive for the festivals, even if something isn't officially still a work in progress there may yet be tinkering to be done, etc. - but DVD? For $12? Especially considering that the folks in the next theater over paid something like $8 for an evening show (compared to the rest of Boston, The Somerville Theatre and Arlington Capitol are great deals)... The math used for upconverting DVDs is pretty good nowadays, but blown up to big-screen size, blurriness and compression still rear their heads.
Unlike most of my complaints, I did put my money where my mouth is this time - hearing that Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Undead would be projected from DVD during the introduction to The Horde pretty much sealed my decision to hit the comic shop and go home rather than stay for a second movie on Wednesday. As much as I like the theatrical experience and festival atmosphere, I'm not knowingly paying more for something I know will look better in my living room.
Still, I don't want to be too negative - I saw a couple good movies, in a bigger crowd than I might otherwise have expected, and with any luck, the event will grow and be even better next year.
La Horde (The Horde, duh)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 September 2010 at Somerville Theatre #5 (TerrorThon 2010)
For a while, every action movie of a certain type was described using the shorthand "Die Hard in a ____". For better or worse, when someone said that, the audience knew what they were going to get, even if it likely wasn't anywhere close to as good as that film. About the only subgenre more rigidly defined is the zombie movie - "____ are thrown together when the zombie pandemic breaks out". Barring an especially creative twist, those types of movies each come down to execution. That's the case with The Horde, which is a little bit of both: Filmmakers Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher seem to have pitched the broad strokes more than the details, but still make a fairly entertaining movie.
A good cop by the name of Rivoallan (Laurent Segall) has just died, and a few members of his unit aren't planning on taking it sitting down - they're planning an off-the-books raid on the gang that killed him. Jiminez (Aurelien Recoing), Aurore (Claude Perron), and Tony (Antoine Oppenheim) are out for blood, although Ouessem (Jean-Pierre Martins) assures the deceased's mother that he's going along to make sure it doesn't get out of hand. Their target: A tenement in which Nigerian drug dealer Adewale Markudi (Eriq Ebouaney) is holed up, along with his brother Bola (Doudou Masta), partner Greco (Jo Prestia) and a number of henchman. Just when one side thinks they've got the upper hand, the informant that Adé had just killed gets up and comes at them, and when they look out the window, they see fires in the distance and a mob of the undead surrounding the building. The only other living soul in the building is nutty old veteran René (Yves Pignot), and the possibility of escape seems slim at best.
Compact that description a bit, and The Horde starts to sound like a French-language version of Versus, although the problem with Ryuhei Kitamura's calling card was that he didn't know when to stop (zombies vs. yakuza vs. cops was just where it started). Rocher, Dahan, and their co-writers don't run wild like that, although "restrained" wouldn't be the right word for this movie either - it's fast-moving, with some big action scenes and a sense of humor that's more than a bit politically incorrect. Still, it's one of those movies that is categorized as horror but isn't really scary - because there have been so many of these movies, its zombies are like robots, video game villains that can be wiped out without remorse, rather than something frightening or disturbing. There's suspense, but it's the kind of suspense that comes from a template - which will be the next character picked off, what form of betrayal will split the group apart? - than real dread.
Full review at EFC.
Tucker & Dale vs Evil
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 October 2010 at Somerville Theatre #4 (TerrorThon 2010)
There have been plenty of slasher comedies, especially since Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson made winking self-reference popular with Scream. Few, however, have done such an entertaining job of marrying the genre with door-slamming farce, which is what you get with Tucker & Dale vs Evil - a snappy screwball comedy with a serious body count.
It begins, as many horror movies do, with a group of college kids heading out to do some camping in West Virginia. Chuck (Travis Nelson) is driving his dad's car, Chad (Jesse Moss) is hitting on Allison (Katrina Bowden); four other guys and two other girls are along for the ride. When they stop at a general store to stock up on beer, they bump into Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine), a couple of hillbillies on their way to their newly-purchased vacation home. A series of misunderstandings and prejudices soon has the college kids believing that the pair are redneck psycho killers, although the kids may be much bigger dangers to themselves.
Everybody has heard the line about how dying is easy but comedy is hard, and combining the two can be harder still. Writer/director Eil Craig and his writing partner Morgan Jurgenson play on certain familiar movie situations - there are two utterly hilarious bits of that at the general store, and the finale features a bit straight out of silents and Saturday serials - but instead of making their movie into a game of spot-the-reference, they find a nice middle ground between playing on broad caricatures and making their main characters, at least, individuals. They also do a fairly excellent job of escalating their comic misunderstandings in a way that stays believable even when people are winding up dead, all the way through to getting to the last act. It's a tricky transition that a lot of horror comedies don't manage, making their characters more active participants so that the story can have a proper conclusion without changing the tone drastically.
Full review at EFC.
Of course, I do wish that they had cast their net a little wider, but I'm almost always going to wish that. The Human Centipede: First Sequence has been playing off and on at the Coolidge all year, Dead Snow is kind of last year's news, and The Horde is currently playing on demand. Then again, there's nothing in the definition that says a festival has to be all unreleased films. Also, both this and the February sci-fi festival (as opposed to the long-established marathon) are new for 2010; considering that both got pretty good attendance, I wouldn't be surprised if next year, they were able to go to distributors with photos of the audience and attendance figures and maybe get some more stuff that had been at Sundance or Fantasia a couple months earlier. Heck, this one had already earned a promotion from the video room to the upstairs cinemas at Somerville.
However, one thing that did frustrate me was the projection. La Horde wasn't bad, but I always wonder about the look of the film with Blu-ray projection; I know I can mess with the sharpness and contrast on my TV, and The Horde had a very pronounced video look. Tucker & Dale, meanwhile, was projected on DVD, and though I'd saved a couple bucks by purchasing my ticket ahead of time, the idea of dropping $12 to watch something on DVD irritates the heck out of me. I accept that film is becoming a more and more rare beast at festivals - prints are expensive for the producers, shipping them is expensive for the festivals, even if something isn't officially still a work in progress there may yet be tinkering to be done, etc. - but DVD? For $12? Especially considering that the folks in the next theater over paid something like $8 for an evening show (compared to the rest of Boston, The Somerville Theatre and Arlington Capitol are great deals)... The math used for upconverting DVDs is pretty good nowadays, but blown up to big-screen size, blurriness and compression still rear their heads.
Unlike most of my complaints, I did put my money where my mouth is this time - hearing that Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Undead would be projected from DVD during the introduction to The Horde pretty much sealed my decision to hit the comic shop and go home rather than stay for a second movie on Wednesday. As much as I like the theatrical experience and festival atmosphere, I'm not knowingly paying more for something I know will look better in my living room.
Still, I don't want to be too negative - I saw a couple good movies, in a bigger crowd than I might otherwise have expected, and with any luck, the event will grow and be even better next year.
La Horde (The Horde, duh)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 September 2010 at Somerville Theatre #5 (TerrorThon 2010)
For a while, every action movie of a certain type was described using the shorthand "Die Hard in a ____". For better or worse, when someone said that, the audience knew what they were going to get, even if it likely wasn't anywhere close to as good as that film. About the only subgenre more rigidly defined is the zombie movie - "____ are thrown together when the zombie pandemic breaks out". Barring an especially creative twist, those types of movies each come down to execution. That's the case with The Horde, which is a little bit of both: Filmmakers Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher seem to have pitched the broad strokes more than the details, but still make a fairly entertaining movie.
A good cop by the name of Rivoallan (Laurent Segall) has just died, and a few members of his unit aren't planning on taking it sitting down - they're planning an off-the-books raid on the gang that killed him. Jiminez (Aurelien Recoing), Aurore (Claude Perron), and Tony (Antoine Oppenheim) are out for blood, although Ouessem (Jean-Pierre Martins) assures the deceased's mother that he's going along to make sure it doesn't get out of hand. Their target: A tenement in which Nigerian drug dealer Adewale Markudi (Eriq Ebouaney) is holed up, along with his brother Bola (Doudou Masta), partner Greco (Jo Prestia) and a number of henchman. Just when one side thinks they've got the upper hand, the informant that Adé had just killed gets up and comes at them, and when they look out the window, they see fires in the distance and a mob of the undead surrounding the building. The only other living soul in the building is nutty old veteran René (Yves Pignot), and the possibility of escape seems slim at best.
Compact that description a bit, and The Horde starts to sound like a French-language version of Versus, although the problem with Ryuhei Kitamura's calling card was that he didn't know when to stop (zombies vs. yakuza vs. cops was just where it started). Rocher, Dahan, and their co-writers don't run wild like that, although "restrained" wouldn't be the right word for this movie either - it's fast-moving, with some big action scenes and a sense of humor that's more than a bit politically incorrect. Still, it's one of those movies that is categorized as horror but isn't really scary - because there have been so many of these movies, its zombies are like robots, video game villains that can be wiped out without remorse, rather than something frightening or disturbing. There's suspense, but it's the kind of suspense that comes from a template - which will be the next character picked off, what form of betrayal will split the group apart? - than real dread.
Full review at EFC.
Tucker & Dale vs Evil
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 October 2010 at Somerville Theatre #4 (TerrorThon 2010)
There have been plenty of slasher comedies, especially since Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson made winking self-reference popular with Scream. Few, however, have done such an entertaining job of marrying the genre with door-slamming farce, which is what you get with Tucker & Dale vs Evil - a snappy screwball comedy with a serious body count.
It begins, as many horror movies do, with a group of college kids heading out to do some camping in West Virginia. Chuck (Travis Nelson) is driving his dad's car, Chad (Jesse Moss) is hitting on Allison (Katrina Bowden); four other guys and two other girls are along for the ride. When they stop at a general store to stock up on beer, they bump into Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine), a couple of hillbillies on their way to their newly-purchased vacation home. A series of misunderstandings and prejudices soon has the college kids believing that the pair are redneck psycho killers, although the kids may be much bigger dangers to themselves.
Everybody has heard the line about how dying is easy but comedy is hard, and combining the two can be harder still. Writer/director Eil Craig and his writing partner Morgan Jurgenson play on certain familiar movie situations - there are two utterly hilarious bits of that at the general store, and the finale features a bit straight out of silents and Saturday serials - but instead of making their movie into a game of spot-the-reference, they find a nice middle ground between playing on broad caricatures and making their main characters, at least, individuals. They also do a fairly excellent job of escalating their comic misunderstandings in a way that stays believable even when people are winding up dead, all the way through to getting to the last act. It's a tricky transition that a lot of horror comedies don't manage, making their characters more active participants so that the story can have a proper conclusion without changing the tone drastically.
Full review at EFC.
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