Archive for the ‘supernatural’ Category

A spiritual journey

Argentinian-born French director Gaspar Noé – I Stand Alone (1998), Irreversible (2002) – challenges the impossible once again with Enter the Void (2009).

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Paradise lost

An initially inventive but ultimately disappointing ‘end-of-the-world’ fable. Picture the scene – it’s the run-up to Christmas on the outskirts of Las Vegas, and a motley crew is gathered in the Paradise Falls desert diner, owned by Bob Hanson (Dennis Quaid). First of all, there’s his son Jeep (Lucas Black), who has, against his dad’s wishes, devoted himself to eight-month pregnant Charlie (Adrianne Palicki). The kid’s not his, but he’s in love, and Hanson Senior doesn’t want to see his son get trapped into a dead-end existence, as he was.

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Haunting

It’s now ten years since The Blair Witch Project (1999) brought the power of cinema and the (then fledgling) internet together, with its faux-true story/documentary approach to what was actually nothing more (but certainly nothing less) than a well-told (and very creepy) spook story.

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Derivative dross

TV director Peter Cornwell’s latest effort to revisit the ‘Based On A True Story (Honest)’ craze that was begun by Stuart Rosenberg’s really rather average The Amityville Horror way back in 1979, with screenwriters Adam Simon (Brain Dead (1990)) and Tim Metcalfe (Kalifornia (1993)) along for the ride, suffers very much from all the same faults as its predecessor, coupled with the ever-increasing tendency (see my recent review of Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell (2009)) of mainstream US horror to dumb it down, big time.

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Wicked Witch of the Web…

Can it really be already ten years since writer-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s horror revolution, The Blair Witch Project (1999), took the world and Web by storm?

In a promotional gimmick worthy of the late, great William Castle, young cineastes Myrick and Sánchez, who could see exactly how big the internet was going to get, decided to sell their grim ‘tale-to- be-told-round-the-camp-fire’ for real – the pitch, which was among the very first examples of ‘viral marketing’, and which was communicated via ‘for real’ news stories etc on the fledgling internet, was that a film made by three young student filmmakers (Heather Donahue, Joshua ‘Josh’ Leonard and Michael Williams, who all ‘play’ themselves) had been found a year after they had disappeared in the woods near the town of Burkittesville (formerly Blair), Maryland.

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Fighting the future

Having insider knowledge of the future and being powerless to do anything about it? It’s a curse as old as Cassandra, and an idea that has been relatively well treated by Hollywood, with Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies (2002) the most recent example of the form before Knowing (2009).

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Exorcising his demons

In 2005, Paul Schrader introduced an unexpected world premiere at the Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film (BIFFF) – his director’s cut of the prequel to The Exorcist (1973), Dominion (2005). The film was notoriously abandoned by its studio on delivery and virtually re-shot by a new director. But, as Schrader explained to James Drew at the time, he is adamant that his hiring (and firing) was based more on a head-of-studio’s whims than artistic problems with his project.

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A grave business…

The late Albert Band was, along with William Castle, a master producer (and, later, director) of pulpy horror during the 1950s, 60s and onwards – the father of similarly prolific B-movie director Charles Band, some of his more recent classics included Dracula’s Dog (1978) (‘Man’s best friend is now man’s worst fiend’, ahem), and Ghoulies II (1987) (‘Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the bathroom’, ahem), but I Bury The Living (1958) (‘Out of a time-rotted tomb crawls an unspeakable horror!’, er, no it doesn’t, actually) was his finest hour.

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[photopress:Mothman.jpg,thumb,alignleft] It only comes out at night…

We’re into the realms of ‘based on a true story’ again here but, in all fairness to director Mark Pellington (Arlington Road (1999)), whether or not you believe the ‘Mothman’ yarns is irrelevant – the film still emerges as rather more than merely exploitative ‘spookiness’.

Washington Post reporter John Klein (yes, it’s Richard Gere, but don’t let that put you off either), and his wife Mary (Deborah Messing) are driving away from a succesful house-hunting trip, on which they’d just found the home of their dreams, when Mary swerves the car off the road to avoid a mysterious apparition that only she sees. Her injuries, while serious, are not life threatening, but doctors discover a very rare and inoperable form of brain tumour (a glioblastoma) during their subsequent tests.

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Not much to see here

And so, the legacy of Ringu (1998) lives on…will horror directors never tire, do you think, of creepy little dead girls with long dark hair? Not if John Fawcett’s The Dark (2005) is anything to go by. Sure, it has a good cast and, judging by Fawcett’s previous horror effort, Ginger Snaps (2000) a promising director, but there is little here that rises above straight-to-DVD shocks.

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