12/24/14: To Grandmother’s House We Go!

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Amanda Walsh, based on a short story, brothers, Byron Shah, Chandler Riggs, children in peril, Chris Browning, cinema, creepy buildings, demons, Dylan McDermott, dysfunctional family, Eddie Jones, farmhouse, feuding brothers, film adaptations, film reviews, films, flashbacks, Frances O'Connor, Gramma, grandmothers, Hastur, horror, isolated estates, Joel Courtney, literary adaptation, Mark Duplass, Matt Greenberg, Mercy, Movies, Peter Cornwell, possession, Reza Safinia, Shirley Knight, single mother, Stephen King, suicide, violence against children, voice-over narration, weeping book

When it comes to filmed adaptations of literary works, the question always comes around to “How close do you stay to the original work?” As a visual medium, film is a much different ballgame than written works and not every book or short story is equally suited to adaptation. In particular, adapting short stories can present certain challenges, especially when filmmakers attempt to make full-length productions out of decidedly shorter works: when you only have 20-30 pages of the original material to work with, stretching the proceedings to 80 or 90 minutes seems to make about as much sense as a silent-film version of a Mamet play.

This, of course, becomes the first (and, perhaps, most significant) problem with Peter Cornwell’s recent adaptation of the Stephen King short story “Gramma,” here renamed Mercy (2014) in honor of the titular character. While Cornwell’s version of the story gets quite a bit right and makes great use of the creepy, isolated farmhouse locale, it also bears little resemblance to the original, save for the film’s final 20 minutes. By attempting to expand King’s original short to roughly three times its size, Cornwell and screenwriter Matt Greenberg manage to add lots of stuff and nonsense, especially concerning “gramma’s” backstory, but very little in the way of real value. In the process, the filmmakers manage to strip much of the quiet menace from King’s story, a creepy little shocker with a simple premise (little kid stuck by himself with his creepy, dead grandmother), turning it into something both more complex and, unfortunately, far less interesting.

After her aging mother, Mercy (Shirley Knight), has a stroke, single mother Rebecca (Francis O’Connor) and her two young sons, George (Chandler Riggs) and Buddy (Joel Courtney), move into her dilapidated farmhouse, in order to take care of her. Rebecca’s loutish brother, Lanning (Mark Duplass), had been taking care of their mother but he’s not quite reliable (he may also be a little crazy, come to think of it) and doesn’t really seem to care whether Mercy lives or dies. Also on the scene are Jim (Dylan McDermott) and his wife, Charlotte (Amanda Walsh), an artist who paints eerie pictures of local “haints” like the death wolf. Seems that Jim and Rebecca used to be an item, back in the day, and there appear to be a few unrequited feelings flying around on both their behalves: hell, even the kids make constant comments about “the one who got away” and keep talking about how they wish dear ol’ mom had married Jim, when she had the chance.

Via flashbacks, we’ve already had a little inkling of Mercy’s past, including her tireless efforts to conceive (she has one miscarriage after the other, at first), as well as the shocking suicide of her husband (by axe to the face which, if you think about it, is pretty much one of the most hardcore way to off yourself, ever). After her stroke, Mercy has been mostly silent, although her eyes seem ever watchful. When George gets a mysterious note that mentions “Hastur,” however, he sets off a rather dreadful chain of events when he speaks the name to his ailing grandmother. In no time, Mercy seems sharper, more alert and, needless to say, more than a little sinister (she’s given to dropping more big winks than the wolf in a Merrie Melodies short). As bodies begin to pile up around them, George is faced with the frightening notion that his beloved gramma may be both more and less than completely human: with the help of his brother and a local priest (Eddie Jones), George must get to the bottom of Mercy’s past, before he becomes her next victim.

Right from the jump, Mercy looks and sounds great: Byron Shah’s evocative cinematography really shows off the landscape and creepy farmhouse to great effect and the droning musical score, courtesy of Reza Safinia, adds immeasurable tension to the proceedings. The acting is generally pretty good, with industry vet Shirley Knight chewing a bit less scenery than she’s been known to and familiar faces like Dylan McDermott and Mark Duplass giving a little oomph to the film. Chandler Riggs isn’t bad as George, although I found Joel Courtney’s performance as his brother to be slightly off. The film moves at a decent clip and, at slightly under 80 minutes, doesn’t really wear its welcome out until the final reel.

The biggest problem, as previously mentioned, is how overstuffed Mercy’s narrative is compared to the original source material. While the need to expand on the evil gramma’s backstory makes sense, the new material ends up being rather confusing and unnecessarily jumbled: by the time we get to the climax, we’ve even been introduced to some sort of shaggy Sasquatch-demon-thing that pops up out of nowhere, sends the narrative in a new direction and disappears just as quickly. Unlike the sinister bit of foreshadowing that ends the original story (although these kind of “Or are they actually evil?” endings have been driven into the ground, as of late), the conclusion to Cornwell’s film makes little sense: the film ends happily but certain unresolved issues seem to make this an impossibility, rendering the final image as something perilously close to silly.

Despite all of the frustratingly unnecessary added backstory, I kind of liked Mercy: for much of the film, the atmosphere and tension is as thick as a New England fog and there are some genuinely interesting ideas floating around (the concept of the “weeping book” is pretty great, to be honest). While the acting can, occasionally, dip into the highly unrealistic, most of the time, Mercy is filled with some nice, dependable performances, none of which really stick out like a sore thumb. Perhaps my overall dissatisfaction with the film has more to do with my status as an avowed Stephen King fan than any more technical reason: in any other situation, Mercy would be an enjoyable,  decent-enough B-horror film. As a King adaptation, however, the film comes up just a little bit short.

6/28/14 (Part One): Root For the Witch

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cinema, co-directors, co-writers, creepy buildings, Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, found-footage, Heather Donahue, horror films, independent films, Joshua Leonard, lost in the woods, low-budget films, Michael Williams, Movies, murdered children, The Blair Witch Project, witches, writer-director

Back in 1999, I was among the groups of moviegoers that flocked to see The Blair Witch Project (1999) in theaters, turning the micro-budget found-footage film into not only a surprise hit but something of a cultural milestone. At the time, found footage films weren’t as common-place as they are now, so Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s modest little film about a film crew lost in some very haunted woods seemed not only fresh but revolutionary. At the time, I remember being genuinely freaked out by the film, which probably had a lot to do with seeing it in a packed theater: I’ll never forget how quiet the theater would get or how shocked everyone looked by the end. The Blair Witch Project was a triumph in “less is more” filmmaking and seemed to signal a sea-change in the world of indie horror films, a change which has come to roost in the form of the endless found footage films which currently glut the market.

Over the years, I’ve returned to the film periodically, although I’ve never really taken the time to look at The Blair Witch Project critically. If anything, I’ve always judged the movie on a purely visceral level, while mentally glossing over any of the film’s shortcomings. As I’ve often found, however, films that I loved in my youth don’t always hold up down the road. Case in point: Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994). At the time of its release, I absolutely adored Smith’s vulgar little confection, finding it to be not only one of the best-scripted films I’d seen (until I got to Pulp Fiction (1994), I would imagine) but also ingeniously crafted. Nowadays, however, I can’t stand Clerks: the film is juvenile, stupid, vulgar for the sake of vulgarity and vapid as all hell. Time and perspective has taught me something very important: films that appeal to 17-year-olds don’t always have resonance for 30-year-olds. Since coming to that realization, I’ve avoided Clerks (and most Smith films, to be honest) like the plague. Once it came time to rewatch another old favorite, would I end up with the same outcome? Would The Blair Witch Project end up getting “sent to the corn,” just like Clerks?

As far as a film goes, The Blair Witch Project is simplicity, itself. Three independent filmmakers, Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard and Mike Williams (named for the actors who portray them in a pretty nifty example of blurring that reality/fiction line), are making a documentary about the Blair Witch, a figure who’s said to haunt a secluded wooded area and is (supposedly) responsible for the death or disappearance of quite a few folks over the years. To this end, the film crew interviews the residents of the small town of Burkittsville, who help fill in some of the legend’s details, along with adding additional stories about other local killers and assorted oddness. The creepiest of these extra stories details a serial killer who targeted children, taking them in pairs to a creepy house in the woods where he would kill them, one by one, in the basement. After getting as much local color as they can stand, the trio ends into the woods, intent on recording some of the eerie happenings. In no time at all, however, the group is hopelessly lost and at each others’ throats. As more and more weird things happen to them (strange sounds at night, weird piles of rocks everywhere, creepy totems hanging from trees), the group gradually realize that something is stalking them in the woods. When one of their group goes missing, the other two must now deal with the very real fear that they will never leave the woods alive. Is it the Blair Witch or does something even more insidiously evil stalk the woods outside Burkittsville? Since all we’re left with is the missing trio’s found footage, recovered a year later, it’s pretty safe to assume that whatever happened, it wasn’t a picnic.

One of the initial charms of Myrick and Sanchez’s film is how much it’s able to do with so little. Aside from the various “locals” that the crew interviews, the entire film consists of the three actors trooping around the woods with a hand-held camera. Since the dialogue was largely improvised, there’s a great opportunity for blurring the lines and making everything seem truly authentic. The film was made for around $60K but ended up raking in over a million dollars on opening weekend: it made almost 30 million during its run, making the film one of the biggest independent films of all time. In many ways, this was the greatest shot in the arm that low-budget, indie filmmakers could possibly get: get some friends and a camera, become a star. The film has obviously been extremely influential, as seen by the high volume of similar found footage films that are everywhere these days. In face, one of the other modern horror hits, Paranormal Activity (2007), is also a found footage film and ended up repeating many of The Blair Witch Projects victories at the box office. By all accounts, Myrick and Sanchez’s film should hold up as well as Carpenter’s legendary Halloween (1978), another “little indie film that could.” It could, of course, if the film was actually any good but, unfortunately, it really isn’t.

Upon closer inspection, the film just doesn’t hold up. The backstory about the witch is still great and there’s undeniable power in some of the “lost in the woods” moments. The climax is still creepy, even if it makes less sense to me now than it did when I was younger and who wouldn’t find some of the nighttime scenes scary? The major problem ends up being twofold: the actors, especially Donahue, are all completely obnoxious and absolutely nothing happens until the final few minutes. The first flaw ends up being the killing blow since, for all intents and purposes, we’re stuck with three very unpleasant people bickering about being lost in the woods. Since the dialogue is largely improvised, we’re also stuck with a disarming amount of “No, I didn’t”/”Yes, you did” back-and-forth which gets tedious almost immediately. By the midpoint in the film, despite already knowing its resolution, I was actively rooting for the witch to appear and put these jackasses out of their misery. To be honest, I’m not quite sure how “younger me” ever sat through this drivel, since I actively hated all three characters/actors within a remarkably short amount of time. Similar to being stuck with feuding relatives on a long car ride, The Blair Witch Project’s “characters” end up being the most terrifying thing about the film.

The second issue, the lack of action, ends up being only slightly less significant, at least to me, personally. I’m a big fan of slower-paced, more subtle horror films, so the glacial pace didn’t really bother me. My main issue with this came when I reflected back on the film after finishing it and realized that I had just spent 90 minutes watching three people stumble around the woods. The bits involving the totems and rock piles are cool but too few and far between: when you’re asking a mysterious pile of rocks to do all of your horror heavy-lifting, we might have a problem, Houston. The end still holds up, for the most part, but it’s way too little, too late to get there: whereas I found the chaotic conclusion to be utterly nail-biting as a 20-year-old, my main takeaway 15 years later is how poorly blocked it is, making it exceedingly difficult to actually figure out what’s going on. It still has impact, mind you, but not nearly as much.

At the end of the day, I’ll always respect what The Blair Witch Project did but it’s impossible for me to really enjoy the film, itself. As an influence on countless found footage films that followed, the importance of the film can’t be overstated, especially since I tend to really enjoy found footage films.  While Daniel Myrick hasn’t had much of worth since that point (his Believers (2007) is decent but not amazing), Eduardo Sanchez has been quite a bit more successful, at least as far as I’m concerned. Sanchez’s Altered (2006) is a cracking-good tale about rednecks, alien abduction and revenge, while his Lovely Molly (2011) is one of the most painful, unpleasant and amazing horror films I’ve ever seen. As it stands, then, The Blair Witch Project was more of a petri dish than a neo-classic: it fostered not only the found footage subgenre but also a generation of indie filmmakers who would see the film festival circuit as there best bet at getting recognized.

I’m pretty sure that my latest trip to Burkittsville will be my last (at least until I decide to do a Blair Witch/Book of Shadows (2000) marathon sometime in 2030, that is). While there are still moments that really grab me in the film, just as there are moments that still grab me in Clerks (to be honest, the only thing I can stand in Clerks is the soundtrack, which I still love to this day), my overall experience rewatching the film was massively disappointing. Sometimes, it would seem, you really can’t go back.

5/3/14: From Siberia with Shrug

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abandoned research facilities, Blair Witch, Branko Tomovic, Charlotte Riley, cinema, creepy buildings, Darkest Secrets, Dervla Kirwan, drama, Entity, film reviews, films, found-footage, found-footage films, horror, horror film, horror films, Movies, Oliver Jackson, psychics, Rupert Hill, Siberia, Steve Stone, writer-director, [REC]

I’ve always felt that a good location is the one thing that can turn an “okay” horror film into a “pretty good” horror film. There’s a lot of other ingredients that go into the cake, of course, but an interesting location is the one that usually seems like an afterthought. Too often, horror filmmakers (especially low-to-no budget filmmakers) put an undue focus on their makeup, effects and gore, which are usually the three areas that even films with decent budgets struggle against. The value of a good, unique, creepy location just can’t be discounted, however: I’ve seen at least two dozen films that were made highly watchable (and even quite enjoyable) thanks to an expertly used location. For example, Hollow (2011) is a fairly worthless wannabe chiller but it makes tremendous use of one of the single creepiest trees I’ve ever seen, granting the film more class than it really deserves. As far as horror films go, Chernobyl Diaries (2012) is a complete flop, yet the movie is filmed in an abandoned Russian air force base (subbing in for the irradiated city of Pripyat) and I get goose bumps just thinking about it. Sometimes, a really great location can help keep a film afloat, even if there’s always the feeling of wasted potential. Sometimes, however, even a really creepy location can’t save an inherently flawed film: Entity (2012), yet another found footage film, is flawed to the point of being essentially useless and squanders a genuinely eerie location with one massively clumsy story.

A small film crew, led by Kate (Charlotte Riley), are trooping through a forest in Siberia as part of a TV show called Darkest Secrets. With Kate are her crew members, Matt (Rupert Hill) and David (Oliver Jackson), as well as a psychic with a lazy eye named Ruth (Dervla Kirwan) and a local guide named Yuri (Branko Tomovic). They’re out there to discover the truth behind 34 bodies that were discovered there twelve years before; as they explore, their investigation brings them to a mysterious, ultra-creepy, abandoned research facility in the middle of the forest. Once there, the intrepid crews will have to deal with lots of…well, lots of something, but I’ll be honest: I was so often confused that I’m not sure what they’re dealing with. The only thing I am sure of is that the facility was used to test psychics, which means this may be some sort of X-Men tie-in: if so, it would definitely explain my confusion. If not…well…

Any plot summary of Entity will, most likely, seem confusing, with good reason: the film is highly confusing. The narrative is jumbled, character motivations frequently seem more whimsical than based on any reality (even within the framework of the story) and the shooting style (tight shots, frequently using a “night-vision-camera” effect, with extremely quick-cut editing, ala [REC]) just makes everything worse. All too often, some sort of chaotic activity would happen, characters would run around, regroup and the whole process would repeat itself. Were there any more than four characters on-screen at any given time, I would definitely have had trouble telling them apart: as it is, I can close my eyes and have absolutely no memory of what either Matt or David looked like: the only thing I can remember is Ruth’s damn lazy eye, which will haunt my dreams forever.

Entity is that rare film that manages to be both boring and overly fidgety, frequently throwing out that quick-cut POV footage to no good effect and possessing about zero forward momentum. This is also another of those found-footage films that feels compelled to constantly remind us of its conceit by way of exceptionally tedious picture grain, sound loss, rolling picture, etc. Like the very worst of these, Entity goes so overboard with the effect that it makes it seem as if the crew is shooting on a crappy thrift-store camera that’s been kicked into traffic a few too many times: with footage that bad, their show would be lucky to air on public access, much less any kind of legitimate network. This, of course, is lazy filmmaking at its worst, no different from using cheap stereotypes as a way to shorthand character development.

Speaking of character development: there is none. We know, essentially, the same thing about the characters on the way out as we knew on the way in, which is to say, not enough to give a shit. Kate is shrill and annoying, Matt and David are anonymous, Yuri is way too hyper and Ruth vacillates between looking confused, looking scared and trying to look scary: of the three emotions, confusion seems to be her most natural mode. Since we don’t know anything about the characters and none of them are charismatic or interesting on a service level, there’s absolutely no sense of urgency in the film: it’s hard to be worried about a character when you would kind like to wring their neck, yourself.

But about that aforementioned location: is it worth watching the film for? Absolutely not, unless you’re the same sort of stupid masochist I must be. The research facility is actually really scary, the kind of place that would seem to write its own horror film. And, to be honest, I bet that would be a pretty interesting film. What we get, however, is reheated mush, yet another “ghosts in a facility” tale that traffics in pale-skinned, dark-haired “creepy girls,” stereotypically “scary” faces and lots of stupid jump scares. By the time we get to the tired ending (ever get the feeling that the old-timey photograph bit in Kubrick’s version of The Shining influenced far more future filmmakers than it should have?), it’s impossible to care about any of it. When the “twist” ends up being no surprise whatsoever, you know that you’re in Middle-of-the-Road-Land, Population: Entity.