7/29/15 (Part One): A Sinister Case of Deja Vu

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Antonia Campbell-Hughes, archival footage, archivists, Calum Heath, Carl Shaaban, Ceiri Torjussen, cheating partners, children in peril, cinema, dead children, dramas, father-son relationships, film reviews, films, foreign films, Hannah Hoekstra, haunted bathrooms, horror, horror films, human sacrifice, husband-wife relationship, infidelity, Irish films, Ivan Kavanagh, Kelly Byrne, Movies, Piers McGrail, Robin Hill, Rupert Evans, sewer tunnels, Sinister, Steve Oram, supernatural, The Canal, The Ring, twist ending, UK films, writer-director

Here’s a bit of friendly advice, free of charge and as heartfelt as the day is long: should there ever come a time when you’re in the market for a house and discover creepy video footage of terrible acts being committed in said house…go find another damn house. I mean, sure: this particular place might have hardwood floors, a nice backyard, good schools, a progressive city council and easy access to public transportation. If, however, it was also a place where people were tortured/murdered/sacrificed/et al, well…is linoleum really that bad?

While there have been a handful of films that have utilized the above trope to good effect, perhaps none have been more recently popular than Scott Derrickson’s Sinister (2012), in which Ethan Hawke moves his family into a former “murder house” and shit gets all kinds of…you know…sinister. On the heels of that surprise smash (with a sequel scheduled for sometime in the near future), we get Irish writer-director Ivan Kavanagh’s The Canal (2014), in which a husband/father discovers that his family’s new(ish) home might have more than a few secrets of its own. Similar to Derrickson’s film in some pretty substantial ways, The Canal still manages to carve out its own path, paralleling the sad dissolution of a marriage with the eerie happenings in and around a creepy house and the adjoining canal.

We first meet our hapless hero, David (Rupert Evans), as he and his pregnant wife, Alice (Hannah Hoekstra), are just about to buy the aforementioned creepy house. Flash forward five years and David, Alice and their now five-year-old son, Billy (Calum Heath), seem content in their abode, although we get hints of trouble in paradise. In particular, David and Alice seem to have a strained relationship that includes her getting late-night calls from “clients,” one of whom, a strapping young lad named Alex (Carl Shaaban), seems to be just a little too close for comfort to David’s lady-love.

As these dramatic developments are unfolding, David’s day-job suddenly inserts itself into the equation. You see, David and his partner, Claire (Antonia Campbell-Hughes), are film archivists and they’ve just got in a new batch of old police films, one of which takes place in the very house that David, Alice and Billy call home. It appears that a husband murdered his philandering wife, was jailed, escaped and proceeded to hunt down and slaughter his own son and the boy’s nanny. Faster than you can whisper “sinister,” David has become obsessed with the case, the grisly details of which have begun to seep into his dreams.

Opting to follow his hunch, David trails Alice, one night, and his worst fears are confirmed when he witnesses her making the beast with two backs with handsome, ol’ Alex. Utterly destroyed, David slouches away and winds up at the undeniably creepy public restroom, next to the canal by his house, where he and his young son once threw stones at “ghosts.” While sobbing in a stall, David is confronted by a mysterious figure who intones the suitably chilling “The Master wants you.” Racing out, he seems to be just in time to witness his wife grappling with someone by the water’s edge.

When his wife never comes home that night, David calls the police and ends up in the gravitational pull of one Detective McNamara (Steve Oram), a cagey, soft-spoken Irish Columbo who gets one of the film’s best lines: “People always suspect the husband. You know why that is? Because it’s always the fucking husband.” Needless to say, McNamara doesn’t buy David’s story of a mysterious assailant or bathroom visitation for one minute: from the jump, it’s pretty obvious that he’s a bulldog with a bone and has no intention of dropping his “prize” whatsoever, especially once Alice’s body is hauled up from the canal.

As David tries to keep his life together, with the endless assistance of long-suffering, pot-smoking nanny Sophie (Kelly Byrne), he digs deeper and deeper into the history of his house. Turns out that the aforementioned husband and wife weren’t the only tragedies in the home’s past: there’s a virtual laundry list of previous crimes, atrocities and terrible acts, including a woman who burned her own child alive but insists that “demons” did it. David becomes convinced that the house (and adjoining canal) are all part of a terrible child sacrifice conspiracy, a terrifying tradition of evil that he, Alice and Billy have, unwittingly, become part of. To make matters worse (better?), David sees all manner of strange, creepy figures around the house, especially once he begins to film supposedly empty rooms with an old-fashioned movie camera.

With Claire and Sophie worried about his sanity and McNamara doing his damnedest to put him into jail, David knows that the only way to clear his name is to uncover the hideous paranormal monstrosities at the heart of it all. Is David really getting a peep into a murderous, ghostly phantasmagoria or is he just as insane and guilty as McNamara assumes? To find out, David will need to do the unthinkable: he’ll need to go into the murky, seemingly bottomless depths of the canal. Will he find salvation…or doom?

Exceptionally well-made, if always a little too obvious, writer-director Kavanagh’s The Canal is the latest in a series of austere, serious-minded and atmospheric horror films that include the likes of Absentia (2011), The Pact (2011) and Oculus (2013), among others. As with the rest of these “New Wave of Atmospheric Horror” (NWoAH, patent pending) films, The Canal looks and sounds great: the colors are bright and vibrant (the color palette switches between reds and blues, depending on David’s current state of mind), cinematographer Piers McGrail (who also shot the highly lauded Let Us Prey (2014)) shoots some truly lovely footage and the sense of creeping unease is thick from the jump.

The acting is solid, with Evans and Oram leading the pack, albeit from two completely opposite sides of the coin: Evans perfectly portrays the combined despair, agony, fear, rage and sorrow within David, leading to a performance that’s truly three-dimensional, even if the whole thing is colored in shades of gray and black. Oram, on the other hand, is like a breath of fresh air, a vibrant, alive, cynical and altogether awesome police presence who provides a perfect foil for David and a great source of association for the audience.

Between these towering presences, the rest of the cast acquits themselves nicely (Campbell-Hughes is especially great as David’s partner/only friend), although a few of the characters (Alice’s mother comes immediately to mind) are so under-developed as to be more plot points than real people. I also wish that Hoekstra got a little more to do: there are a few nicely emotional moments between her and David but, by and large, the focus is squarely on him, not her. Due to this, Alice comes across as more of a “bad guy” than anything: since we never get to spend much time with her, the decision to cheat on David also feels more like a plot point than an organic culmination of their relationship.

On the horror side, The Canal also equates quite nicely with the aforementioned NWoAH films: like the others, the film has a chilly, glacial pace and a tendency to rely on slow burn chills and “something’s happening behind you”-isms, although the occasional jump-cuts and loud musical cues are thoroughly off-putting and kind of obnoxious. When you have images as nice as the ones in this film, long, leisurely takes work much better than jump-cuts or quick-cuts, especially when trying to build atmosphere. It’s a minor quibble, to be sure, but one that definitely took me out a time or two.

While The Canal is full of really rich horror moments/imagery (one of the most unforgettable being the zombie-like figure that gives birth to an equally horrifying child…I’ve rarely seen anything quite that nasty and it’s a truly bracing moment), the main problem, once again, ends up being the familiarity of it all. In particular, Kavanagh and company make two explicit references to Gore Verbinski’s remake of The Ring (2002), including one where a creepy woman with long, dark hair crawls out of a television set. To be honest, it’s an oddly lazy moment in a film that’s generally much more interesting than that, although the image, itself, still packs a nice visceral wallop.

There’s also an inherent issue with this kind of “did he/didn’t he?” storyline, especially when the filmmakers seem to push one particular viewpoint over the other: while The Canal does take a few twists and turns and does a good job with the kind of open ending that usually causes me to roll my eyes, nothing that happened was really that surprising or shocking. I felt like I knew what was coming from the first reel and, for the most part, that’s exactly what I got. Again, this isn’t to cast undue derision on Kavanagh’s film as much as to state the relative limitations of this particular kind of tale.

Despite some minor issues and the aforementioned similarities to other films, The Canal is actually quite exceptional: some of the supernatural elements and imagery were quietly stunning and the relationship drama aspect feels utterly real (almost painfully so). One of the scenes, where David films by the canal as “something” approaches the camera, agonizingly slow step by agonizingly slow step, is really as good as NWoAH films get: there’s a genuine sense of building terror that hits you in the gut like a brick.

Looking through Kavanagh’s back-catalog, The Canal appears to be his most explicitly horror-related film, with the majority of his work seeming to fall into the “dark drama” category. This, of course, makes perfect sense: as mentioned earlier, the dissolution of David and Alice’s marriage has a verisimilitude that makes you want to look away, even though you’re too wrapped up in the events to do so. Here’s to hoping that Kavanagh continues to work in the horror field: there are enough good ideas and stylish moments here to indicate that he definitely has something to say. Hopefully, in the future, he won’t lean quite so heavily on what came before: I have a feeling that Kavanagh’s “roads not taken” might lead to some pretty damn interesting places.

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7/26/15 (Part Two): Run to the Light

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Anna Paquin, auteur theory, Carles Cases, cinema, Craig Stevenson, darkness, dead children, dysfunctional family, father-son relationships, Fele Martínez, Fermí Reixach, Fernando de Felipe, Film auteurs, film reviews, filmed in Spain, films, Giancarlo Giannini, haunted houses, horror, horror films, human sacrifice, Huntington's Disease, husband-wife relationship, Iain Glen, isolated estates, Jaume Balagueró, Lena Olin, Luis de la Madrid, Miguel Tejada-Flores, missing children, mother-daughter relationships, Movies, multiple writers, possession, set in Spain, sins of the fathers, sins of the past, solar eclipse, Spanish-American films, Stephan Enquist, The Nameless, writer-director, Xavi Giménez, [REC], [REC] 2, [REC] 4

Back in 2007, before found-footage/first-person-POV horror films had become as standard a fixture in the industry as zombies were before them, Spanish writer-director Jaume Balagueró unleashed a feral little film known as [REC] (2007) on a largely unwitting populace. While the film would go on to produce three sequels (two of which were also directed by Balagueró) and an awful American remake (Quarantine (2008) is, without a doubt, one of the most unrelentingly shitty films I’ve personally sat through), I was taken enough with Balagueró’s style to check out his entire filmography.

Beginning with his feature-length debut, The Nameless (1999), and continuing through Fragile (2005), his short film To Let (2006) and the [REC] series, Balagueró’s films have been darkly stylish, atmospheric fables that combine the stresses of familial interaction with the traditional tropes of haunted house films. In Balagueró’s hands, the sins of the parents always come home to roost on their children, every dark, sinister room holds a secret and mysterious figures have an alarming tendency to slink around while the hapless protagonists are looking in the other direction. In many ways, Darkness (2002) is a synthesis of his myriad themes and influences, all top-lined by an all-star cast that includes Anna Paquin, Lena Olin, Iain Glen and Craig Stevenson. Primo Balagueró? For better and worse: absolutely.

Darkness details the adventures of a small family of American ex-pats who’ve been uprooted from their home and moved back to the father’s childhood stomping grounds in Spain. As horror movie families are wont to be, our happy clan is more than a little dysfunctional: father Mark (Iain Glen) suffers from Huntington’s Disease and has a tendency to either fly into manic episodes or collapse into painful-looking seizures; mother Maria (Lena Olin) seems distracted to the point of completely ignoring her children; teenaged Regina (Anna Paquin) is as overjoyed as any kid would be who has to leave all of their friends behind and move to a foreign country just as she’s about to begin her senior year of school; and young Paul (Stephan Enquist) keeps getting his colored pencils stolen by spooky ghost children. You know…the usual stuff.

As their new home, a sprawling, isolated country manor that practically screams “Here there be ghosts” begins to reveal certain creepy, sinister happenings at an alarming rate, Mark begins to channel ol’ Jack Torrance, leading Regina to fear for the safety of her brother, especially after he begins to develop unexplained bruises and injuries. While investigating the convoluted history of her family’s new abode with her new friend, Carlos (Fele Martínez), Regina begins to unravel a strange story that spans back 40 years and involves her father, his father (Giancarlo Giannini), a complete solar eclipse, insane cult members, murdered children and the end of the world. Will Regina be able to save her family from the grip of ultimate evil or will all of her best efforts, inadvertently, bring about the very apocalypse that she so desperately wants to avoid?

When Balagueró eases back on the narrative clutter, needless back-and-forth and pointless quick-cut editing, Darkness is actually a pretty decent “old dark house” film, albeit one with a “twist” that puts it firmly in the camp of someone like Adrian Garcia Bogliano (there are more than a few similarities to his Penumbra (2011), not the least of which is the eclipse element). The problem, as it turns out, is that the writer-director over-seasons this particular dish something fierce: the final 20 minutes are so cluttered, confusing, noisy and melodramatic as to be almost completely off-putting, despite the genuinely intriguing core story.

There’s just too much of everything: too much explanation, too much confusion, too many vague motivations, too much unrealistic interaction, too many noisy jump-scares and musical cues…stripped of all its bulky “clothing,” Darkness would be a much scrawnier film, to be sure, but it would also be one that could stand better on its own two feet. As it is, the narrative (and film) is too overladen to ever move far in any direction. It’s difficult to get fully invested in a story where new elements seem to pop up at random (the bit about the snake and the egg makes no sense, no matter how I try), while old standards like “characterization” leave and return like a wandering sleepwalker.

Lest I heap too much abuse on the cluttered narrative and stylistic issues (when the quick-cut editing falls by the wayside, cinematographer Xavi Giménez produces some suitably attractive, evocative images), Darkness is also plagued by some seriously odd, uneven performances. While Paquin has a few moments that strain credibility (her occasionally halting line delivery is a real head-scratcher), Glen is all over the place and Olin, despite her legendary status, is almost completely worthless. The character of Maria never makes a lot of sense, to begin with, but Olin’s totally “checked-out” performance does no one any favors. Each and every moment of her screentime is painful (for various reasons) and I never could see through to her character’s actual motivations: was Maria crazy? Did she hate her kids? Her husband? Did she actually care about any of it? Each and every reaction and bit of dialogue is so laissez-faire and noncommittal that Maria always seems superfluous to the larger story.

Glen, for his part, goes the full “Nicholson” here (as we all know, you never, ever go full Nicholson), which turns the film’s back-half into something of a poverty-row re-imagining of The Shining (1980): as Mark bellows, huffs, screams, rages and attacks doors with aplomb, in frantic pursuit of his wife and young son, it’s hard not to think back on the far-superior older film. Glen has moments that are nicely realized (unlike poor Olin) but he’s never a particularly believable character, which really hurts any identification we might have with him. On a lesser note, Mark’s Huntington’s Disease never seems to function as anything more than a plot device, leading him to act in whatever manner the narrative calls for at that time. For all the difference it makes, Mark could have been a recovering alcoholic, a schizophrenic or just really angry…like many of the film’s elements, the disease seems as arbitrary as anything else.

Despite my frustrations with Darkness, it’s still impossible to deny that Balagueró has some genuine skill, both as a writer and a director (here, he co-scripts with Fernando de Felipe). When the film is allowed to work on its own merits, there’s some undeniable power to be found: amidst the chaos and noise of the film’s climax, there’s some really interesting observations about familial duty, fate, the nature of reality and weird dooms-day cults. More’s the pity, then, that the whole thing collapses into a soggy mess of evil doppelgängers, frantic action, ridiculous proclamations (“Regina is in her house…in Hell!!!”) and haunted house conceits that would have been moldy decades ago (the scene where a character is pursued down a hallway by extinguishing lights is so well-worn that it’s threadbare).

As it stands, Darkness is an interesting enough part of Balagueró’s oeuvre, even if it never comes close to either its predecessor or the [REC] films that would follow. Think of it as a transitional film, a bridge between his more atmospheric chillers and the action-packed fare that would follow, that first tentative moment where one transitions from walking to running. While his future ended up suitably bright, there will always be a little Darkness in Balagueró’s rear-view mirror, for better or worse.

2/28/15 (Part Four): Making a Case For the Staycation

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Andrés Levin, Beto Cuevas, black magic, Borderland, Brian Presley, cinema, co-writers, cults, Damián Alcázar, drug cartel, drug cartels, drug dealers, Eric Poppen, extreme films, extreme violence, film reviews, films, foreigners abroad, Francesca Guillén, gory films, Greg McLean, horror, horror films, horror movies, Hostel, human sacrifice, inspired by true events, Jake Muxworthy, Marco Bacuzzi, Martha Higareda, Mexican gangs, Mexico, Movies, Rider Strong, Scott Kevan, Sean Astin, set in Mexico, torture, torture porn, tourists, violent films, Wolf Creek, writer-director, youth in trouble, Zev Berman

If there’s one thing that modern horror films seem to make abundantly clear, it’s that tourists make great cannon fodder. From Hostel (2005) to Wolf Creek (2005), from Turistas (2006) to The Ruins (2008) all the way to the frigid water of the Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (2009), horror films have taught us that foreigners abroad (usually Americans in foreign countries…fancy that!) can expect a few things: beautiful locations, sinister locals, dangerous sight-seeing and more occult ceremonies, dismemberment and torture than they can shake a stick at. Hell, under this rubric, Australia’s Greg Mclean is probably the number one bane to that country’s tourism industry: between his Wolf Creek films and Rogue (2007), his giant croc opus, it’s a wonder that any non-resident would ever want to step foot in the Land Down Under, much less poke around in its isolated, Outback areas.

Tourism-based horror films work, in many cases, because we all (Americans, in particular) harbor certain preconceived notions and prejudices about “the other”: we all want to take in and experience as much of the world as we can but there’s always the nagging notion that what you don’t know can, without a doubt, flay you alive. Meeting new people and experiencing new cultures is always a good thing, we say, but humanity’s inherent fear of the unknown is a mighty powerful primal urge to overcome. For some audiences (and filmmakers, apparently), there can be nothing more terrifying than being “stuck” in a foreign country, surrounded by strangers, unable to fully communicate, protect or look after ourselves. It’s a biased fear, of course, but aren’t all fears? After all, the difference between fearing something and respecting it is usually a pretty small step, one that begins with understanding and empathy. As the TV used to say: knowing is half the battle.

Zev Berman’s Borderland (2007) is another in the long line of “tourists in peril” films, while also slotting neatly into the “torture-porn” subgenre that was spearheaded by the likes of Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) in the mid-’00s. While I’ve never been a fan of torture-porn films, despite having seen more than my fair share – I’ll go on record as saying that the Saw films are something of a guilty pleasure, for me, while I find the Hostel films (and most of Eli Roth’s output, to be honest) to be fairly worthless, aside from the geek-show appeal – I’ve seen plenty that manage to balance their gratuitous blood-letting and suffering with actual narratives. When done right, these types of films can be unbelievably powerful, drawing us right into the dark heart of suffering and putting us uncomfortably close to the terrible action on screen. Despite some scattered issues, Berman’s Borderland ends up in the “well done” column, thanks to some atypically solid acting, a suffocating sense of helplessness and a connection to real-world events, no matter how tenuous. They’re small differentials, in some cases, but they make all the difference in a relatively crowded field.

The “other,” in this case, is Mexico: to be more specific, the violent, drug cartel aspect of Mexico that’s managed to turn the border between the U.S. and its southern neighbor into a veritable war-zone. The issue, of course, is much more complex than simply “good vs evil”: notions of societal infrastructure, politics (both domestic and international), xenophobia and good old-fashioned capitalism all play in. While the notion of eradicating the cartels is a noble one, it’s also a notion that’s steeped in wish-fulfillment as much as reality: at this point, the relationship between the cartels, Mexico’s political structure and its civilians is too intertwined to be easily severed. There’s also the underlying (and largely unspoken) notion that the United States plays a huge role in this problem: issues of supply and demand notwithstanding, the “war on drugs” has managed to turn cartels into cash cows, in the same way that Prohibition managed to give the mob a significant boost in the ’20s.

This is the framework into which we’re dropped, although the meat of the narrative is another “fish out of water” tale, involving a trio of freshly graduated, all-American high school seniors who decide to have one, last blow out in Mexico and get more than they bargained for. The trio are “types” more than individuals but that’s also par for the course: Henry (Jake Muxworthy) is the macho, cocky douchebag with a dick for a brain and an inherent dislike of the lower classes; Phil (Rider Strong) is the geeky virgin who just wants to get laid and Ed (Brian Presley) is the sensitive, nice guy (and obvious hero). After Ed “saves” a comely bartender (Martha Higareda) who ends up being more than capable of taking care of herself, the trio get a pair of bumming-around companions in the form of Valeria and her demure, religious cousin, Lupe (Francesca Guillén).

This is all well and good, of course, but the film’s opening introduced us to a severely terrifying group of Mexican drug dealers, led by the astoundingly creepy Gustavo (Marco Bacuzzi), and it doesn’t take a psychic to foretell that paths will, eventually, be crossing. When Phil mysteriously disappears after going to visit his 17-year-old prostitute “girlfriend” (she was his first, after all), Ed and Henry, along with Valeria and Lupe, scour the area, looking for any signs of him. When they run into a grizzled, former police detective by the name of Ulises (Damián Alcázar), however, they learn about the cartel and discover just how much trouble their friend (and they) are really in. As luck would have it, they’ve come to town just as the cartel’s “high priest,” Santillan (Beto Cuevas), has arrived: it’s time for a special ceremony, it seems, and Phil is the guest of honor.

Despite its unrelenting brutality, Borderland is actually a fairly thoughtful, well-thought-out film. While the camera never shies away from the violence (particularly in the incredibly unpleasant scene where a cop is tortured), it also doesn’t wallow in it: there’s never the sense that Berman has simply strung one gore setpiece to the next, ala the Hostel films. The violence is all justified within the framework of the story: Santillan and the cartel have a reason for doing what they’re doing, even if it isn’t a particularly solid one, which positions this as the furthest thing from “psycho killers hackin’ up teens.”

Unlike the recent spate of overly-glossy, polished horror films (think anything by Platinum Dunes), Borderland actually has a gritty, grainy look that really helps sell the foreboding atmosphere. At times, particularly during the opening credits, the film actually reminded me (favorably) of Tobe Hooper’s original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), although Berman’s film is nowhere near as accomplished. Cinematographer Scott Kevan, who also shot Eli Roth’s gore-tastic Cabin Fever (2002), does lose points for some unnecessarily shaky camera (especially during some nausea-inducing running scenes that would make the Blair Witch blush) but it’s never bad enough to fully pull one out of the action.

One of Borderland’s secret weapons is definitely it’s collection of bad guys. Beto Cuevas’ Santillan is a cold, reptilian, uber-polite, smart and unassuming dude, the kind of guy that you wouldn’t mind discussing art with…if he wasn’t so busy sawing you into pieces, that is. Channeling something of the cool menace of Anthony Hopkin’s legendary Hannibal Lecter, Cuevas is nothing short of masterful and Santillan is, easily, one of the scariest “real-world” villains to pop up in horror films in some time. We’ve already mentioned Bacuzzi’s freakish Gustavo (sort of a Mexican cartel Michael Berryman who shoots first and asks never), but let’s not forget Sean Astin’s stellar take on the ex-pat-turned-cartel-whipping-boy Randall: friendly, apologetic and completely mercenary, Randall is the last person you’d want watching you in this situation. Put them all together and Borderland has a better group of villains that most action films I’ve seen in a while: kudos, indeed!

While Borderland certainly plays up the popular media perception of the Mexican border as a lawless war-zone (we’re informed that the film is “inspired by real events” at the outset), it’s certainly no more xenophobic than any of the aforementioned tourist-related horror films. We spend time with not only the cartel but also the police and locals (in the form of Valeria and Lupe): it’s not a fully-fleshed portrait, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a fair sight more balanced than the typical “sneering, glowering, backwoods” take on this sort of thing.

I also appreciated that Higareda’s Valeria was never a shrinking violet, clichéd sexpot or damsel in distress: by the film’s conclusion, she’s maintained herself as a fairly independent asskicker and a worthy equal to Ed. Additional bonus points for allowing the character of Henry to develop (if ever so slightly) from arrogant asshole to properly-humbled dude after a confrontation with Gustavo: I’d change my tune awful damn quick if I butted heads with that guy, too!

Ultimately, Borderland is a well done, if decidedly unpleasant, film: despite a questionably happy ending, the majority of Berman’s movie is claustrophobic, lean, mean and engineered to pummel an audience into submission. While nothing here surprised me, necessarily, I was genuinely impressed by the way all of the moving parts came together into a cohesive, fairly unique and endlessly disturbing whole. While there might not be a shortage of tourist-in-peril or torture-porn films on the market, Berman’s Borderland manages to stand out from the crowd: sometimes, that’s all you can ask for.