The Year in Horror (2016) – The Most Disappointing Films

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2016, Abattoir, cinema, Don't Breathe, film reviews, Ghostbusters, He Never Died, horror, horror films, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, most disappointing films, Movies, Tank 432, The Conjuring 2, The Good Neighbor, The Last Heist, The Neon Demon, year in review, year-end lists

At long last, we arrive at the beginning of the end: the final breakdown for the year in horror, circa 2016. We’ll be examining the best, the worst and the ones that got away (so far) in later posts but I always like to start with the ones that coulda been contenders first. These are the films that had tons of potential (at least in my eyes), yet managed to drop the ball in some pretty crucial ways.

By this point in the year, I’ve managed to screen 179 of the 259 horror films released/scheduled for this year, meaning that I’ve seen 69% of all horror films released in 2016. Of those 179, I’ve whittled the list down to the ten most disappointing films of the year. Keep in mind that these weren’t the worst (with one exception) but they were the ones that were capable of so much more. With no further ado and in no particular order, I now present the evidence to you humble members of the online jury.

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Ghostbusters

There were a lot of routes that Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot could have taken: it could have been a straight-up nostalgia fest, full of cameos from the original duology…it could have been a sly, feminist commentary on the inanity of modern-day online fanboydom and the expectations of genre fanatics…it could have been a remake, a reboot, a realignment or any other re- that you care to add…it could have been a big, dumb, loud, CGI-heavy popcorn flick…really, the world was its oyster.

In reality, Feig’s Ghostbusters ended up being ALL of these things, which only served to dilute the final product down to the lowest common denominator. With no clear vision, the film whiplashed from snarky meta-commentary to unbelievably dumb CGI spectacle with an ease that did nothing but give me a headache. This wasn’t the worst ghostbusting-related film of 2016, by a long shot (that title belongs to the woeful Ghost Team), but it was the one that had the potential to be a neo-classic and that missed opportunity was a real bummer.

Abattoir

I happen to like writer/director/all-around maniac Darren Lynn Bousman quite a bit, finding his Repo: A Genetic Musical to be an unsung modern cult classic, along the lines of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and thoroughly enjoying his batshit crazy art projects like The Devil’s Carnival and Alleluia. Hell, I don’t even particularly mind his Saw films, even if that franchise is a study in diminishing returns.

In other words, I was really looking forward to his ingenious haunted house film, Abattoir, which featured the thoroughly unique concept of an evil man cobbling together the ultimate haunted house by cutting out particular rooms from various crime scenes and stitching them together into one Frankensteinian monstrosity. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is a logline worth getting excited for.

The actual film, unfortunately, is a complete and total piece of shit, easily the worst “film” that Bousman has released and one of the very worst films of the entire year. Nothing works, the film manages to completely squander a fantastic cast (poor Lin Shaye!) and the whole concept is completely dropped for a swing into Mouth of Madness territory that’s so inept, it feels like parody. In a year full of surprises, both good and bad, this was easily one of the worst.

He Never Died

This tale of Henry Rollins as an immortal, cannibalistic but, ultimately, very human and flawed “hero” had so much going for it (Rollins is quite good, for one) that it kind of hurts when it devolves into stupid comedy and tedious, indie film “run and guns.” There are moments where the concept is allowed to fully breathe and, for those brief moments, He Never Died is actually kind of special. For the most part, however, this is a classic case of filmmakers coming up with a better idea than they have the ability to actually portray.

The Conjuring 2

I thoroughly enjoyed James Wan’s original The Conjuring, along with the first Insidious. Since that time, however, the Waniverse has started to look suspiciously like the same film, with slightly different clothes, akin to those old RPGs where you could tell an enemy was different because they were blue instead of red.

This has got all the typical Wan trademarks: creepy old house, lots of jump scares, lots of creepy figures popping up in the background and doing creepy things, Patrick Wilson and Vera Fermiga doing their best to add gravity to the silliness…if this was a checklist, it would hit all the appropriate boxes. The problem, of course, is that none of it is actually scary or even particularly interesting, by this point, lending everything a dull sheen of “been there, done that.” Not the worst big-budget horror film released in theaters, this year, but easily one of the most forgettable.

The Neon Demon

I’ve dearly loved every single Nicolas Winding Refn film, so fully expected The Neon Demon, his first official foray into horror, to top my Best Of list for the year. As it turned out, I ended up really disliking the film, finding it to be exceptionally beautiful, visually, but completely empty and thoroughly frustrating. I’ve seen lots of year-end lists that extol the film for everything from its ultra-lush visuals to its tricky, feminist reimagining of the typical “starlet gets lost in L.A.” trope but I can’t help but feel this is another example of lauding a film for its intentions rather than its actual outcome. I can fully appreciate what Refn was trying to do and still think he’s one of the very best cinematic auteurs of our era. This doesn’t stop The Neon Demon from being a stinker, however, and one of my very biggest disappointments of the whole year.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

I love old-fashioned, austere ghost films, the more Gothic, the better. This had all the trappings, from an appropriately gauzy visual aesthetic to a supremely leisurely pace (some might call it slow but that’s easily the film’s smallest issue) but it was missing the most important aspect of any film: a genuine sense of tension, danger or any kind of stakes. More than anything, IATPTTLITH comes across as a style exercise, an attempt by a modern filmmaker to replicate an older style of genre film without really understanding what made those films work in the first place. This is too well-made to be written off as a complete loss and some of the visual effects are genuinely unsettling. For all that, however, I couldn’t help but be disappointed at what could have been, with more focus and a tighter grasp on the mechanics of the story.

Tank 432

Three things I love: British horror films, modern British war films and Michael Smiley. Tank 432 was supposed to feature all of these elements, all but assuring it a place on my favorites list. In reality, Tank 432 is an awful mess, predisposed on a twist that’s so obvious and silly that it thoroughly wrecks any of the preceding atmosphere or creepy elements. You wouldn’t think that a film about an army platoon who must take refuge in a broken-down tank from monstrous, unseen forces would be so dull, confusing and frustrating but you, like me, would be very wrong, indeed.

Don’t Breathe

I actually enjoyed Fede Alvarez’s re-do of Sam Raimi’s classic Evil Dead, so I was curious to see what the burgeoning, young filmmaker could do with an original concept. This film, about shitty young Detroiters trying to rob a blind war veteran and getting much more than they bargained for, has a lot going for it: the film careens along like a rollercoaster, there are plenty of smart, intense setpieces and Stephen Lang is an instantly iconic “villain.” In other words, a complete classic.

Or it would have been, had the actual film not been so dumb, mean-spirited and predisposed on one eye-rolling deus ex machina after another. This is the kind of film where nothing would happen if any of the characters displayed even a modicum of common sense or desire for self-preservation, the kind of movie where you shout yourself hoarse telling the on-screen idiots to just use their goddamn brains for thirty seconds. In many ways, Don’t Breathe is this year’s It Follows: hailed by everyone and their granny as being the second-coming of horror but so far below the year’s very best as to be laughable. And let’s not even get started on the turkey baster…

The Last Heist

Mike Mendez makes big, loud, dumb and relentlessly fun genre films (his Big Ass Spider! is still one of my very favorite modern cheeseball horror films), the equivalent of PBR tallboys out of an ice-filled cooler. The Last Heist, about hapless bank robbers choosing to rip off the one financial institution that happens to be frequented by a stone-cold serial killer (Henry Rollins, being Henry Rollins), has lots of silly action but there’s never a real spark or sense of unmitigated mayhem and fun. This felt like a made-for-cable movie, with all that implies, and could never quite shake the stigma. While too good-natured and zippy to really dislike, this was also rather dull and found me frequently checking my watch, a first for any Mendez film. Not a strikeout, per se, but a supremely weak bunt to first base.

The Good Neighbor

This had a great cast (Logan Miller and Kier Gilchrist are two of the most interesting young actors currently treading the silver screen and James Caan is James fricking Caan, fer chrissakes!) and a fairly interesting concept but managed to collapse into soggy, Lifetime Channel territory by the time the lame twist reared its ugly head. This is also only marginally a horror film (very marginally), making it one of the films I screened this year that doesn’t quite fit in with the rest. As such, this was a double disappointment: very little horror and a complete squandering of James Caan. Again, not the worst of the year, by a long shot, but so dull, generic and painfully obvious as to be a real chore to sit through.

The 31 Days of Halloween (2016): 10/22-10/28

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31 Days of Halloween, 8989 Redstone, cinema, Dead 7, Evil Souls, film reviews, films, Halloween traditions, horror, horror films, horror movies, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, Movies, October, The Funhouse Massacre, The Interior, The Pack, Within

As we near the end of this glorious month, I now present you with the eight films screened during the 4th Week of October: this features some of the most extreme highs and lows of the year, so enjoy the roller-coaster. After this, we only have the 30th and 31st before we can close out this year’s festivities. Fire up your Dragula and feast those blood-shot windows to the soul on the list below.

Within

Another well-made but thoroughly pedestrian and obvious haunted house film, this one is saved a bit by an absolutely batshit, brutal finale that comes out of left field. A newlywed couple and the husband’s sassy teen daughter move into a house with a bad reputation and run into lots of scary bumps in the night. If the house doesn’t get them, maybe it’ll be the pervy next-doot-neighbor, who also happens to be the neighborhood locksmith: gotta love a creep with a strategy! Well-made and acted but absolutely everything up until the last 20 minutes or so feels about as old as Stonehenge.

8989 Redstone

The hot-headed, casually racist host of a home renovation show and his obnoxious daughter have a new project, deep in the decaying heart of Detroit’s worst neighborhood. Turns out the house may be a bigger threat than the area, however, as weird things begin to happen and various workers suffer injuries ranging from bad to worse. When Rebecca begins to see visions of the house’s original owner and architect, her dad has to determine whether this is a recurrence of a previous mental breakdown or something much darker and more insidious. Despite a cheap look, an occasionally silly script and some strictly amateur acting, this actually had ideas and imagination to spare (the central concept seems to exist in the same wheelhouse as The Dark Tower and House of Leaves, which is pretty fuckin’ rad, if ya ask me) and the chaotic finale hits Fulciesque levels of insanity that were only hinted at earlier. Yeah, the ultimate resolution is a bit muddled (if I’m reading it right) but it’s a bumpy ride with some undeniably cool moments.

Evil Souls

Incredibly sleazy, often unpleasant and throughly gonzo throwback to old-school Italian horror maestros like Fulci and Soavi, Maurizio and Roberto del Piccolo’s Evil Souls definitely won’t be for everyone but it sure as hell got me nostalgic for those old grindhouse days. An insane madman named Valentine (the all-the-way-in Peter Gosgrove, doing frighteningly good work) kidnaps two women and holds them captive in his dungeon. He’s an eloquent sociopath who dresses like a turn-of-the-century gentleman and thinks he’s the Marquis de Sade. He also has some kind of a larger plan, one that involves his drug-addicted, insane prostitute sister (he’s also her pimp) and his childhood best friend, who’s now the local priest. Did I mention that his plan also seems to involve the kidnapped women’s sons and, possibly, something occult? Because it does. Or seems to.

To be honest, it’s a little hard to tell: like the best Italian horror films, this exists on pure nightmare logic, right up to the thoroughly head-scratching finale. Like the best, old-school Italian horror films, Evil Souls works splendidly despite (or even because of) its handicaps and shortcomings: it’s a film that commits to a central tone and runs with it fearlessly. Even when the film doesn’t work (which is often) or becomes almost unbearable nasty (there’s quite a bit of graphic torture and realistic practical effects), it still manages to show a rare level of restraint that keeps it from pitching wholesale into trash cinema: it just toes the art-house line, if barely. Individual results may vary but for someone who grew up on a steady diet of Italian VHS fare, this one felt right at home.

The Funhouse Massacre

Arthouse, slow-burn horror will always be my personal favorite but, sometimes, you really just need a good, old-fashioned blood-n-guts slasher: with that in mind, Andy Palmer’s The Funhouse Massacre was just the film that I needed this October. This endlessly inventive, genuinely cool, outrageously gory little jewel is an obvious love-letter to horror, in all its era, and that’s something that’s always gonna hit me hard. The plot is simple: a collection of nefarious serial killers are sprung from the local maximum security nut-hatch (think Arkham Asylum but with mild-mannered Robert Englund as warden) and take up residence in the local haunted house attraction, an attraction which happens to feature individual exhibits based on the killers’ exploits. The real killers move into the attractions, people really start dying in the middle of a crowded carnival and the whole thing builds to a truly insane Grand Guignol finale on the terror-stricken midway.

I dearly loved everything about this film, even when it veered hard into the cheese (the obvious Harley Quinn substitute was pretty silly, in a cosplay kinda way). The references to other horror characters and franchises could be really clever (the cannibal chef was named Ramsey, ala Blood Feast and Rocco the Clown was an obvious Leatherface stand-in) and the high-energy, good-humored and gory proceedings reminded me of nothing less than Waxwork, one of my all-time favorites from any era. The Funhouse Massacre is an ideal group or party, fill of quotable lines and plenty of genuine laugh-out-loud moments. Easily one of my favorites of the year and sure to be a seasonal rotation, in the future.

Dead 7

The cast list on this one should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect: Backstreet Boys Nick Carter, Howie Dorough and AJ McClean; NSYNC’s Joey Fatone and Chris Kirkpatrick; 98 Degrees founder Jeff Timmons; O-Town members Erik Michael Estrada, Jacob Underwood and Trevor Penick; TV host Carrie Keagan; Jon Secada; Everclear’s Art Alexakis. Behind the scenes, we get SyFy in the producer’s chair and Nick Carter with a screenplay credit. Plotwise, it’s a “comedic” zombie-Western take on The Magnificent Seven, featuring the boy band members in all the pivotal roles, both good guys and bad.

As someone who avoids purposefully campy and stupid films like the plague, I can only give my personal, unbiased opinion: Dead 7 was, without a doubt, the absolute nadir of a year that has seen plenty of stinky cheese. I stretch to think of another film that was so effortlessly tedious and obnoxious, so cheap-jack, manic and utterly tone-deaf: at least B.C. Butcher was under an hour…this monstrosity felt at least twice that, if not more. I’m obviously not the intended audience for something like this but, even in this case, I really did try to find something worthwhile, anything. At the end, the best that I could say is that it finally does end, eventually: that’s really the best I got, I’m afraid.

The Pack

Despite all of the tedious haunted house and possession clones, there were still plenty of absolute treasures in the 2016 horror roster and the Australian killer dog film The Pack was one of the very best…maybe Top 5, even, if I were forced to draw up a list today. Expertly plotted, beautifully shot and full of endearing, empathetic performances, everything about this sleeper is top-notch and virtually flawless. With a supremely simple set-up (a pack of uncannily intelligent wild dogs terrorize an Australian family on their isolated sheep ranch) and perfect balance between pulse-pounding action setpieces and genuine horror, this is as lean and mean as it gets. Like the best films, the less said the better: just take my advice and seek this one out ASAP.

The Interior

Easily one of the most inventive, odd films I screened this month, writer-director Trevor Juras’ full-length debut, The Interior, is pretty impossible to classify. Think of it as an odd, sardonic mash-up of Into the Wild, Dead Man and The Blair Witch Project but that’s probably as far in a box as I can put this one: a cooly blase office drone (Patrick McFadden doing magnificent work) receives some sort of bad medical diagnosis (we’re never really told what) and decides to retreat into the woods, alone, to find some sort of peace within himself.

He doesn’t quite find that but what he does find is certainly open to interpretation: one of the best things about Juras’ confident debut is that there’s no hand-holding, whatsoever. He establishes a consistent mood (helped immensely by the gorgeous forest location and some of the creepiest night scenes ever), gets us to like his main character and then lets the rest develop organically. The Interior is a slow, methodical film but it’s never boring or tedious: as with the best filmmakers, you trust that the destination will be worth the journey and, depending on your level of patience and frustratability, Trevor Juras absolutely does not let down. Eerie, smart and full of surprising humor, The Interior is definitely one of the year’s better films.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House

I was fully prepared for Oz Perkins’ second film, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, to vault right to the top of my Best of the Year list: after all, his still unreleased debut, The Blackcoat’s Daughter (nee February), received almost universal praise on the festival circuit, with the filmmaker being credited as the next-big-thing in atmospheric, slow-burn horror. Since that’s my favorite flavor, I was ready and willing to dive in with both hands.Spoiler alert: it’s not making the list.

While I Am…looks gorgeous, sort of like a Merchant/Ivory take on the Waniverse, and features more creeping dread and leisurely pacing than a funeral procession, it’s also completely empty inside, so devoid of genuine meaning and impact as to be the equivalent of cinematic cotton candy. Ruth Wilson’s constant, tedious voiceover is a huge part of the reason the film didn’t work for me (I don’t mind a good voiceover but this was just lazy writing, the equivalent of a white noise machine for sleep problems) but the biggest issue is that the film is just so damn dull. There are plenty of good ideas, here, and no shortage of striking, beautiful imagery: Perkins’ grasp of filmmaking mechanics seem pretty solid, no two ways about it. The revelation is also strong, if simultaneously open-ended, leaving the film on a satisfyingly hazy note.

On the downside, I spent almost the entirety of the film looking at my watch, which is never a good sign. Keep in mind that I’m also the target audience for this type of film: they were preaching to the choir and I still rejected the sermon…that says quite a bit, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t mind style over substance: that can produce some truly unforgettable results, in the right hands. In this case, however, the most that I can say is the film looked great and featured a refreshingly different point-of-view and focus. Next time, I’m hoping that Perkins manages to match those awesome visuals and mood to something with real substance. Call this a near miss but a miss, nonetheless.

Coming up: the final two days of the 31 Days of Halloween, including the main event! Stay tuned!