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Tag Archives: Muse Watson

7/5/15 (Part One): Home is Where the Haunt Is

08 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by phillipkaragas in Uncategorized

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Barbara Niven, cinema, dead children, father-son relationships, film reviews, films, ghosts, grown children, haunted houses, horror-comedies, Housebound, Jack Plotnick, Jeffrey Combs, John Waters, Kat Dennings, Lucas Lee Graham, Mackenzie Phillips, Mark Bruner, Matthew Gray Gubler, McKenna Grace, Mel Rodriguez, Michl Britsch, Movies, multiple writers, Muse Watson, Odd Thomas, paranormal investigators, racists, Ray Santiago, Ray Wise, Richard Bates Jr., Ronnie Gene Blevins, Sally Kirkland, scatological humor, seances, seeing ghosts, Sibyl Gregory, silly films, Soska Sisters, Suburban Gothic, suburban homes, suburban life, suburbia, The Frighteners, Under the Bed, writer-director-producer

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Ah, suburbia: endless rows of identical houses, with identical lawns, with identical Suburbans parked in identical carports, tended to by identical suburbanites as they go about their virtually identical lives. For many people, suburbia is the very picture of success: after all, what really says “You’ve made it” more than your own house, family, steady job and reliable source of transportation? For the outsider, misanthrope and loner, however, the very concept of suburbia can be a kind of hell on earth: the place where all dreams go to become pureed into easily digestible slop. As the Descendents so aptly put it: “I want to be stereotyped…I want to be classified…I want to be a clone…I want a suburban home.”

For filmmakers, the concept of the dark underbelly of suburbia is nothing new: after all, films like The Stepford Wives (1975), The Amityville Horror (1979), Neighbors (1981), Parents (1989), The ‘Burbs (1989),  American Beauty (1999) and Donnie Darko (2001) have been equating cookie-cutter neighborhoods with existential dread for decades now. To this storied tradition we can now add writer-director Richard Bates Jr’s Suburban Gothic (2014): proving that there’s nothing wrong with ambition, Bates Jr takes the aforementioned suburban angst films and throws in elements of “I see ghosts” films, ala The Frighteners (1996) and Odd Thomas (2013), as well as “grown children moving back home” films, such as the instantly classic Housebound (2014) and the less successful Under the Bed (2012). If Suburban Gothic never comes close to reaching the heady heights of Housebound, there’s still enough silly, funny and outrageous material here to give genre fans a grin from ear to ear. Plus, it’s got Ray Wise: any film with Ray Wise is, of course, automatically better than any film without him…that’s just basic math, amigo.

Poor Raymond (Criminal Minds’ Matthew Gray Gubler) is in a bit of a pickle, the same conundrum that might befall many twenty-to-thirty-somethings: he’s over-educated and under-employed. Despite having his MBA, Raymond must swallow the bitterest pill of all and move back in with his over-protective, smothering mother, Eve (Barbara Niven), and obnoxious, disapproving and casually racist father, Donald (Ray Wise, swinging for the rafters), an event which is sure to put a crimp in any attempt he can make to take control of his life.

You see, Raymond is a bit of a mess: bullied as a child about his weight and “gifted” with the ability to see ghosts, he escaped his one horse town as soon as he could, hoping to put as much distance between him and the past as possible. Given to wearing outrageously showy clothes (his bright, purple scarf is a definite highlight), Raymond couldn’t be more out-of-place in his old hometown, especially once he ends up back in the sights of former bully Pope (Ronnie Gene Blevins) and his small crew of miscreants. Everyone in town is glad to see that Raymond failed at life, since it (somehow) validates their own humble existences. Everyone, that is, except for Raymond’s former classmate, Becca (2 Broke Girls’ Kat Dennings), who now tends bar at the local watering hole. To her, Raymond was always the only interesting person in town and she’s mighty glad to have him back, even if she has a snarky way of showing it.

Just in time for his homecoming, however, some truly weird shit has started to happen, seemingly centered around the makeshift childs’ coffin that Donald’s gardeners have just dug up in the yard. Before he knows what’s going on, Raymond is experiencing the same ghostly visions that he used to have, this time involving a sinister little girl. As the occurrences become more pronounced, Raymond and Becca are convinced that a wayward spirit is in need of a peaceful journey into the light, while Donald and Eve are convinced that their son is losing his ever-lovin’ mind. As Raymond and Becca dig deeper into the history of the house, however, they begin to realize that the spirit in question might not be that of a little lost girl: it might just be something a bit more on the “extreme evil” side of things. Will Raymond and Becca be able to set it all to rights or will this humdrum slice of suburban life end up destroying them all?

My anticipation level for Suburban Gothic was pretty high, right out of the gate, for one very important reason: I pretty much adored writer-director Bates Jr’s debut, the outrageous Excision (2012), a slice of high school life that managed to combine Grand Guignol gore with fanciful dream sequences and arrived at a wholly unique, if often repugnant, place that wasn’t so far removed from what the Soska Sisters did with their stunning American Mary (2012). Excision was the kind of debut that puts a filmmaker firmly on my radar, which leads us directly to the sophomore film, Suburban Gothic. If his newest possessed a tenth of the gonzo energy of his first, this seemed like a pretty sure-fire no-brainer.

In reality, Suburban Gothic is a good full-step (certainly at least a half-step) down from Bates Jr’s debut, although it’s still a thoroughly enjoyable romp on its own terms. The big difference ends up being tonal: unlike Excision, which buried its blackly comic sensibilities under a lot of very unpleasant material, Suburban Gothic is a much sillier, goofier affair. Nowhere is this made more explicit than the impossibly silly scene where Raymond watches his toenails rise and fall to the tune of the old chestnut “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” Shoddy CGI aside, the scene has the feel of something truly slapstick and goofy, perhaps closer to The ‘Burbs than anything in Bates Jr’s debut.

This “silly” elements end up seeping into almost every aspect of the film: John Waters shows up as the blow job-obsessed head of the local historical society, the medium’s daughter is named Zelda (et tu, Poltergeist (1982)?), Raymond and Becca dress up in the most ridiculous ghost costumes ever (think Charles Schultz), anonymous hands grab Raymond from every-which direction and there’s more mugging going on than a thug convention. In one of the film’s most notable bits, Raymond masturbates while checking out his favorite site, “Latina Booty,” as an overhead light slowly fills with “ghostly” semen: at the “appropriate” moment, the light shatters, showering poor Raymond in about fifty gallons of spooky spunk. Disgusting? You bet yer bottom dollar! Terrifying? Not quite.

The aforementioned example, however, is also a good example of Suburban Gothic’s ace-up-the-sleeve, as it were: for all of the film’s silliness and scatological humor (along with the jizz, we get a lovingly filmed vomiting scene and a nice, long shot of a turd in a toilet), there’s also genuine intelligence and love for the genre. The light gag might be an easy-shot gross-out joke but it’s always a subtle, kind of brilliant nod to Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead (1981). There’s also a not-so subtle reference to del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), lots of visual ques for The Amityville Horror and Poltergeist and plenty of cameos by genre royalty (the legendary Jeffrey Combs gets to play a bugshit-crazy doctor (natch), while the Soska Sisters pop up in a crowd scene).

While the actual plot is nothing revolutionary, Suburban Gothic is such a good-natured, eager-to-please popcorn flick that it’s never painful to watch: the CGI is fairly well-integrated (save that rather dreadful toenail bit) and if the color-timing on the cinematography seems constantly off (the film has an odd red cast that’s pretty noticeable), cinematographer Lucas Lee Graham (who also shot the much more striking Excision) serves up plenty of nicely composed, evocative images.

On the acting side, Gubler is pitch-perfect as the sarcastic, quietly suffering schlub who must swallow his distaste for everything in order to save his (decidedly undeserving) childhood home. Gubler has a rare ability to mix wiseacre dialogue delivery with Stoogian physical comedy, an ability which serves him well here: one of the film’s easy highlights is the hilarious scene where Raymond accidentally drops an ice cream cake, over and over, until he finally stamps on the damn thing in an abject display of childish tantrums writ large.

While Dennings takes a little longer to get revved up (her early scenes have a rather distracting “I don’t give a shit” quality that’s off-putting), she fully comes into her own by the film’s final reel and her and Gubler make for a believable enough couple. Although she’s never as consistent as Gubler, Dennings shows enough steel, here, to make me interested in her next move: here’s to hoping she spends a little more time in the horror genre…we could use a few fresh faces!

While Niven is fun as Raymond’s mom, Wise really gets to run roughshod over the proceedings: whether he’s proclaiming that all of his Latin American workmen are “Mexicans,” telling his son to “take a knee” as he rolls up to him in a squeaky office chair or apologizing to his black football players for his lack of “grape pop,” Wise is an absolute blast. If anything, his performance as Donald makes a nice comparison to his role as Satan in Reaper, albeit tempered with more than a little lunk-headedness. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if there’s ever a Mount Rushmore for iconic genre personalities, Wise is guaranteed to be there.

Ultimately, Suburban Gothic is a thoroughly entertaining, amusing and mildly outrageous horror-comedy: fans of this particular style will find no end of delights, I’m willing to wager, although I still found myself slightly disappointed by the time the credits rolled (the less said about the ridiculously sunny coda, the better). Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by standout films like Housebound and The Frighteners, a pair of horror-comedies that are pretty much the first and last word on this particular subject…perhaps I was hoping for something with a little more bite, ala Excision. Whatever the reason, I have no problem whatsoever recommending Suburban Gothic (provided, of course, that potential viewers are prepared for the often rude humor), although it’s not quite the Richard Bates Jr joint that I hoped for.

I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that Bates Jr is going to become a force to reckon with in the next several years. If that doesn’t blow yer toenails back, pardner…well, I don’t know what will.

10/17/14 (Part Two): The Scarecrow That Wasn’t

07 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by phillipkaragas in Uncategorized

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31 Days of Halloween, abandoned plantation, Alex Turner, American Civil War, cinema, cornfields, curses, Dead Birds, extreme violence, favorite films, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, Henry Thomas, horror, horror film, horror films, horror movies, horror westerns, Isaiah Washington, Mark Boone Junior, Michael Shannon, Movies, Muse Watson, Nicki Aycox, North vs South, Patrick Fugit, racism, scarecrows, set in 1860s, Simon Barrett, slavery, Steve Yedlin, stolen gold, The Burrowers, voodoo curses

dead-birds-movie-poster-2004-1020344598

In the world of horror films, hyphenates and hybrids are king: horror-comedies, sci-fi horror, teen slasher flicks (as opposed to geriatric slasher flicks, one assumes), rom-zom-coms, found-footage films, military-based horror films…if two disparate styles/genres/things can be forcibly jammed together, the horror industry has probably already done it. Of all of these various amalgams, however, one of the most under-represented, but endlessly entertaining, variations must certainly be the horror-Western.

While horror-Westerns appeared to have a bit of a renaissance in the ’50s and ’60s (albeit one composed entirely of questionable fare like Billy the Kid vs Dracula (1966) and The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956)), you can count the number of “modern-day” horror-Westerns on a remarkably small number of fingers. Among exceptional films like The Burrowers (2008) and Ravenous (1999), there are also odious entries like the obnoxious Wesley Snipes-starring turkey Gallowwalkers (2012) and The Quick and the Undead (2006): while a Western setting can be glorious fodder for a horror film, it can also lead to any number of tired, stupid “zombie gunslinger” clichés, lazy ideas that are easily as tedious as cheap, cash-in found-footage films or dime-a-dozen zombie flicks.

Of the modern-day horror-Westerns that “get it right,” Alex Turner’s Dead Birds (2004) is easily one of the highlights, ranking right there with the aforementioned Ravenous and The Burrowers as some of my favorite modern horror films. There’s a quiet elegance to Dead Birds that’s almost hypnotizing, a notion of stepping off the beaten path and into a world that’s just slightly askew from ours. Thanks to an excellent script by genre mainstay Simon Barrett and some truly gorgeous cinematography courtesy of frequent Rian Johnson collaborator Steve Yedlin, Dead Birds is a subtle chiller that looks great and is smarter than the average bear. The resulting film is a slow-burner that still manages to incorporate jump scares (albeit fewer than the typical modern horror film) to good effect, while offering up an ending that should give audiences something to mull over for days to come.

The film begins in Alabama, in 1863, at the tail-end of the American Civil War. A group of gunmen – William (Henry Thomas), Sam (Patrick Fugit), Joseph (Mark Boone Junior), Clyde (Michael Shannon), Todd (Isaiah Washington) and Annabelle (Nicki Aycox) – have just made off with a large shipment of gold after a brazen, bloody bank robbery. After making it out of the town, the group decides to bunker down at an old homestead, the Hollister place. When they finally make it to the place, it ends up being a sprawling, abandoned plantation, the main house decrepit and unbelievably creepy at the end of a massive cornfield. Trudging through the wall of corn, the group makes two equally unsettling discoveries: a scarecrow that’s probably a human body stuck up on a pole and a bizarre, small, hairless creature, vaguely humanoid in shape, that Sam handily kills with a bullet to the head. As foreboding moments go, it doesn’t get much more foreboding than that.

Once the group makes it to the farmhouse, the usual tendencies to fight and form sub-groups take over: Clyde and Joseph hate that they’re getting paid as much as Todd, who’s black, and scheme to keep all the gold for themselves; William and Annabelle continue the courtship that appears to have begun in a military field hospital and Sam seems to be getting more fidgety and paranoid by the minute. When the group begins to see strange apparitions throughout the house, demonic things that look like children with hollow, empty eyes, they come to the realization that they might have stepped smack-dab into quite a bit of trouble. As the group try to make sense of what’s going, they’ll gradually come to learn the full story of the plantation’s former owner and the terrible steps he went through to get back his lost love. If they’re lucky, the group will make it out with their hides, if not their minds, intact. If not, however, they’ll find themselves as just another part of the plantation’s terrible past, trapped in the cornfield until the end of time.

There’s an awful lot working in Dead Birds’ favor (great cast, good effects, fantastically creepy setting, authentic period detail) but the feather in the cap definitely ends up being Simon Barrett’s exceptionally sharp, intelligent script. Rather than traffic in tired horror movie clichés (other than the nearly ubiquitous “scary-faced” people, of course), the film comes up with a fresh, nicely realized mythology of its own, one that manages to incorporate voodoo curses, demons and no small amount of irony. In a genre where story often feels like something you trip over on your way to the next gore shot, Dead Birds is definitely a breath of fresh air.

As a horror film, Turner’s movie hits all of its marks: the violence can be sudden and intense, the atmosphere is thick with tension and the scares are genuine and frequent. While the film doesn’t really traffic in setpieces, ala something like Suspiria (1977), there are still plenty of memorable scenes, such as the moment in the final third where we get a good look at the scarecrow and some really spooky bits involving the demonic children. Unlike more “cookie-cutter” films, we get to know and like (for the most part) the characters in Dead Birds, making their inevitable fates all that much more impactful.

In particular, Henry Thomas (yeah, Elliott from E.T. (1982)) is a great square-jawed protagonist, while genre vet Michael Shannon and Sons of Anarchy’s Mark Boone Junior make a great pair as the evil-leaning Clyde and Joseph. Most importantly, the ensemble works really well together, bringing a sense of cohesion to the production that’s likewise missing in more slap-dash films. None of these characters exist as mere cannon fodder, which makes the overall film that much more meaningful.

Despite positively adoring Alex Turner’s debut feature, I ended up being massively let-down by his follow-up, the Iraq-set Red Sands (2009), a sloppy affair which was full of great ideas and ramshackle execution. Here, Turner gets everything just perfect, turning out an absolute modern classic, in the process. Here’s to hoping that Turner has another Dead Birds up his sleeve for the future: films like this don’t come along every day but you can’t fault me for being greedy and wanting a few more.

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