Suspiria (2018)

 

Berlin, 1977.  As the city struggles to come to grips with a series of terrorist actions by the militant left-wing Red Army Faction, dance student Patricia Hingle tries to persuade her psychotherapist that something even more sinister is afoot at the Markos Dance Academy, where she studies.  She believes that the school's matrons are a coven of witches who will consume her for their magical empowerment.

The good doctor does not take Ms Hingle's claims of witchcraft particularly seriously, though he does believe she is genuinely frightened.  When she abruptly vanishes, he begins to become concerned.  And so he should: the school most definitely is a coven of witches. 

Shortly after Patricia vanishes, a new student arrives from the US.  Suzy Bannion has no formal training, but there is raw power in her that the witches immediately sense.  They move immediately to bring her into the school, intent on harnessing this power for their own sinister purposes.

I found this remake of Dario Argento's (in my opinion, overrated) 1977 horror film to be very interesting due to how profoundly it differs from the film on which it is ostensibly based.  The very first scenes of the film establish this very different approach.  They demonstrate that this movie will be visually sombre, with lots of shadow and muted colours, in direct opposition to the deliberately garish primary colours of Argento's film.  Similarly, the soundtrack is subdued instead of bombastic.

This remake also avoids many of the narrative flaws of the original. In the original, the strangeness of the academy is very open and in your face.  Maggots shower from the ceiling, the building floor plan clearly makes no sense, and creepiness abounds.  It's not the kind of place that any halfway sensible person would choose to stay, and it's hard to believe that the weirdness would not be common knowledge.  The coven here is far more subtle in its activities.

I have to give the film kudos for actually making the dance academy setting explicitly relevant to the plot.  The link was more tenuous in the original.

On the other hand, the new version introduces its own narrative issues. I think it exposes too much of what is going on to the audience too early, and keeps it from the cast too long. The movie tends to be a bit indulgent in its use of time in general, and could easily have lost 20 minutes.

Then there is the climactic confrontation, which - while I appreciate what they were going for - was a bit of a misfire for me. I was irked that suddenly the entirety of the young and attractive female cast were naked for it, for one thing: this seemed unnecessary and a bit gauche.  It was also a victim of the film's "over long" issue. It took far longer for what actually happened to happen than it needed to. Perhaps they thought the audience needed the time to process the 'surprise' of what happened. This audience was not surprised at all, though, and thought it had been thoroughly telegraphed already.

A brave effort with some good elements, but not ultimately a success.

Black Roses (1988)

 

Nothing much ever happens in the sleepy little town of Mill Basin, a fact that its teenage inhabitants lament on a regular basis.  So there is considerable excitement among the younger set at the news that their town will host not one but four live shows by the heavy metal band "Black Roses", as they kick off their first nationwide tour.

The town's conservative parents, on the other hand, are deeply perturbed at the band's reputation for rebellious, anti-establishment lyrics.  They strongly resist allowing the event to go ahead, but eventually their concerns are mollified by the band's initially low-key appearance and by the town's mayor assuming that the band is harmless.

Only one person, high school teacher Matthew Moorhouse, suspects that the band's agenda is more nefarious than it seems, but even he does not suspect the truth: Black Roses are literal demons from hell, and these shows are a test case for their plan to transform America's youth into an army of unholy abominations!

Black Roses clearly trades on the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980s, where people genuinely worried that listening to heavy metal would lead to Satanism, and that playing Dungeons & Dragons would teach you 'real magic'.  It is tempting to laugh at the naivety of such nonsense, but as a society we continue to demonise that which we do not understand, making all kinds of baseless accusations against it, such as with the current war on trans rights.

Now by 1988 the 'Satanic Panic' was actually more or less over, in part because heavy metal had changed through the decade and the likes of Guns 'n' Roses were superseding bands like Iron Maiden as the face of the genre.  Still, it was probably still recent enough to resonate, and I don't think the film-makers in any way bought into the idea, themselves.  If they did, they wouldn't use so many real life heavy metal musicians in the cast and soundtrack, nor would the tone of the film be one of goofy, corny excess.

Because make no mistake, this is is not in any way a scary movie, nor does it make any attempt to be.  It's very much focused on delivering lots of hard rock on the soundtrack while throwing some goofy monster action and a few bosoms up on the screen.  It's pretty much tailor made for teenage boys of the era.  Or it would be, if it was better executed.

One of the movie's biggest flaws is its mostly puppet-based demons and mutations.  They generally look like under-nourished muppets, and the lack of sophistication in them is transparent from the limited views we get of them.  When one attacks Mike in his home, for instance, we pretty much only ever see its head.  The rest of it is always out of shot, likely because it didn't exist; there's just someone crawling around behind the kitchen counter, waving the head and one claw in the air above them.

This is a bit of a shame, because the band's make-up in the opening scene actually looks pretty cool (if lacking in flexibility).  I do wonder if this sequence might have had a formative experience on a young Mr Lordi.

hard rock hallelujah

The lack of motion of the monsters contributes to the overall weakness of the action scenes.  Mike's face-off with the 'big bad' is hilariously stilted and awkward, with it being clear that the supposedly terrifying demon (which is actually someone in a suit, at least, unlike many of the others) is not actually capable of doing very much except standing in one place and menacingly waving its arms about.

It's all thoroughly naff, and while ultimately, I had a decent time watching Black Roses, I was very much laughing at the film, not with it.  If you are a fan of 'so bad its good' movies, it may appeal.  Though honestly on that front it is not a patch on the director's earlier offering Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, which is gloriously terrible and which also actually had one interesting idea to go with all the cheese.

Chopping Mall (1986)

 

Park Plaza Mall has just installed a state-of-the-art security system, including shutters across all exits and three high-tech robots programmed to disable and apprehend thieves using tasers and tranquilizer guns.  A suave salesman gives the mall's business-owning tenants a demonstration of the high-tech sentinels, smilingly assuring them "Nothing can go wrong!"

Everything, of course, is going to go wrong.

And it happens to all go wrong on a night when eight 'teenage' mall employees (the actors are all clearly well into their twenties) are having an illicit after-hours party in the complex's furniture store.  When a lightning storm fries the logic circuits and safety inhibitors of the security system's computer, the would-be partiers find themselves locked inside the mall with three implacable and very, very lethal robot menaces.

Chopping Mall was produced by Julie Corman, the wife of legendary schlockmeister Roger Corman, after she landed a deal to produce a horror film set in a mall.  Mrs Corman seems to have learned a few tricks from her husband: she apparently picked Jim Wynorski to write the film on the basis that he agreed to do it for cheap if she also let him direct.

Wynorski and his cowriter Steve Mitchell packed the film with quirky little references to earlier Corman productions, including squeezing in bit roles for long term Corman collaborators Dick Miller and Mary Woronov.  As a fan of several of their earlier films, such as Little Shop of Horrors and Death Race 2000, it was fun for me to see them both turn up here, even if I didn't particularly like Ms Woronov's scene.  Her character is one of the store owners, and during the salesman's presentation they mock the killer robots for looking like "The Three Stooges" (among making other, more offensive comments).  This was a poor choice, I think.  Don't undermine your monster, movie-makers!

Once the robots go berserk, of course, no-one is mocking them.  They're running and screaming and in many cases, dying.  There's not really any narrative surprises here.  Chopping Mall is at its heart a straightforward slasher movie in the best Friday the 13th style.  The killer(s) here may be robots, instead of a psychotic human with severe hang-ups about teenage sexuality, but they're still unstoppable, implacable murderers and the script still targets the cast in descending order of their promiscuity.

Said targets are not the hapless, clueless victims we most often see in slasher films, though.  They become aware of the threat much earlier than is usual in such films and are largely proactive and cooperative about trying to find a way to survive. Their strategies were not always the smartest - and wow, they were lucky they were in a mall that was so well stocked with weaponry! - but at least they had agency in the film and showed real efforts to defeat the robots. 

Chopping Mall was a surprisingly fun bit of nonsense.  If you are a slasher fan, check it out!

Dagon (2001)

 

When Paul Marsh wakes from a dream about a mermaid with razor-sharp teeth, he's not in the best of moods.  This leads to a squabble with his girlfriend, Barbara, but the bickering is quickly forgotten when a sudden and violent storm sweeps in.

The storm drives the boat they're staying on into some rocks, smashing a hole in the hull and trapping one of their friends in the wreckage.  While that woman's husband stays with her, Paul and Barbara climb into a dinghy in a desperate attempt to seek assistance in a local village.

Unfortunately, the little town of Imbocca is most definitely not a place to look for safe harbour.  In their efforts to survive the storm, Paul, Barbara and their friends have put more than just their lives at risk ...

Despite its title, Dagon is not an adaptation of the H P Lovecraft story of the same name.  It is, however, based on another of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories, 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'.  And as an adaptation of that tale, while it differs a lot in the details - featuring in particular a lot more violence and nudity - it is actually reasonably faithful to the basic story arc.

And that combination of 'faithful in the broad strokes while adding a lot of sex and violence' should probably not be a surprise, coming as the film does from Stuart Gordon, who in 1985 gave us the wonderfully goofy squick of Re-Animator. Schlocky though that film definitely was, it was a fun watch.

Dagon is unfortunately not up to delivering the same amount of entertainment.  Some of this is the fault of the script: in particular the fact that the opening squabble on the boat doesn't make either our leading man or his love interest seem very appealing people.  Some of it is the production.  The film's action sequences are not generally well-staged and  on at least one occasion are were executed so poorly that the only fitting description is "thoroughly laughable".  The film also suffers from the inclusion of cheap noughties-era CGI, which is particularly a shame given that when it relies on old school practical effects, they're genuinely rather good.  Though very gruesome, I should note.  If you have a weak stomach for gore and grue, be warned.

 

Perhaps the biggest disappointment for me though is the cast.  Though I have to say this is not because of anything the actors do.  On the whole they are quite acceptable in their roles.  It's just that as I was watching the film, I found myself thinking on several occasions "Dang, I wish this movie was made 16 years earlier, so Jeffrey Combs could have starred - he'd have been great in this!".  And in fact, it seems that Stuart Gordon had indeed planned to do more Lovecraft-based films with Combs after 1986's From Beyond, but they didn't manage to make the films happen at that time.  A real shame, I think.  It would have got rid of the cheapie CGI, if nothing else!

One final note, because it needs to be mentioned: even for the deeply racist time in which he lived, H P Lovecraft was notoriously, egregiously racist.  This fact often came through in his work.  While the basic themes of 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' definitely reflect his xenophobia and prejudice, the film is thankfully spared the the smug, judgemental superiority of Lovecraft's narration.

Still, ultimately, I think Dagon is probably for hard-core Mythos-fans only.

Mom and Dad (2017)

 

The Ryans are a family of four with a strained relationship. Father Brent disapproves of his teenage daughter's (slightly) older boyfriend. Mother Kendall is keenly aware of the emotional distance developing between her and both her husband and her daughter, Carly. Her efforts to resolve both merely seem to exacerbate Brent's frayed temper and Carly's scorn. Only young son Josh seems more or less content, though his habit of getting into things he shouldn't do causes occasional flare-ups from the other members of the family.

Despite all that, though, they are a family and they love each other. Nothing could make any of them turn on the others. Particularly not the parents on their children, right?

Right?

Well that, of course, is exactly the scenario presented in this entertaining little comedy-horror. Somehow, through unknown means, a wave of madness is spreading. It turns the fierce love (most) parents feel for their children into savage, violent hatred. Parents across the city are engaging in brutal acts of filicide. But it only their own children who are at risk. Their behaviour toward other people is wholly unaffected.

It's going to be volatile times at the Ryan household, today ...

Despite its child-murdering premise, Mom and Dad is surprisingly fun horror comedy. ... provided you like your comedy black, that is!  It has a straight-forward hook that I think will resonate with most people.  Almost everyone has parents or children or both, and while some families are obviously much more deeply dysfunctional than the Ryans, the ideal of a more-or-less functional family is one that we see depicted in fiction all the time.

The movie profits hugely from the pairing of Selma Blair and Nicholas Cage as Mom and Dad, respectively.  The script gives Cage plenty of scope to indulge his renowned ability for histrionic, impassioned ranting, and then neatly juxtaposes Brent's always-on-the-verge-of-exploding mania with Kendall's far more considered and thoughtful approach to child-murdering.  They make a fun double act, especially as the script slyly shows their joint homicidal efforts helping them to reclaim some of the affection and camaraderie that the years of middle-class drudgery have ground away.

Blair and Cage are ably complemented by the younger cast members.  Anne Winters is good as the initially resentful and self-absorbed Carly, who suddenly finds herself thrust into the role of her young brother's protector.  Zachary Arthur is similarly good as young Josh, who wants nothing more than for things to go back to normal.

The script smartly keeps the run time lean - less than 90 minutes - and eschews too much graphic on-screen violence in favour of merely suggesting what happened, such as by the presence of a thick pool of blood on the kitchen floor, or a gory baseball bat clutched in a man's hand.  It also saves its most manic sequence for the final act, building to it through the elder Ryan's escalating efforts to slaughter poor Carly and Josh.

I enjoyed this.  Recommended for fans of horror-comedy, as well as for those who just enjoy Nick Cage being his most Nick Cage-like.

Happy Death Day (2017)

 

After a night of drunken partying, university student Theresa "Tree" Gelbman wakes up on her birthday in the dorm room of classmate Carter Davis. She ignores a phone call from her father and dismisses Carter, returning to her sorority.  Her behaviour there is no more friendly: she ignores her sorority sisters as much as she can and when Tree's roommate gives her a birthday cupcake, she throws it on the floor for having "to many carbs".

So, Tree is not winning many friends here.  And when you add in the fact that she is having an affair with her married professor, there's a pretty long list of people who might want to stick a knife in her.  Which is, in fact, exactly what someone does, that very night.

Which would make for a short film, if it were not for the fact that Tree wakes up again in Carter's bed, the memory of her own murder still fresh in her mind.

Yep, what we have here is "Groundhog Day, but a slasher movie", as Tree tries to work out who's killing her (and killing her, and killing her) and why.  And if the whole ordeal happens to teach Tree a few things about being a better person along the way, well, let's hope she'll eventually find a way to live through it and put those lessons in practice!

I thought Happy Death Day was great fun.  Jessica Rothe shows great versatility in portraying Tree's obnoxiousness at the start, and then of first her rising hysteria as she realises what is happening, before moving on to her subsequent later manic experimentation - and more - as she tries to resolve her situation.  Despite how awful her character is at the beginning of the film, she's pretty easy to root for after a couple of times through the loop.

I also that Tree isn't necessarily an easy kill.  Even the first time, she doesn't go down without a fight, and in subsequent loops she learns from previous experiences and tries to find new ways to avoid her fate.  This is a smart choice as making her scrappy makes her more relatable and easy to cheer on, even while she remains quite snotty.  Plus, it's fun to see how her efforts go awry, as they inevitably must, for quite some time!

The script does a couple of other smart things, too.  It avoids any real engagements with the question of how or why Tree got stuck in the loop to begin with, and isn't just dead.  Given her situation, I can definitely understand why this is not something that Tree - and therefore the film - spends much time worrying about.  Seizing the opportunity to survive, rather than worrying about how the opportunity came to be, is very much the name of the game.

I also liked that the film found a way to still make Tree's situation a precarious one.  Without spoiling the details, it quite smartly presents evidence that sooner or later, these loops will stop, and Tree needs to find a way to survive before they do, or she will be really for real dead dead, and not just temporarily non-breathing.

Good stuff.  I see it has a sequel: I certainly plan to check that out!

Forget Me Not (2009)

 

Sandy Channing and her brother, Eli, are teenagers on the cusp of attending college.  To celebrate the end of the academic year, they attend a party at their friend T.J.'s house. Many of the people at the party are long term friends of theirs, and the whole group of them go to the graveyard to play a spooky, ghost-themed version of 'tag'.

A new girl their age meets them at the cemetery and asks to join the game. There is some reluctance, but when she proves to already know how it works, they agree.

The new girl wins the game by evading capture the longest. She then asks Sandy if Sandy remembers her. Sandy says she does not, and the girls states, "You will," before jumping from the cliff behind her.

Sandy, understandably, freaks out.  The kids call the police, who arrive and search the base of the cliff, but are unable to find a body.

Sandy's friends are all willing to chalk off the experience as weird but ultimately unimportant - the girl probably knew a safe way down, and then ran off - but Sandy herself thinks something far more sinister is going on.  And this is, of course, the kind of movie where such suspicions are well-founded.

Forget Me Not is a tale of ghostly vengeance.  It's a fairly low budget production, a fact that occasionally undermines it.  For instance, there's a scene where someone is trapped in a "pit", and it's pretty obvious that the walls of the alleged pit are fake.  I actually saw them shift at one point.

Fortunately, the limited resources don't seem to have extended to the cast.  They are mostly pretty good in their roles, even if they're almost all clearly much older than the characters they are portraying.

Said characters, it should be noted, are frequently not especially nice people.  They're certainly not all bad enough to merit being murdered, but they're in a horror film, so I don't think it is much of a spoiler to tell you that grisly fates are definitely on the cards for at least some of them!

The variety and execution of kill scenes is a common metric of quality for hardcore fans of horror films, and if it's one that is important to you, I think Forget Me Not should satisfy.  The film's deaths are nicely varied and come with decent regularity.  The staging is not always the best, as already noted, but some are done well and there is some nicely creepy make-up at times, even if in many cases the 'spooky monsters' don't do a lot more than stand around looking ghastly.

Probably my favourite sequence of the film, though, has nothing to do with the kills.  It's an early section where we see Sandy getting ready for her day, which is intercut with a comatose hospital patient going through a similar process at the hands of her carers.  It's quite nicely done, and pleasingly avoids being too skeevy, which it could easily have become given that it involves two attractive young women bathing and getting dressed.

Overall, Forget Me Not doesn't break much new ground, but it's a relatively solid low budget horror offering.

 

The Banana Splits Movie (2019)

 

Harley Williams is a huge fan of "The Banana Splits", a successful children's television series featuring four animatronic characters —Fleegle, Bingo, Drooper, and Snorky— along with their human co-star Stevie. As a surprise birthday present, his mother Beth takes him, with his step-father Mitch, step-brother Austin and his classmate Zoe, to a live taping of the show.

Unknown to the family, or to any of the other fans queuing to get in, the studio's new vice president has decided that this will be the show's final ever episode: he considers the program an embarrassing throwback that's well past its use-by date.

However, when the animatronic denizens of the show get wind of this decision, they have different ideas, and are willing to go to any lengths to ensure the show does go on ...

This comedy horror film is ostensibly based on, and uses the characters from, the real life Banana Splits television series.  This show (which used people in costumes, of course, not implausibly sophisticated robots) ran for 2 seasons in the late 60s, but then enjoyed another 12 years of screening in syndication.  I watched them as a kid in the mid to late 70s.

I suspect the computer game Five Nights At Freddy's is probably the real inspiration, but the Banana Splits were existing designs that doubtless proved a lot cheaper to license.  Making a horror film based on the franchise did come with some other costs, though: the movie was the target of a review bombing campaign from fans of the real TV program, who were outraged at the 'desecration' of their childhood memories.  

I, on the other hand, am fully on board with the 'desecration', as long as then movie is any good.  And it is, in fact, a pretty good example of the kind of film it sets out to be.  It's not high art by any means, but overall it's an effective and entertaining little bit of gory horror-comedy.  Certainly a far more engaging watch than the similarly themed Willy's Wonderland.

Key to this film's entertainment value is Dani Kind's performance as Harley's mother Beth.  She channels great, manic "Mama Bear" energy as her character swings from appalled horror at the unfolding carnage to "nobody messes with my kids" avenging fury.

While Beth's arc is the most fun, and gives Kind plenty to do, I was happy with all the other performances as well.  All of the cast seem to be embracing the script's goofily macabre vibe and just going with it, which keeps things fun and rollicking even as the body count escalates

Speaking of escalation, I enjoyed the film's structuring of the Splits' rampage.  Their early murders are of pretty awful people, band you might even cheer the 'bad guys' on a bit for one or two of them, but once their homicidal impulses are unleashed, they rapidly become (almost) wholly indiscriminate.  The gore and the likeability of the victims pretty much rise in parallel.

Oh, and one other thing the film gets absolutely right, and which wins it huge points with my inner child: Snorky is BEST BANANA.

#TeamSnorkyForLife

A Quiet Place (2018)

 

Aliens with highly sensitive hearing take over the Earth and kill most of the human population. The Abbott family, living on an isolated farm in the middle of the forest, are among the few survivors. They take special precautions in order to avoid making noise, such as making sand paths through the forest to avoid stepping on crunching leaves.  They also do almost all of their communication through sign language, which they know due to their eldest child being deaf. 

Despite all their precautions, however, the Abbotts' existence is a precarious one.  The aliens are big, strong, fast and tough, and there are still several of them prowling the area.  

The pressure of never making a sound is unrelenting, and the strain of their situation is wearing ever heavier on the family.  Sooner or later, something is going to go wrong ... will any of them survive when it does?

A Quiet Place was a huge critical and financial success, and I can see why.  It's very effectively structured and performed.  

The film establishes its scenario and mood from the offset, with an opening sequence that not only does an effective job of communicating the 'rules' of the aliens without extensive exposition, but also makes it clear that safety is most definitely not guaranteed.

Silence is integral to the film's concept, and it commits to this.  Not only do the characters only communicate verbally in very limited circumstances, but the film itself is very sparing in its use of background music.  The film doesn't completely eliminate its use, but it definitely keeps it very pared back and subtle.  I think this was a smart choice, given the movie's theme.

Key to the film's success of course is the cast, who are uniformly strong.  They all do a good job of (often mutely) convey their emotional connection and distress.  They also do an excellent job of selling the tension of moments where the (largely CGI) monsters are prowling around.

Plot-wise, the film is mostly good.  To give credit where credit is due, the major story element that was bugging me through the first half of the movie was given a decent explanation and answer.  Still, I did think there were a few minor gaps in the logic, and they occasionally dragged me a little out of the experience.  In particular, whatever the movie claims, the aliens aren't blind - they interact with their environment too much for that to be true, grabbing onto banisters, not walking into walls by accident, and so on.  I got distracted wondering how they actually 'saw', on a couple of occasions. 

But overall any complaints I have are frankly minor quibbles.  This is a tense and entertaining film, and - as long as monster movies aren't on your 'no go' list - well worth a watch.

Bad Kids Go To Hell (2012)

 

A SWAT team barges into a school library to find a student holding an axe and surrounded by savaged bodies.

The film then jumps back to eight hours, where we see the axe-wielder, Matt Clark, arrive at the school for weekend detention with five other students.  Matt's actually technically been expelled from the school, but he's somehow talked the principal into allowing him to just serve an eight hour Saturday detention, instead.

In what quickly proves to be a recurring theme of Matt's life, however, he has picked the wrong day and the wrong detention.  After the school counsellor locks them all in the school library, without their phones or other devices, the six kids decide to have an impromptu séance.  Just for giggles, right?  But it seems to summon something, and suddenly people are turning up dead ... 

The pitch for Bad Kids Go To Hell is pretty clearly "the Breakfast Club reimagined as a horror comedy".  Matt's five detention-mates are all on the surface pretty much one for one analogues for the characters from the earlier film.  Plus, just in case you didn't spot the parallel, this film gives a small role to Judd Nelson, one of the stars of The Breakfast Club. 

It's a decent concept, but alas the execution goes wildly astray, almost from the very start.  Matt's introduction of main character is very poorly conceived.  While it does manage to establish his habit of having colossally bad luck, it also makes him look like a smug grifter as he fast talks his employer into telling his parole officer that he's at work, rather than detention.  The scene could have worked if his tone and delivery were much more desperate and pleading, rather than confident and almost authoritative.  I can only assume the flaw here lies with the direction, as the actor's performance seems otherwise solid.

Speaking of Matt's calamitous bad, some of it is pretty funny - one of the few examples of the film's efforts at humour actually landing.  Unfortunately, he's also colossally foolish in his behaviour at many points, often compounding, if not directly causing, his own misfortune.  This makes it hard to sympathise with him, at least for me.

More broadly, a lack of sympathy for the characters is a calamitous problem for the whole film.  I don't like any of these people and I therefore didn't care about them or their fates.

Finally, the true nature of the threat that looms over these students is ... well, it's absurd, and not in a "ha, that's really funny!" kind of way.  My reaction was very much "Really, this is what you're going with?".

Watching this felt like being in detention.

Suspiria (1977)

 

Suzy Bannion, a young American ballet student, arrives in Freiburg to study at the Tanz Akademie, a prestigious German dance school. Her arrival does not go well: she is caught in a torrential downpour, sees another woman flee the school in apparent terror, and then refused is entry to the building, forcing her to spend the night in town.

Perhaps not being at the school was a good thing, though, as the young woman Suzy saw fleeing gets murdered overnight.  Still, Suzy is determined to put the murder out of her mind and dedicate herself to her lessons.  Ballet is her life's ambition, after all.

But the longer she stays at the Tanz Akademie, the more she begins to suspect that there is something very, very wrong there, and her life may also be in danger ...

Suspiria was written and directed by Dario Argento, whose horror films of the 70s and 80s were often influential and successful.  It is one of his most renown works, but I was not much impressed by it.  I feel Suspiria is very much a case of style over substance.  Though to be fair, style was definitely always Argento's strong point.

And Suspiria certainly does have style in spades.  It is drenched with bright colours - reds and whites particularly - and stark, striking lighting, itself often coloured.  The camera also makes good use of shadows and pools of darkness to convey information or generate tension.

The soundtrack has also drawn a lot of attention over the years, and I ca see why.  It is cudgel-like in its approach; loud and verging on discordant. This is often effective at being unsettling, but on flip side can be hard to hear whispered conversations - of which there are quite a lot.

Conversely, much of the staging has not aged well.  There are several  knife attacks, all of which are a bit awkward and overly deliberate; and a 'bat attack' scene that induces giggles rather than gasps.

Script-wise, meanwhile, there are a lot of problems.  All the female characters are rather passive, their behaviour on the verge of just standing there and letting themselves be murdered.  There is something of an implicit explanation for that, but it's still not very satisfying.

Less satisfying still is that when Suzy finally decides things are too weird not to investigate, all the information she needs to solve things is pretty much immediately dumped into her lap.

Finally, the film never really explains how the villain's actions achieve their objective; or indeed what their objective even is, other than 'feed power to their leader'? Their intentions are nebulously defined at best and their method seems destined to draw much more attention that needed - why, if your front is a ballet school, would you target students at the school?  There's a whole town of potential victims out there that aren't obviously linked to you!

Unearthed (2007)

 

After a sinister crash on the highway in a small New Mexican town, people start disappearing and animals begin dying.  For Sheriff Annie Flynn, already facing the loss of her job after the accidental shooting death of a child, it's yet more pressure in her personal fight against the resulting post-traumatic stress and the retreat into alcohol that it has brought on.

The Sheriff's troubles are worse than even she realises, however.  The deaths and disappearances are the work of an alien monstrosity.  Bio-engineered to be all but unstoppable, it is slaughtering its way through all the local life forms in pursuit of its (murky and ultimately irrelevant to the events of the film) agenda.

No-one believes in Sheriff Flynn, not even Annie herself, but she is going to have to find some way to put a stop to this menace.

Unearthed is not good.  It features cookie cutter movie characters being killed off by a cookie cutter monster for poorly defined reasons in poorly defined footage, because the movie's always either murky or jumping around like crazy to try and keep the monster off screen.  There is good reason for that: when we do get visual effects, they are not very good.

And then there's the casting and writing of non-white characters, which is straight out of the 1950s.  The one African-American character is a walking stereotype of all the worst kinds, while the elderly Native American character waxes hippie at the drop of a hat.

And then there is the casting of former pop singer Luke Goss as Kale, a mysterious mercenary with a horrible face tattoo, who appears to be coded as an 'honorary' native by the script.  The British and extremely white Goss can usually be relied upon to deliver a decent performance in even a bad film, but he's woefully miscast and unconvincing here.  To be fair, though, I'm not sure anyone could have salvaged such a hackneyed role.

Is there any plus to the movie?  Well, the sound design is actually quite good.  The film makes good use of wet, squelching noises in the creature's attacks.  Given that most of the time we hear the monster's kills to a much greater extent than we see them, the audio needs do a lot of the heavy lifting in selling the violence, and it does the job quite well ... at least until it gets overly familiar and over-used.

Boring, listless and bad.  Steer clear.

Shivers (1975)

 

Shivers posits the idea of medical research creating 'beneficial parasites' that can could be introduced to the human body to supplement or replace malfunctioning organs.  'Beneficial parasites' is of course an oxymoron; parasites are by definition not beneficial.  A more correct term would be 'symbiotes', but either writer/director David Cronenberg didn't know that at the time, or he did not expect his audience to do so.

One member of the team conducting this research believes humans to be "too much brain and not enough guts", and secretly sets out to create a 'parasite' that will make people more sexual and less cerebral.  He incubates these creatures in his girlfriend, Annabelle.  Somehow, he expects this to have a positive outcome.

Surprise!  It does not.  The outcome is an orgy - I use that word very specifically - of sexual predation as the parasites violently attempt to spread themselves to more and more people.

Shivers was Cronenberg's third feature film.  At the time of its release it was the most profitable Canadian film ever made; and also one of the most controversial.  Its sexual and violent content offended many critics of the day, and even led to the film being debated in the Canadian parliament.

Even by today's much more permissive standards of content, parts of this film remain quite confronting.  In particular, some of the violent scenes have a significant sexual element.  There's an attack right near the start of the film for instance, where a young woman writhes, half-clothed, as she is choked into unconsciousness.  It is quite intense.  

If that kind of content is not too off-putting for you, there are some good elements to the film.  For instance, Shivers makes clever use of silence, and of the awkwardness that can exist between people within that silence.  

In other ways, though, it does show its age and limited budgets.  Scenes where the 'parasites' emerge from their human hosts definitely look dated and unconvincing.  They're not helped by the dubious quality of some of the supporting acting, either.

The film also begins with an introductory commercial for the apartment complex where its events takes place. This is hilariously dated: the place looks drab and grim and thoroughly unappealing, and the 'Olympic sized' swimming pool they claim to have is clearly at most half that length.  But perhaps that is deliberate irony: the drabness could be seem as a manifestation of the "too much brain and not enough guts" concept that the 'parasites' are supposed to address.

Overall, I think Shivers is stronger in its build up to the 'parasite' outbreak than it is once the outbreak actually happens.  Once it takes that step, much of the tension leaks out of the film and we mostly just titillation and violence (some of it very poorly staged) instead.

70s cinema was big on "they look like us but they're wrong inside" wasn't it?  This film, Future World, Invasion of the Body Snatchers ... there is a real theme at work.  Shivers is no Body Snatchers, but even at its schlockiest, it is considerably more entertaining than the turgid Future World.

October 2022 Schedule

 

As usual, my October reviews will all be horror-themed.  They will be posted on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays.  Regular reviews will resume on Friday, November 4th.