Trick 'r Treat (2011)

Anthology films are common enough in the horror genre that Horror Movie A Day has totted up an impressive 48 reviews of them during its lifetime.  Many of these tend to just string a series of short films together, one after the other, such as with Tales from the Darkside.  This film, on the other hand, takes a more complex approach with four different but related stories each evolving over the course of the movie.  It does a pretty good job of this integration, and - probably even more importantly - the individual stories are also pretty fun.

So as you might deduce from the title, Trick 'r Treat is a Halloween-themed film, which made it a natural choice for my review on October 31, really.  All four of its stories revolve around Halloween festivities in the same small town, with the characters from each subsection interacting with each other in more or less significant ways.

Without going into too many spoilers, the four basic subsections of the film involve a serial killer, a group of young women on the prowl, a bus full of murdered children, and the charming little fellow in the image above.  His name is Sam.  Sam takes Halloween seriously.  Sam does not like it if you don't treat the holiday with respect.  And you trust me, you don't want to upset Sam.

Deftly balancing creepiness and (dark) comedy, Trick 'r Treat is a fun little horror film with a surprisingly recognisable cast.  If you like the spooky and the ooky, give it a watch.

The Girl With All The Gifts (2016)

Every morning, the soldiers come to Melanie's cell-like room.  One of them covers her with a rifle while the other straps her into a wheelchair, binding her feet, hands and head so that she can't move any of them.  Then they wheel her to her lessons.  On good days, Ms Justineau will be there to teach the class.  She's the only grown-up who doesn't treat the children like rabid animals, and Melanie idolises her.

Of course, there are very good reasons most of the adults treat the kids the way they do, and before too much of the film elapses, Melanie will get a first hand demonstration of them.

So I doubt I am spoiling anything much by mentioning that this is a zombie film.  Even if you hadn't guessed something of the fact from my first paragraph, the quote in the DVD cover image above drops that spoiler on you.

You shouldn't believe everything in that quote, though, because The Girl With All the Gifts is actually a much better film than 28 Days Later.  The nature of the zombie menace is more interesting, and we have a much more interesting group of characters through which to experience it.  All the main players have their good and bad points, and when they act - for good or for ill - they do so for sound and solid reasons.  There's no need for handwaves like "oh well Chris Ecclestone's character is just a nutter" here.

If you're at all into zombie movies, put this on your list.

The Day (2011)

A man scavenges through an abandoned suburb, looking for food.  As he does so, unseen assailants abduct his wife and child.

Some time later, the same man walks along an isolated road with four others.  The colour in the film has now been desaturated to the point of almost-but-not-quite black and white.  The five travellers are nervous about "Them" being in the area, but with a storm approaching and one of their number already ill, they decide to take shelter in an isolated farm house.

Of course, a building can be a prison as easily as a protection, and if "They" come, then the quintet will find themselves under siege.

So far, so Night of the Living Dead, and I know of at least one person who turned the film off right about here on the assumption it was just another Romero rip-off.

But I'm pleased to say that unlike some of the other films I've reviewed this month, The Day actually has a few surprises to spring on the audience.  It also has conspicuously better fight choreography than is the norm for lower budget offerings, with most of the action feeling very convincing and visceral.  There are a few times where the CGI gore is somewhat unconvincing, but when characters swing weapons in this, it genuinely feels like they are trying to land a blow on an enemy.

I'm not going to spoil the wrinkles that The Day has to offer, because I think the film profits from having you discover them as you watch.  But if you've ever enjoyed a zombie film, I think this movie is worth adding to your list of things to see.

Manhunt (2008)

It's interesting watching this film so soon after Them, because it really does bring home the technical skill of the French/Romanian film.

Like Them, this film (named Rovdyr in the original Norwegian) features a group of everyday people unexpectedly coming under persistent and unexplained assault by an anonymous group of aggressors.

The everyday people in this case are a group of soon-to-be college students, plus a couple of incidental folks they encounter, and the scene of the attack is up in the isolated backwoods of the Norwegian countryside.  Our protagonists are there for a hiking trip, though mostly they seem to be squabbling with each other, even after they start getting targeted by pyscho-killers.

Manhunt is an adequate enough slasher film of the "the entertainment is mostly in the imaginative violence" kind that was so prominent back in the 80s.  The gore effects are good, the acting - as far as I can tell, given it's in Norwegian - seems fine, and the script moves along at a decent pace.

But if you're not a full-on slasher aficionado (and possibly even if you are), you're likely to find yourself asking "is this it?".  Manhunt is so busy ploughing through its violent plot points that it very rarely stops to take a moment to actually be tense.  Despite all the gory antics, the film lacks any real sense of menace.

If you want something scary, you need to look elsewhere.  And if you just want to see a bunch of teens getting murdered in the woods ... well you'd be better off watching one of the better Friday the 13th films; say number 4 or number 7.

Zombie Apocalypse (2011)

I guess on the plus side, when you call your zombie apocalypse movie Zombie Apocalypse you are doing your prospective audience the service of providing advance notice of how creatively bankrupt your film is going to be.

So what we have here is your standard "flesh-eating undead destroy civilisation" type premise.  Six months after the collapse, three young people emerge from the isolated cabin where they've been hiding and go in search of other survivors.  What they find instead is zombies.  One of them is killed, and the other two look set to join him, when four strangers turn up and slaughter the undead in an orgy of badly choreographed melee and gunplay action.  Get used to seeing actors awkwardly swing swords and hammers at zombies that aren't actually on screen with them: it's a really cheap if thoroughly unconvincing way to stage a fight scene.

The six survivors join forces and set off toward Catalina, as the newcomers have heard that there is a safe zone on the island.  Along the way, they will naturally run into a bunch more undead.  Distractingly, the same recognisable extras will be used in a couple of scenes that are supposed to take place many miles apart.  It's that kind of movie.

It's also the kind of movie where they position one character as the audience surrogate / point of view character, set up what looks like the start of an arc for her, and then kind of shrug and forget about her in the last forty minutes when they introduce several new characters and suddenly promote some of the other survivors to more prominent roles.

Anyway, zombie "action" ensues for a while, and the film finally delivers some memorable if extremely random cheese in its last ten minutes, and then it ends.  That final, amusingly stupid scene can't redeem the ninety minutes that came before it, and they certainly aren't enough to make me give the film any kind of recommendation, but they do make me a little less bitter about the time I spent watching this when I could have been re-watching Mega-Python vs Gatoroid instead.

Them (2006)

As you can probably tell from the image above, this is not the wonderful 1954 film about giant ants.  Instead it is Ils, a French-Romanian film about a young couple terrorised in their isolated home by a mostly-unseen group of attackers.

Because the film's premise requires that there be only two characters for much of its run time, we begin with a largely unrelated sequence where a mother and daughter are forced off the road late at night, and then killed.  This five minutes or so relates to the main plot only in that one of the main characters sees the dead women's car the next day, and the perpetrators of the attack are presumably the same group.  The sequence does however establish the main basic shot of the film, which is to have the camera linger on the face of a terrified person as they glance wildly around, nervously reacting to every slightly-too-loud bit of background noise.

That probably sounds dismissive, and on some level it is.  Them/Ils is fundamentally a very slight film, content-wise.  In that regard, it is something of a triumph of style and technique over substance, as it does genuinely build and maintain tension through much of its relatively short run time.  On the other hand, the actual specifics of the plot are more than a little shaky, and its sympathetic characters are drawn in only the sketchiest of manner.  In the latter case, I'm reminded of James Herbert's The Rats, where he would repeatedly introduce a character, give you a page of backstory on them, then have them savagely killed and eaten by mutant rodents.

Of course, sometimes less is more.  The lack of information we have about the attackers is part of what makes them scary, and frankly the more the film reveals about them the less effective they become as a source of menace.  I suspect the movie would be even more effective if we never learned anything about them at all.

At the end of the day, if you just want a scary movie and you are willing to switch your higher cognitive functions off to get that animal brain chill thrill, then Them delivers.

Nosferatu: the Vampyre (1979)

Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to sell a house to the reclusive Count Dracula, despite the manifold warnings of the locals that the Count and his castle are bad, bad news.  When the unnerving, rat-toothed Count becomes besotted with an image of Harker's wife (who has been inexplicably re-named Lucy, instead of Mina), old Jonathon starts to regret his pigheadedness ... for death now draws close to his home and family.

If you search online for reviews of this remake of the 1922 classic Nosferatu, you'll find glowing accounts from multiple sources, including the late Roger Ebert.

I have no idea why.

Yes, the film is visually quite striking at times.  But artfully shot landscapes and re-mixes of the clever imagery of the original film do not make a good movie.  Not by themselves, anyway.

Perhaps the film works better in German.  It was filmed in both that language and in English, and given the heritage of the actors and writers it's entirely possible that the acting and the script both suffered in translation.  Certainly I hope that it did, because in English they're both at a community theatre levels.  When you're making a sombre horror film and the dialogue feels like a retread of Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch, something has gone wrong.

Ironically, this is a remake of a silent film that I suspect would itself work better as a silent movie.  Mute all the dialogue and add a few text interstitials, and the film would at least be a treat for the eyes without being an assault on the ears.

Or you could just watch F W Murnau's original film, instead.  That's what I'd do.