100 Feet (2008)

This is the film for which I actually purchased this "Horror 4 Pack" and I'm pleased to say it turns out to be a pretty good little ghost story.

Marnie Watson killed her abusive husband Mike in self-defence and served several years in jail as a result.  She's now been released into house arrest.  She has to wear an ankle bracelet than can never be more than 100 feet from the detector in the hallway of her home, which means she can just reach the front door, but no further.

As you might imagine, it makes for a rather lonely existence.  The only people Marnie speaks to with any regularity are the young man who makes deliveries from the local market - who seems rather taken with her - and her husband's former partner on the police force.  Who it is safe to say is no fan of Marnie's.

Of course, Marnie's life would probably be bearable, if a bit tedious, if being isolated in the house was all she had to worry about.  Unfortunately for her, there's also the matter of her husband's ghost.  It seems that dead though he may be, Mike plans to keep on smacking his wife around.

100 Feet is not a movie that mucks about.  Mike-the-ghost makes his first appearance less than twenty five minutes into the film, and Marnie doesn't take long to try and fight back as best she can, given that she's up against a ghost.  This is a smart decision, I think, as is the fact that the film's back story gives obvious reasons why the ghost wouldn't simply kill Marnie.  Perhaps Mike is simply continuing his previous abuse, without real awareness that he's passed on.  Perhaps if he kills Marnie he'll actually cease to exist.  This haunting is a very personal one.

While it is not free of missteps, this is on the whole a well put together ghost film.  You should definitely check it out if that's your sort of thing.

A Haunting in Salem (2011)

A Haunting in Salem continues the "slightly better than the last one" pattern of the first two films from this quartet.  And it turns out that comparing this movie to The Amityville Horror is pretty apropos, because they have strikingly similar scripts.  Both feature a house that was once associated with killings; both have a family moving into said house; both families have a father who is suffering from PTSD; both families are plagued by a supernatural menace.

Fortunately for this film, it is executed better on pretty much every front.  For instance, the script actually mentions that the dad has PTSD, rather than just having him act like a crazy person - and his behaviour is much less over the top and nutty.  The film also eschews the whole 'found footage' thing, which is a good call, not least because it means we don't have to put up with all the "corrupted video" nonsense the last two films used so much..

Then there's the cast.  The four actors cast as the family are all solid, particularly Bill Oberst Jr, who plays the dad.  The supporting actors are a bit more uneven, but they're not actively distracting at least.

Of course, we're still talking about a cheapie horror film that was filmed in a brisk 12 day shoot.  Artistry is bound to give way to efficiency in such circumstances, particularly when you consider the film was shot in Native 3D.  The direction is functional but humdrum, kind of the IKEA furniture of film-making.  The script also doesn't really manage to change gears well as it escalates the supernatural shenanigans.  For instance, there's quite a nicely creepy scene early on, involving a shower drain.  It works because it is quite low key.  Later, when we get to much more overt "ooga booga!" type stuff, the sense of creepiness actually dissipates.

So yeah, this is not good enough that I would actively recommend it, but it is still easily the best movie of this set so far.  Hopefully the last film (which is actually the movie I bought the pack to get) will be better again.

Arthur & the Invisibles 3: The War of the Two Worlds (2010)

This film begins with a 60-second recap of the first two movies that mainly serves to underline how superfluous the second film really was.

I'm pleased to say that this third entry in the trilogy is a significant step up from the middle chapter, but that is frankly a very low bar to clear.  I mean you'd probably have to dig a bit before you could set the bar up.

So Maltazard has grown to human size and is at loose in our world, while Arthur and his friends are stuck in the tiny world of the Minimoys.  Apparently that makes them two millimetres tall (about 1/12th of an inch, for you American types), though the films are kind of inconsistent on how they actually scale things on screen.

Anyway, Arthur and Co set out to find his grandfather's potion, which can make a Minimoy grow to human size, but said potion is also in Maltazard's sights, as he wants to enlarge an army of Mosquito warriors to take over the human world.  Quite why he had the last film's highly complex plan to get himself embiggened when there was a potion for it all along, I don't know.  The film appears to hope you won't think to ask that (nor, presumably, are you supposed to ask about the shrinking potion they later introduce, what with "it's really tough to get to the Minimoy world" having been a major plot point of the last two flicks).

There are some decent action set pieces in this final entry of the film, and even a few moments of comedy that work.  They tend to belabour those few moments into the ground when they do happen, of course, but a few hits on the funny bone are better than none.

This film is not terrible, but it really isn't in the class of your Pixar, Disney or Laika films.  There are plenty of better options for entertaining your wee ones (and yourself, for that matter).

The Amityville Haunting (2011)

A reviewer at Dread Central said "a part of me wonders if the only reason The Amityville Haunting even exists is because someone made a bet that they could dethrone Amityville 3D for the title of worst 'Amityville' movie of all time".

Bear that in mind when I tell you that this film is superior to Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes.  Both films are utterly unconvincing "found footage" affairs, but in this one the acting's a little less dire, the script significantly less dull - not good in anyway you understand, but gonzo enough to deliver a few moments of amusement - and there's not that whole bad taste element of making the victim into the monster, as was done in Anneliese.

In case you've been living under a rock for the past forty years, the whole Amityville thing started in 1974 when Ronald DeFeo Jr shot and killed his family.  Probably, anyway.  DeFeo initially blamed a hit man, then confessed to all the killings, and has offered several other versions of events in the years since (generally blaming his sister Dawn for a lot of the deaths).  The first people to move into the house after the killings left it after only 28 days, claiming they had been terrorised by paranormal phenomena.

Although no-one else who has subsequently lived in the house has noticed anything unusual, the whole thing has led to the production of no less than seventeen supernaturally-themed films as of the time of writing (this movie was the ninth).

So basically the premise of the film is that a family moves into the house, and "spooky" stuff ensues.  Some of this spooky stuff seems to involve the ghostly presence of Ronald DeFeo Jr, which seems a bit odd since he isn't dead, but like I said - the script is kind of goofy.  For instance, the father's behaviour throughout comes across as somewhat imbalanced.  I get the feeling the writers may have been aiming for the idea that he's a traumatised veteran; certainly he talks almost entirely in military terminology; but they appear to have overlooked the need to actually establish this fact about the character at any point.

I got some unintentional amusement out of The Amityville Haunting, but as an actual scary movie, it's definitely a failure.

Orphan Black, Season 1 (2013)

Ten months after running out on her life, Sarah Manning returns home with only one thing on her mind: getting custody of her seven year old daughter Kira.  A task that, given her 'colourful' past, may not be possible within the confines of the law.

Her quest gets rapidly derailed though, when a woman commits suicide right in front of her.  Because if seeing someone deliberately step in front of a train wasn't shocking enough by itself, there's also the fact that the woman and Sarah share the same face.

Sarah grabs the woman's discarded handbag and gets out of the station.  Initially her main thought is to impersonate the woman just long enough to clear out any bank accounts her doppleganger might have possessed.  However, there is an old military adage that plans rarely survive contact with the enemy, and Sarah is about to discover that she has a whole bunch of enemies she never even dreamed about.  Fortunately, she may also have some friends: her foster brother Felix, for instance.  And well ... if there are two women who share the same face, should Sarah really be that surprised to discover that there are more?

Orphan Black is a fine work.  The scripts in this season are fast-paced and engrossing, and do a good job of handling the balancing act between maintaining the sense of mystery and providing a sense of progress.  Whether they'll manage to continue that into future seasons is yet to be seen, of course, but at least for this one, they do it very nicely.

And then there is Tatiana Maslany, who plays Sarah, and the suicide victim, and several other characters in the show.  Her work here is astonishing: her voice, attitude and even body language change depending on who she is portraying, and every time - whether she's being feisty punk Sarah, or tightly-buttoned soccer mom Alison, or tightly-buttoned soccer mom Alison doing her best to pretend to be feisty punk Sarah, or someone else again - she owns the role.

Frankly, Orphan Black would be worth checking out purely for Maslany's performance: it's that good.  But on top of that the show also offers a great mix of action, intrigue and humour.  Recommended.

Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes (2011)

Anneliese Michel was a young German woman who suffered from epilepsy and psychiatric conditions.  She and her parents were convinced she was afflicted with demonic possession, and appealed to the Catholic church for an exorcism.  Their requests were refused ... at first.  Eventually the local Bishop authorised the rite, on the proviso that it remained secret.  Two priests spent ten months attempting to exorcise Anneliese, before her death from dehydration and malnutrition.  Her parents and the priests were subsequently convicted of negligent homicide (though their prison sentences were suspended).

This film presents itself as "real footage" of the exorcisms, and I have to grudgingly admit that the people behind it have gone to some lengths to maintain the illusion that it's real.  There are no actor credits, for instance.  Of course, the illusion isn't very hard to pierce: the footage clearly isn't 40 year old film stock, there's a (single) very ill-advised special effect involving CGI insects, and they can't keep their dates in order (if "day 1" is the 13th, then "day 16" is the 28th, not the 29th, guys).  Plus you know, there's the whole "performed the exorcisms in secret" thing, which is pretty hard to do if you've got an international film crew camped out in the subject's bedroom.

I have to say that even if this film was good, I would have pretty mixed feelings about any movie which takes the unfortunate death of a mentally-ill person and then makes them the villain of the piece.  In depicting Anneliese as having definitely murdered at least one person, and strongly implicating her in the death of another - neither of which events, of course, has any basis in fact - the film does exactly that.  "Fortunately" the movie is terrible, so I don't need to feel conflicted at all.

Avoid.

The Beyond (1981)

George Romero's Dawn of the Dead was an international hit, and given that the Italian cinema industry has never been shy about jumping on the latest bandwagon, it should be no surprise that a slew of Italian zombie films soon followed.

Lucio Fulci directed 1979's Zombi 2, a financially successful "sequel" to Romero's film which is memorable mostly for two reasons.  The first is a particularly gruesome moment involving an eyeball, the second a fight between a zombie and a shark.

Yes, zombie vs shark.  A bout for the ages, I am sure you will agree.

Fulci would then go on to make a trilogy of zombie films, all based around the premise that the gates of Hell had opened.  This is the second of the three.

The film begins in 1927, with a lynch mob bursting into a hotel to murder an artist named Schweik, whom they believe to be a warlock.  Maybe they were right, because nothing untoward happens for over 50 years, until the now-derelict building is purchased by a young woman from out of town.  She sets about having the place renovated, but this quickly proves a cursed undertaking: first a workman suffers a nasty fall, and then a plumber has his eyes torn out while working in the basement.

Now I think you can probably write off the first as bad luck, but alarm bells really ought to be ringing over the second.  Particularly when a blind woman turns up issuing all kind of dire-albeit-not-very-specific warnings about the danger that lurks in the hotel.

The Beyond was heavily cut during its original US and UK releases, due to the graphic scenes of gore it contained.  There are no less that three eyeball-related bits of gruesomeness, for instance, though regrettably no zombie vs shark smackdowns.  Or zombie vs octopus, which is another aquatic-themed adversary I could get behind.

Unfortunately once you get past the gore, there's little substance here.  The basic script is pretty thin, the zombie horde is deeply mediocre, and plot elements get introduced and then forgotten without any ceremony.  It's mentioned, for instance, that when our heroine purchased the hotel, it came with two staff attached (despite being a dump).  The local doctor is perplexed by this, as he didn't know of anyone associated with the place.  Is there some sinister significance to the characters?  Well, apparently not, since they just get eaten by monsters later on.

If you really have to check out an Italian zombie film, either go for Fulci's Zombi 2, or track down Bruno Mattei's dreadful Zombies: The Beginning, since at least then you have the fun of watching a transparent rip off of Aliens.