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HORRORPHILE IN THE LAND OF THE LONG WHITE CLOUD

March 5th 2010 09:20

Kane Gledhill, Midway Beach, Gisborne, New Zealand

My fellow True Believers, the horrorphiles, and those of you fresh to the Darkness, I’m slipping into the abyss for the rest of the month; visiting family and old friends across the ditch, and will not be posting during the time I’m away, which, unfortunately, results in you, my loyal subscribers, not receiving your regular fix. I trust you’ll survive, and when I return I will make it up to you with some filthy, wicked nightmare carnage! Heh heh!!

But hey, why not use the downtime to explore some of my blog you may not have yet seen ...

Try one of my quizzes perhaps; test your movie title knowledge.

Delve into the expressionistic art of horror from around the world in The Art Lair.

Admire the graphic art of the movie poster design in my Poster Galleries.

Or dip into the archive of movie reviews from my first two years of blogging.

And don't forget to vote in my zombie movie poll!

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Shutter Island

March 4th 2010 23:41

“God gave us violence to wage in his honour.”

Martin Scorsese, arguably the greatest living American director, has delivered some of the finest examples of bravura cinema storytelling ever put to celluloid; Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, After Hours, Goodfellas, Cape Fear (1991), Casino, and The Departed, movies that expose the most potent and fragile elements of humanity; dark and resonant studies of character, faith and betrayal, loyalty and deception … and the glorious beast of violence.

Although Scorsese has worked with original screenplays, he frequently prefers to direct a story adapted from a novel, painting his own shades on the story’s multi-layered levels (A Martin Scorsese Picture). Shutter Island (2010) is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane and has been adapted for the screen by Laeta Kalogridis (who penned Oliver Stone’s Alexander and the Russian sf-horror Night Watch – talk about chalk and cheese!) Scorsese has grabbed the baton and he runs hard; Shutter Island is the best movie he’s made since Casino.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Teddy

To analyse this movie in any great depth is to fiddle ungraciously with the movie’s great conceit. And therein lies The Rub. Scorsese is essentially taking the paranoid brilliance of Phillip K. Dick and injecting it into the intensity of a Hitchcockian psychological thriller, laced with Gothic overtones, and anchored in a dark historical context. Shutter Island is pure nightmare, a slow-burner that smolders away for two hours, leaving third-degree wounds across your psyche by movie’s end. Where had the reality ended and the insanity begun? Where had truth been masked and the façade of lies fabricated? Is everything clear cut, or is everything within a frame?

Mark Ruffalo as Chuck

It’s 1954 and US marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) are investigating the mysterious disappearance of a patient from a high security institution for the criminally insane called Ashecliffe, on ominous Shutter Island. On the island Teddy and Chuck met the affable head Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and his associate Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow). Almost immediately Teddy deduces that all is not what is seems. There are demons in Teddy’s closet and the onset of a ferocious hurricane seems to be aggravating them.

Ben Kingsley as Dr. Cawley

Max von Sydow as Dr. Naehring

Like Phillip K. Dick’s famous novel Time Out of Joint and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Shutter Island plays on the audience’s suspicions, on the character’s paranoia, and on the duplicity of the narrative itself. On the surface the movie is a convoluted murder mystery, but once the surface is peeled back, the darkness gleams like a monster waiting in the abyss. Packaged in Scorsese’s usual high calibre production style; fluid, striking camerawork and cinematography, edgy and compelling use of music (a diverse range of sourced pieces from Mahler to Cage), elliptical editing (from Scorsese’s ever-loyal Thelma Schoonmaker), and a fantastic cast that sees DiCaprio put in some of the best work of his career, but also features a shining performance from Kingsley, solid work from Ruffalo, with the always excellent Patricia Clarkson, Emily Mortimer and Elias Koteas (seemingly channeling De Niro) in small pivotal parts, and in one delightfully menacing scene (which felt like it was conjured from the mind of Roald Dahl), Ted Levine as the Warden.

Shutter Island Leonardo DeCaprio and Michelle Williams

Teddy has nightmares of his dead wife (Michelle Williams)

Shutter Island Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo

Teddy and Chuck confront the storm head on

Shutter Island is, however, very talky, and I felt some two-hander scenes went on too long, such as Teddy’s encounters with George Noyce (Jackie Earl Haley) and Rachel 2 (Clarkson). Perhaps this is reflective of screenwriter Kalogridis trying to harness too much of the novel’s literary weight? Apparently, however, there were considerable modifications made to Lehane’s original story to steer the screenplay toward being a more action-oriented “blockbuster” (and rightfully so the movie has given Scorsese and DiCaprio career highs in box office openings). Thankfully Scorsese’s innate ability to maintain audience interest simply due to the performances he elicits from his actors prevents the movie from becoming turgid or tedious.

Does the lighthouse contain the truth?

The last ten or so minutes reveals quite the masterminded operation that in itself questions everything we’ve witnessed as an audience. This is moviemaking as workshop; the artifice that continues to be sculpted as it is polished; the art of hallucination amidst the pretence of radical experimentation. If a patient is diagnosed as insane, then any rationale or defence mechanism offered by the patient must be taken with a grain of salt by those deemed sane. Shutter Island will no doubt reward and confound with repeat viewings.

“What would be worse? To live as a monster or die as a good man?”

Here's the trailer:

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Scrubbers

March 3rd 2010 23:48

I remember watching the trailer for Scrubbers (1983) as part of the routine bunch of teasers for B-grade genre flicks that were thrown in front of the main feature on VHS releases back in the mid-80s. They were usually for movies that hadn’t done such good business at cinemas, and so distributors were hoping they’d make up some money on the home video circuit. It never really worked, as viewers would simply fast-forward through the lot. The imagery from the Scrubbers trailer was stored in the grime in the back of my mind. Until just recently.

Co-written by Roy Minton, who penned the brilliant, but disturbing Scum (1979), a sordid and sorrowful portrait of life in the English borstal system for young male offenders, Scrubbers is the borstal for young women, the term ‘scrubbers’ being slang for an undesirable person (think Richard E. Grant screeching it drunkenly to the schoolgirls passing by in Withnail and I), however, there are a few scenes of the inmates down on their knees with hard brush and soapy water.

Directed by Swedish glamour actor Mai Zetterling and produced by Handmade Films (George Harrison’s film company), Scrubbers has a theatrical quality to it, partly due to the movie’s low-fi production values, but also in the way Zetterling directs the scenes and actors, often emphasizing an almost pantomime element. While by no means as realistic, in terms of the violence, as its male counterpart Scum, nor as convincing in terms of the acting, there is a sense of conviction that emanates strongly through the whole movie. Many of the actors had actually done time, and look genuinely hardened.

Eddie (Katy Ingram) protects Carol (Amanda York) from the bullies

The central narrative focuses on the plight of two women, Carol (Amanda York) and Annetta (Chrissie Cotterill), who at movie’s start have escaped their incarceration and are on the run. It doesn’t last long before they’re both back behind bars in a new borstal. Annetta is desperate to see her baby girl and won’t have a bar of anyone telling her otherwise. Carol is also desperate, for affection. She gazes in distress at her ex-girlfriend Doreen (Debby Bishop), a striking-looking lesbian, and her new lover, the extroverted Shaw (Caroline Needs), both cavorting in the prison bath. Carol achs for something elusive. Later she is befriended by Eddie (Kate Ingram), a butch dyke, who is compelled to protect the fragile Carol.

There are some striking similarities between Scrubbers and Scum, that one could even accuse the screenwriting of Scrubbers as being simply a rip-off of the critically lauded Scum, right down to the lonely suicide, and the one-on-one climatic confrontation between Annetta and Carol in the kitchens. What stands out most memorably from the movie is the vernacular of the inmates, the banter and exchange of cigarettes and whatnot via swinging strings from their respective cell windows, the dirty sing-songs aimed at maintaining some level of morale.

Dana Gillespie as borstal screw Budd

Scrubbers is very much a curio, not as hard-hitting as it would have been when it was first released, but it still carries an emotional resonance, and the nightmare of incarceration - of being slowly and steadily institutionalized (as is evident in the scene when Eddie is released and stalls just outside the detention centre) – is etched in the filthy white walls. This is the kind of movie that would be interesting to remake, updating the story to reflect the current state of the British juvenile justice system. I’m sure the level of bitching and brawling is just as nasty and prevalent, but a contemporary version could lift the acting game and production values to make it all the more harrowing.

So where did the majority of these actors end up I wonder? Kathy Burke (Glennis), was notable in Gary Oldman’s searing study of violence Nil By Mouth (1997), Pam St. Clement (Strapper) went on to star in popular UK series EastEnders, Miriam Margoyles (Jones) featured in several Blackadder episodes, while Dana Gillespie (Budd) was already known as a blues singer. But I want to know where Amanda York disappeared to. And what happened to the rather fetching tartan-skirted lesbian, who performs the Punch & Judy puppet sketch in black lipstick with Doreen? There’s very little about Scrubbers online, even imdb.com has no external reviews or pics available, which is frustrating.

As it was very difficult to find stills from the movie here’s the trailer and two excerpts:

Here’s the Hellhole Bitches chant and dirty limerick scene:

And for those with stronger stomachs here’s the movie’s pivotal gross-out shock scene from the same psycho freaks sequence:

Scrubbers DVD is courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment, many thanks!

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The Hurt Locker

March 3rd 2010 02:55

Fear as a fix, fear as a friend, fear as a foe, fear as a formidable film: The Hurt Locker (2009) is one of the best war movies of the past twenty years, boldly and apologetically portraying the soldier as adrenalin junkie, embracing war’s terror with open arms, sweating profusely in the heat of the moment, making the decision between red, blue or yellow, and snipping those wires with a simple pair of pliers in order to defuse a bomb capable of destroying anything and everything within a 300 metre radius; this is the job of the bomb technician, those precious few that dice with death within the hurt locker.

Jeremy Renner as Sgt. James

Director Kathryn Bigelow is a Hollywood rarity, a female director who has been nominated for a Best Director at this year’s upcoming Academy Awards. Only three other women have been given that honour, although none actually won the award: Lina Wertmuller, Jane Campion, and Sofia Coppola. Kathryn Bigelow deserves the acknowledgement; The Hurt Locker is sensational filmmaking, not to forget Bigelow made the superb vampire movie Near Dark (1987), and the guilty pleasure thriller Point Break (1990). Whether she manages to keep ex-hubbie James Cameron from repeating his 1997 success will be known in a week’s time.

Anthony Mackie as Sgt. Sanborn

“Fear is clarifying. It forces you to put important things first and discount the trvial,” explains Bigelow in her director’s statement, “When I learned that these men [bomb technicians] volunteer for this dangerous work, and often grow so fond of it they can imagine doing nothing else, I knew I had found my next film.” Indeed this is an area of the army rarely, if ever, focused on in Hollywood war movies. But more significantly, the screenplay by Mark Boal, who experienced first hand the combat – and the bomb disposal units - in Iraq during a reporting trip, takes the opportunity to present the true colours of these unusually fearless men. Of course, there are many who loathe having to do the work, but then there are a “chosen few” who relish the intensity, the perversely precarious situation they put themselves in, suited up in the specialized bomb protection outfit (um, how much damage can it actually sustain per chance?), and getting down to the nitty-gritty

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Communion

March 2nd 2010 00:46

What a strange little movie this one is. Communion (1989) is based on the autobiographical book of the same name by sf writer Whitely Strieber (who wrote the novels Wolfen and The Hunger), who claimed to have had close encounters of the third kind; an alien abduction which intrigued everyone, but convinced no one. More than likely it was the result of a severe case of writer’s block and an over-heated imagination. The movie, directed by Australian Phillipe Mora, only fuels the writer’s fancies, including a cosmic boogie!

The events of the movie, which apparently really took place, are set around Christmas, 1985. Whitley (Christopher Walken jazz-riff acting and chewing scenery like it’s the last movie he’ll ever make!) takes his wife Anne (Lindsay Crouse), young son Andrew (Joel Carlson who is given all the wrong kind of dialogue), and two of their friends, Alex (Andreas Katsulas) and Sarah (Terri Hanauer), to their upstate New York mountain cabin. The weekend getaway doesn’t last very long when following a disturbing incident in the middle of the night freaks Alex out so badly (lots of big flood light action) he demands that they be driven back to the city after breakfast

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VOTE FOR YOUR FAVOURITE ZOMBIE MOVIE - Poll closes March 31st

February 28th 2010 23:39

Now that your favourite vampire movies have been selected it’s time to really peel back the undead flesh. Who are your favourite gut-munchers? Which putrid flesh excites you the most? What cinema evisceration exhilarates you the most? How revved up do you get when you hear the call of “Zomieeeeeeeeee!” ...?

Below is a list of many of the most influential and admired zombie movies ever made, including some considered so bad, they’re good. It’s funny how zombie movies command that kind of dodgy respect. I’ve included some zombie movies that don’t even use the word “zombie” in the entire movie, and some which feature an infection that doesn't create the undead, but turns the victim into a zombie-like flesh-eater; the lines of ghoulish distinction are pallid at best. Of late, both creatures of the undead – zombies and vampires - have made a return in fine form to the big screen and in your living rooms

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YOUR FAVOURITE VAMPIRE MOVIES

February 28th 2010 22:16

The results are in! My True Believin’ fellow horrorphiles have spoken! Your favourite vampire movies have been decided upon! And there are no big surprises either.

Two movies - eighty-five years apart – share the top spot

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Alice in Wonderland

February 26th 2010 04:39

Let’s get one thing straight! This is most definitely Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010), and shouldn’t be confused with Lewis Carroll’s novels Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass, as Tim Burton – and just as importantly, his screenwriter, Linda Woolverston, have taken great liberties with the famous tales, transposing the central characters and particular incidents into a playground realm for Tim Burton to manipulate his own tall stories. As a stand alone movie Alice in Wonderland is only partly successful, and as an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s work it isn’t anywhere near as engaging as it should be. And therein lies the Rub.

Mia Waskowska as Alice

I’ve always had a problem with Tim Burton’s movies, well most of them. The ones I’ve enjoyed the most have been Peewee’s Big Adventure (which worked a treat back in my more hedonistic uni days), Mars Attacks! (I love how darkly funny and menacing it is), Ed Wood (his most emotionally resonant), and Sweeney Todd (normally I can’t stand musicals). I was never really a fan of Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I hated his take on Planet of the Apes. Batman Returns was okay (but that was probably because of Michelle Pfeiffer’s droll performance).

Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter

I’ll admit I was excited when I first heard that Burton would be helming his own version of Alice in Wonderland, just as I was excited when I heard Guillermo del Toro was going to direct The Hobbit. They both had extraordinary imaginations and are capable of conjuring the most amazing imagery and fantastical realms. But very quickly into watching Alice in Wonderland, I realised the same problem I have with all those other movies of his, I was no waving with this one; it was failing to properly engage me, the storytelling, even the characters, despite how richly etched they are, were hollow, lacking soul. It’s like watching moving pictures, literally

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RICHARD STANLEY'S TEN FAVOURITE ITALIAN HORROR MOVIES

February 24th 2010 03:44

Ex-pat South-African director Richard Stanley, an auteur of sorts, burst onto the scene back in 1990 with his rogue sf-horror Hardware, a low-budget shocker that quickly gained a cult following. He followed up with an hallucinatory desert vision of a demon in human guise, Dust Devil (1992), however the movie was plagued with executive interference and distribution hell, yet still gained a fervent cult following.

In 1996 Stanley was hired to direct the big budget remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau, a cautionary tale of human-animal hybridization. It starred Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando (and an unrecognizable Eric Roth under elaborate makeup). Legend has it that Brando, playing the extreme eccentric, clashed with the director so swiftly and profoundly that Stanley was fired from production after only a handful of days shooting. Apparently Stanley snuck back onto the set disguised in a dog-man mask

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Posted By: Bryn - Category: lists

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THIRTEEN DEFINING MOVIE MOMENTS OF EXQUISITE AGONY

February 18th 2010 04:05

I was given the best book for my birthday, The Book of Lists: Horror, which was published 2008. One of the three authors, Amy Wallace, co-edited the original bestselling The Book of Lists with her brother and father back in 1977. I love lists, and as an adolescent I relished reading the weird and wonderful selections published by the Wallace family; one that stands out in my memory was the macabre list of Possible Jack the Ripper Victims (in gory detail).

I was very impressed that Amy Wallace had the inclination to delve into the Darkness and compile a thoroughly delectable array of inspired tastes and insightful opinions from a small pool of horrorphilic staff writers and numerous renowned figures from the horror arts and entertainment (chiefly writers and directors). And the gallows humour is mixed beautifully with scholarly indulgence

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HORRORPHILE IN THE LAND OF THE LONG WHITE CLOUD	Shutter Island	Scrubbers
The Hurt Locker	Communion	VOTE FOR YOUR FAVOURITE ZOMBIE MOVIE - Poll closes March 31st
YOUR FAVOURITE VAMPIRE MOVIES	Alice in Wonderland	RICHARD STANLEY'S TEN FAVOURITE ITALIAN HORROR MOVIES
THIRTEEN DEFINING MOVIE MOMENTS OF EXQUISITE AGONY	Horror QUIZ #30: What Movie Is That Tagline From?	A SEVERED-TONGUE-IN-CHEEK GUIDE TO SURVIVING (or not) A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE
The Horseman	The Wolfman	A Lizard in a Woman's Skin