The Demon and the Darkness

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012): written by Christopher Landon and Chad Feehan; directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman; starring Kathryn Newton (Alex), Katie Featherston (Katie), Matt Shively (Ben), Aiden Lovekamp (Wyatt), and Brady Allen (Robbie): Jesus, there are two more Paranormal Activity movies after this one. The Law of Diminishing Returns will not stop this franchise!

If you're scoring at home, the linear chronology of the Paranormal Activity movies goes 3, 2, 1, 4, 5, and 6.

There are a couple of good moments in Paranormal Activity 4. There might have been more had the movie been made five years later, when smart-phone video technology was better. Why do I say this? Because teenaged girl protagonist (Supernatural's Kathryn Newton, aka the angry, monster-fighting daughter of Castiel's human host) spends about a third of the movie carrying a goddamned laptop around so she can talk to her boyfriend and film supernatural incidents at the same time. Yeah, that isn't... awkward.

Anyway, the demons and ghosts are now nigh-omnipotent, which means that the movie soporifically muddles towards pretty much the same ending as the first three. Newton does what she can, but she's adrift in a sea of nihilistic found-footage nonsense. Not recommended, and really no fun at all.

The Darkness (2016): written by Greg McLean, Shayne Armstrong, and Shane Krause; directed by Greg McLean; starring Kevin Bacon (Peter Taylor), Radha Mitchell (Bronny Taylor), David Mazouz (Michael Taylor), Lucy Fry (Stephanie Taylor), Paul Reiser (Peter's Boss), Ilza Ponko (Gloria Ortega), and Alma Martinez (Teresa Morales): The Darkness isn't a good movie, but it's at least a better remake of Poltergeist (1982) than Poltergeist (2015). 

The Taylor family (Mom Radha Mitchell, Dad Kevin Bacon, bulimic teenaged daughter Lucy Fry and autistic son David 'Bruce Wayne' Mazouz) vacations at the Grand Canyon. However, autistic son Mikey walks off with five stones from a secret Anasazi chamber. Removing the stones from the chamber frees five demons from imprisonment in the Phantom Zone. Well, whatever.

As it apparently takes months for these demons to power up, the Taylor family gets bedevilled at an ever-increasing rate by water taps that turn themselves on, bulimia, potential marital infidelity, and loud bumps in the night. Mikey now has an imaginary friend he calls 'Jenny.' 

So a bunch of stuff happens that's a lot like Poltergeist, only with nods to the mysterious Anasazi civilization rather than Indian burial grounds. Mikey is enamored of his demonic friends. No one else is. Thankfully, the Internet is quite authoritative on the subject of Anasazi demons! Though based on the screenshots we see, Mom and Pop get all their information from the same web page.

Director Greg McLean made his name with Wolf Creek and also directed the underwhelming Belko Experiment. He achieves some nice horror effects here. He also seems to forget what establishing shots are at key moments. Oh, well. There's a wise Hispanic psychic and her wise psychic grand-daughter to help straighten things out with the help of some sort of demonic diving rod made out of coat-hangers. 

The portrayal of autism in The Darkness isn't exactly offensive. It just seems... undercooked. Mikey is either robotically gormless or suddenly HUMAN. David Mazouz does what he can with the character, but you really start to hate Mikey, which I don't think was the intention. Lucy Fry is much better than she needs to be in the role of bulimic sister/demonic punching bag. Radha Mitchell is also fine in a somewhat underwritten part. 

And Kevin Bacon! He's quite convincing as a sleazy, affair-prone, distracted white-collar (he's an architect) Dad and somewhat less convincing as Good, Self-Sacrificing Dad. His hair is crazy, though not unjustified -- he looks like a 50-year-old guy trying to look young and failing miserably when he remembers his pomade and failing really, really miserably when he forgets his pomade and his hair looks like a toupee made of badly-dyed straw. 

I mean, it's really a bad movie, but it's an enjoyable bad movie. Recommended.

Karl Malone's Crypt of Terror

The Mailman by Bentley Little (1991): Like several Golden-Age science-fiction writers, Bentley Little's style is plain while his ideas and plots are baroque and sometimes nearly absurd. This makes him the most interesting of contemporary American 'plain-style' horror writers. I honestly never know what paths his novels will take to their conclusions. Or what those conclusions will be.

The Mailman is about as 'normal' a horror novel as Little is going to write. A stranger comes to town and Bad Things Happen. That's the set-up for a lot of horror over the years. Hell, that's the last two-thirds of Bram Stoker's Dracula!

In the course of the novel, however, Little does a couple of things differently: he evades any and all explanations for why a seemingly supernatural, malevolent mailman is threatening a small Arizona town, and he has the townspeople realize very early on that something is really, really amiss. The novel's about (increasingly inexplicable) apathy in the face of mounting evidence, not the more standard 'wait for the evidence' plot. Why don't people act in light of overwhelming evidence? Good question.

The characters, especially the father, mother, and 11-year-old son whom the Mailman seems especially obsessed with, are keenly and sympathetically drawn. Little's prose is about as basic as prose can be, and he's got the unfortunate tic of using actor-shorthand to describe people ("He looked like Broderick Crawford"). Nonetheless, a more-than-competent horror novel, and one with a fascinatingly odd choice of villain (even moreso now than in 1991 when The Mailman came out, obviously). Recommended.