Three More Horrors

 

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019): Based on a popular series of children's books compiled by Alvin Schwartz, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark often shows its origins in an unconnected compilation of traditional ghost stories, anecdotes, Hallowe'en games, and the occasional plot synopsis of a work of fiction. 

Things drag occasionally over the first hour but pick up over the last 40 minutes with a terrific sequence in a hospital and another running from the police station to the haunted mansion to close the film. Produced by Guillermo del Toro, who also  co-wrote the screen story. Nixon's 1968 presidential victory and the Viet Nam war run as real-world horrors in counterpoint to the supernatural ones plaguing the teenagers in the movie. Lightly recommended.

Host (2020): In this Shudder original, several socially distancing friends decide to hold a seance over Zoom. Hilarity ensues. One of the first Covid-19 horror movies released, Host is short (less than an hour) and to the point. 15 years ago, it was difficult to believe that people would continue to hold cameras on themselves and others while crazy shit went on. Now, it's entirely plausible, thanks in part to the smartphone and to a general uptick in our camera-obsessed culture. A very enjoyable horror movie. Recommended.

Constantine (2005): Very, very loosely based on the DC Comics supernatural investigator/mage created by Steve Bissette, John Totleben, Alan Moore, and Rick Veitch and developed by Jamie Delano and John Ridgway. 

Constantine is now an American based in LA rather than a Liverpudlian based mainly in London. A few character names remain. The supernatural stuff is almost entirely reworked. Somehow it's still enjoyable for all that, with some surprisingly weird CGI used to depict the world of demons, angels, and the supernatural. Because the Matrix series had already been a big hit, Constantine now uses supernatural shotguns and flamethrowers when he battles demons as well as the more traditional spells and sigils. 

Keanu Reeves is fine as John Constantine, as written, and Rachel Weisz manages an OK American accent as a somewhat improbable LA cop. The real showstoppers are Tilda Swinton as the Archangel Gabriel and Peter Stormare as Satan. But they could have just called this movie pretty much anything -- well, except for the fact that Time Warner owned the rights to the characters. At one point, Nicolas Cage was attached to play Constantine, which would have been a whole other level of weird. Recommended.

Hallowe'en Horror Quartet!!!

Annihilation (2018): adapted for the screen from the Jeff VanderMeer novel and directed by Alex Garland; starring Natalie Portman (Lena), Benedeict Wong (Lomax), Oscar Isaac (Kane), Gina Rodriguez (Anya), Tessa Thompson (Josie), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Dr. Ventress), and Tuva Novotny (Cass): The first half is a slog hallmarked by monotonal performances from the leads, punctuated by occasional bursts of yelling. The second half is better, with some nice creature and production design. 

A mysterious alien 'zone' named the Shimmer has enveloped part of the Southern United States. And it's growing. A team of five scientists goes in, other teams having vanished in the year or two the Shimmer has been active. They find a strange zone of mutated and mutating plants and animals. It's very much like H.P. Lovecraft's seminal piece of eco-horror, 1928's "The Colour Out of Space." But with a lighthouse. Lightly recommended.

Mimic (1997): adapted by Matthew Robbins and Guillermo del Toro from the (very) short story by Donald A. Wollheim; directed by Guillermo del Toro; starring Mira Sorvino (Dr. Susan Tyler), Jeremy Northam (Dr. Peter Mann), Alexander Goodwin (Chuy), Giancarlo Giannini (Manny), Charles S. Dutton (Leonard), Josh Brolin (Josh), and F. Murray Abraham (Dr. Gates): 

Donald A. Wollheim's very short story "Mimic" simply presented the idea that there were lifeforms humanity wasn't aware of because they'd adapted to hide in the urban landscape. The movie gives humanity the blame for creating these things, albeit for a good cause -- the elimination of a child-killing, cockroach-spread disease in New York through the use of genetically engineered 'Judas Bugs.'

Giving the mimics an origin saps the story of much of its mystery. Guillermo del Toro does a nice job of conjuring up murk and mayhem in the underground vaults and abandoned subway lines of Manhattan. Making the story yet another iteration of Frankenstein, albeit with human-sized insects that can mimic human appearance, eliminates any sense of mystery or the Sublime. It's still a pretty solid piece of action-horror movie-making. 

And kudos to del Toro and co-screenwriter Matthew Robbins for addressing the simple fact that a man-sized insect would need lungs to even exist. Mira Sorvino and Jeremy Northam are solid but a little bland as the scientists who are the cause of, and solution to, the problem of man-sized bugs in Manhattan. Lightly recommended.

Ju-On (2002): written and directed by Takashi Shimuzo; starring Megumi Okina (Rika), Misaki Iyo (Hitomi), Misa Uehara (Izumi), and Yui Ichikawa (Chiharu): Itself a sequel to two (!) of the writer-director's similarly titled made-for-TV movies of 2000, Ju-On was remade as The Grudge, a so-so horror movie starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. 'Grudge' may be the least effective translation of a concept from Japanese to English in, like, ever. 

The Grudge in this case involves ghosts that murder people over the course of years or even decades whenever those people have the misfortune to encounter these ghosts... or the misfortune to have a family member encounter these ghosts. That's some grudge!

The capricious nature of the supernatural attacks, and the presentation of them as being wholly inexplicable, make Ju-On a success. Some of its tropes have been recycled and parodied nigh onto exhaustion in the years since, but the source still contains the power to shock and disturb. On the other hand, there's a cute ghost cat! On the other other hand, these ghosts can materialize literally anywhere... and they can drag you off to some hellish netherworld! Highly recommended.

Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972): written by Don Houghton; directed by Alan Gibson; starring Peter Cushing (Lorrimer Van Helsing/ Laurence Van Helsing), Christopher Lee (Dracula), Stephanie Beacham (Jessica Van Helsing), Christopher Neame (Johnny Alucard), and Michael Coles (Inspector Murray): We start with an exciting pitched battle between Dracula and his arch-nemesis Van Helsing in 1872 Victorian England. Then we jump to the groovy times of 1972, where a dink with the unlikely name of Johnny Alucard has gotten his friends all hepped up to hold a magical ritual for, you know, kicks. Is Johnny Alucard trying to resurrect Dracula? What do you think?

Any Dracula movie with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in it is going to be watchable. Lee is only on-screen for about ten minutes, leaving the always capable Cushing to do the heavy lifting in a dual role as both the Van Helsing of 1872 and the grandson of Van Helsing in 1972. Stephanie Beacham overcomes the movie's focus on her ample, heaving bosom to deliver a solid performance as Van Helsing's grand-daughter. 

As always, though, it's Cushing and Lee we come for, whether in a Dracula movie or some other horror or thriller. They deliver, as always. The opening battle, on top of a runaway carriage, is one of the high points of the series. The scene in which we discover that the running water from a shower  head can incapacitate a vampire, not so much. Recommended.

Hellboy in Hell: The Death Card

Hellboy in Hell Volume 2: The Death Card (Collected 2016): written and illustrated by Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart: A moody and magnificent and hopeful and dark conclusion to the saga of Hellboy. 

Is it the end? 

Well, BPRD continues, as things look dire on Earth. Down below, though, Hellboy, dead but alive, battles enemies in the Underworld in the wake of his execution of Satan in the previous volume.

Satan's death has sent Hell into turmoil. Hellboy still has miles to go before he sleeps, however. But as one character notes, you're dead, and yet your story continues. 

More background gets filled in, explaining Earth's ongoing peril over in BPRD even as hope is offered up against those forces of darkness that continue to gnaw at the world's vitals. Hellboy's role in the Apocalypse is also vital, though utterly unlike that which he was born and bred for before his premature arrival on Earth allowed Nurture to defeat Nature.

There is some two-fisted action here, but the overall tones bounces between the bleakly comic and the elegaic. Saying much more would give things away. Suffice to say that Hellboy meets his destiny, both like and utterly unlike what one might have guessed more than 20 years ago when this crusader against evil, born of evil, first appeared. The end cycles back to Hellboy's arrival on Earth, bringing things full circle while leaving a certain amount of mystery in place.

Mike Mignola, writing and on art, and with collaborators that include Duncan Fegredo and so many others, has crafted a moving, personal, hilarious, dark epic of fantasy and superheroics. It's a great achievement. Highly recommended, though not as a stand-alone volume.

The Shape of Water (2017)

The Shape of Water (2017): written by Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor; directed by Guillermo del Toro; starring Sally Hawkins (Elisa), Michael Shannon (Strickland), Richard Jenkins (Giles), Octavia Spencer (Zelda), Michael Stuhlbarg (Hoffstetler), David Hewlett (Fleming), Nigel Bennett (Russkie), and Doug Jones (Creature from the Black Lagoon): 

Guillermo del Toro is in a groove here he hasn't been in since Pan's Labyrinth, combining genres and stirring up emotional attachment in service to a gloriously melodramatic story handled with delicacy and sold through terrific performances by the entire cast.

It probably helps to have seen The Creature From the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature. But it's not necessary. The film hits some surprising notes as it plays with a comment made in del Toro's last movie that was metafictionally about that movie -- in Crimson Peak, we're told that this is not a ghost story but rather a story with a ghost in it. Similarly, The Shape of Water is not a monster movie but rather a movie with a monster in it. Who the monster really is... well, that's part of the story too.

Sally Hawkins is wonderful as the protagonist, mute because of an old throat injury, feeling excluded by the world of Baltimore 1962 except for her best friends Richard Jenkins and Octavia Spencer. Hawkins' Elisa is a night-shift cleaning woman at a US military experimental facility, as is Spencer's character. Jenkins is Elisa's room-mate and confidante, a gay man trapped in a very ungay world and a painter whose career has stalled out due to alcoholism and changing tastes.

Then along comes Jones, Doug Jones, the go-to actor for soulful monsters and super freaks, this time out playing an amphibious biped captured in the Amazon and much, much more than he appears to be. Jones is terrific, too. Michael Stuhlbarg is also excellent as a scientist with his own secret agenda. Michael Shannon is scary and warped as the sadistic neat freak charged by the military with learning the Creature's secrets.

It all runs beautifully and, unusually for del Toro, without any stretches in which one longs for an editor to curb del Toro's tendency to extending a movie 10-15 minutes beyond its optimum length. You've seen elements of this story in everything from Beauty and the Beast to del Toro's Hellboy movies. It's the style and the little bits and the performances that make this one special in and of itself. Highly recommended.

The White People and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen (2011); edited by S.T. Joshi

The White People and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen (2011); edited by S.T. Joshi, containing the following pieces:

Foreword: The Ecstasy of St. Arthur by Guillermo Del Toro: Nice, brief appreciation of Arthur Machen by the film-maker, whose works often refer directly or indirectly to Machen's work and concepts.

Introduction by S. T. Joshi: A usual excellent historical overview from Joshi.

The Inmost Light  (1894): Pseudo-science based horror with ties to the longer, creepier "The Great God Pan.".

Novel of the Black Seal  (1895): 'Novel' meaning 'Nouvelle' here and below, and not a matter of length. One of several Machen stories dealing with a survived, malign race of 'Little People.'

Novel of the White Powder  (1895): Another piece of pseudo-science based horror. As with the above 'novel,' this was also published as part of the actual 'novel'/short-story cycle The Three Impostors. The 'science' moves into the realm of the occult at the conclusion.

The Red Hand  (1895): A fine piece of horror which uses the style and structure of the mystery story.

The White People  (1904): A towering achievement in first-person narrative in the horror genre, framed by a somewhat wonky but necessary philosophical discussion of the nature of good and evil. One of the most unnerving stories ever told.

A Fragment of Life  (1904) : A slightly weird tale of a young couple chafing at life in a London suburb really grows on one as it builds to a climax reaffirming Machen's love/hate relationship with cities.

The Bowmen  (1914): That famous piece of accidental 'journalism' (it's a short story mistaken at the time for being real) that spawned the World War One legend of ghostly bowmen coming to the rescue of British soldiers.

The Soldiers' Rest  (1914): Another of Machen's brief newspaper short stories meant to buoy spirits during the early days of the Great War.

The Great Return  (1915): A weird tale without horror -- instead, it's a faux-journalistic piece on the Holy Grail in the Welsh countryside.

Out of the Earth  (1915): Very minor piece concerns Machen's underground, malign, and apparently foul-mouthed little people. 

The Terror  (1916): Written in a straightforward journalistic style that's unlike Machen's earlier works of weird fiction that include "The White People" and "The Great God Pan," The Terror is instead the great-grandfather of Max Brooks' World War Z. The Terror depicts its events as real, investigated by the unnamed narrator.  Those events aren't zombie attacks -- they're mysterious deaths breaking out in various locations throughout Great Britain during World War One. Have the Germans landed some sort of hidden force on the British Isles? Is someone using a mysterious 'Z-Ray' to smother people or send them running off cliffs to their deaths? Or is there something wrong with the animal kingdom Machen was writing furiously at this time in his life, forced into newspaper work in order to pay the bills. The Terror isn't the imaginative and literary triumph that the aforementioned stories were, but it's still an enjoyable and often weird book. It's also an important permutation in horror's long love affair with the pseudo-documentarian style. Where 'letters' and 'journal entries' once told us that what we were reading was 'real,' now the journalistic voice does. It's also a mutation of something going back to at least Daniel DeFoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. In that early 18th-century work, DeFoe told a fictional 'you-are-there' story about a real event. Machen embeds The Terror in the real, early events of the Great War and then, like DeFoe, tells everything as a piece of actual reportage. It's a major stylistic leap. There are many fine moments of horror and pity throughout The Terror, along with some marvelously weird images. Machen captures the way fear can travel through gossip when the official channels are trying to hide the problem. A late-novel tableaux of horror at an isolated farm is especially well-managed through the description of the aftermath and through a dead man's journal describing the mysterious and terrible events that led to that aftermath. There are a couple of flaws to note. One isn't so much a flaw as a relative lack of closure. Things just sort of stop. This first flaw is exacerbated by the second, which is the narrator's jaw-dropping, climactic theory about why what happened, happened. It's an explanation totally in keeping with Arthur Machen's beliefs about society. But it's a moment of political and social commentary that will leave a sour aftertaste with anyone who doesn't long to live in a medieval fiefdom. I kid you not. 

Overall: A selection that includes non-horror pieces makes for an interesting overview of Machen's career. Those interested only in Machen's horror output would be better served by seeking out a collection that includes "The Great God Pan" and "The Shining Pyramid." The end-notes to the stories are extremely useful. The cover is the only oddity, as it seems to have been commissioned for a collection that did include "The Great God Pan." Highly recommended.

Crimson Peak (2015) and The Innocents (1961)

Crimson Peak: written by Matthew Robins and Guillermo del Toro; directed by Guillermo del Toro; starring Mia Wasikowska (Edith Cushing), Jessica Chastain (Lucille Sharpe), Tom Hiddleston (Thomas Sharpe), Charlie Hunnam (Dr. McMichael), and Jim Beaver (Carter Cushing) (2015): Guillermo del Toro delivers a love letter to Edgar Allan Poe, Gothics, haunted houses, ghost stories, and the 1950's and 1960's horror movies of Hammer Studios and Roger Corman. Oh, and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Rebecca. "The Turn of the Screw." "The Beckoning Fair One." And a whole lot of others. Also, a guest appearance by Buffalo, New York. 

The production and costume design are extraordinary, colour-super-saturated in the manner of many of Corman's Poe adaptations while also supplying the requisite amount of decay and disintegration. Mia Wasikowska is solid as the late-19th-century American woman who chooses the wrong English guy, Tom Hiddleston conjures up some Vincent-Price-like morbid empathy as he plays that wrong guy, and Jessica Chastain is sinister and loopy as the wrong guy's sister. 

There are even elements of steam punk in Hiddleston's clay-digging machine, and a tribute to Sherlock Holmes (and creator Arthur Conan Doyle, fully name-checked in the narrative) in the person of Charlie Hunnam's opthamologist/ghost-hunter/amateur detective. 

There's nothing subtle about the movie -- it wears its metaphors on its brightly coloured sleeves. All this, and the ghosts -- as in the del Toro-produced Mama -- are stunningly creepy, a triumph of visual effects and the imagination of del Toro and his designers. This movie isn't for everybody. The build is just a tad slow in the first half, while in the second half del Toro pulls away from the cataclysmic finale antecedents such as "The Fall of the House of Usher" have primed us to expect. Highly recommended.

The Innocents: adapted from the Henry James novella "The Turn of the Screw" by John Mortimer, William Archibald, and Truman Capote; directed by Jack Clayton; starring Deborah Kerr (Miss Giddens), Megs Jenkins (Mrs. Grose), Martin Stephens (Miles), Pamela Franklin (Flora), Peter Wyngarde (Quint) and Clytie Jessop (Miss Jessel) (1961): Director Jack Clayton's adaptation of "The Turn of the Screw" is also an adaptation of a stage play based on "The Turn of the Screw." The play supplies many of our governess-protagonist's speeches, which Deborah Kerr pretty much nails -- though I'd always pictured Miss Giddens as being much younger than Kerr was at the time of her performance.

The set-up is simple and direct. A governess is hired to take care of the two orphaned charges of their uncle. They reside at a country estate. Miss Jessel, their previous governess, died under mysterious circumstances, as did the estate's head groundskeeper Mr. Quint. But the longer the governess stays at the estate, the more disturbing the circumstances become. The children begin to behave strangely once older brother Miles returns, expelled from boarding school for unnamed acts. The governess starts to see strange figures and hear strange noises. But the cook doesn't see or hear any of these things. The Uncle in London doesn't want to be bothered with anything to do with the children. The governess is in charge of the household. What will she do?

The movie doesn't really answer the faulty either/or binary posited in much of the 150 years of literary discussion about "The Turn of the Screw." Are ghosts haunting the governess' two young charges or is everything in her head? The movie, like the text itself, evades the binary and instead works best with both possibilities existing simultaneously. They're not mutually exclusive.

The Innocents manages to create a genuinely creepy atmosphere through direction, cinematography, sound, and the occasionally unnerving performances by the two child actors. There are a couple of 'Gotcha!' moments that involve the sudden appearance of a specter, but for the most part the movie relies on a gradual accumulation of distressing details.

Two changes from the original text limit some of the film's possibilities. "The Turn of the Screw" was told as a narration inside a narration decades after the events of the story; the movie omits this construction. James' original forces the reader to consider the fact that the governess went on being a governess for decades after the events of the story while also parenthesizing the entire story inside the governess' own telling of it, recounted to another person decades later. The movie also tries to be a bit more overt in explaining why Miles got expelled from boarding school, limiting the more unnerving possibilities of what Miles is capable of -- and of what Quint and Jessel subjected he and Flora to.

The whole thing works very well, though it is occasionally a bit mannered. Both the supernatural and the psychological work within the movie to gradually build a sense of dread. The acting is fine throughout, from the salt-of-the-Earth cook to Kerr's increasingly freaked-out governess to the two preternaturally coy and manipulative children. Highly recommended.

Re-Animator: adapted from the H.P. Lovecraft novella "Herbert West, Re-Animator" by Dennis Paoli, William Norris, and Stuart Gordon; directed by Stuart Gordon; starring Jeffrey Combs (Herbert West), Bruce Abbott (Dan Cain), Barbara Crampton (Megan Halsey), David Gale (Dr. Carl Hill), and Robert Sampson (Dean Halsey) (1985): Richard Band's score channels Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho as Vertigo-riffing opening credits zip by.  Then we get this weirdly faithfully unfaithful adaptation of a novella that H.P. Lovecraft essentially wrote on a dare and considered complete schlock uncharacteristic of all his other stories.

Schlock and grue and hyper-violence and nudity are all in writer-director Stuart Gordon's wheelhouse. Indeed, Re-Animator would help make his name and his studio's name as a creator of enjoyable, bloody, violent, witty, and low-budget horror movies. Gordon on less pulpy Lovecraft fare such as "Dagon" or "The Dreams in the Witch-House" -- not so good. Gordon on Re-Animator, From Beyond, or the Re-Animator sequels? Just fine.

I had forgotten the lamely acted romantic plot that weighs down parts of this movie. Really, I'd forgotten Bruce Abbott and Barbara Crampton, the ostensible leads of the movie, completely. Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West and David Gale as Dr. Carl Hill are the real stars, along with a whole lot of resurrected dead people, mobile body parts, and extremely angry resurrected cats. Gordon throws blood and guts around, but he does so with wit and a fair idea for what makes a horror movie gross and funny even as it occasionally verges on disturbing the viewer. I'll be damned if I completely understand part of the climax, though: sometimes a little exposition is a good idea.

Jeffrey Combs holds the screen whenever he's on it, which is never enough. He certainly captures the gonzo spirit of Lovecraft's obsessed Resurrection Man. And Gale is a hoot, never moreso than when he's menacing people while his head is separated from his body. The splatter effects are cheerfully bright, as is West's day-glo-green Resurrection Fluid: in reality, the liquid from inside a glowstick. Recommended.

The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan (2009-2011)

The Strain: Book I of The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan (2009): Apparently, the new F/X series based on this vampire trilogy is something of a slow-moving mess. That's too bad, as this book and the next two may have flaws, but being slow-moving isn't one of them.

Guillermo del Toro seems to have come up with most of the concepts, monster designs, and all-around ickiness for the series, with thriller writer Hogan supplying the actual prose. It's a pretty good match, as del Toro's main flaw in his film work has been the occasional aimlessness of his plotting.

The Strain builds to a climax that really sets the stage for greater, more apocalyptic events to come. The chief villain is a vampire known only as the Master, one of seven Vampire Ancients who have existed since pre-history. With the help of an extremely unscrupulous zillionaire named Eldritch Palmer (a nod to Philip K. Dick's malevolent cyborg Palmer Eldritch), the Master comes to New York to break the long truce with the other six Ancients and take over the world.

Against the Master are set a Van Helsing figure -- Setrakian, a survivor of the Holocaust who first encountered the Master at Treblinka -- and a ragtag group that also includes Ephraim Goodweather, a top-ranking doctor with the Centres for Disease Control; Nora Hernandez, his female co-worker; Gus, a Hispanic gang-banger; and Fet, a New York exterminator.

The Strain focuses on the quasi-scientific aspects of the vampire plague, while dropping hints throughout that these are nonetheless not simply the products of the world's worst Ebola outbreak. Scenes set beneath the streets of New York and in its increasingly vampire-infested bedroom communities are the strongest. Hogan keeps the plot zipping along while also doing a fairly strong job of arousing sympathy for both our heroes and for the unfortunate victims of the Strain.

As the first book of a trilogy, The Strain asks more questions than it answers. But the questions are pretty interesting. And the mix of science and, well, magic, suggests a world in which supernatural forces must occasionally work through scientific means to achieve their ends. The vampires have a viral pathology that's fairly well-explored herein, in the manner of Richard Matheson's landmark 'rational' vampire novel I Am Legend. But it's in service to something from Outside human and scientific experience. The scientific explanations for the efficacy of silver and UV-C rays against the vampires don't fully explain the speed with which silver and sunlight work in dispatching them.

As in his work on Cronos and Blade 2, del Toro heavily invests in de-eroticizing the vampire and returning it to its plague-bearing, rotting, drooling roots. The vampires here share some physical traits with his super-vampires in Blade 2. However, the squalid pathos of the turned also echoes some scenes in Cronos -- these are vampires who foul themselves while eating, and rapidly lose their sexual organs as the cancer-like apparatus of the vampire physiology takes hold. Shiny and sparkly they are not. Recommended.


The Fall: Book II of The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan (2010): The vampire apocalypse accelerates in the second book of The Strain Trilogy, with lots of ickiness and tragedy for all. The supernatural starts to assert itself, as we gradually see that while the vampire plague seems to be viral in nature, it's supernatural in origin and intent.

There are a lot of nice set-pieces here, ripe for visual interpretation. One of the threads -- that the Master has learned new ways to be cruel from humanity -- begins to come to the forefront. So, too, the weaknesses of his human opponents, who are themselves compromised by their fear for their relatives, by old age, by alcoholism, and by ignorance of the Master's origins.

Part of the novel involves the quest to secure an ancient book that explains everything you need to know about vampires and how to kill them. Thankfully, the quest for this item is handled in a refreshingly off-beat but pragmatic way: the book is up for auction at a major New York auction house. It's these touches of the mundane that help make the second volume stronger in many ways than the first. Recommended.


The Night Eternal: Book III of The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan (2011): This is the end. The Master, his vampires, and his human collaborators have won. Much of the Earth has been enslaved. Society continues to function under a pall of nuclear winter which has blotted out the sun for the most part. Inspired by his experience with the Nazis, the Master has created concentration camps to provide his vampires with a reliable source of liquid nourishment. People still live and work outside the camps, either as collaborators or as the cowed servants of the Vampire elite. The world is now one big factory slaughterhouse.

But the Resistance lives on, outnumbered and outgunned. The surviving protagonists of the first two books have been bloodied and beaten. The Master has now survived two attacks that should have killed him, were he simply a vampire like all the other vampires. Madness, alcoholism, and in-fighting plague the surviving rebels as much as the vampires do. Ephraim Goodweather, nominally the leader of the Resistance, has almost succumbed to alcohol-fueled despair when the novel opens. Can he get off the mat?

The supernatural elements introduced in Book Two now become ascendant, as del Toro and Hogan's narrative begins to resemble The Lord of the Rings more than anything else (and remember that del Toro was going to direct The Hobbit movies before he bowed out, and retains a screen-writing credit on them). The book delves into the secret history of vampires, thanks to the book that was the quest-item of The Fall. There is a way to end vampirism forever, one that the Master himself has shown them in the way he eliminated the other six Vampire Ancients at the end of Book Two. It's time to nuke it out to duke it out!

Even with a certain number of scenes of psychological anguish and equivalence on the part of several characters, the plot of The Night Eternal moves quickly and efficiently towards its climax, with a few enjoyable stops in the realms of myth and legend. The Master's origin story is bizarre and striking, as is the explanation for all the weaknesses of vampires derived from that tale. I was entertained. Recommended.

Bash and Pop

The Purge: written and directed by James DeMonaco; starring Ethan Hawke (James Sandin), Lena Headey (Mary Sandin), Max Burkholder (Charlie Sandin), Adelaide Kane (Zoey Sandin), Edwin Hodge (Bloody Stranger), and Rhys Wakefield (Polite Leader) (2013): Efficient little dystopic pot-boiler that would probably have benefitted from having a no-name cast. Still, the actors are fine in this story of an America that purges its violent tendencies every year with 12 hours of state-sanctioned violence. Yes, it's the Red Hour from the original Star Trek episode "The Return of the Archons." Rich people either hide behind fancy security systems or go out hunting the poor; the poor run around and hide. The allegory is so transparent that I'm not sure it qualifies as allegory. Less than 90 minutes long, though, including credits! Huzzah! Lightly recommended.

Pacific Rim: written by Travis Beacham and Guillermo del Toro; directed by Guillermo del Toro; starring Charlie Hunnam (Raleigh Becket), Idris Elba (Pentecost), Rinko Kikuchi (Mako Mori), Burn Gorman (Gottlieb), Charlie Day (Geiszler), and Ron Perlman (Hannibal Chau) (2013): Still fun the second time around, even on the home screen. About the only problem is that on a smaller scale, a couple of the giant robot-armour fighters are virtually indistinguishable from one another in the final battle scene. Or maybe I'm just getting old. Still, pretty much the modern gold standard for giant robots punching giant monsters. Highly recommended.

Mama (2013)

Mama: written by Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Neil Cross; directed by Andy Muschietti; starring Jessica Chastain (Annabel), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Lucas/Jeffrey), Megan Charpentier (Victoria), Isabelle Nelisse (Lily), Daniel Kash (Dr. Dreyfuss) and Javier Botet (Mama) (2013): Produced by Guillermo del Toro, Mama has some of his tropes scattered throughout, most notably the linkage of insects with the supernatural. It's not the most brilliant of horror movies, as at least two characters do really stupid horror-movie cliche things, and a sub-plot turns out to exist because it makes the main plot run more smoothly towards the end.

On the other hand, the movie looks great. The set design is impressively functional insofar as it's atmospheric while also serving the plot and not being ridiculous. Jessica Chastain is never less than fully invested in her lead character, almost unrecognizable in a black short-cut wig and raccoon eye make-up. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jamie Lannister in Game of Thrones) has an oddly thankless dual part as twin brothers, both of whom disappear for the middle of the picture so thoroughly that one wonders if he was called away to do reshoots on that HBO series. And the two little girls do about as good a job of playing semi-feral girls abandoned in the woods for five years as one could ask.

The movie really succeeds or fails, though, on how one feels about the eponymous monster. Or ghost. Or ghost-monster. There are a couple of really nice aspects to the visualization of Mama: her hair perpetually seems to float as if she's underwater (and metaphorically speaking, she is). And she occasionally comes at people while almost completely submerged in the floor, with only her ghostly hair marking her approach like some ghastly shark's fin. There's more imaginative CGI in her creation than in all of Peter Jackson's last three films put together.

And there are also several imaginatively shot dream/memory sequences from Mama's standpoint that are seriously disturbing. It would be lovely if as much care had been taken with the story as is taken with the visuals, but at least the movie is neither found-footage nor 'based on a true story.' Recommended.

Pacific Rocket Punch

Pacific Rim: written by Travis Beacham and Guillermo del Toro; directed by Guillermo del Toro; starring Charlie Hunnam (Raleigh Becket), Idris Elba (Pentecost), Rinko Kikuchi (Mako Mori), Burn Gorman (Gottlieb), Charlie Day (Geiszler), and Ron Perlman (Hannibal Chau) (2013): Pacific Rim is a hoot, an expensive homage to every Japanese movie and cartoon that gave us gigantic, city-destroying monsters and/or giant, man-shaped, world-saving robots and cyborgs. There's even a rocket punch, and monsters that could clearly beat the crap out of Leonard Maltin AND Sydney Poitier. But not Robert Smith!!!

The movie even mostly hangs together as a thought experiment, though it overcomplicates the plot in a couple of ways. The most problematic overcomplication is the movie's premise that humanity has stopped making Jaegers -- the giant human-run robots that are the only effective defense against the monstrous Kaiju that periodically come striding out of a dimensional rift in the Pacific Ocean floor -- and instead turned to building a giant, and soon-to-be-proven useless, wall around the Pacific (!!!!!!!!). It would have been a lot simpler to note that the defense program is temporaily short on Jaegers due to the increase in period and frequency of Kaiju attacks, and move on.

Other than that, though, the movie is a lot of fun, with an emphasis on teamwork over individuality, and a multi-national cast that may have hindered its box-office performance in the United States. Either that, or they should have just titled it Transformers: Pacific Rim, even though the robots don't actually transform.

The main cast of Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, and Idris Elba is tremendously likeable; the twitchy scientists played by Burn Gorman and Charlie Day are intermittently amusing and ultimately heroic; the Kaiju organlegger played by Ron Perlman is a welcome jolt of energy. The robots look great, as do the Kaiju, though I wish the filmmakers had spent a bit more on visual effects and given us one extended Jaeger vs. Kaiju battle staged entirely in the day-time. The murkiness of the night battles and the undersea battles sometimes gets a bit annoying.

The best Kaiju sequence, as if from a postmodern fairytale, involves one of the gargantuan monsters -- this one vaguely crab-like -- chasing a little girl through the streets of Tokyo. It's scary and funny, and better than pretty much any visual effects sequence from any other blockbuster this summer. Highly recommended.

Adaptations and Mutations

Fright Night: written by Marti Noxon, based on the 1985 movie written by Tom Holland; directed by Craig Gillespie; starring Anton Yelchin (Charlie Brewster), Colin Farrell (Jerry), Toni Collette (Jane Brewster), David Tennant (Peter Vincent), Imogen Poots (Amy) and Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Ed) (2011): Buffy the Vampire Slayer veteran Marti Noxon manages to rewrite Fright Night so as to make it a lot better than its original. Only Roddy McDowall's delightful horror host Peter Vincent is sorely missed here, though former Doctor Who David Tennant does the best he can with a somewhat unfocused role as a Criss Angel-like Vegas magician who's also an occult collector a la Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page.

Frankly, the Vincent role would be funnier (and truer to the original) if we had someone like Steve Coogan playing Vincent as an aging, occult-obsessed rock star suddenly faced with the real thing. Oh, well. Tennant does have a terrific smoking scene. But I'd still like to see an old rock star with a fetish for Aleister Crowley and The Lord of the Rings taking on the hounds of Hell. Wouldn't everybody?

The bare bones of the story remain the same as in the original: geeky Charlie Brewster comes to believe a vampire has moved in next door to him. Almost no one believes him, but he's right. Vampiric shenanigans ensue.

The movie cleverly moves the action to Las Vegas, where despite the anti-vampiric sun, there's lots of good eating in a town with a lot of itinerants and a large population of people who are already nocturnal due to their night jobs at the casinos and hotels. There's real wit in our first look at Charlie's subdivision, which seems to sit in the middle of an empty desert.

Yelchin and the other actors do nice work here, though the character of 'Evil' Ed gets shoved off-stage rapidly so as to focus more on Charlie's ass-kicking girlfriend Amy, played by hellacute Brit Imogen Poots (!). The always reliable Toni Collette, who now seems to be the go-to actress for American single moms, also gets to be a bit more pro-active on the vampire-fighting front.

Colin Farrell plays the vampire (incongruously named Jerry) as an Alpha Male thug, and it works nicely as a counterpoint to all those more refined vampires out there. Director David Gillespie stages some nifty setpieces, most notably a funny/scary car chase in which a realtor's sign makes a surprisingly welcome appearance. All in all, an enjoyable romp. Recommended.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark: written by Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins, based on the 1973 movie of the same name written by Nigel McKeand; directed by Troy Nixey; starring Bailee Madison (Sally), Katie Holmes (Kim) and Guy Pearce (Alex) (2011): As with Pan's Labyrinth, this film can either be viewed as a fairy story told not to but by a child, or it can be viewed as a story with annoying plot holes and lapses in character motivation.

I'd go with the first choice, as the tone, the atmosphere and even the performances would support such a view even if one didn't know that Guillermo del Toro had something to do with this.

Based on a 1973 TV movie that got del Toro interested in horror in the first place. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark features plucky, misunderstood 10-year-old Sally, a girl suffering through the divorce of her parents and, soon, persecution by tiny monsters living beneath the basement of the old New England house her father is renovating for profit.

Oh, it's Rhode Island -- that an H.P. Lovecraft allusion whether one wants it or not. Explicitly referenced in the film is Welsh fantasist Arthur Machen, whose stories often featured the monstrous real creatures behind the myths and legends (Machen's "The White People" and "The Shining Pyramid" are the two stories most relevant to this one). A doomed 19th-century painter and naturalist gets named (Ralph Waldo?) Emerson (Algernon?) Blackwood. Hoo ha.

The father is distant and somewhat thick (remember the fairy tale elements here or you'll obsess over stupid parents a bit too much), his new girlfriend sympathetic to Sally and, ultimately, an ally. The little, talkative monsters are a bit of a letdown -- they're basically Gollum crossed with a rat -- but occasionally scary, though if someone had the sense to buy a tennis racket, they'd be a lot less dangerous. Troy Nixey summons a lot of atmosphere and a real sense of place; the opening titles (directed, I assume, by someone other than Nixey) are stunning. Recommended.