Invisible Hindu Zombies of the Stratosphere

28 Weeks Later (2007): written by Rowan Joffe, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Enrique Lopez Lavigne, and Jesus Olmo; directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo; starring Robert Carlyle (Don), Rose Byrne (Scarlet), Jeremy Renner (Doyle), Imogen Poots (Tammy), and Mackintosh Muggleton (Andy): An astoundingly dumb sequel to an excellent original (28 Days Later). And even though the original film's director (Danny Boyle) and writer (Alex Garland) are credited as executive producers, the makers of this film don't seem to have ever seen 28 Days Later.

In 28 Days Later, the Rage Virus that turns people into murderous "fast zombies" fully dilates the pupils, causing these rage zombies to hide inside during daylight hours and hunt at night. Within five minutes of the start of 28 Weeks Later, Robert Carlyle is fleeing across the sunlit fields of England, pursued by hordes of rage zombies who should by all rights be inside taking a nap.

Along the way we're also told that the Rage Virus can't "jump species," which may surprise viewers who remember it doing just that -- from chimps to humans -- to start the apocalypse in 28 Days Later. OK. It's a scientist who makes this observation (Rose Byrne in a thankless role), so I assume she knows what a species is. Or not. The film-makers don't know how nerve gas works, how long it would take a car battery to die left unused in the open, or when you can push a car to start it, so I'll put the species mistake on them and not the character. 

These problems ultimately pale in comparison to the endless chain of idiocies, improbabilities, and impossibilities that crowd the screen from beginning to end. 28 Weeks Later could be used as a perfect example of Roger Ebert's Idiot Plot: nothing in this movie could happen if everyone wasn't an idiot. It's blazingly stupid and preciously self-important because, like, this is like Iraq, dude! The film-makers also must have really liked it when Roy Batty gouged out Tyrell's eyes in Blade Runner because we get not one but two eye-gouging scenes. Hoo ha! Not recommended.

The Other Side of the Door (2016): written by Johannes Roberts and Ernest Riera; directed by Johannes Roberts; starring Sarah Wayne Callies (Maria), Jeremy Sisto (Michael), and Suchitra Pillai (Piki): A privileged white American couple get up to shenanigans in India. First their son dies. Then he comes back from the dead thanks to the mother's intentional misapplication of what seems to be intended to be some sort of Hindu ghost-raising ritual. Oh, white people. Is there anywhere and any way you can't cause trouble? 

Only one Indian actor has a role with more than a couple of lines of dialogue. Sarah Wayne Callies does that perpetually constipated look that seems to be her default facial expression. Jeremy Sisto has almost nothing to do. It's an even dumber version of Pet Sematary. The Guardian of the Underworld looks pretty cool, though, and technically she's the heroine of the movie. Just bad enough to be fun.

The Invisible Man (1933): adapted by R.C. Sherriff from the novel by H.G. Wells; directed by James Whale; starring Claude Rains (Griffin), Gloria Stuart (Flora), and Henry Travers (Dr. Cranley): The voice of Claude Rains does terrific work as our titular mad, invisible scientist. It's a bit jarring to see Clarence the Guardian Angel (Henry Travers) as a scientist, though. Other than Travers, the supporting cast is surprisingly weak. 

The odd use of English bumpkins as comedy relief in James Whale's Universal horror movies continues here, and is just as unfunny and distracting as its use in his Frankenstein movies. However, the invisible effects hold up, and Whale manages some moments of creepy terror and unease throughout the film. Though given the necessity of the Invisible Man being naked to be completely invisible, he really should consider trying to conquer a country with a more tropical climate. Recommended.

Enjoyable Badness

The poster reflects nothing in the movie!

The Happening (2008): written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan; starring Mark Wahlberg (Elliot Moore), Zooey Deschanel (Alma Moore), John Leguizamo (Julian), Ashlyn Sanchez (Jess), and Betty Buckley (Mrs. Jones): This is great bad movie-making, stupid and weirdly acted and filled with scenes that will blow your mind, including repeated scenes of people trying to run away from the wind. 

It's a Must-See, the moment at which M. Night Shyamalan bottomed out. Zooey Deschanel and Mark Wahlberg (the latter as the least likely high-school science teacher of all time) don't even seem to be acting in the same movie. Highly recommended as a great bad movie.

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016): written by Juliet Snowden, Stiles White, Mike Flanagan, and Jeff Howard; directed by Mike Flanagan; starring Annalise Basso (Lina Zander), Elizabeth Reaser (Alice Zander), Lulu Wilson (Doris Zander), Henry Thomas (Father Tom), and Parker Mack (Mikey): I had completely forgotten pretty much everything from the first Ouija movie when I saw this, so certain things did surprise me that were not in fact intended to be surprises. Unlike the tedious Ouija, this one has an increasingly gonzo sense of horror that, by the end, has made it oddly satisfying without really being any good. 

One of the great pleasures of the movie derives from the decision of the Casting Director to cast three actresses as a mother and two daughters who look nothing like one another, and then the CD compounds the problem by casting a priest and a girl's boyfriend with very similar-looking actors. There are many other pleasures, most of them from the 'WTF?' school of enjoyably bad movie-making. One of the few supernatural movies that embeds a debunking seminar on Mediums in the narrative. Highly recommended as a great bad movie.

Enclosed Spaces

Wind Chill (2007), JeruZalem (2015) and Quarantine (2008)

Ancient Images (1989) by Ramsey Campbell

Ancient Images (1989) by Ramsey Campbell: Probably the sleekest, most thriller-like novel in the prolific Ramsey Campbell's catalogue, Ancient Images is a story of detection with occult elements that begin to dominate as the novel progresses. 

It's 1988 in London, England. Metropolitan TV film editor Sandy Allan witnesses the baffling, apparent suicide of her friend and mentor, a film historian who had just announced that he'd secured a copy of a long-lost 1938 Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi British horror film. But the film isn't in Sandy's mentor's ransacked apartment. 

In order to help deal with her trauma, Sandy uses the mentor's notebook to reconstruct a list of people to contact for information about the film. She takes holiday time and with the help of an American film writer sets out to see if she can track down another copy of the film.

Her quest takes her across much of England. Many of the actors and production staff remain alive 50 years later. Not so much the director, who died in a car crash mere days after the completion of filming.  

Campbell does such a fine job of describing the fictional film that one starts to wish it were real -- if so, it would be one of Karloff and Lugosi's finest on-screen team-ups. Along the way, Campbell deals with anti-horror, censorship crazes in Great Britain in both the 1930's and 1980's. The English peer responsible for the initial quashing of the film invoked the good of the British people back in 1938 as to why this horror film -- and horror films in general -- shouldn't be allowed in Great Britain. In 1988, the 'Video Nasties' censorship hysteria is in full-blown inferno.

But Sandy won't be dissuaded, despite increasingly weird goings-on, the mysterious death of her cats Bogart and Bacall, and a growing sense of being followed. Campbell has noted that Sandy is perhaps his least tortured, most 'normal' protagonist. This aids in the generation of suspense -- she's not the sort of Campbell character who would believe in even the possibility of the supernatural. All those times she thinks she sees something at the edge of vision -- well, they can be explained away. Can't they?

Its likable, uncomplicated protagonist and its detective-thriller architecture make Ancient Images Campbell's most accessible book to non-horror readers, in my humble opinion. It's a terrific ride with a tense climax. Highly recommended.

Solo (2013)

Solo: written and directed by Isaac Cravit; starring Annie Clark (Gillian), Daniel Kash (Ray), Richard Clarkin (Fred), and Steven Love (Marty) (2013): Surprisingly competent straight-to-video cheapie filmed in the terrifying woodlands of Ontario, Canada. 17-year-old Gillian, nursing some tragedy that one knows will be revealed before the end credits, takes a job as a camp counselor somewhere in Ontario's cottage country. She knows nothing about camping.

Before the kiddies arrive, new counselors have to spend two nights alone on a small island to prove their camping ability. As all the counselors seem to be at the camp when this Solo occurs, I guess that either the camp never hires more than one new counselor a year, or the experienced counselors have a lot of down time before the kiddies arrive.

Anyway, 25 years earlier, a girl disappeared on that island, never to be seen again. Now, it has a reputation as being haunted. Man, this is the best summer job ever! So Gillian goes camping, and various things happen.

Annie Clark does a solid job as Gillian, and the rest of the acting is fine. The plot creaks a bit at times -- there's nothing really new here, but writer-director Isaac Cravit shows talent throughout. And at about 80 minutes, the movie certainly doesn't overstay its welcome. Lightly recommended.

Minotaur

The Cabin in the Woods: written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard; directed by Drew Goddard; starring Kristen Connolly (Dana), Chris Hemsworth (Curt), Anna Hutchison (Jules), Fran Kranz (Marty), Jesse Williams (Holden), Richard Jenkins (Sitterson), Bradley Whitford (Hadley), and Sigourney Weaver (The Director) (2011): In a perfect world, The Cabin in the Woods would, at the very least, get a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination for 2012. But it's a horror movie and it's a comedy, so it won't. Nonetheless, it is a humdinger.

Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, who worked together on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, conjure up something special here: a postmodern, metafictional slasher movie that also works as a nifty addition to the Cthulhu Mythos and as a commentary on the tastes of both horror audiences and horror-film makers. Light-footed and well-acted, it never becomes leaden and it never punches the audience in the face with its cleverness. It's a Charlie Kaufman film without the underlying pomposity.

Five college students on Spring Break go to a cabin in the woods. And then...well, frankly, you should experience it yourself. The ads and trailers for the movie gave way too much away as it is. Like the Scream movies, The Cabin in the Woods plays with cliches of the modern horror film. Unlike the Scream movies, it never becomes what it parodies. As one character realizes, "We are not who we are."

If nothing else, this may be the first horror movie that could be read as a metaphor for U.S. drone strikes on targets in Pakistan. Or I may be overthinking it. But you'll never look at a bank of elevators the same way again. Or a Japanese horror movie. Highly recommended.

Coma Chameleon

Insidious, written by Leigh Whannell, directed by James Wan, starring Patrick Wilson (Josh Lambert), Rose Byrne (Renai Lambert), Ty Simpkins (Dalton Lambert), Barbara Hershey (Lorraine Lambert), Lin Shaye (Elise Rainier), Leigh Whannell (Specs) and Angus Sampson (Tucker) (2011): Surprisingly 'old-school' ghost story given that the writer and director are best known for their work on the hardcore Saw films. If it weren't for the last twenty minutes and the subsequent, exhausted 'twist' ending, this would be a really solid film.

Young Dalton Lambert goes into a medically inexplicable coma. His family searches for answers. Weird things happen. A psychic is consulted. More weird things happen. That's the movie with the major twists and revelations unrevealed.

Wan and Whannel get a lot of productive mileage out of showing little and suggesting a lot, of quick scares and odd things lurking in the outskirts of the frame. The cosmology introduced by the psychic to explain what's going on makes a certain amount of sense, though it's not developed enough to be all that convincing for long. A visual homage to Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is a bit jarring; that one supernatural entity looks an awful lot like Darth Maul undercuts a certain amount of tension.

Rose Byrne is a stand-out as the worried mother. Byrne's face in repose tends to look sad anyway -- I think it's her eyebrows -- and the look suits the material. Patrick Wilson is fine as the father, who has supernatural secrets of his own, though he appears to lose about 50 IQ points in the last twenty minutes. When the psychic tells you not to draw attention to yourself, don't run around yelling at every supernatural entity you encounter, that's all I've got to say.

The movie also joins the horror sub-sub-sub-genre of 'Monsters who love novelty songs,' as one entity really likes Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe Through the Tulips," which was already terrifying enough on its own. Hell's playlist must be really awful. Recommended.

Docudramamine

Paranormal Activity 3, written by Christopher B. Landon, based on characters and situations created by Oren Peli, starring Chloe Csengery (Katie), Jessica Tyler Brown (Kristi), Lauren Bittner (Julie), and Dustin Ingram (Randy Rosen) (2011): The 'documentary/found footage' subgenre of horror films, so popular right now, harks back to the 19th-century beginnings of what we now recognize as the horror story. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was told in the form of letters and diary entries; Bram Stoker's Dracula added fake newspaper clippings to that mix; Edgar Allan Poe played with fiction and fact within stories that were sometimes published as 'fact.'

H.P. Lovecraft moved the documentary style in a more holistic fictional direction, having his narrators tell ostensibly true tales about fictional events and mythologies and framing everything inside the conceit that the fiction was the real truth about the universe, and recognized fact the fiction.

I have a great fondness for these attempts at documentary horror -- at their best, they're much better than almost every other filmed attempt at horror in the last twenty or thirty years, in part because they move so resolutely away from the grapohic violence of the slasher films that have dominated the horror film genre since the late 1970's. Suggestion and subtlety are what work best in these movies, and Paranormal Activity 3 comes up with some lovely moments of 'found' horror.

The fictional backstory of the three Paranormal films situates the entire narrative within the subtext of long-term child sexual, physical and emotional abuse, abuse that spans generations and is part of the horror. It's a classic example of Stephen King's 'sub-text school' of horror, in which the supernatural stands in for something too mundanely awful to be depicted on film.

Thankfully, one can also say 'pooh!' to sub-text and simply enjoy the movies as a depiction of the pervasive and perhaps unkillable influence of supernatural evil. That the threatened protagonists are spiritually and intellectually unsuited to a confrontation with elemental and generational evil is part of the point of the movies, I think -- no one is coming to save them because they're too dumb, or too conditioned to an unintellectual passivity, to make any real effort to save themselves. They're reactive, not pro-active.

I won't bother with the plot of the movie, or even the characterization. It all makes more sense if you've seen the first two films, though if you haven't you may be a lot more shocked at some of the plot developments. There is clever, killer use of a camera mounted on a rotating fan within the story world, with menace building as we move at a set pace back and forth from foyer to dining room and back again, and things start to appear that shouldn't be there.

There's also one of the smarter, more realistic character reactions to a haunting that I've seen in some time -- a secondary character seems to have seen Eddie Murphy's hilarious bit about The Amityville Horror and reacts accordingly when threatening weirdness occurs. Highly recommended.

Attack of the Scottish Blob

X, The Unknown, written by Jimmy Sangster, directed by Leslie Norman, starring Dean Jagger (Dr. Royston) and Leo McKern (Inspector McGill) (1956): Tight little Hammer science-fiction horror film from the mid-1950's, seemingly consciously constructed to resemble the proto-Doctor-Who Quatermass tv serials and movies (the title recalls the title of the then-recent Hammer Quatermass picture, The Creeping Unknown).

Atomic scientist Royston ultimately becomes the only thing standing between an intelligent radioactive blob and global armageddon. The blob, which apparently lives somewhere in the Earth's molten mantle or core, surfaces in Scotland and starts heading for every available radiation source, which it then slurps up.

This would be fine if it didn't kill any human being in its way. The blob is pretty much a big, radioactive brother to the Horta in the original Star Trek episode "The Devil in the Dark": even its malevolence is in question, as its mere proximity to a human being kills that person due to heat and radioactivity. For all we know, it's just on vacation.

There's an enjoyable ruthlessness to this movie that probably wouldn't exist now, at least if it were a studio picture -- a young boy actually dies of radiation poisoning, foregrounding the menace. The filmmakers wisely keep the blobby thing off-screen as long as possible, and when we do see it, we don't see it much (a scene of the blob destroying power lines shows us just how limited a budget the filmmakers were working with). There's also a shocking level of violence for the time period -- two victims melt pretty convincingly before our eyes.

The science is hooey, delivered quickly and with conviction. The performances by Jagger and McKern are solid and professional, lending verisimilitude to what is, after all, a Shaggy Blob story. The film ends with a tiny lack of closure, in keeping with its overarching story concern with the gaps in human knowledge when it comes to the fundamental atomic forces of the universe. A fun 80 minutes. Recommended.

Target That Explosion And Fire!

It! The Terror from Beyond Space, written by Jerome Bixby, directed by Edward L. Cahn, starring Marshall Thompson (Carruthers), Shirley Patterson (Ann Anderson), Kim Spalding (Van Heusen) and Ray "Crash" Corrigan (It) (1958): I salute the B-movie makers of the 1940's and 1950's for being able to make enjoyable movies that clock in at under 90 minutes. Actually, this one clocks in at less than 70 minutes. And that's with a mostly unnecessary frame-narrative involving expositional press conferences back on Earth.

About 90% of this movie takes place on a rocket ship headed from Mars to Earth. It's just picked up the last survivor of the first Mars manned mission (in 1973, no less!), Colonel Carruthers. He maintains that a mysterious monster killed the other members of his crew. Nobody believes him. Guess who's right? Veteran science-fiction writer Jerome Bixby writes a solid script with some wackiness, while the direction is tense and suggestive rather than literal most of the time. The filmmakers do what they can with a very limited budget, and the suspense remains pretty tight for the entire movie.

Many moments anticipate Alien and Aliens and any number of other monster movies in which a seemingly indestructible creature stalks humans in an enclosed space. Almost every movie ever made along these lines seems to owe a debt to Canadian Golden-Age science fiction writer A.E. Van Vogt's seminal 1940's novellas "Black Destroyer" and "Discord in Scarlet" -- indeed, the makers of Alien paid Van Vogt an out-of-court settlement because of the similarities between their movie and his novellas.

The monster looks about as good as any humanoid monster of the 1950's ever looked -- rubbery and a bit goofy, but fine as long as it remains in the shadows. The spaceship crew is hilariously trigger-happy, firing off wildly inside the spaceship (which ain't that big), setting off grenades, setting off gas bombs, and in general doing things that should pretty much result in their immediate deaths, monster or no monster. One astronaut even fires off rounds from a bazooka during the final battle. Did I mention that the ship consists of four levels, each of them maybe 30 feet in diameter?

Hilarity will also probably ensue when you realize that the all-female medical staff of the ship is also in charge of serving food and beverages. This is what I went to medical school for?

The title is, of course, misleading -- it should really be It! The Terror from Mars. Marshall Thompson, who plays Carruthers, bears an uncanny resemblance to Tim Robbins, who was in the much worse Mission to Mars movie decades later. Recommended.