Movie Review—The Slender Man

I've mentioned the Slender Man before on this blog; he was monster #2 on the Monster Day articles, after all. Not only is it a really creepy story, but I'm endlessly fascinated by the fact that this whole thing was, essentially, an entire and rather complex mythology created entirely online by all sorts of different people, resulting in something realistic enough to fool others into believing it's real. Very impressive.

So, when I was looking around over at Bloody Disgusting (one of my favorite horror-themed websites), and saw an article about a Slender Man movie being free to view on the internets, I immediately relocated from my home office to my couch, fired up You Tube on my TiVo, and after a bit of frustration finding the right movie (it's tough searching for long titles when you have to spell them with a TiVo remote!)... I was watching a movie that 3 minutes earlier I didn't know existed. Technology, for the win!

"The Slender Man" is a true child of the internet. Not only is the movie based on something created on the internet and distributed on the internet... it was FUNDED on the internet over at Kickstarter. I totally missed it... otherwise I would have certainly kicked in some cash, but they made their goal and made a pretty fun movie as a result. The fact that you can make a movie like this is pretty exciting as well, needless to say.

Now, all that said... how is the movie itself?

Really quite good! Several of the scenes were so thick with tension that I was afraid to blink, for fear of missing something—the Slender Man myths are all about barely catching glimpses of the faceless, tentacled, suit-wearing child-abducting monster, after all.

The movie is not a true found-footage film—while it's filmed in that style, with all of the on-screen footage being from in-movie cameras that are in most scenes being carried by the actors, it has some musical cues and doesn't involve a "this footage was found" element to it at all. It's a subtle difference, but it absolutely works.

The idea that the Slender Man can only be seen through video footage or photographs or works of art is also fascinating and super creepy. The movie isn't content to just scare us with the threat of Slender Sightings, though. The plot follows three different people:

1) A young woman who's father just passed away. While she and her brother sorting out his estate, she finds a huge amount of files on her father's computer—collections of articles about kidnapped children and a file called "Slender Man," clues that send the two out to try to determine what it was their father was researching.

2) A detective hired to track down a missing child many years ago who became involved in the Slender Man's machinations peripherially, and who is now involved in a fresh spate of missing children cases that have a disturbingly similar theme.

3) A father who's child goes missing in the first scene of the movie, a really chilling long shot of the two playing catch with a ball. The ball rolls into the woods at the edge of the yard, the kid goes into the woods to find it... and doesn't come back.

HEART ATTACK!!!!!!

It's a low budget film, but it's really effective and quite well done. Some of the scenes drag on for a bit too long, and one scene in particular has some really unpleasant sound work on someone screaming that could have been handled a bit by some post sound work to make it less painful on the ears. But the tension that builds as the footage shot by the three primary characters starts to slowly weave together as their involvement with the Slender Man inexorably draws them into each other's fates is VERY well done. And while the Slender Man himself doesn't show up often... when he does, it's always effective. The first shot of him (which is done with, alas, some pretty dodgy CGI work—the rest of the shots with him aren't quite as ambitious and are all done quite well with costumes and make-up that's enhanced by CGI and video distortion), is shocking... but the last is one of the scariest things I've seen in a movie in a while!

The Slender Man...

• ... has a satisfying conclusion to the movie, but then adds a coda that completely blew me away with how well done and how disturbing it was. Yikes!
• ... doesn't even have an IMDB page yet!
• ... isn't alone out there; there's quite a few other Slender Man movies on the way, including at least one with the same name that DOES have an IMDB page.
• ... made all its money via Kickstarter, and the movie's creators have simply unleashed it onto the internet for anyone to watch. Not only that... they're encouraging folks to spread the word and repost the movie. Which is a refreshing bit of non-corporate, non-greedy modern thinking.
• ... works best if you watch it with a sound system that includes a sub-woofer, since like Paranormal Activity and Jaws, the approach of the horror is broadcast by low, ominous tones.
• ... has not a trailer below... but the ENTIRE MOVIE! Although you really should watch it on a big TV with the lights out and the sub-woofer and all that.

Grade: A–

Movie Review–Hollow

And so here's more proof that I'm a sucker for the old found footage genre. About 4 minutes after I posted my review of "Grave Encounters 2," I was back on my couch firing up another one.

"Hollow" is a movie that I'd been looking forward to for a while; I saw its trailer last year and was intrigued by the fact that it featured a spooky looking tree. I'm pretty sure that anyone who grew up in the woods like I did understands what I'm saying here... some trees just look evil.

The movie is about two pairs of friends—one about to be married, and one not quite yet a couple. They get together to head up for a relaxing weekend in a remote village in the rural England countryside... of particular note is the fact that the village they go to visit is Dunwich. Of course, this is the real-world Dunwich in England, so there's not any Yog-Sothothery going on here, but the movie DOES have a pretty creepy Lovecraft vibe to it. Actually, strike that... it's got more of an Algernon Blackwood vibe, or maybe an Arthur Machen vibe. Whatever vibe it's got... it's a good one.

Anyway, the couple heads up to this house in rural England for a relaxing weekend, and since this is a found footage horror movie, things are anything but relaxing. And while the last 10 minutes of the movie are pretty intense, it's also another one that does the slow burn. You see, one of these four people has some psychological damage, and the movie doesn't really come out and explain it via dialogue. Instead, you see it in the way this character films things with his camera, how he obsesses on a fly trapped against a window, or becomes so interested in the weird nooks and crannies in an old ruined monastery, or sneaks around in the house after dark filming the woman he'd rather be up here with, but who is instead here with her fiance.

Did I mention there's a creepy evil looking tree in a field nearby? A tree that seems to have an unusual number of suicides involved with young lovers who hang themselves from its gnarly, twisted branches? A tree that some local legends say is a place where, if you hang yourself there, the ghost of a monk who served in the nearby monastery will give you absolution so that you'll still go to heaven, but which some other local legends say that the "monk" is not a monk at all, and those who end up hanging in the boughs are hardly suicides?

Or that there's rusty chains wrapped around the tree trunk?

See? Evil.

Aside from a little bit of gore, there's really no special effects in the movie. It's very understated and deliberate in its pacing, and when it's over, it leaves a lot of what actually happened up to interpretation. But the atmosphere of tension and dread that it builds as it goes makes it all quite worth it... especially if you look at it through the eyes of Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, or Lovecraft.

Hollow...

• ... is very much a minimalist horror movie. Don't check it out if you're expecting big special effects scenes, spooky music, or anything like that. But if you like found footage movies and think the Wicker Man's a great movie and don't require answers to all your questions, you can do a lot worse.
• ... is one of the few found footage movies I've seen that concedes that video cameras run on batteries, and even better, makes the draining battery on that camera into a plot point.
• ... will have you straining to see if there's something in the shadows of the footage while simultaneously trying not to stare too hard just in case there's a jump cut or a jump scare about to strike.
• ... incorporates a pretty creepy and classic urban legend into the plot.
• ... gets creepier the more I think about it.

Grade: B+

Movie Review—Grave Encounters 2

So, yeah. I'm a sucker for found footage films. I saw the first "Grave Encounters" a while back, and was pleasantly surprised by the movie. It was about the cast and crew of a ghost hunting show that supposedly went up to an old asylum in some remote area that was supposedly haunted, and they set up all their film equipment to film an episode of their show there, and as it worked out... the place really was haunted. By more than ghosts, although ghosts are certainly involved. But so might be some mad scientist stuff, some demon summoning stuff, and just maybe some extra-dimensional horrors. You see, as the movie progressed, the asylum they were exploring and filming in took on a life of its own and started rearranging its layout, changing where doors and hallways go and basically keeping them trapped in a perpetual night within a haunted asylum that had no end and no beginning.

Pretty nifty movie!

And so when the sequel was announced, I was interested. And lo and behold, it went live on Netflix streaming this week!

The sequel, like the original, is a found footage movie, but it gets even more meta than that. The central conceit of "Grave Encounters 2" is that the first movie exists, and it starts out with lots of movie reviews of the first movie–some folks love it, some hate it, some think it's real, some think it's fake, and so on. The movie settles on one young film student who's convinced it's fake, but then he starts receiving strange emails from someone called "Death Awaits." Intrigued, he starts to look into things, and soon discovers that the cast of the original movie are nowhere to be found and the producer reveals that, yes indeed, the footage WAS real.

So... shocked that this Hollywood producer basically cashed in on the deaths of a bunch of movie makers and turned their unintentional ghost snuff film into a movie, the film student and his friends set out to find the real site of the asylum and find out just what happened.

Yeah... there's some pretty good quality nightmare fuel in here, I'll give the movie that.

The thing that's actually quite intersting about this movie is that it takes about a third of the running time for the movie to actually GET to the haunted asylum... up until then it's a slow burn of character building and some pretty interesting research about the fates of the cast of the first movie. The movie stays interesting once it inexorably moves to the asylum... but alas, things start to get a little too over the top... although there is a pretty unexpected and delightful third-act development I didn't see coming. Alas, the unusual and compelling setup for the movie ends up not delivering as satisfying a conclusion as it could have... still a fun ride, though!

Grave Encounters 2...

• ... is at its best when it's being subtle, and when the ghosts themselves are actually on screen, but can't quite keep the momentum going once it goes beyond ghosts into that over-the-top third act.
• ... has one of the most interesting premisies for a sequel I've seen.
• ... also has one of the more frightening visual themes for its ghosts I've seen... the themes worked better in the first movie when we weren't quite ready for the disfigured black-mouthed specters, but when they show up here, they're still quite unsettling. Even if, by this time, we really DO want to know a bit more about WHY the ghosts look the way they do.
• ... isn't as good as the first one, but is pretty close. If the movie had managed to keep its excellent writing and script going all the way to the end, it would have been a great little movie! But good is sometimes good enough.
• ... makes me want to see a "Grave Encounters 3," which is absolutely a compliment, but if they DO do a third one, I want to know more about the genesis of what's going on behind things. The sequel to [REC] did this really quite well, as did the first two sequels to Paranormal Activity. Not so much Paranormal Activity 4.
• ... also makes me want to see someone try a big-budget film adaptation of "House of Leaves."

Grade: B–

Monster #7—Rat Bat Spider

One of my favorite sub-genres (I have a lot of favorite sub-genres) of movie is the "Astronauts journey to an alien planet and explore it and encounter monsters on said planet." There haven't been many movies made with this plot lately. "Avatar" is probably the one that comes the closest most recently, but "Pitch Black" is more what I'm talking about. The height of this genre's popularity, though, was back in the '50s, it seems, with movies like "First Spaceship To Venus" and "Journey to the Seventh Planet" and, of course, my absolute favorite of all in the genre, "Angry Red Planet."

The thing I love about this movie is that, despite its low budget, it just doesn't care. It's not content with having monsters that are just people in alien suits. No siree. The monsters of "Angry Red Planet" are big, bigger, and enormous. The fact that all the Mars scenes (yes, that's the Angry Red Planet the astronauts visit) are filmed in "Cinemagic," which makes all those scenes appear all solarized and red makes the whole thing so surreal that the low budget sets actually kind of end up working in a bizarre sort of way. Of course, I'm certainly looking at it with a giant dose of nostalgia.

ANYway.

The reason I'm talking about it for Monster Day is the Rat Bat Spider.

You've seen what the thing looks like in the pictures here already, but make sure you watch the movie below. The thing is HUGE! And not only that, it's a completely freaky weird monster unlike anything I've really ever seen in movies before or since. Heck... it's got enormous pincers, so the fact that the Internet calls it a Rat Bat Spider isn't even right... it should be a Rat Bat Spider Crab. Except that it's the size of a house.

Man... this is one movie that someone needs to remake JUST for ME.

Recommended Viewing

• Angry Red Planet, dir. Ib Melchior

Movie Review—Carnage

Sometimes, movies are fun because they have cool special effects. Other times, they're fun because of a fun unexpected plot twist. And then there are movies like "Carnage," which are fun purely and solely because of the actors and actresses involved.

This is by no means a big movie—it's not even 90 minutes long and, with the exception of 2 shots outside (one during the opening credits and one during the closing credits), the entire movie takes place in a single apartment. There's plenty of cuts, but the movie proceeds in real time.

The plot is pretty simple. Two kids got in a fight in the park. One kid may or may not call the other kid a name, they start pushing each other, then the other kid wheels around and hits the first kid in the face with a stick. It's all shot in a long shot, and then we cut to the apartment, where the parents of the two children have gotten together to talk about the incident and agree on a statement about what happened. One thing leads to another, and in a series of events involving fruit cobbler, tulips, a pesky cell phone, some art books, an upset stomach, some really good scotch, and a possibly murdered hamster... things go from relatively awkward and tense to almost unbearably awkward and tense. It's a quietly hilarious movie about two couples who don't really like each other learning just how much they don't like each other or, indeed, their own spouses.

Oh... and by the way... the couples? Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz VS John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster.

Roman Polanski's recipe for mayhem.

I could have watched these four talk for another ten hours easy.

Carnage...

• ... made me want to make sure my favorite books are not out on the coffee table when I have guests over.
• ... has a much better French movie poster than the American one.
• ... made me worry about that poor hamster.
• ... taught me the secret about making apple and pear cobbler.
• ... also taught me that it's important to keep a bucket and a bottle of cologne handy for accidents.

Grade: A–

Movie Review—The Snow Creature

So, IMDB claims that "The Snow Creature" is the first movie about the yeti. My favorite yeti movie is probably "The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas." Made a few years after "The Snow Creature," that movie featured Peter Cushing in a movie directed by Val Guest and written by Nigel Kneale—the duo responsible for the Quatermass Xperiment and Quartermass II, two of my favorite sci-fi movies from the 50s.

But it's "The Snow Creature" that I'm here to talk about, and if it is indeed the first yeti movie, then it's also rock solid proof that what comes first is not always the best. In fact, in this case, what comes first is one of the worst.

The plot, such as it is, involves a botanist and his boozy photographer henchman who head up to the Himalayas to seek out and photograph high-altitude plants. Like moss and some tiny flowers. When the yeti (more on THIS piece of work below) shows up to abduct the lead Sherpa's wife (despite the fact that the yeti has a doomed nuclear family at home), said distraught Sherpa rounds up the other guides and they head off to hunt down the yeti, save the wife, and kill the presumably rapist or woman-eating monster.

Unfortunately, the movie assumes we, the viewer, identify more with the (white American) botanist and his boozy photographer pal. Who are mortified that their plant-seeking expedition is being usurped by a mutinous crew of Sherpas and a yeti. Much of the first 3rd of the movie consists of the group trudging around in the snow during the day, then the two American "heroes" spending time trying to fix the radio to call the police at night. Eventually, the botanist realizes that catching a real-live yeti might make him more money than mountain moss, and soon thereafter they find a yeti in a cave with his yeti-wife and yeti-kid. There's a confrontation, and the yeti-dad (for some reason I'm still not clear on) races up to the cave wall and pounds his fists on it, causing a cave-in that not only knocks himself out but also kills his yeti-wife and yeti-child. The brave Americans boldly leave the two dead yetis behind, truss up yeti-dad with a rinky-dink home-made stretcher, and after 15 agonizing minutes of watching the logistics of walking their prize down the mountainside, storing him in a warehouse, arranging to have a refrigerated shipping unit (that looks like a metal outhouse with a frosted window in the side) built in the states and then shipped to Tibet, and then loading up their yeti onto an airplane and flying to Los Angeles from Tibet via New York.


ANYway... they get back to LA and after spending a mind-boggling 5 minutes or so on a "must see to believe it" subplot wherein the customs department at the LA Airport are trying to decide if the yeti is a man or a beast so they can decide if he needs immigration papers... the yeti gets out, kidnaps and/or chases some women, steals some meat from a meat packing plant, then gets netted in the sewers by the cops and shot dead by a hand gun (seen in a closeup wherein the man firing the gun is using his middle finger... thanks movie!). The movie ends with us seeing the botanist eager to get home to his wife, his policeman friend excited to go see his new baby at the hospital...

...and with the Sherpa's wife still missing out there in the Himalayas after being kidnapped by a yeti. Well... I guess it was the 50s. American movies had different priorities back then I guess.

Behold the SNOW BEAST in all his glory! Check out those muppet mitts!

So! On to the yeti! This was one of the WORST monsters I've seen in a movie. Ever. I kid you not. The yeti was basically a tall lanky guy wearing what looked to be like long underwear to which someone had glued swaths of rabbit fur to the the shoulders, chest, groin, back, and legs, then slapped a couple of novelty muppet monster gloves on each had, then threw on a squarish fur hat and a fake beard.

That's it.

Oh... and he's all gray and black, just like you'd expect a creature that lives in the snow and, indeed, is called "THE SNOW CREATURE" to appear as.

But the absolute best part? The director doesn't skimp at all on showing us the monster, often in unforgiving hard focus. Unfortunately, probably 75% of the scenes where we see the monster doing stuff ARE THE SAME SCENE! There's a shot of the monster walking slowly forward toward the camera against a black background, and the director sees fit to simply splice in that scene over and over and over and over whenever he wants to remind us that the yeti is out there. Doesn't matter if the scene's supposed to take place on a snowy mountainside or a deep Himalayan cave or in the LA city sewer or in an airport warehouse or in an alley. That scene's apparently good enough for anywhere!

HA! Also? When he wants to convey the notion that the yeti is being sneaky and retreating into the darkness to hide? He simply runs that same footage BACKWARDS.

I picked this movie to watch tonight out of the 100+ movies in my online Netflix queue for 1 reason—it was tied with "Tetsuo: The Bullet Man" for the title of "shortest movie in my online Netflix queue" at a mere 70 minutes or so. I'll have to watch "Tetsuo" later this weekend to see which one seems longer. Because "The Snow Creature" seemed like it went on for 70 hours, not 70 minutes!

The Snow Creature...

• ... informs the viewer of many well known scientific facts, including, for example, that yetis instinctively know where to seek out the cooler areas in a region... such as the sewers of Los Angeles.
• ... may well have the honor of the least convincing yeti costume ever filmed.
• ... seems to think that in a movie featuring a woman-abducting yeti and life-or-death survival situations on the slopes of the highest mountain range on the planet, the best place to go to for tension and action are sequences of radio repair.
• ... assumes that if a dude brings a live yeti back to Los Angeles, one reporter is enough to represent the media attention such an event would bring—and that this one reporter wouldn't put up a fight when the cops tell him "you'll get a chance to ask questions about the yeti later; first we have to get him through immigration!"
• ... would have probably been about 15 minutes shorter if the producer had told the editor & director, "Okay, you can't re-use ANY FOOTAGE in your film."
• ... is one of those movies that's important to preserve and see, so that you can point it out to those people who say that Hollywood doesn't make great movies the way they used to.
• ... teaches us that the best time to cry out a warning to "LOOK OUT!" is after the cop you saw walk by the tunnel you just watched shabby-yeti shamble into has already been snatched and mauled.
• ... really could use a good rifftraxing.

Grade: F

Sorry... couldn't find a trailer for this one, so enjoy a clip from the movie where the heroes ambush the yeti and his family at home and marvel at the yeti's nonsensical reaction to this home invasion.

Book Review—Cold City

Repairman Jack's one of my favorite recurring literary characters. As I've mentioned elsewhere, my love of reading (and particularly my love of the horror genre) is directly attributable to my father, and his parents as well. My grandma and grandpa kept me in solid supply of spooky stuff to read—be they horror comics or novels. My grandma introduced me to Stephen King, Clive Barker, Dean Koonz, and F. Paul Wilson.

The first of Wilson's novels I read was as a kid back in the early 80's; I started reading "The Tomb" at Grandma's house, camped out in a big cozy chair in the huge front room/library of their expansive farmhouse in central California. I still remember how that first long chapter of the book surprised me—it read like a good old-fashioned adventure story up until the end of the chapter... when all of a sudden, MONSTERS showed up! I was immediately hooked on Wilson for life.

Since then, he's written 19 books in the Repairman Jack line, along with several other stories and novels that feature him or events tied to his life in some way or another. Some have been better than others, but all of them were very entertaining. The last one in the series was initially going to be "Nightworld" but Repairman Jack fans convinced him to do a final trilogy about Jack's formative years in New York. His origin story, if you will.

"Cold City" is the first book in that trilogy.

With each book in the Repairman Jack series, things grow more and more fantastical. Early on, a lot of his plots are against relatively mundane threats like criminals, conspirators, con-artists, and the like, but by the end, he's going up against all sorts of monsters, undead foes, Lovecraftian horrors, and eventually the end of the world. And as delightful as those books are... ("Nightworld" remains one of my favorite books of all time) ... there's a certain charm that gets left behind when the foes get so out of this world.

The supernatural is present in "Cold City," but only VERY subtly and margianally. In fact, if you haven't read all the Repairman Jack stories to come before, you might even miss the supernatural elements entirely. Here, we see Repairman Jack as just Jack, a young man in New York who's living off the grid and only starting to build up his skills by working as a smuggler and a protector/avenger of those in need. There's all sorts of cool Easter eggs and prizes to delight long-time readers of the series, but the book also reads great as an introduction to Jack. If I had one complaint (and it's a pretty small one) it's that among the slavers, terrorists, vengeful co-workers, mobsters, cultists, con-artists, and more who Jack ends up going up against in this book, there's probably one group too many. Yet Wilson manages to pull off this vast cast of bad guys arranged against Jack nonetheless, and the book's final chapter does a great job "recapping" the situation as it's built during the previous 350 pages.

Fair warning—as with several of the books in this series, there's not really an ending... just a point where the pages stop. All three books are VERY tied together, and while there is a climactic scene of sorts in "Cold City," it's really all about not only setting up the next two books, but about setting up the star of the entire line of books. As such, and as someone who's been following Repairman Jack's adventures for over 30 years, I found it to be an excellent read.

(Special thanks to Pierce Watters, who gave me this book for Christmas at last year's Paizo Holiday Party—he knows F. Paul Wilson and was able to get me an inscribed/signed copy direct from the author! Best Secret Santa EVER!)

Cold City...

• ... is a delight for fans of Jack, especially in that it also introduces several other characters who are mainstays throughout the series and a few new ones who aren't. I'm pretty sure these new ones aren't going to make it out of the trilogy alive, otherwise we'd have heard about them by now!
• ... has Jack getting in over his head multiple times, and it's pretty cool seeing a Jack who doesn't know how to handle a gun or trail a bad guy or sneak around learning the ropes.
• ... made me hungry; I had just started a diet, and each scene where Jack brings his friend Abe food made my mouth water. Especially the big plate of bagels and lox!

GRADE: A