Horrorfest 2011: Cube

Like [REC], I went into CUBE a little prejudiced. Ever since CUBE hit the new release wall in 1997, it has been one of those movies friends and acquaintances tell me they've "discovered" and that I have to see. I was always reluctant because it seemed like one of those movies that relied a little too heavily on its premise -- a group of strangers wake up in a mysterious cube shaped maze made of booby trapped rooms and have to figure their way out of there. I mean, once you know that, what else is there to know? I can see sitting through 25 minutes of a TWILIGHT ZONE episode, but an entire feature film?

Anyway, I've finally seen it. I have to say, even though the premise is gimmicky, it was not the film's undoing. The film's undoing was basically everything else.

To be fair, we're dealing squarely in the realm of low budget filmmaking, here, so you have to at least give these guys credit for coming up with an interesting idea for a puzzle and a credible solution to that puzzle. The movie doesn't rely on cheating or withholding clues from the audience. The central mystery makes sense, basically, even if the existence of the "cube" itself could probably never be satisfactorily explained. To the movie's credit, it doesn't do much in the way of trying to explain. Wise move.

Unfortunately, clever ideas do not a good film make. They help. But they have to have backup. And there's not much in the way of backup here. The whole movie is shot, edited and designed about on par with a syndicated sci-fi show of the era. Even the music, what little there is, is laughable in its attempt to be mysterious. There are a couple effects that belong in the majors, including some nifty gore moments, but these are few and far between and most of what we're stuck with is a series of stock sci-fi rooms (actually one set redressed a bunch of times). I mean, that's the premise -- characters stuck in a cage. But, at least make the cage interesting.

The acting is also wildly uneven with a cast of mostly unlikable characters. Normally I don't like to shit on actors because they're at the mercy of so many variables it's hard for anyone to really know who's a "good" actor and who's a "bad" actor without being on set to see what went down, but there was clearly no one on this production charged with the task of making these poor bastards look good. The cliche ridden dialogue offers nothing interesting for them to say and the director's primary performance note seems to have been, "Yell more!" When you're stuck with one set, you've got to do better than that.

Our cast includes Maurice Dean Wint as an angry cop, David Hewlett as an angry office worker, Nicky Guadagni as an angry doctor, and Wayne Robson as an angry escape artist. They're all angry. Got that? Of these, Wint has the most heavy lifting to do as his character goes through the most changes, but he seems to play it all on about the same level, robbing the movie of some momentum along the way. I was hoping for a good death scene for Guadagni early on since she seemed to be the worst offender in the yelling contest. Robson doesn't get much screen time and Hewlett is probably the most likable of the bunch if only because he seems to hate the movie about as much as I did.

Of special note is Nicole de Boer, who plays a high school (or college?) math whiz. I say special note because she's cute as hell. You might remember her as the second Dax from DEEP SPACE NINE. I mean, if you're a nerd, like me. And if you're watching CUBE, you probably are.

Just when you think things can't get any more unintentionally hilarious, Andrew Miller shows up as a mentally challenged individual. I'll leave it up to your imagination as to whether or not he has a super secret, borderline magical, special skill. Sheesh.

The movie does eventually manage to get around to ratcheting up some tension towards the end, after a long slow wind up, and it is fairly clear there was a genuinely good movie buried in here somewhere. A couple more rewrites, maybe a little more attention given to the actors, a little moody lighting, and we might have had something.

Now that I've seen CUBE I'm a little confused as to how it has gathered the following that it has. It is among the highest voted horror movies on IMDB. I think it might be the result of a phenomenon where people embrace it because it wasn't a pre-packaged thing that was marketed to death and shoved onto the movie going public. It's something people found for themselves. And, once found, it was slightly more interesting than your average low budget sci-fi horror flick. So, back in 1997 it must have been a rewarding experience to rent it on a whim and have your mind blown, relatively speaking.

I guess maybe I should have watched it 14 years ago when I had the chance.

Horrorfest 2011: [REC]

I was a little wary going into [REC]. Having heard about the 2007 film for a few years now, I was aware it was yet another of those BLAIR WITCH inspired handy-cam flicks where we're supposed to be scared by how real and immediate everything seems. Still, I was pleasantly surprised that [REC] is one of the better examples of the genre I've seen.

[REC] opens as raw footage for a late night show in which a cute host (Manuela Velasco) interacts with different people who are up working while most citizens are sleeping. This episode happens to be about firemen and gets off to a slow start before an engine is finally called to respond to an apartment building where a woman is trapped in her apartment. Unfortunately for everyone, the woman turns out to be a blood thirsty zombie, and before the building residents, the two person TV crew or the firemen know what's happening, they're being quarantined in the building.

For the rest of the film the quarantined people argue, run up and down the stairs several times, become infected, kill each other, and attempt to escape, all shot from the point of view of the camera man (Pablo Rosso) in a fairly realistic manner. There are very few cheats in the film to interrupt this point of view, though when they do pop up they're a little more glaring than they probably should be, most notably in a sequence in which the camera is rewound and a key scene is replayed for us. This suggests within the fictional world of the movie some editor touched the footage after it was shot and discovered, and if that's the case, how come a bunch of other stuff wasn't edited out? There's another sequence in which man in being interviewed and his audio is spoken over a montage of shots of injured residents, which could have only been done by an editor after the fact, which again, makes you wonder, if that's the case, why not cut out the endless runs up and down the stairs and the multiple gaffes committed by the TV host early on?

But, I'm being a little too nerdy and nitpicky here. That stuff hardly matters. Let's concentrate on the main strength of the: it does not suffer from the one thing that plagues most of these films the most which is the complete unwillingness to actually show any monsters or suitably supernatural events to the viewer. I'm not saying all movies have to be graphic and I realize there is something to be said for holding back the monsters for suspense's sake. However, too many of these "amateur" pseudo-documentary horror flicks use their own premise seemingly as an excuse not to deliver the goods. Too many of them suffer from thinking their premise is good enough. Not [REC] -- this one promises zombies, and you get zombies and more, including a particularly frightening creature who emerges from the shadows during the film's freaky climax, easily the best part of the movie.

Ironically, the pseudo-documentary style of the film ends up making it seem a little longer than it actually is. It's not quite 80 minutes but seems to move a little slower than you'd think an 80 minute zombie outbreak movie would, and I guess that's mostly due to repetition. In some ways, while being one of the best examples of its genre, the movie is also a victim of its own set up -- a slave to a camera man who must run from one place to another in seemingly real time, tied down to a script consisting mostly of panicked people shouting the same things to each other over and over again. This is probably a little easier to put up with if you speak Spanish (oh yeah, this movie is from Spain) but it gets a little old when you're reading subtitles super imposed on top of shots that never stop moving.

The actual story almost eclipses the wow factor of wondering how they pulled this off, but not quite. Probably the best audience for this film is a group who can appreciate watching the filmmakers pull off all their tricks while also looking for a good scare. If you're just in it for the scare, you may not make it all the way through the set up to the payoff. But, if you do, it's totally worth it.

Horrorfest 2011: The Picture of Dorian Gray

It's 19th century London and the handsome, mild-mannered Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield) is seduced with the possibility of living a hedonistic lifestyle before he grows too old to enjoy it by worldly gentleman Lord Henry Wotton (George Sanders) in this classic film adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel.

As Dorian Gray explores the seedier side of London, he falls in love with a lower class but innocent singing showgirl (Angela Lansbury). However, not all is as it seems, and as Gray attempts to protect his terrible secret his love affair falls apart and the bodies start piling up.

Gray's secret? He somewhat inadvertently wished for eternal youth, transferring not only the ravages of age but also of sin to his own visage on a recently painted portrait. The portrait's painter, Gray's friend Basil (Lowell Gilmore) becomes suspicious of Gray's sudden change in attitude and lack of change in appearance as the years go by, though Basil's daughter (Donna Reed) is devoted to the idea that Gray is just as innocent as he was when she was just a little girl and knew him as a young man.

This is a great production, beautifully shot in black and white with the notable exceptions of a few color shots of the portrait itself, at first beautiful and later even more twisted than you'd probably imagine. The score is also haunting, featuring a particularly well placed Chopin piece used as a repetitive and chilling theme throughout. There are also several compelling performances, particularly George Sanders as the philosophically hedonistic, but not evil, inspiration for Dorian Gray's life of sin and Angela Lansbury as the showgirl with a tragic destiny. It's surprisingly relevant and modern the way Gray toys with the showgirl's emotions as he's initially courting her. All those pick up artists on TV and in self help seminars could take notice of this tale as an example of how manipulating someone's feelings can lead to disaster.

I only have two complaints -- one nitpicky, the other legitimate. First, the nitpick. Because of the way the movie is cast and the way the plot works out, the most interesting actors, Lansbury and Sanders, are taken off of center stage early on. We're left with Hatfield, but he has a thankless role as the cold, calculating Gray.

The more legitimate complaint involves a redundant and intrusive narrator who butts in at the worst times and seems to explain things the audience could easily figure out for themselves by simply watching the movie. I'd be willing to write this off as a sign of the times in which the film was made if I hadn't already seen plenty of films from the same era that don't have this problem.

Still, that's not enough to eclipse an otherwise compelling and tragic story.

Horrorfest 2011: The Golem

THE GOLEM is one of the many films I read about as a kid but never actually saw at the time, so I'm glad to have finally watched it. When I was little, I used to read books about monster movies, but before the age of the Internet, obscure flicks were harder to come by. The video store might have FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA and KING KONG if you were lucky, but you were out of luck if you wanted to affordably and easily get your hands on the likes of THE GOLEM.

THE GOLEM is the 4th silent film of Horrorfest 2011, the 3rd German film, and the 2nd to take place in Prague. This time it's the 16th century and Rabbi Loew (Albert Steinruck) is observing the stars when he sees a constellation foretelling disastrous times ahead for his Jewish community. This tragedy comes to fruition when the Emperor (Otto Gebuhr) decrees that all the Jews are to be banished from the ghetto where they live. Loew decides to use black magic and invokes the demon Astaroth in a successful attempt to build an artificial man out of a clay, a "Golem," and bring him to life to serve the community and protect them from their enemies.

The Golem is played by Paul Wegener, who also directed the film. Apparently Wegener was particularly taken with the legend of the Golem and had attempted to film it two other times before this film. Both of those films are lost, however. As played by Wegener, the Golem is a towering barrel chested brute who lumbers around like a zombie but possesses super human strength. At first he's used for manual labor around the ghetto, where he's viewed in fear and awe by the community. Later he's presented to the Emperor as a curiosity and goes on to save a bunch of partying Christians, thus sparing the Jews from their impending expulsion. Unfortunately, still later, the Golem goes out of control and rampages through the city, wrecking havoc.

As an early horror film I'd say THE GOLEM is influential in two ways. First, it was shot by cinematographer Karl Freund, who went on to shoot other classic German expressionist films like METROPOLIS and eventually created the "official" look of horror by shooting the Bela Lugosi version of DRACULA. This, coupled with the fact that he directed Boris Karloff in THE MUMMY, make him almost single handedly responsible for the way horror films looked in the 30s and 40s.

Secondly, THE GOLEM is a clear inspiration for the James Whale/Boris Karloff version of FRANKENSTEIN, perhaps the most influential monster movie of all time. The makeup, the mannerisms, and even some of the scenes appear to have been a direct influence. Like Frankenstein's monster, the Golem is created in a flashy creation sequence involving lots of explosions, lightning, and emotional carrying on by the chief creator. Also, The Golem displays signs of humanity, despite his monstrous origins, and is a sympathetic character. Finally, both monsters have a climactic scene played opposite an innocent little girl.

As a film, THE GOLEM falls a little flat. Again, as always, I have to remind myself that this thing is over 80 years old and take it with a grain of salt. However, compared to others like FAUST, NOSFERATU, THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, it is clear that Wegener, as a director, wasn't quite as inspired as some of his contemporaries. Most of the images seem flat and the characters are even more one dimensional than your usual silent era cast. The only really chilling scene is the appearance of the demon Astaroth, and while the design of the Golem himself is effective and the outdoor sets of the ghetto are appropriately expressionistic, most of the movie just seems a little too ordinary for what should be a weird, fantastic tale.

Of course you can't watch a German film about a Jewish community made in the 1920s without thinking about it in a socio-political context. Here, my own ignorance about the issues at hand might hinder any kind of useful discussion, but I will share my opinion just the same -- it seems clear the film's primary aim is to entertain and it doesn't smack of having any kind of agenda outside of that. Although the story is partially about anti-Semitism, the filmmaker's themselves don't seem to be willfully anti-Semitic (though Wegener did collaborate with the Nazis later on).

The portrayal of the Rabbi as an astrologer and practitioner of black magic seems to be more in the service of telling this particular story, which calls for a Golem to be created, and not so much an indictment of the religion or culture as a whole. In some ways, it seems miraculous a film about a (mostly) heroic Rabbi who stands up to a Christian Emperor would be made at all, but of course, that's viewing the film through my eyes and not through the eyes of its primary audience, who might have seen it differently.

One way to view the story is that a Rabbi rescues his people by creating a magical protector to stand up against their enemies. Another way to view it would be to say the Rabbi is in league with evil forces and creates a monster who he ultimately can't control. Both are legitimate interpretations that can actually co-exist with each other. Whether either interpretation is intended by the filmmakers to say anything in a larger context, I'm not sure.

Perhaps the movie's biggest crime is that it's simply too shallow to even really enter into these kinds of discussions -- it uses the relatively exotic backdrop of a Jewish community to tell a supernatural story, but isn't really interested at looking into any of the deeper implications of its own story. I'm not sure whether that's to the movie's credit or detriment. Although this film was influential and definitely has its moments, you don't get the sense that there's anything "bigger" going on here like you do when you watch a movie like FAUST or THE CREMATOR.

Horrorfest 2011: The Call of Cthulhu

Playing the film festival circuit starting in 2005, THE CALL OF CTHULHU is the newest film of Horrorfest 2011. But, guess what? It's still silent, and it's still black and white.

This low budget adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's well-regarded short story of the same name has an ambitious premise -- what if it was made to look like it was produced in 1926, when the story was originally published? To this end, director Andrew Leman went to interesting and ambitious lengths to reproduce not only the look of the films of the era, but also the style of acting and story-telling that is so unique to the silent era.

Is Leman successful in his attempt? Yes, to an extent. There are moments in which the film plays uncannily like a lost artifact of a bygone era. There are also moments where I felt like I was watching a film shot on video with a couple low-rent visual effects added in the editing process to make it look like it was shot on film, which is exactly what I was watching. The film is most effective in the surreal or fantastic scenes involving expressionistic sets, specifically the many dream sequences and the climactic visit to an uncharted island.

These scenes force the filmmakers to use their imaginations and ingenuity to create weird landscapes that have a timeless quality, like the expressionist films that inspired this one. The other scenes, set in drawing rooms and houses, rely a little too heavily on the idea if you just set the color to "black and white" and throw on some fake film scratches, you don't really have to dress up the set much because it'll cover up anything modern that sneaks in (like fluorescent lights on the ceiling). This is the downside of an otherwise inspired idea. On one hand, it's smart to use the style of a silent film to cover up your budget limitations. On the other, you don't want to rely on that idea as a crutch.

The production value might have gotten a simple boost from an attempt to shoot on actual film, which could have been physically artificially aged and rendered the movie's look perhaps a little closer to what the filmmakers wanted. However, I imagine the use of actual film was cost prohibitive and therefore would have undermined the whole point of the production in the first place.

The actual story involves the son (Matt Foyer) of a dying professor (Ralph Lucas) who inherits the notes, newspaper clippings and journals of his father's lifelong investigation into a mysterious cult. As the son looks over the research, it first looks like a series of unrelated weird disasters and tragic incidents taking place across the globe but eventually comes into focus as an interconnected series of events all tracing back to the mysterious name, Cthulhu. Unrelated cultures and individuals over a span of decades and in a variety of settings have heard Cthulhu's "call" in their dreams, and soon Foyer's character is as obsessed with the investigation as his father was and is bent on getting to the bottom of all this.

While the story-within-a-story concept is far from unheard of, here it gets so convoluted that it is sometimes unintentionally comical -- the son will start reading an account of a meeting his father went to where one guy started telling one story, another guy interrupted, a guy within the story starts telling a story, and so on. Soon we're several layers deep into a bunch of different peoples' stories and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight.

The climactic final scenes involving a group of sailors' encounter with the beast Cthulhu on a deserted island during a torrential sea storm are the most effective scenes of the movie and act as a fitting finale for the slow build of the rest of the story. In a sequence reminiscent of the original KING KONG, the filmmakers use an endless bag of tricks to squeeze as much production value out of this movie as possible. The Cthulhu monster is presented using stop motion photography (I think).

To be honest, I've never fully understood the fascination with "The Cthulhu mythos." This might be because I've never actually read any Lovecraft. But it seems to me there isn't much to the myth -- basically, as I understand it, there's a monster out there, and it's gonna get us. Am I missing something? Apparently this is yet another of those stories that is considered "unfilmable" but it seems like the only unfilmable stories I ever read about are ones that have been filmed to varying degrees of success, so maybe it's time to stop using that term. I'm also a little mystified as to how this movie got so well regarded among horror fans and movie nerds -- it's listed among the top rated horror films on IMDB right alongside bonafide classics that have stood the test of time, but it never even had a theatrical release beyond a couple festivals.

In the end, THE CALL OF CTHULHU stands as an example of what a group of low budget filmmakers can accomplish when they have a little ambition and imagination and don't just rely on teenagers getting slashed. As a horror classic, I don't think it stands up. As an alternative to exploitation filmmaking, I hope it starts a trend and inspires a generation of low budget filmmakers.

Horrorfest 2011: Repulsion

Roman Polanski's REPULSION is more horrifying than your average horror film precisely because most of the action takes place in the mind of the heroine.

The incredibly beautiful Catherine Deneuve stars as a shy, awkward Belgian girl living in London. She shares an apartment with her older sister (Yvonne Furneaux) who is carrying on an affair with a married man (Ian Hendry). Deneuve pleads tentatively for her sister not to leave her alone in the apartment, but the happy couple heads off on a trip to Italy anyway, leaving the scared girl alone with her thoughts.

REPULSION is one of the most effective attempts to show the inner workings of the human mind on the big screen that I've ever seen. Although REPULSION deals with a young woman's descent into outright, violent insanity, which thankfully few of us will ever experience, anyone who has had a long, dark, lonely night should be able to identify at least a little bit. Polanski takes the trappings of the known -- an ordinary, every day apartment -- and makes it into a house of horrors. Food rots, the bathtub overflows, the noises from the street intrude, the telephone and the doorbell rudely interrupt the silence, and even cracks in the walls seem to menace Deneuve.

Most of Deneuve's hang-ups seem to stem from interactions with the opposite sex. She is clearly frightened and unsure of every day interactions with men, and suffers disturbing nightmare images of rape. This can be read as both a somewhat antiquated take on the idea of sexual repression getting the better of an unstable young woman and as an illustration of what the victims of trauma and abuse go through when they haven't been able heal.

The film moves along at a slow, deliberate pace, with minimal dialogue, as the camera lingers on still images as if it is waiting patiently for all hell to break loose. There are just enough surreal scares thrown in to keep the viewer on edge. The pace begins to pick up towards the end of the film, however, and before we know it, the once seemingly normal apartment has transformed from a lonely prison into a gory crime scene.

I can already tell this is the kind of film that's going to haunt me for a while. The sullen, lost look on the poor girl's face in her childhood photograph at the end of the film doesn't really solve any mysteries, but, in a way, it tells the whole story.

Horrorfest 2011: The Unknown

Now we go back to the silents for THE UNKNOWN, starring the actor most synonymous with silent horror, Lon Chaney. THE UNKNOWN was directed by Tod Browning, who later went on to define the first wave of American talkie horror with the Bela Lugosi version of DRACULA, and gained a cult following for daring to film the controversial FREAKS.

THE UNKNOWN actually has a lot in common with FREAKS, since they both take place in a circus setting and feature circus freaks as main characters. They also both involve love triangles that lead to violence. Comparing the films, it's interesting to note that although THE UNKNOWN does not have the controversial reputation of FREAKS and is not as viscerally terrifying because of its slick, polished, big studio feel, on paper it actually contains a more despicable and horrifying villain.

Lon Chaney stars as Alonzo the Armless, a circus freak with no arms who performs in an act where he uses his feet to throw knives and fire a gun at a pretty showgirl (Joan Crawford). Meanwhile, the strong man (Norman Kerry) is hopelessly in love with the showgirl and can't keep his hands off of her, much to her dismay. Even though she's kind of into him, she's sick of dudes pawing her all throughout her life and has developed an aversion to that kind of attention. This is why she hangs out with Alonzo, who, not having any arms, is "safe." Of course, Alonzo's in love with the showgirl, too, but he's strictly in the friend zone.

Interestingly, both the strongman and the showgirl are shown to be fairly innocent, good-hearted people. Alonzo is a sympathetic character as well, early on, though we get glimpses that he harbors deep resentment and anger and there are early hints that he is capable of violence. This is a perfect dichotomy for Chaney, known as the man of 1,000 faces, to play, because although he doesn't wear crazy makeup in this film as he was known to do in several of his roles, he does go through a magnificent range of emotions before our eyes, smoothly transitioning from a puppy dog face one moment to a grimace of violent rage the next.

I feel a little repetitive since in almost every review I say, "Not to give too much away. . .," or something along those lines, but I have to say it again here because one of the things I liked about this movie was how unpredictable it was. So, I'm not really going to be able to tell you how awesome this movie is -- because of the slim chance that you might actually go watch it, I don't want to ruin the good parts for you. Within 10 minutes of the movie starting I was already surprised by a twist, and the twists kept coming. A few of the later twists that were more obvious weren't really let downs because they show a knack for storytelling that inspires awe and respect rather than coming off as contrived as they really are.

Aside from throwing knives and shooting guns, there are a few pretty neat tricks here where Chaney seems to light cigarettes and smoke them with his feet. Apparently this is a bit of trickery and it's really the top half of Chaney interacting with the bottom half of armless foot double Paul Desmuke. Still, its totally convincing and just adds to the overall weirdness of the whole story.

THE UNKNOWN is short, simple and direct, densely packed with intense scenes and entertaining twists. Tod Browning and Lon Chaney really knew what they were doing.