ghosts

Miss Hokusai (2016)

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fourstar

Brandon directed us to keep it spooky this past October, and although that’s normally my forte, there was a dearth of time to check out much horror goodness this past month (notably, my only review last month was of Magnificent Seven, while my review of tense anxiety-driven thriller Don’t Breathe found itself online during September). I was fortunate enough to catch a screening of the animated feature Miss Hokusai, which, despite not being a scary movie, does have a lot of the hallmarks thereof: ghosts, dragons, demons, and spectres.

The film exists less as a straightforward narrative and more as a series of vignettes that depict short periods of time in the life of Katsushika Ōi, the daughter of Katsushika Hokusai, a painter most well known in the west for The Great Wave off Kanagawa, which I (and probably you) had a poster of in college. Plot descriptions of the film imply that the plot will largely center on the fact that Ōi was herself a painter whose own work was overshadowed by her more famous father, but this is actually a relatively minor element. The most overarching themes are Hokusai’s failure as a father to Ōi’s blind younger sister O-Nao (a character invented for the narrative), whom he ignores in favor of his work and because he feels responsible, as well as Ōi’s attempts to transcend her own artistic limitations. Along the way, she fends off an overzealous suitor and spends time with O-Nao, taking her for walks and treats.

The more striking visual elements come largely from dream sequences and a few scattered moments of magical realism. Most notably, a dragon that Ōi paints (after ruining Katsushika’s painting of the same) appears in the sky over their humble abode, and a courtesan whose neck is rumored to grow overnight is shown to have a spectral head that leaves her body in the night and attempts to fly away, but is kept in check by bed netting. In another sequence, a woman is haunted by dreams of Hell and the demons therein after receiving one of Ōi’s paintings depicting just that scene; Katsushika must correct this error by including an image of salvation in a tiny corner, underlining the apparent message that art releases beauty and terror into the world in equal measure. Ōi herself is also haunted by strange dreams of being trampled by gods when she realizes that O-Nao will die, and that the young girl fears damnation because her handicap prevents her from being a “good daughter” to her parents.

There’s a lot more going on in Miss Hokusai than is first apparent, but the film is not without its flaws either. The vignette nature of the film leaves something to be desired narratively, and there are musical choices that are, frankly, puzzling. Still, this is a beautiful movie with images that intrigue and disquiet, and it’s well worth watching if you can track down a screening.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)

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threehalfstar

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Between Battleship, Clue, and now Ouija: Origin of Evil, I can honestly say I’ve never seen a movie based off a board game that I did not enjoy. It’s a strange feeling, considering how many awful movies based on action figures, video games, and comic books have been released over the years. My best guess as to why the board game movie has a fairly high success rate, besides not having a large number of chances to shit the bed, is that there’s a playfulness inherent to the sub-subgenre that calls for a kind of in-on-the-joke campiness that deflects a lot of potential criticism with a casual wave of the hand. The trailers for Ouija: Origin of Evil signaled to me, “Hey, we’re just having fun here. No pressure,” and the film itself followed through on that cavalier attitude. I’m not saying that Origin of Evil was the kind of lazy, winking affair you’d find in a Sharknado or a Lavalantula, but it did have a playful smirk in the way it chose to deliver its genre thrills, one that undercut any of its generic formula and made me wonder if I might be a fan of the board game movie as an artistic medium.

If there’s anything unfortunate about the ad campaign that hooked me into watching Origin of Evil, it’s that it revealed a little too much. Not only was every potential scare up until the last half hour thoroughly spoiled in the trailers, but the film’s few major narrative reveals were also spelled out in the campaign. Since we know ahead of time that a family of scam artist “psychics” who fake communication with the dead will be taught a harsh lesson by actually communicating with the dead through the titular haunted board game, there’s not much room left for the film to surprise in terms of unexpected story beats. Worse yet, the ads revealed that the youngest, most adorable member of the family would suffer a Linda Blair-style demonic possession that causes her to do & say all the freaky Creepy Kid Horror things we’ve been seeing on film since all the way back to Village of the Damned (if not earlier): spooky voices, inhuman contortions, ice cold precociousness, etc. Where Origin of Evil makes these already-expected tropes worthwhile, then, is in how willing it is to have fun with the very familiar space it carves out for itself.

Like with a lot of recent horror films, Origin of Evil sets its haunted house/board game horrors decades in the past, this time opting for the 1960s instead of the well-worn temporal setting of the 70s (like in The Conjuring & We Are Still Here). This not only makes room for beautiful sets & costuming in its production design and removes pesky horror-prevention inventions like cellphones & Google from the scenario; it also harkens back to a time when the ouija board was new & sacred. The religious adherence to rules like “Don’t play by yourself” & “Never play in a graveyard,” makes it all the more significant when they’re inevitably broken and violators are punished accordingly. Visually, the film also has a lot of fun with the detail allowed by the setting, digitally recreating “cigarette burn” reel changes & indulging in the most split diopter shots I’ve seen since Blow Out. There’s some fun touches in the dialogue that are specific to the era as well, like when a teen boy mansplains to a group of girls why we could never land on the moon & in the general Brady Bunch precociousness of the evil little girl at the film’s center as she gleefully channels the restless spirits of the dead. If set in 2016, Ouija: Origin of Evil might have been a generic, by the books blur (which, by all accounts, its 2014 predecessor Ouija was), but something about a rock ‘n roll 60s familial melodrama being invaded by an evil board game allowed a lot of room for camp horror efficiency & the film had a lot of fun playing around in that space.

It’s difficult to say exactly what I’m looking for when I go see a modern generic horror at the theater, but Ouija: Origin of Evil delivers it with ease. It’s got exactly what I felt was missing from other 2016 titles like The Darkness, The Forest, and (the worst of the bunch) Lights Out, bested only by The Boy in putting a smile on my face while supplying what I want from Modern Big Studio Horror, whatever it is. Director Mike Flanagan, who also helmed Hush & Oculus, has a great track record with making gold out of standard horror fare so far, so surely he should be given some significant credit for crafting an enjoyable prequel to a film I never plan to see here, but I also think there’s something to the board game movie as a novelty subgenre that made his playfulness possible. Using the ouija board as a centerpiece opened up a goofy-spooky playground for Flanagan to let loose in and it’s fun watching him gleefully run in circles with his camera within that environment.

-Brandon Ledet

Demon (2016)

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threehalfstar

Weddings can be overwhelming, dizzying affairs. This is especially true of the larger productions where a few cases of hard liquor & an overly-expansive list of guests mix to create an emotional powder keg of celebration & exhaust. Think back to the wedding scene in Goodfellas, lines of happy Catholic Italians lining up to dispense money & kisses to Henry’s new bride to the point where her head is spinning. The Polish horror film Demon turns that nauseous energy into a full-blown nightmare. Demon is ambitious in its themes, playing the past atrocities of WWII as a ghost that haunts Poland, a country-sized burial ground, and building its story around the undead spirits of traditional Jewish folklore. At the same time, though, it can be easily understood as a very conventional haunted house ghost story, one that plays out over a single night of the celebratory Party Out of Bounds mania of High-Rise. Audiences more in tune with the history of Poland’s tragic WWII horrors or the intricacies of the dybbuk in Jewish folklore might get a lot more out of Demon than I did as an outsider, but the film is still effective enough as a traditional ghost story without that insight. Its dizzying wedding setting in particular helps set it apart in that regard.

A young outsider joins a community of Polish Jews by marrying into the fold. While clearing the grounds of an old property his bride-to-be inherited from her deceased grandfather, he uncovers a literal skeleton from the past. It’s a discovery that changes him & his relationship with his new homeland in profound & disturbing ways. As a wedding ritual increasingly devolves into drunken, celebratory madness, our protagonist also loses hold of his own stability, both physical & spiritual. Strangers party in slow motion to an eerie score while the groom continually returns to the burial site he mistakenly uncovered. In his obsession with the grave he gradually becomes something new, something very ugly & very dangerous. Demon plays off the Body Snatchers-esque fear of never truly knowing your spouse as well as traditional genre film hallmarks like demonic possession, haunted spaces, and body horror. However, it avoids any clear cut, straightforward resolutions that usually accompany that territory. The mystery of what, exactly, is happening might in fact be too slow of a reveal, to the point of distraction, even if it never actually reaches a clear destination. Still, the film’s mix of otherworldly dread with manic, drunken celebration & Old World superstition is enough to make it an arresting experience overall.

There aren’t a lot of specific elements in Demon where I can say you won’t find its genre thrills anywhere else, but I do believe the lead performance by Itay Tiran as the doomed groom is one that required a lot of ambition and a lot of naked bravery. The only other performance in the horror genre I can liken it to is Isabelle Adjani’s iconic turn in the cult film Possession (which was also helmed by a Polish director, appropriately enough). Both roles ask their performers to play several different people in one: the unsuspecting spouse, the inhuman raving lunatic, and the in-transition middle state of the body contortionist. The tunnel scene in Possession is a rare moment of dramatic physicality that you won’t find in many other performances, horror or otherwise, no matter how vulnerable. Tiran somehow approaches that same naked, savage, maddening vulnerability in Demon, no small feat, and his starring turn is a lot of what makes the film feel special, if not entirely unique.

Representing Jewish folklore in horror cinema dates as far back as The Golem in the early 20th Century, but it’s still somewhat of an infrequent occurrence. The way Demon weaves its ancient narrative into modern Polish anxieties over the ghosts of past wars is fascinating and open-ended enough to be engaged with as an art film rather than a formulaic genre picture. Still, the film works just fine in a conventional horror context as well, telling an effectively unnerving ghost story against the Party Out of Bounds structural backdrop I have such a soft spot for. The film’s real world & fantastical horrors clash with the celebratory fantasy of its wedding setting remarkably well, represented visually in the mixture of its crisp formal wear with the grime of its natural forces: dirt, mud, rain, wind. The cheery visage of a wedding ritual is cinematically transformed into the eerie nightmare of demonic ritual, one that seemingly summons an overwhelming force of Nature & an inescapable ghost of the past to tear down the national façade of healed wounds & a guilt-free future. Demon might not be the most original or the most terrifying horror film you see all year, but its thematic ambition, the distinctive mania of its setting, and Itay’s lead performance all are sure to haunt you well after you leave the theater, maybe even for longer than the more eccentric films it casually resembles.

-Brandon Ledet

Death Ship (1980)

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trianglethreehalfstar

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A cruise liner is minding its own business when suddenly an empty, ghostly freighter rams it. The wreck leaves only a handful of survivors, including a hard-ass Captain Ashland played by George Kennedy. The survivors drift on a raft until the freighter appears again. Like every group of protagonists in every haunted location based movie, they willingly enter a situation despite the obvious red flags. They board the Death Ship. We learn that the boat is a “Nazi interrogation vessel,” still on its mission to kill. In fact, it needs blood to keep running. Eventually the Death Ship possesses captain Ashland, and generally terrorizes the lot, killing off a few of them.

It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly it is that makes Death Ship engaging. It’s a disappointment in most regards. The acting is terrible, the characters are under-developed (to the point of wondering if anyone even tried at all), and the premise is never really fully explained. There are some shocks, but they’re too hokey to be convincing or effective. In fact, there’s almost nothing redeemable about this film at all. Yet, I still enjoyed it. Maybe not as a spooky Shining-esque boat horror I assume they intended, but as a campy masterpiece.

One of Death Ship‘s many enjoyable flaws is the unexplained nature of, well, everything. A lot of strange things happen and have strange consequences. For example: a woman writhes around in a blood shower in one sequence and in the next we just get the information that she’s dead. How did she die? Why does a ship that needs blood waste so much blood on a shower? You don’t get answers, but do you really need them after watching someone squirm around under a shower head oozing fake blood? There are so many moments like this.

Death Ship is great, but it is also bad. Unlike cult films like Troll 2 — which is tone-wise the best movie to compare it to, where unknowns deliver the best performances they can muster under bizarre direction and bad writing — Death Ship manages to get a similar style of performance with actual actor, and actual Oscar winner, George Kennedy. The idea of a Nazi Interrogation vessel still sailing back and forth on the atlantic looking for victims isn’t developed much more than this one sentence. I think the strongest thing it’s got genuinely going is the ominous synth-y soundtrack.

-Alli Hobbs

Ghostbusters (2016)

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fourstar

Like most people my age (I was born in 1987), my first experience with the Ghostbusters came not in the form of the 1984 comedy classic; instead, my love for all things Ghostbusting was the result of watching the animated The Real Ghostbusters as a kid. In fact, watching the cartoon adventures of Egon, Venkman, Ray, Winston, and Janine on Saturday mornings, alongside Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Garfield and Friends, is one of my earliest memories; unlike TMNT, I can actually remember particular episodes and character types from Ghostbusters (I know that the Turtles theme song delineates each turtle’s individual personality, but that blew right past me as a kid and I couldn’t tell you which one was a “party dude” right now to save my life). I didn’t see the original film until I was a little older, and even then my clearest childhood memories of the movies actually comes from Ghostbusters II, where the pink slime that fills Sigourney Weaver’s bathtub made me terrified of the tub for a few months.

I was pretty excited to hear about the remake/reboot when it was first announced last year, but wasn’t confident that it would ever really been made and even less thrilled about how well it might turn out. I still remember hearing on the radio about a fourth Indiana Jones film as far back as 1997, when Joaquin Phoenix was in talks to play Indie’s younger brother; then, eleven years later, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull plopped into theatres on my birthday like the worst present of all time. I had mixed feelings about Paul Feig; he directed seven episodes of Arrested Development, sure, but one of those was “Ready, Aim, Marry Me,” which is probably the worst single episode of the original three season run. I was also not one of those people who was terribly impressed with Bridesmaids, although it might merely have been that I was in a terrible mood the first time I saw it. Still, Feig was heavily involved with Other Space, Yahoo’s sci-fi comedy that was released last year and which I enjoyed much more than anyone really has a right to (and which featured super cutie Karan Soni, who plays deliveryman Bennie in Ghostbusters, and Neil Casey, who plays villain Rowan North*). Still, when I saw a pic of the all-gal Ghostbusters squad all suited up and ready to bust last year, I was super on board. I retweeted the picture and expressed my excitement, even (and Feig favorited it!).

*According to the credits, fellow Other Space alums Milana Vayntrub and Eugene Cordero were also in the film, as Subway Rat Woman and Bass Guitarist, respectively, but I missed them, unfortunately.

There was (unfortunately, inevitably, and unfortunately inevitably) a backlash, mostly of the misogynistic variety, because of course there was. Of. Course. There. Was. Most of the criticism of the film had little to do with the fact that Ghostbusters is pretty much a perfect movie in a lot of ways (if inarguably a little dated in its kinda creepy sexual politics); after all, this is the primary objection that is usually voiced in response to remakes of any kind. “Why would you remake Total Recall/Robocop/King Kong/True Grit/The Manchurian Candidate/Poltergeist (etc.) when the original still holds up?” But that’s not why (a certain subset of) people were upset about Ghostbusters 2016 at all, even if they tried their best to couch their anti-woman bias in that language. Of course, the blanketing effect across the internet meant that people who were legitimately concerned about the potential artistic or financial failings of the film, especially after the not-very- good first trailer was released, were lumped in together with the rabid woman haters; as a result, those who were anxious that the film would simply fail ended up being on the side of the worst parts of the internet, meaning that there any real criticism was immediately swept away in a wave of meaningless manpain.

So, as someone whose childhood was very GB-influenced, how’s the new movie?

….

I loooooooved it. I loved it so much, y’all. Of course, it pales in comparison to the original, but that’s like saying that Canopus pales in comparison to Sirius: they’re still both pretty bright. It’s not a perfect movie, but it is a lot of fun, and I honestly can’t wait to see it again. There’s a perfect mix between nostalgia and novelty, a slew of cameos from the original cast, and a hell of a lot of laughs throughout.

The film opens with a tour of a supposedly haunted mansion that becomes a little too real for the tour guide (Zach Woods). Meanwhile, Dr. Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) is preparing for her final tenure defense at Columbia when a book about the paranormal she co-wrote many years before threatens to derail her career track. She tracks down the other author, Dr. Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) and asks her to stop pushing sales of the book long enough for her tenure to be accepted. Yates and her engineer officemate Dr. Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) agree, as long as Gilbert assists them in investigating the mansion. Following a genuine encounter with a ghostly entity, all three women find themselves rejected from academia. Meanwhile, MTA employee and amateur historian Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones) has a strange encounter with commuter Rowan North (Neil Casey), then follows him down to a subway tunnel where he plants a device that summons a ghost from which Patty barely escapes. The three parascientists set up shop above a restaurant in Chinatown and hire hunky dingbat Kevin (Chris Hemsworth) as their receptionist, and Patty invites them to check out the ghost in the tunnels beneath the city. From there, the Ghostbusters become a legitimate team, and the story builds until the four of them face off against an entity that threatens to destroy New York.

First, the negatives: this film lacks a lot of the New York flavor that permeated the first Ghostbusters and its sequel, although I’d argue that this was inevitable given the overall Disneyfication and general enforced conformity that New York has undergone since the Giuliani administration (Sam Delaney’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is required reading on this subject, if you can find a copy). Still, it’s impossible to ignore how much that affects the overall tone of this film in comparison to the original. Further, the original Ghostbusters is a film that has a very dry wit, and although that same temperament is here, the comedy is a little more broad (no pun intended) and varied: there’s slapstick, improvisation, and your standard jokes tied in with the more sardonic wit that characterized the eighties flicks. Here, instead, the film runs the gamut from very dry (the mansion tour guide notes that the mansion that opens the film had the best contemporary security measures at the time of construction, including a fence specifically designed to keep out Irish immigrants) to the more over-the- top (Andy Garcia, as the mayor of New York, blows his lid when Dr. Gilbert compares him to the mayor from Jaws, in one of the film’s funniest moments).

There are other negatives. The music choices in the film are terrible, frankly, outside of the revisitations of the original GB theme and its derivations. There’s an extended sequence in which the team captures a ghost at a nü-metal concert, and the music playing throughout is utter garbage, but even that sounds like the music of the angels in comparison to the closing credits theme “Good Girls” by Elle King, which stands out as possibly the shittiest pop song of the new millennium. There’s also a slight editing problem in a few sequences where it is apparent that a scene has been cut. For instance, it seems like the big psychokinetic dance sequence that plays out over the end credits might once have been part of the film proper, but that’s not terribly distracting on the whole. There also may have been a cut subplot in which Gilbert leaves the team after one of their very public outings that ends with a fake arrest, but that’s also not a problem for me (honestly, the sooner someone takes the “team member rejects the group but then comes back in the end” third act subplot out into a field and puts it out of its misery, the better). I also didn’t love the “battle sequence” toward the end of the film, but that’s more a statement about the the state of modern film structure than a complaint that’s specific to this particular movie.

As far as other things that people have had negative criticism for, I don’t really agree. I’ve heard complaints that some of the improv jokes go on a little too long, but I’m not bothered by them. I’ve also seen much hay being made about Patty’s being a blue collar worker and not a scientist like the three other (white) women in the group, but I found her to be a delight and not at all the potentially troublesome stereotype that she was presented as in a few of the trailers. There are some people out there who are intent on finding something to hate in the film, especially anything that seems “man hating,” but there’s so little of it and it’s so toothless in comparison to the generally misogynistic tone of most media that it won’t bother you unless you go looking for it (for instance, the fact that one of the ghosts takes a crotch shot is something I’ve seen a great deal of discussion about, as if hits to the groin aren’t a staple of comedies with brows both high and low).

Overall, however, the film is great. There’s a lot of great parallelism between Gilbert and Rowan, and the way that each fights or assists supernatural evil with science and technology. There’s very overt humor throughout as well as more subtle moments, and there’s a lot to enjoy whether you’re a fan of old school Ghostbusters or not. None of the characters are direct one-to- one parallels with Egon and the gang (although Holtzmann has Egon’s cartoon hair, which I love), and the story feels fresh and new while retaining echoes of the past. One of the best visual gags in the original GB is when Egon activates Ray’s “unlicensed nuclear accelerator” in the hotel elevator, and then he and Venkman subtly move away from the proton pack, as if a few extra inches would really make a difference; there’s a similar scene in this film in which two of the Ghostbusters inch away from an activated device in the alley where they test their equipment. It’s subtle, but there’s a lot of love and respect for Ghostbusters as a franchise in this film, no matter what you’ve heard. Some of the more slapsticky moments went on a little long for me, but there’s too much fun to be had to stick your head in the sand and ignore this movie just because the ‘Busters aren’t the same ones that you grew up with. And, hey, if Dave Coulier replacing Lorenzo Music as the voice of Venkman in The Real Ghostbusters or the creation of the Slimer! shorts to pad out the Slimer and the Real Ghostbusters hour didn’t destroy the Ghostbusters legacy, this certainly won’t either.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Darkness (2016)

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three star

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Early summer’s kind of a weird time of the year to release a goofy, low-rent horror. The Darkness might’ve been more at home among the year’s earlier horror cheapies like The Boy or The Forest or maybe held off until  whatever lackluster PG-13 terrors await us this Halloween season. Instead, it arrived now, begging to be drowned among blockbuster releases like Captain America: Civil War & X-Men: Apocalypse. Even I, connoisseur of bland horror cheapness, almost passed over the film based on its not so memorable ad campaign. It was the IMDb plot synopsis that drew me back in: “A family returns from a Grand Canyon vacation, haunted by an ancient supernatural entity they unknowingly awakened and engages them in a fight for their survival.” Now that sounds silly enough to work. Obviously, I would rather would rather see a Mt. Rushmore ghost story, but a Grand Canyon one is enough to raise my eyebrow & get my ass to a theater.

Kevin Baton is the paterfamilias of a dysfunctional family vacationing at The Grand Canyon. His autistic son angers ancient spirits by stealing mystic pebbles from a forbidden cave. Some dumb teen we thankfully never see helpfully explains, “There’s all kinds of creepy old shit in this place.” He’s not wrong. The caves & curves of The Grand Canyon have an ancient, old world magnetism to them that can really chill you in their enormity. That’s why, I’m assuming, The Darkness spends as little time there as possible & scuttles the family back to their standard issue suburban home as soon as it gets the chance. You wouldn’t want the majestic beauty & ancient spookiness of a natural phenomenon getting in the way of a familial melodrama after all, especially not in a cheap horror flick. No way. The Darkness is mostly of a portrait of a family unraveling where each member is dutifully assigned a personal struggle to overcome (adultery, alcoholism, autism, an eating disorder) and evil pebbles that open dimensional gateways to the Native American version of the Apocalypse are reduced to manifestations of bad karma due to a business dad’s selfishness in choosing work over family. Oh yeah, and Paul Reiser stops by, which I guess is scary in its own way too.

The Darkness is never truly scary, but it can occasionally be amusing in its ineptitude. I especially found it humorous when the film claims that autism puts children in a more spiritually receptive state, which is why its spooky-autistic tyke who steals the Apocalypse stones befriends a ghost he names Jenny & opens a portal to a ghost dimension on his bedroom wall (a plot detail that’s very reminiscent of last year’s Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension). If turning a mental disorder into a source of cheap horror isn’t goofily offensive/insensitive enough for you, the film is just as willing as any 80s misfire you can think of to other Native American societies as some kind of spooky mystics and only portray them performing spooky-mystic rituals involving chants & feathers. There’s also more standard-issue cliches the film tosses out (I assume) for a laugh: crows as foreshadowing, husbands ignoring their wives’ claims of hauntings, spooky Google (em, “E-web”) search results, etc.

Had The Darkness stayed in the desert it might’ve borrowed some of the same location-specific horror that colored properties like Pitch Black, The Descent, and 127 Hours in a memorable way. Had it portrayed evil spirits a little more menacing than a dude wearing fake wolf hide to Burning Man it might’ve convincingly threatened an imminent Apocalypse. Had it not reduced autism or Native American rituals into cheap gimmicks & novelties I might not have laughed in its face. As is, it’s a fairly run-of-the-mill PG-13 horror with just enough goofy misfires to make the experience enjoyably corny & mildly offensive, as if the Lifetime Channel had started producing late night creature features (which is a racket Lifetime totally should break into).

-Brandon Ledet

We Are Still Here (2015)

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three star

Are there any ways left for the haunted house genre to surprise us? I’m actually certain that there are, but We Are Still Here has no interest in looking for them. This is a no frills ghost story that relies entirely on genre to get its point across. Every haunted house cliche you can think of makes an appearance in its brief 84 minute running time. Strange noises spook new homeowners. Photographs move seemingly on their own. An old town of creepy local yokels conspire against haunted newcomers. A skeptical husband doubts his legitimately-spooked wife’s concerns. A seance backfires. A monster appears in the backseat of a moving car. Innocent house guests are possessed by demons. Creepy children get involved. The film even has the nerve to show a baseball slowly rolling down basement stairs. It’s all here.

I won’t bother you too much with the film’s plot, which, outside a couple minor twists & flourishes, plays out exactly how you would expect. All you really need to know is that a grieving family moves to a new town in the late 70s in order to instigate a fresh start after the loss of their son in a car crash. When it becomes apparent that the house is haunted by a powerful spirit (possibly their son’s) they invite his hippie roommate & his family to stay with them for moral support & spiritual cleansing. Ghostly hijinks & genre tropes ensue, driving the film to a concluding bout of blood-soaked mayhem involving the ghosts, the town folk, and the hippie house guests. No one is safe from We Are Still Here‘s spooky parade of violent cliches.

For all of its seen-it-before cheesiness, We Are Still Here is at least smart enough to deliver the goods in the monster department. The ghosts that haunt the basement (and eventually the town at large) are creepily-designed humanoids of smouldering ash. Their “skin” pops & bubbles, singeing everything it touches. I can’t recommend We Are Still Here as anything more than a routine genre exercise, but if you’re looking for some straight-forward ghostly action, you can do much worse than the brief, concise, burn-victim creature feature that’s delivered here. There’s certainly a market for this kind of back-to-the-basics horror cinema that’s emerged in recent productions like Insidious & The Conjuring, so I’m sure that this film will find its proper audience with ease. It’s a relatively harmless genre entry in that way – once you get past the flashes of horrific gore.

-Brandon Ledet

The Forest (2016)

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three star

Horror is not a genre typically known for its good taste or sense of tact. That’s why it’s kind of fucked up, but not at all surprising that (the first major release of 2016) The Forest turned a mental health epidemic into plot fodder to support cheap jump scares in a mostly mediocre horror pic. In case you’ve missed the film’s ad campaign, The Forest is a spooky ghost story set in the real-life Aokigahara forest, a wooded area near Mt. Fuji in Japan where startling numbers of (again, real) people have been known to ritualistically commit suicide. The Forest, of course, has no interest in addressing the cultural stigma attached to suicide & pays only the faintest attention to Aokigahara’s troubled history (which stretches back even before the suicide epidemic). For the film’s purposes, Aokigahara is merely a spooky backdrop for a fairly standard ghost story & not much more. Imagine if another country made a found footage slasher film about the 9/11 terrorist attacks & you’d get a pretty good idea of how crass The Forest is as an intellectual property. (Also, I would totally watch that 9/11 slasher.)

Thankfully, I don’t need to look to PG-13 horror flicks starring supporting actors from Game of Thrones (Natalie Dormer, in this case) as pillars of morality. I’ve accepted horror as a mostly exploitative genre by nature, so the general ickiness of The Forest doesn’t bother me too much, if at all, especially considering that it’s at least the fourth movie that’s been staged there since 2010. This allows me to see the film for what it truly is: a generic ghost story set in the woods. If anything truly bothered me about the film it’d be its clunky exposition that required multiple flashbacks & mood-setting conversations before the film finally gets lost in the titular forest nearly a third of the way into its runtime, but even that offense is forgivable once the story gets rolling. As a modern horror flick for the PG-13 crowd, The Forest is surprisingly decent. I’d dare say that large chunks of the concluding 45min even approach greatness (without ever exactly achieving it) as the film’s themes crumble into a satisfyingly pessimistic climax. If the first 45 minutes were nearly that focused & confident, we might even have something truly recommendable here.

The Forest‘s plot concerns an American housewife (Natalie Dormer) searching for her twin sister (also Natalie Dormer, duh) in the famed Aokigahara forest after she has been reported missing for several days. As the film progresses it becomes apparent that the missing twin has a history of suicide scares & struggles with depression, not to mention a history of familial mental health issues at large. Something pretty incredible starts to take shape during these revelations: The Forest begins to establish its own unique mythology through the specific imagery of basements & children’s toy viewfinders. It even accomplishes this through flashbacks to a childhood trauma, which is curious considering that flashbacks are what makes the film’s opening half hour such a clunky slog.

A lot of The Forest goes more or less exactly as you’d expect a ghost story set in the wilderness to go. There’s a wealth of jump scares surrounding creepy demon children & the elderly (whose presence are explained in a brief history lesson about Aokigahara’s past & mythology) with CGI-altered faces. There’s also an obligatory Stranger Who Cannot Be Trusted & incessant, well-intended advice not to camp in the woods overnight & to always remember “Do. Not. Leave. The. Path.” that the main character, of course, ignores the first time she gets the chance. The film can also surprise you at times if you allow it, though. I particularly enjoyed the way its natural setting was employed in its HD nature photography & in the way its ghostly hallucinations allowed the reality & physical landscape to shift from scene to scene.

As I said, though, what’s most surprising about The Forest is the way it finds its own sense of purpose through the imagery of a memory of a basement-set childhood trauma, as well as its resolve to bring its themes to a satisfyingly pessimistic, fucked up conclusion instead of a falsely happy one. I didn’t expect nearly that much effort out the formlessness of its first act & the morally reprehensible aspects of its pedigree. January & February can typically be dumping grounds for a lot of lackluster horror properties, but this one wasn’t all that bad. If nothing else, it’s far more satisfying than The Lazarus Effect, which was unleashed upon us around this same time last year.

-Brandon Ledet

 

The Nightmare (2015)

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Rodney Ascher is a rare bird in the documentary world. His debut feature Room 237 took a wildly unique approach to exploring the cultural staying power of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. It didn’t detail The Shining‘s production or much of its technical achievements, but instead provided a forum for the film’s conspiracy theorists to voice their own outlandish theories about what Kubrick mean to achieve in the film, which ranged from ideas about Native American genocide & the Holocaust to the accusation that the film was Kubrick’s way of apologising for faking the moon landing. Ascher’s follow-up applies Room 237‘s judgement-free presentations of wild supposition to a different subject entirely: the phenomenon of sleep paralysis. Halfway between the late night paranormal radio broadcast Coast to Coast AM & the hyper-artificial dramatic re-enactments of Rescue 911, The Nightmare pushes the boundaries of what a documentary even is & what it possibly could be. Ascher’s approach has little concern for evidence or context, but instead builds narratives from the oral history end of anthropology. This technique is sure to frustrate many a purist, but in its own weird way it reveals more about the power of its subject than a Wikipedia-in-motion style of documentary could.

Sleep paralysis is a medical condition in which a person is temporarily left paralysed after stress-interrupted REM, caught halfway between dreaming & reality and unable to snap out of it. It’s a condition without any real, physically-threatening symptoms, except for an intense, psychologically torturous sense of fear. The strange, paranormal aspect of sleep paralysis is that the nightmare hallucinations are remarkably similar across sufferers’ personal experiences. Almost every sufferer of sleep paralysis reports the undeniable presence of “intruders.” Individual interpretations of “intruders”  vary greatly & include such beings as aliens, ghosts, cats, soul-sucking  demons and, most common of all, a dark, ambiguous figure called The Shadow Man. As the eight sleep paralysis sufferers interviewed share their experiences, they hypothesize about whether the condition is an out-of-body experience or a journey to the spiritual realm or something else entirely. The only theory they won’t accept is that it’s an imagined experience, both because it feels so palpably real and because the visions of the intruder are so universal among sufferers.

Rodney Ascher reportedly chose this project because of a personal experience with sleep paralysis, but he makes very few moves to legitimize the claims of his interviewees, instead presenting their personal anecdotes without bias, the burden of interpretation left entirely on the shoulders of the viewer. The dream logic of these anecdotes are fascinating & The Nightmare‘s strongest moments are in its dramatic re-enactments of run-ins with soul-sucking shadow demons, TV static aliens, and chest-sitting cats with glowing red eyes. The only time you can truly see Ascher’s own personality peaking through is in a fascination with the way sufferers find solace & community in films like Insidious, Communion, and (duh) A Nightmare on Elm Street, since their claims are largely brushed off by the scientific & medical communities (for obvious reasons). Ascher has obvious love for film and often indulges in somewhat radical ideas about the power of personal interpretation & the basics of what makes a documentary that can both excite & bewilder, sometimes simultaneously. I can’t say that I’ve specifically learned anything from his two features, but paradoxically they’re both distinctly informative in such an unusual, sometimes frustrating way that their power as oddities on the documentary landscape are undeniable.

-Brandon Ledet

Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (1968)

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If anyone tells you that you need something more than just a few cool monsters to make a great film, they’re spreading lies. Sure, over-the-top creature design works best when it’s paired with an intricate narrative structure, as is the case with John Carpenter’s immortal The Thing. It’s not a necessary combo, though. One of my favorite discoveries this past year, for instance, was the creature-laden Monster Brawl, which was essentially just famous monsters murdering each other in graveyard pro wrestling matches with little to no narrative embellishment. The monsters were impressive enough & the premise was silly enough for the movie to work on that bare bones formula. The sensation of watching Monster Brawl brought me back to the days of banging action figures together on the carpeted floor of my childhood home, imagining epic battles between fantastic monsters & superhuman muscle men.

That same childish exuberance for fantastic monsters is what won me over wholeheartedly in the late-60s Japanese film Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (aka The Great Yokai War). The second installment in a series of three Yokai Monsters movies released in just one year’s time (alongside One Hundred Monsters & Along With Ghosts), Spook Warfare was the most popular film of its trilogy, as it focused more on the personalities of the fantastic monsters at its core instead of the humans that live in their presence. For Japanese audiences, the film has a built-in historical context for each of its monsters, but for American audiences unfamiliar with the intricacies of Japanese folklore, the film’s oddball collection of “apparitions” read like psychedelic precursors to the work of such luminaries as Jim Henson and Sid & Marty Krofft. Where I see sentient umbrellas, (literally) two-faced women, and a ladies with snake-esque necks that stretch like Mr. Fantastic, native audiences see very specific legends from the jokingly-titled “Apparition Social Registry” with names like Kappa, Futakuchi-onna, and Kasa-obake.

I say “apparitions” instead of “creatures” because the “spooks” in The Great Yokai War are not quite monsters, but the ghosts of ancient monsters, which adds a whole other fascinating level of awesomeness to their peculiarity. To provide a conflict for these apparitions to combat, the film brings to life a “several thousand years old” monster from the ruins of Babylonia named Daimon. Daimon is a bird-like humanoid wizard prone to blowing himself up to kaiju proportions & possessing the minds of local magistrates in order to turn them into godless tyrants. Daimon is pretty bad-ass, but he stands no chance against the water-nymph bird-fish (who could pass for a bassist in the animatronic Chuck E Cheese band), his long-tongued umbrella, and the ghosts of a hundred of their closest friends. Besides the general disruption of peace & order the ghost monsters are insistent on putting a stop to Daimon’s evil deeds post haste because “Shame will be brought upon Japanese apparitions” if they don’t.

Perhaps the strangest detail about the ghost monsters in Spook Warfare is just how kid-friendly they look. I didn’t use the comparison to the soon-to-follow work of Jim Henson and Sid & Marty Krofft lightly. Many of the creature designs are just aching for plushie doll or action figure merchandise, a sensation backed up by the film’s broad physical comedy & the fact that they befriend children in the film. What’s strange about this is that so much of the film would be a nightmare for certain young audiences. Ghosts take shape from magical, colored mists in spooky swamps. Buckets of giallo-crimson stage blood is spilled in the film’s many brawls. Adult language like “damn”, “bastard”, and “hell” are liberally peppered throughout the script. This is all jarring at first, but when I think back to staging action figure battles on the living room carpet, that sort of violent crassness actually makes total sense. Children can often be goofy & violent in the same breath, so then it’s really no surprise that Spook Wars was somewhat of a cultural hit upon its initial release. Even as an (admittedly goofy) adult, the mere sight of the film’s gang of monsters was enough to win me over as a fan, effectively bringing out my inner child enough to sidestep any concerns with plot or general purpose. Sometimes monsters brawling really can alone be enough to make a great film & Spook Warfare stands as a prime example of that maxim.

-Brandon Ledet