Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

I was in the mood to to watch/mock a bad horror movie last night, and Don't Be Afraid of the Dark seemed like a pretty good option.  It's a Katie Holmes vehicle, a remake, it has a first-time director, and a pretty awful title.  It should be a shoe-in for a good drunken time, but it had a few surprises in store for me.  First of all, the star of this movie is actually a little girl.  It's rarely as much fun to brutally ridicule children as much as it is terrible adult actors with lopsided faces.  Besides, I think we can all agree that children are creepy.  Second of all, Guillermo Del Toro co-produced and co-wrote Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, which implies a certain degree of creativity.  So what's it to be?  A spectacular crap-fest, or a creative mood piece?

Sally (Bailee Madison) is in the never-enviable position of being the young child being shuttled between self-absorbed divorced parents.  Her mother has sent Sally to visit her dad, Alex (Guy Pearce), while he renovates a dilapidated New England mansion.  And by "visit," I of course mean "live forever with" --- surprise!  Alex isn't a very attentive parent, and his interest in Sally's happiness can best be described as "nonexistent."

Alex, envisioning his daughter's future bedroom

Making things even better for Sally, her dad is dating his interior designed, Kim (Katie Holmes), who feels very uncomfortable acting as a fill-in mother.  But that's all okay, because they both more or less ignore her most of the time, which allows Sally to investigate the massive building and its surrounding land.

...which apparently includes parts of Narnia

 While exploring, Sally discovers something in part of the overgrown garden.  It is a skylight for the basement, which Alex and Kim had no idea existed.  You see, the basement had been hidden by someone many years ago, when they put up a wall in front of the basement door.  Why would anyone want to do such a thing?

Because they didn't want to see children going through what appears to be a doorway to Hell?

Well, when Sally goes down to the ancient basement, she hears her name being whispered.  Some thing --- or things --- that sound like they have emphysema keep whispering for her to play with them.  Their actual words are, "We're your friends.  Come down to the basement and play with us."  While that may ring all sorts of alarm bells in a reasonable person's head, Sally is an eight-year-old and, therefore, capable of an entirely different type of stupidity.  Soon enough, the creatures are terrorizing Sally, and she can't get any adult to believe that there are evil faeries hunting her in the darkness.

Try shouting "I don't believe in faeries!"  It would kill Tinkerbell.

And that is their biggest weakness: these creatures are sensitive to bright lights.  But how hard is it to plunge an isolated old mansion into darkness?  And what do they want when they finally get their tiny paws on Sally?  They want to feast on her teeth.

Oh relax.  You have another set to look forward to.

I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised by the acting in Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.  Bailee Madison did a solid job in the lead role.  For child actors in horror movies, there is a fine line between acting scared and being extremely annoying, but Madison never really approached anything obnoxious.  I thought she was pretty believable, even when making extremely poor choices.  

Example: this is where she went potty

She wasn't a fantastic lead, but I'll take solid acting over overacting any day, especially with children.  Aside from her lopsided smile, Katie Holmes was also pretty good as the most reasonable character in the movie.  Her character was pretty bland, but I didn't mind watching her in this movie, which is as much as I am capable of complimenting her.  Guy Pearce was capable as the father, in that I think he played the part that the script asked for, but his character was just awful.  It's not just that he was an offensively bad (although, to be fair, not evil) father figure; he has a complete 180 toward the end of the movie, and it just doesn't work.   

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark was the first (and so far, only) directorial effort by Troy Nixey.  For a first effort, Nixey had an uphill battle.  This is, at its core, a haunted house movie, which means it relies heavily on atmosphere and suspense --- two things that even veteran directors have trouble with. There are moments where he succeeds; the smaller-scale scares that leave something to the imagination are actually pretty good.

Two words: creepy hands

However, the script calls for a lot less mystery than I think this plot calls for.  For being a movie about creatures in the dark, the audience gets to see an awful lot of the creatures in question.  The special effects on these creatures are pretty good, but that's beside the point.  If this isn't supposed to be a creature feature --- and it definitely isn't --- then why do we see so much of the things that are supposed to be scaring us in the dark?  

"Bippity boppity bitch!"

That's a choice that I disagree with, but it doesn't make for a bad film.  What dumbs this picture down a few notches is its inconsistency with regards to how it treats light.  The sensitivity the devil faeries have for light ranges the gamut, from absolutely requiring deep, dark shadows to being able to hang out at a well-lit party (sitting in a potted plant, but still...).  The cinematography doesn't help any.  This should be a very, very dark film, from a lighting perspective.  It's called Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, but whenever the lights go out, it looks like a spotlight is shining in from outside.  And once Katie Holmes' character buys into this whole shadow faery thing, she doesn't think to go out and buy a bunch of lamps or flashlights or anything?  That's just stupid.  The film's consistency and logic, as well as its look and feel, are definitely things the director is responsible for.  I think Nixey had some good instincts in his first directorial effort, but some of the basics are lacking.

As a horror movie, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark doesn't have a lot of what genre fans typically look for in an R-rated flick.  There is a bit of gruesome violence at the beginning of the movie; the prologue was pretty cool and even had me cringing a little.  For the rest of the movie, though, there isn't much violence or gore to speak of.  If you were looking for gratuitous nudity, I would like to point out that the heroine is a child, so...please stop.  

This is not sexy

Still, this is more of a suspense-type horror, so sex and violence were never strong possibilities.  Unfortunately, the suspense isn't too effective.  It has creepy moments, especially in the first half, but the second half is full of mind-numbing stupidity.  None of the characters, the monsters included, do anything even remotely logical.  Here's just a small example of how frustrating this script is: little Sally has just fought off some faeries and has taken some pictures of them and has even crushed one; when her father dismisses her claims as an overactive imagination, she tries to find a photo to prove her case instead of the faery corpse she left in the damned bookcase.  That's not the dumbest moment in this movie, mind you --- it's just one of the easiest to explain.  When you add all that up, this isn't a very good horror movie.  The acting of Bailee Madison goes a long way toward making this easier to watch, but it doesn't make up for a dumb script.  If this was PG or PG-13, I would be a little more forgiving, but being rated R and missing out on anything on my horror checklist AND being stupid is just too much to overlook.  It's not as bad as I thought a Katie Holmes movie would be, but it is definitely not very good.

Scream

I didn't grow up in a family that watched horror movies.  Aside from an occasional sleepover, I didn't watch horror movies until I was in college.  The movie that convinced me that I was, maybe, missing something was Scream.  Toward the end of my senior year in high school, a friend invited me over to watch a movie and she chose Scream.  I agreed, but was wary.  I wasn't trying to impress this girl, but I didn't want to embarrass myself either, by wetting my pants or shrieking like a schoolgirl.  For some unfathomable reason, I just assumed those were the options open to me.  But then I watched the movie and did not shriek --- it's none of your damn business about the pants-wetting --- but instead really enjoyed myself.  Seventeen years and three sequels have passed since its release; how has Scream held up?

Scream opens with one of the more famous scenes in modern horror.  Casey (Drew Barrymore) is home alone when she receives a phone call.  Casey doesn't recognize the caller's voice, but he is playful and a little flirty, so she goes along with it.  The caller asks what her favorite scary movie is (and she somehow didn't choose Poison Ivy?!?) and everyone is having a good time...until the caller lets it slip that he's watching Casey.  In fact, the caller has captured her boyfriend and will kill him, unless Casey plays a sort of horror movie trivia game over the phone.  How did she do?  Let's just say that you don't want Casey on your Trivial Pursuit team.

"Orange!  No, *sob* red!"

It seems that the brutal slaying of Casey and her boyfriend were not the first of their kind in this area; a year ago, Sydney's (Neve Campbell) mother had been murdered and the case became a media phenomenon.  But, since high schoolers are sociopaths on their good days, Casey's presumed friends aren't terribly affected by the crime.  Instead, Sydney and her boyfriend, Billy (Skeet Ulrich), are more worried about their sex-free relationship; Stuart (Matthew Lillard) and Tatum (Rose McGowan) are concerned over who can be more stereotypically 90s;

The answer is "nipples"

and the media-oversaturated Randy (Jamie Kennedy) sees the events as a direct parallel to horror movies.  Against all odds, it turns out that Randy is right.  The killer is following horror movie logic, which means that people who break the cardinal "rules" of slasher flicks (promiscuous teens, people who announce that they will "be right back" when going somewhere alone, etc.) will pay for their sins.

On the surface, Scream is kind of a sketchy idea.  A horror movie about a killer who loves horror movies, and victims who are aware of horror movie cliches?  There is a high potential for snottiness and finger-quotes irony in that pitch.  Thankfully, director Wes Craven had already toyed with this notion in his last horror film, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, and got that out of the way.  Craven, along with writer Kevin Williamson, did a very good job keeping Scream from succumbing to its potential weaknesses.  The script had clever dialogue and a reasonably likable (by horror standards) lead character.  Craven directed his relatively young cast well, and none of the featured characters seemed terribly obnoxious or paper-thin.

Well, nobody was unusually obnoxious

There are several bits in this movie that Craven handles expertly.  The opening scene is probably (and justifiably) the most famous, but pretty much every subsequent extended sequence with the killer is well-balanced and suspenseful.  As a whole, the script's efforts to be funny undercut any prolonged attempt at creating atmosphere or a sinister tone, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  Scream works because it is light and funny and because it plays along with the tropes that horror fans have known about for years.  I revisited this film, expecting the movie to have aged noticeably, but the only things showing their age are some of the costume choices.

Her "Dancing in the Dark" outfit has aged better than this

Well, okay...there is one noticeably stupid moment in this movie: the killer attacking Sidney in the bathroom in the high school.  For a killer that chose his moments pretty well in the rest of the movie, that just seemed gratuitous.

One of the things that separates Scream from its slasher movie brethren is its cast.  In the 80s and early 90s, a lot of noteworthy actors started out in horror movies, but established talent didn't stick around.  There isn't much prestige or acting challenge in the role of "Bust Campy Councilor #2."  Thanks to its script, though, Scream was able to attract some reasonably well-known talent.  The biggest name in the movie at the time (and even now) was Drew Barrymore, who was in the midst of her "bad girl" career renaissance.  Even better than having a big name actress was the fact that Barrymore took a role similar to Janet Leigh's in Psycho; by taking a smaller, more memorable role and nailing it, Barrymore set Scream up for success.  The rest of the cast is not quite as good, but not bad, either.  Neve Campbell's character has some angst, but she wasn't out of her depth when articulating those emotions, or showing a reasonable amount of intelligence.  I typically ignore people who clearly don't wash their hair in odd-numbered months, but Skeet Ulrich wasn't half bad either.

That shirt will get washed before that hair

Rose McGowan doesn't really do much, which is about par for course with her.  I will give her credit for having the stupidest death in the movie; if your character is boring in a horror movie, it's good to strive for a memorable kill scene.  She's really the worst actor in this movie, and that is shocking, given this cast.  The typically obnoxious David Arquette comes off fairly cute and likable.  Courteney Cox played a fairly one-dimensional character, but at least her character served a purpose in the plot. 
Jamie Kennedy, who has never not been terrible, is actually okay; granted, he is just acting as a mouthpiece for the writer, pointing out all the horror movie cliches that Kevin Williamson wanted to mock, but credit where it's due.  Why it was decided that Kennedy should wear pastel hush puppies and do Jerry Lewis impersonations, I do not know, but the 90s were a very ironic time.  Even the always (ALWAYS!) annoying Matthew Lillard played his part well.

Maybe he should get stabbed in more movies?

There are a few teeny-tiny roles that are worth pointing out, as well.  Henry Winkler had some lines and a death scene, even though his role was uncredited.  Less obvious was Linda Blair's cameo, but the best bit part went to Wes Craven himself, as the Freddy Krueger-looking school janitor.  That was great.  Oh, and Liev Schreiber is also in the movie, but he doesn't actually say or do anything aside from glare, so he barely counts.

When it comes to the classic horror stuff, the sex and violence, Scream does some interesting things.  This is a violent movie, no doubt.  We see a few people getting disemboweled and there is a good amount of stabbing.  In other words, a lot of fake blood was spilled in Scream.

The worst was the blood swirlie Campbell got

Maybe it's the humor in the script, or maybe it is the fact that most of the kills aren't especially ridiculous, aside from Rose McGowan's, but it just doesn't feel all that violent to me.  Still, the blend of violence and humor keeps it interesting, even in the late-second-act wasteland that can drag down a lot of slasher pics.  While there isn't any gratuitous nudity, the script does speak of the evils of teenage sex; somehow, the self-awareness of the script is almost as enjoyable as random boobage.  The strangest thing about Scream is the fact that the killer is so bland.  When you hear the voice over the telephone, he is charismatic, funny, and a little frightening.  When you see Ghostface in the flesh, though, he's underwhelming.

Look at that face!  It looks like he's apologizing!

Ghostface (Killah) isn't a bad villian, per say, but Scream isn't iconic because of him.  Scream was a hit --- and is now working its way toward "classic" status --- because of the writing and the wit.  That's not a knock on the series, by any means, but it is a knock on Ghostface.

All in all, I was genuinely impressed with how well Scream stood the test of time.  Even though it has had three sequels and revitalized slashed movies in the late 90s, it still feels fresh.  The writing is still fun, and even the presence of a moderately anonymous killer doesn't dampen its impact.

World War Z

31 Days of Horror: Day 6

If you are a big fan of Max Brooks' sweeping zombie novel, World War Z, you should prepare yourself before watching World War Z.  The film has absolutely nothing in common with the book, aside from a multi-national scope and the presence of zombies.  If you watch zombie movies for creative and excessive amounts of gore, then you might want to slow your proverbial roll.  These aren't your classic, slow-moving, flesh-falling-off-the-bone zombies and there is no channeling of Tom Savini with these special effects.  So, that is what World War Z is not.  What is it like?

Gerry (Brad Pitt) is just a normal guy, hanging out in a traffic jam with his wife (Mireille Enos) and kids, when the zombie apocalypse happens.  That's not a euphemism for being stuck in traffic with small children.  All of a sudden, the streets are filled with a raging mob that is becoming more and more undead with every passing moment.

You know, your basic zombie movie opening scene

Gerry survives Z-Day through a combination of cleverness and knowing somebody with a helicopter.  I won't spoil the movie and tell you which is a better trait to have.  The reason Gerry is valuable enough to save via airlift is because he is a retired UN investigator and one of his old work chums (Fana Mokoena) needs someone to discover the origin of the outbreak.  

"Oh.  That's all you need?  Great."

And that's the premise.  Gerry does some globetrotting, sees how different areas are handling the end of the world, and works his way towards a cure.  If there is one.

The quality of the acting in World War Z boils down to how much you like Brad Pitt.  That's not a knock on the other actors; Pitt is simply the only one with an emotional arc and more than ten minutes onscreen.  As far as that goes, Pitt is solid.  You can make an argument that he's a little bland here, but this isn't a character piece.  It's a zombie movie, and he serves his purpose by giving the audience something to care about.  Mireille Enos was okay as his worried wife, but her expectations for a husband in the post-apocalypse were a little unreasonable.  If one of them had to work for a living in the real world, why wouldn't one of them have to work to keep them from un-living?  Daniella Kertesz was better as Gerry's unwilling surgical patient, but her part was pretty basic.

It looks like Pitt is going to throw her at someone here, right?

Everyone else in the cast basically amounted to cameos.  James Badge Dale was charismatic as a bad-ass soldier, but his part was super-brief.  Matthew Fox might not have even had a line in the ten seconds I remember of him.  David Morse managed a few lines before Gerry globe trotted elsewhere.  Fana Mokoena had a bit more screen time than the others, but his character was just a boring bureaucrat.

Marc Forster directed World War Z, and he succeeded in one of the most important aspects of this film: the scope.  The movie looks and feels big, as a global zombie epidemic movie should.  Most zombie movies have a small scope --- a mall or a house, or the like --- because the costs associated with a large-scale apocalyptic film are so high.  Forster did a good job upping the ante and making this feel appropriately large.

There are more zombies in this shot than in every Romero movie combined

Forster also did a good job making this movie look good in a variety of ways.  The World Health Organization looked distinctly different from Jerusalem, which was significantly different than New York, etc.  I thought the action looked pretty good, although there were no truly great action pieces.  The special effects, which looked wretched in the trailer, actually worked well in the context of the film.

Surprise!  This didn't look like crap in the movie!

My only real problem with Forster's direction is the huge change of tone and pacing in the film's final third.  There has been a lot of press about that; apparently, the original ending was awful and this ending was the result of extensive rewrites and reshoots.  I actually like this ending, but there is no denying that the difference is jarring.  This was a tough project that was notoriously difficult to bring to the screen, and I think Forster delivered a movie that successfully avoided being a monstrous disappointment.

Speaking of disappointments, let's address how well World War Z fares as a zombie film.  In short, not well.  I don't have a problem with the fact that the zombies here are the fast variety, as opposed to the classic slow creatures from the book.  These zombies like to run.

...and stage dive.  Unsuccessfully.

Here's the thing, though.  These zombies don't feel much like zombies.  For starters, there aren't any outstanding examples of gore in this movie.  The coolest bit of gore came from Brad Pitt chopping off a hand.  That's fairly unusual in a zombie movie (the lack of gore, not the hand-chopping), but I'm sure there is a precedent for it.  Not a good precedent, but a precedent.  These zombies don't act like any movie zombies I have seen, either.  Instead, they were clearly inspired by swarming insects.

Big insects, though.  The kind you need a hatchet for.

That's actually a pretty clever idea.  The overall effect was threatening and unsettling.  They didn't feel like zombies, though.  That's not a bad thing, necessarily, but in a movie based on the highest-profile zombie novel ever (maybe?) and has a title that implies zombies...?  These choices don't really make sense.  I wouldn't mind so much if the movie worked around the Z-word --- 28 Days Later got away with a "rage virus," after all --- but the term "zombie" is front and center, even if the zombies in question are pretty uncommon.

Example: this is a buffet for "real" zombies

The most frustrating and rewarding parts of World War Z stem from the same ultimate cause: the script.  Having read the book, I can assure you that the process of creating a screenplay from that source material would be very difficult.  That this film has a coherent story is an accomplishment in and of itself.  However, to get this much of a narrative, a lot of sacrifices had to be made.  When you couple that with budget constraints, you end up with a finished product that bears almost nothing in common with World War Z.  To be perfectly honest, the money spent securing the film rights to the book was a complete waste, as the finished product is unrecognizable from the source material.

And yet...World War Z manages to do zombies on a scale that we haven't seen before (at least, not done well).  This is a flawed movie, no doubt, and a few well-placed and gory zombie kills would have gone a long way toward making this more fun to watch, but it's not bad.  It wasn't the zombie epic I was hoping for, but it brought some new elements to the table that I thought worked out pretty well.  Since the film grossed over half a billion dollars, we will probably (eventually) see a sequel pop up, and that wouldn't be a bad thing.  It should probably add some gore, though.

C.H.U.D.

31 Days  of Horror: Day 5

Have you seen C.H.U.D.?  Have you?  I remember getting excited for this one the very moment my friend explained the acronym: Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers.  Of course I want to watch a movie about C.H.U.D.s!  Of course I want to discuss C.H.U.D.s!  Who wouldn't?

C.H.U.D. begins the way you always knew, deep in your heart, that it had to begin: with a high-end photographer getting edgy, socially important photos from the safety of his apartment.  Cooper (John Heard) is tired of taking fancy, well-paying fashion gigs, because professional photographers hate receiving monetary compensation out of proportion to the work they do.  Cooper wants to track down some homeless people he photographed last year, but he can't track them down --- and he's looked everywhere in his apartment.

I'm saying you're an unsympathetic dick, dick.

Meanwhile, Police Captain Bosch (Christopher Curry) is in charge of the worst police precinct in the world.  That's not a plot point, it is just a conclusion I have reached from the fact that every police officer we see in this movie is either lazy, stupid, or a complete asshat.

...or all three

Captain Bosch is hushing up a series of missing persons cases, but one of them also happens to be his wife.  That's right, Bosch is covering up disappearances that are similar to his wife's.  No, he (probably) did not murder his wife.  Even more meanwhile, there is a savvy crime beat reporter who asks the police clever questions, like "What's going on, Bosch?"  The man is clearly driven to uncover an important story.  Beyond meanwhile, over in Meanwhileington, a filthy, greasy ex-con (Daniel Stern), who is running a soup kitchen for the homeless, decides to report some of his regulars as missing persons.

"You forgot to describe me as 'probably contagious'"

How are these seemingly disparate plot threads united?  By C.H.U.D.s, of course.  It turns out that Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers are eating (hint: cannibalistic) people, especially those who wander too close to the sewers.  Or, in the case of some of the homeless, those that choose to live in the sewers.

"Sure beats the coal mine we must have just emerged from"

But what does a C.H.U.D. look like?  C.H.U.D.-ish?  C.H.U.D.-derly?  C.H.U.D.-tastic?  All good guesses, and none of them are wrong.  Specifically, though, they look like this:

Now, all we need to know is what is causing these C.H.U.D.s to C.H.U.D. (yes, C.H.U.D. is a noun and a verb), and why the government is covering up our hot C.H.U.D. on C.H.U.D. action! their existence!

Let's talk about the acting in C.H.U.D., shall we?  There are some decent actors in this movie, after all.  Jon Polito, John Goodman, and (to a far lesser extent) Jay Thomas all make early career appearances, but they are extremely bit parts. 

Above: John Goodman, moments before the only time something in a movie ate him

The top-billed actor is actually John Heard.  I don't know why that is, since he is the whiniest character in the film and does the least good.  For my money, it is Daniel Stern's turn as AJ that deserved the limelight.  Not only is he the most reasonable character in the movie --- not counting his grooming habits, obviously --- but he has his own name, AJ, tattooed on his arm.

There aren't many good shots of it, but here's a cropped version:

That's right.  Not only does he have his own name as a prison tattoo, but it has lines coming out from it, like it's shining bright!  I don't know who thought of that, or what it means, but I fucking love it!  As far as his acting goes, Stern was competent in a movie full of awkward dialogue.  Christopher Curry was pretty terrible as Bosch, but he rocks a pretty nice cop 'stache.  I don't understand the early 80s and the insistence on giving Kim Greist work, but this is yet another movie that casts her as a supposedly beautiful and interesting love interest for the lead.  I haven't seen it work yet, but at least I did get to see her sprayed with blood this time.

With that vacant expression, this looks more like hazing than horror

Rounding out the notable cast, Sam McMurray did what he does best --- he played an unsympathetic asshole, and he did it perfectly.

C.H.U.D. is the only movie Douglas Cheek ever directed.  He apparently got the gig thanks to Daniel Stern and John Heard stumping for him.  Whatever the cause, he didn't do a very good job.  It's certainly not entirely his fault, but there isn't a single well-assembled scene in this movie.  There is no suspense or terror or horror.  Of course, this is a movie about Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, so it's probably pretty stupid.  But that doesn't explain why my favorite scene in the entire film is this one:

AJ is being tailed by Alligator Shirt.  AJ stops to make a call on a payphone.  Alligator Shirt hangs up the phone before AJ can dial (it was a close tail), grabs the change, and then eats it.  And then they just look at each other.  Not a word has been said during this entire exchange.

I couldn't stop laughing.  I actually rewound that part to make sure it really happened.  Stern's puzzled look, paired with the blank smugness of Alligator Shirt was so beautifully awkward.  I can guarantee that Cheek had something other than abject hilarity in mind when he filmed that scene.  But it is really fair to lay all the blame on the director?  After all, somebody wrote a script for this.

According to CHUDFacts (which is an interesting, if sad, read), large chunks of the movie were ad-libbed or rewritten by Daniel Stern and Christopher Curry (IMDb even lists them as uncredited writers).  Given how it turned out, I wonder if this was anything like Sam Jackson signing on for Snakes on a Plane?

"We signed on to make a movie about Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, dammit!"

Whatever the reasoning or background, this is a pretty dumb script, and the main source of entertainment is from the fact that there are things called C.H.U.D.s in the movie.

This is a horror movie, though, and C.H.U.D. does have "cannibalistic" creatures in it...how good is this movie by horror standards?  First of all, I am curious as to what makes these creatures cannibals.  We don't see C.H.U.D.s eating other C.H.U.D.s, we see them eating people; sure, we later learn that C.H.U.D.s are mutated people (who somehow all mutate the same way), but doesn't the description of them as "humanoid" kind of negate the cannibalism?  Am I being too nitpicky? 

Considering that I am not questioning them sharing the same wardrobe, the answer is "yes"

Anyway, while the title promises a fun horror experience for genre fans, there isn't much in the actual film itself.  If you are a fan of gore, there is one shot of a wounded leg, blood spattering out of a shower drain, and a C.H.U.D. head gets sliced off with a sword (that was conveniently in an apartment).  If you are into special effects, there still isn't much.  The C.H.U.D. costumes are quite obviously just gloves and masks, so very little of them are show on-camera.  For instance, this is the only unobscured shot of the C.H.U.D.s that ate John Goodman:

It's not bad, but if you have the C.H.U.D.s attacking a well-lit diner, we should see a little more.  The only way a film can get away without showing much of its monsters is if it does a great job setting a tone of suspense; it also helps if the story provides a lot of darkness and shadows.  This movie does neither.  So, gore and special effects are underwhelming...what about sex and violence?  Strikes three and four.  Little of either to be seen, and if there was some, it would probably be pretty comical.

BUT.

I truly believe C.H.U.D. is worth watching.  Is it dumb?  Yes.  Is it poorly made?  Unapologetically so. Is it a little slow getting to the C.H.U.D.s?  Definitely.  Despite all that, I think this movie is a pretty fun watch.  I might not recommend watching it alone and/or sober, but I think there is something lovably goofy at the core of this concept.  (Hint: that "something" is the acronym C.H.U.D.)

Sinister

31 Days of Horror: Day 4

"From the producer of Paranormal Activity and Insidious"?  Does that mean that Sinister is not a slasher film or remake, but *gasp* another new, suspense-driven horror flick?  Well, that remains to be seen.  I do like the change of pace we've seen over the last few years, away from cheap scares and toward better-acted and -directed horror films.  I'm not saying that we're in a horror renaissance or anything --- a lot of crap movies are still being made --- but I am seeing more types of horror, with varying levels of quality, and I like that.  Of course, these new IPs have already spawned multiple crappy sequels, but that's a problem for another time.

Ellison (Ethan Hawke) is a true-crime writer that is a few books past his prime.  His specialty is to investigate cold cases and then speculate wildly, often throwing local police under the bus in the process.

His other hobbies include having the audience watch him watch something on the screen

If that doesn't make him charming enough, he is what all authors in movies are: a heavy drinker.  Ellison has just moved his family, wife Tracy (Juliet Rylance), son Trevor (Michael Hall D'Addario) and daughter Ashley (Clare Foley), into a new home in a small town where there is a major unsolved murder case.  Four members of a family were found hanged to death in their backyard; the fifth member of the family, a young daughter, disappeared without a trace.  There were no real clues in the case and no suspects.  The upside to the murders is that Ellison got his house very cheap.  That's right...he bought the murder house.  Logically, that shouldn't make a difference.  But in Sinister, it does.  While investigating/moving his crap into the house, Ellison comes across a box of Super8 home movies.

"Super8 tapes...this will definitely help me with the murder that happened in 2011!"

Despite the odds of these tapes being useful, Ellison finds footage of the murder.  Not the kind that points to a killer, mind you, but more like the snuff film variety.  But there's more.  There are three other tapes, showing three other family massacres, dating back to the mid-sixties.  The more Ellison studies the films and investigates the different murder cases, the more Ellison notices similarities.  These are all families being killed, there are no suspects or clues in any of the murders, and the youngest child in each family is never found.  Oh, and a dude with a creepy face keeps showing up in the background of the scenes and in the drawings of the missing children.

Mr. Boogie appears to be naked

If that's not creepy enough for you, how about this?

He's being haunted by Slipknot?

But how can the same person have killed all those people over such a wide stretch of time?  What is happening to the missing children?  Are we looking at an elderly serial killer, or a legacy of murder being passed on from generation to generation?  Or is it something more *groan* Sinister?

The acting in Sinister relies heavily on the performance of Ethan Hawke.  That's not a huge surprise, since the movie is essentially watching him watch home movies.  Hawke is pretty good, though; he's certainly not likable, but he did a good job showing fear slowly creep up.  The rest of the family was an afterthought in the script, but it is worth noting that Juliet Rylance's character was right 100% of the time; she didn't have a juicy role, but there is something to be said for being the voice of logic and reason in a horror movie, even if it is a thankless task.  The kids were just kids.

...and just kids are just creepy

Performance-wise, they were adequate.  My only takaway is that Michael Hall D'Addario needs a damn haircut.  Fred Dalton Thompson makes a brief appearance as an unfriendly sheriff, and I guess he was fine.  I was a bit surprised to see James Ransone playing the part of the deputy; Ransone seems to specialize in weasely characters, so it was nice to see him try something new, even if his character wasn't particularly interesting. Slightly more effective was Vincent D'Onofrio's cameo as a college professor, if only because his post-Law & Order speech cadence really lends itself to somewhat windy knowitalls. 

Sinister was directed and co-written by Scott Derrickson.  His work in this film marks both the movie's strengths and weaknesses.  On the plus side, Derrickson did a great job building up suspense and creating a creepy haunted house vibe.  However, that is only effective because of how creepy the Super8 snuff films are and some impressive sound effects.  The script itself is a bit of a mess, as it seems torn between wanting to be a true crime mystery with the haunted house being a side effect of Ellison's drinking and being a straight-up supernatural horror movie.

Similarly, is this frightening, or is she doing an impression of a handicapped person?

I thought the final decision as to what direction the movie was going in came too late, which makes some bits confusing in retrospect, unless you're satisfied with the explanation *waves hands* MAGIC.  Derrickson is also not much of a stickler to details.  For instance, all of the "Mr. Bogey" pictures looked like they were drawn by the same person, instead of by several different children, decades apart.  And then there's Ellison's note-taking skills, where he wastes most of a page with a very basic question, just so the camera can see it being written.  Those are fairly nit-picky problems, I know, but it's not like I'm asking where the killer found Super8 film to record the most recent killings.  Oh, that's right: MAGIC. 

Murder victims are the next howling wolves for hipster T-shirts

And that's really too bad.  Sinister comes very, very close to being a cool movie.  The home videos are disturbing.  There is atmosphere and tension.  The villain has a cool look to him.  And then the story settles for a supernatural explanation and starts throwing in all sorts of cheap scares.  You know what would have made this movie better?  Not having a goddamned bogeyman as the culprit.  Someone kidnapping small children, raising them to be killers, and then watching them pay it forward would have fit this movie far better than some sort of shadow demon that kills people because of arbitrary property lines (a much-abbreviated explanation, but essentially accurate).  Still, just thinking about those 8mm videos creeps me out, so it's not a total loss.