Horror Fest: To Conclude on this Movie Bloodbath

The last fortnight has been simultaneously depressing, boring and un-adventurous. It is surprising to think that when a director has the power to frighten an audience, how uninterested the majority go about it. I feel this is the case with most films, particularly horror. The majority of horrors which I watched didn’t seem to exploit the fact that I am a human, that I have fears, that I have weaknesses. Some merely came across as an exercise in killing, and others managed to make murder and rape as disturbing as a five year old, pink-dress-wearing-pig-tailed girl holding a placard saying ‘Boo’. Good horror is about style not content. Getting a serial killer to murder someone isn’t necessarily scary, but rather: the context, the atmosphere and the way the scene is constructed.

To contrast this, some of the films I viewed this fortnight were quite memorable. The majority of these were the camp B-movies ones. The horror-comedies, or just the comedies which had a grizzly subtext. I think I might re-watch Teeth and The Terror. I’ve also come to the conclusion that Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth is one of the greatest ‘so bad it’s good’ films ever made.

Frontiers is a landmark of extreme-political cinema and I desperately wish I was in the correct mood for watching it during viewing; I also wish there were more films like it.

Now what? Well, now I’ve listed all 18 films from worst to best. Oh, and The Terror is below Detention even though The Terror got 0.5 stars higher in my mini-review of it. I think I was too generous when I wrote it.

ANYWAY. Enough of the rambling. Here goes…

18. Bloodlust

17. Detention

16. The Blood on Satan’s Claw

15. The Blood of Fu Manchu

14. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

13. 99 Women

12. The Final

11. Red Mist (aka. ‘Freakdog’)

10. Scream 2

9. The House on Haunted Hill

8. Night of the Living Dead

7. Ju-on: The Grudge

6. The Beyond

5. Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth

4. The Terror

3. Bloodbath at the House of Death

2. Teeth

1. Frontiers

Horror Fest: DAY 14

Scream 2 (1997):

http://www.imdb.co.uk/title/tt0120082/

And now, my horror fest comes to a final close with Wes Craven’s sequel to his hit genre-defying modern-classic, Scream.

Plot:

Copy-cat killings of the original Woodsboro murders occur at the university that Sidney Prescott is in, during the release of a horror film based on the same murders, called Stab.

Review:

Scream 2 (1997)

The original Scream was intelligent, observant and importantly: self-aware throughout. My problem with Scream 2 is that its self-awareness is at a peak in the opening thirty minutes and then disappears instantaneously afterwards. In the opening 30 minutes there are jokes about how sequels aren’t always as good, jokes about how the sequels differ from the original, and a continuous gag concerning the fact that the fictional film Stab is based on real events…which we saw in the original Scream – this great gag develops itself by the fact that we’re shown clips of Stab which are identical to moments in the original Scream. The opening of Scream 2 is self-aware about being self-aware.

But then it dispenses with the satire completely and morphs into a conventional unscary slasher. Yes, this is the point, but if it mocked itself and the slasher genre continuously, it would’ve been as great as the original. You could easily be forgiven for thinking that this is a conventional slasher. Sure on one level, it works as such, but it’s not particularly scary, meaning that its satire is all it stands up on…just about.

Really great sequels are better than the original, and to are able to do this because they amp up the idea of the original to the next level, by exploring it further. Scream 2 had so much potential: there could have been more self-referential gags, the jocks and the blonde bimbos could’ve been dumber and more attractive, the music could have been more ridiculously conventional as to mock the genre, there should have been so many more gags about how most sequels are terrible, yet the film you are watching now is a sequel.

If the rule of the sequel is that it is not as good as the original, then rather ironically, Scream 2 succeeds and is up there with Halloween 2.

Verdict: 2.5/5

Horror Fest: DAY 13

The House on Haunted Hill (1959):

http://www.imdb.co.uk/title/tt0051744/

The penultimate film of my horror-fest!

Plot:

A man offers several people £10’000 if they can survive the night in his house without being killed or wanting to kill themselves.

Review:

The House on Haunted Hill (1959)

This film lies between three states: so terrible it’s brilliant, genuinely good B-movie entertainment, and just dull. It slides from one to the next with ease, like a ball in a pinball machine. The opening of the film is a black screen and we hear screaming and maniacal laughter – this is just undeniably funny. The black screen doesn’t last for long as we get two faces appear on the screen giving a monologue. The second one being Vincent Price, who in this film doesn’t just chew the scenery, but savagely carves into it in such a manner that he makes all of the other actors look like animatronic robots covered with flesh. Price introduces each character as if they were a character in cluedo, guessing in serious jest what their motives are for coming whilst they ride in funeral cars (“it was my wife’s idea”) to come to the mansion.

Once there, the film unfolds slowly. The guests have the choice to leave until it is midnight. When it is finally midnight, all of the doors will be locked, and the challenge will begin. There is a long twenty-minute sequence where I felt that the film lagged as I wanted the film to progress straight to midnight immediately. This is a film which starts off with camp screaming and then begins a progressive anticlimax.

However it soon picks up its pace: ghosts, things that go bump in the dark, hands which will grab your face around corners, and certain characters are hanged. Then there was the twist at the end – somewhat predictable, but added to the charm of the film nonetheless. In between these camp moments of gothic fun are duller moments where character stay in silence, and have unheard internal monologues in their heads, staring into the distance, or having depressive exchanges with other characters about their impending doom. I wanted less of this and more shots of high-pitched screams when a character mistakes a cape dangling in mid-air for a murderous ghoul.

Verdict: 2.5/5

Horror Fest: DAY 12

Sorry about late posting! The day before yesterday was supposed to be ‘day 12’, but I picked a film from my 50 horror boxset, watched it and it wasn’t even a horror! If you’re curious about it, it was a film called The Fatal Hour and stars eyebrow-wizard, Boris Karloff.

Ju-on: The Grudge (2002):

http://www.imdb.co.uk/title/tt0364385/

Plot:

A curse is inflicted upon a house, and whoever enters it is left terrified or dead.

Review:

Ju on: The Grudge (2002)

This psychological horror has some interesting set-pieces in terms of how effective ‘jump n scream’ horror should be directed. It’s a horror film which is very good at surprising you, or catching you out with the child-monster coming out somewhere you didn’t expect. The child in this is remarkably quite sinister: he’s small, thin, has an innocent round head and adorable large eyes – yet with a painted face, blank expression and completely sterile-of-emotion-black-eyes, all of the ‘adorableness’ is sucked away. He’s called Toshio, and he usually lurks in corners, or behind windows or in the nooks and crannies of the house, and is the creepiest child in a horror film I’ve ever seen. Woop-woop.

The film has a different approach to the conventional horror structure. Rather than following one character’s journey, it follows several, so the film unfolds in a very episodic structure. Each chapter of the film allows us to see how that specific character(s) has been affected by the events, and tells its own story, and provides its own scares. However, jumping from one character to the next, doesn’t give us enough time to develop a relationship with any particular character, so the film feels more like a lot a horror-film-cum-sketch-show. This is at once an insult and a compliment: the film could have been more sinister if it stayed with one character, but the structure is very refreshing.

Perhaps another criticism of the film is its style of being creepy and sinister. It involves a lot of ‘jump’ moments, which are fine after the first half hour, but soon I got tired of them or managed to guess when they would come. Good ‘jump n scare’ horror manages to sustain this style throughout – Halloween for example – this, not so much in my opinion, it feels like its scare-factor weakens towards the end.

I usually despise the comparison of horror and comedy, because they – to me – anyway are complete opposites. However, they work in a similar way in terms of emotional reactions. Comedies – to be really successful – have to employ lots of different styles of jokes, otherwise you become immune to them. Constant one-liner gags get dull after a while, as do constant ‘jump n scream’ moments.

Verdict: 3/5

Horror Fest: DAY 11

The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971):

http://www.imdb.co.uk/title/tt0066849/

Plot:

A man discovers an inhuman skull in a field. This then leads to certain people developing skin from the devil, and a secret cult being formed…

Review:

The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

Well that was a masterpiece in blandness. Here we have a film which isn’t boring but just uninteresting. At least the positive aspects of a boring film is that it stands out. This is perfectly forgettable. I don’t think this mini-review will be long in length due to the uninterestingness of this film, but hoh-hum, I shall plough through.

It is a horror-drama where the characters are so uninteresting that they’re not just cardboard cut-outs, but just bits of skin which say words. The sequences of horror in this film are so terrible. Creepy music plays, but visuals do not match. Any director who understands how cinema works will tell you that visuals and sound have to align so that they both work together. It’s as if they did a Kevin Smith, picked up a camera and pressed record. Actually, not “it’s as if”, they probably did. An example of this would be when the cult group gather round a young girl whilst a teenage boy rapes her. The girl is then stabbed in the back with a pair of shears. You’d think this section would be disturbing, or slightly uncomfortable. Nope. Just bland. It doesn’t even have the power to make you wince.

The film is shot in such a way to suggest that the people behind it have no interest. It’s all medium shots. No close-ups or extreme close-ups, and the camera hardly moves to explore the environment. The drama lacks any sense of intensity even though the subject matter concerns murderous, raping, torturous cult possessed by the devil. All of the characters talk in deadpan monotones – it’s as if the entire thing wants to make you drift off to sleep.

This piece of filmmaking lacks cinema.

Verdict: 1/5