a sense of joy and then a panic

Quite the Christian movie for Damn Liberal Hollywood, but not overbearing.  Actually fairly well-done, with sufficiently-drawn characters, and a satisfying story.  It was kind of fun/funny watching Mila Kunis become an action hero - she pulled that off with varying amounts of success, but it was nice that her character got the chance to do major damage.  Denzel Washington clearly playing himself as he sees himself.  A more upbeat version of The Road.  More religious than Christian anyway.  There were actually parts of this - tender quotes here and there, coupled with the apolitical bleakness of the surroundings - that might have converted me if I were, say, a teenager listening to Flyleaf trying to reconcile my interest in zombie apocalypses with my religious upbringing.  Now I do listen to Flyleaf, but that's beside the point.

Awesome score, regardless. 

Forget Avatar.  The anti-military movie of the season is clearly Daybreakers.

Daybreakers posits a world where almost everyone has become a vampire, and the few humans are farmed for blood.  OK, I probably took that exactly from the trailer.  Whatever.  The plot revolves around the efforts of one Good Vampire Scientist, Ethan Hawke, to find a blood substitute/cure, with the help of some human survivors living in secret, armed with crossbows.  Meanwhile, Ethan Hawke's evil corporation led by Sam Neill (who apparently refuses to be cast as anything but super-creepy villains these days?  what happened to Dr. Grant, huh?!) and the Vampire Army hunt humans to be methodically drained of precious, precious blood, like cattle.  Cuz see, if a vampire doesn't get enough blood in his coffee (seriously), their frontal lobe deteriorates and they get all Nosferatu-monster.  And these vampires really, really work at being civilized.  Lunging after blood is impolite.  Looking like something that crawled out of the Capuchin Catacombs is even worse.  And they're running out of blood, yo, the end is near.

The nuts and bolts of the plot are pretty irrelevant here, and the movie knows it, because it keeps getting bored with its heroes - the humans and Ethan Hawke who are trying to find a cure out in the countryside, in wine fermentation vats - and showing us more snippets of the vampire metropolis unraveling as the blood shortage triggers riots against the government ("our families are starving!") and more and more people become Nosferatu-monsters ("he was a local gardener, I saw him two weeks ago!").  And for good reason.  The worldbuilding here is really fucking cool (of course, I had a series of recurring nightmares when I was nine where everybody was a vampire but me).  The heroes are bland.  Their plot does not build tension.  The cure makes no sense.  There's a bunch of melodramatic music inserted lamely.  The human refugee-rebels were a carbon copy of those in Children Of Men, and even less interesting (if that's possible).  I was about 90% of the way through when I was going to conclude that this was another movie with a cool premise and failed execution, when...

The anti-military scene happened.  I'm not going to explain how this comes about (too much blah-blah), but basically, you get five minutes of soldiers eating each other.  And rest assured, these are not "contractors" like the Avatar guys - these are U.S. soldiers (the directors are Australian, fwiw, so...)  It's extremely bloody.  I'm talking organs-flying gore.  And to make it even better it's punctuated by these moments where a few soldiers have regained their senses and stand there, slack-jawed and covered in blood - until they, too, are devoured by "friendly fire."  This stunned me.  I just found this scene incredible. 

I should also add that this movie opens with a little girl vampire writing a suicide note to her family and then committing suicide in the daylight.  In other words, this movie is bookended by two extremely striking scenes.  I don't think there's any embedded message about our current society here - I think it's just an attempt to tell a good yarn, an attempt that ultimately cannot live up to its worthy premise - but damn. 

If you like horror - and can stand gore, because I said before, for all the vampires' plastic civility, this is a gory movie - I recommend this one.  If nothing else, because it takes an interesting concept and really sees where it can go (unlike Avatar, whose concept seems to have been "cobbled together in a weekend’s time" even though J. Cameron has supposedly been sleeping on it since 1997).  This is bold these days, both in Hollywood and in horror.  The directors, Peter and Michael Spierig, also did Undead, a zombie movie that I also found extremely interesting (but was pretty much ignored) - so look to these guys, along with Neil Marshall of The Descent and Dog Soldiers, to be strong contributors to the horror movie genre.  There are clear flaws, but it deserves a look.  It was certainly more interesting than my date.

When I first watched War of the Worlds - midnight showing (2005) - I wasn't too fond of it. I didn't like that all the main characters somehow miraculously survived, in spite of the world totally going to shit. It's very Hobbesian, which I don't enjoy. I thought the ending was too convenient (obviously I need to write to H. G. Wells about that one).

Watching it again now, after having seen 2012, I feel bad. Because despite having pretty much the same cast of characters (deadbeat dad, older son, younger daughter, ex-wife, ex-wife's new husband - latter two not really involved in War of the Worlds) and the same basic situation (mass destruction), War of the Worlds is a much better movie. It's better-acted, better-written, better-directed. Tom Cruise is a way better actor than John Cusack. Dakota Fanning is a way better actress than, fuck, anybody in 2012. As nauseating as Hobbesian situations are, Roland Emmerich's better-angels-of-our-nature transcendentalism is more annoying and less realistic. If War of the Worlds is a manufactured blockbuster (which it is - Spielberg, after all), then 2012 is as manufactured, as artificial and plastic, as an amusement park ride.

So, sorry, War of the Worlds. I gave you a bad rap. I still think your ending is a pathetic 180-degree emotional cop-out. I completely agree with this review by Rebecca Murray:

Unfortunately the movie’s 117 minutes long and those last 17 minutes are just plain horrible. Spielberg delivers a dark, sinister sci-fi story and then screws the whole thing up with an ending that doesn’t fit. In fact, the ending’s so out of place it almost ruins the whole experience. You’ve got to wonder if the ending that’s included in the theatrical release is the only ending that was shot. It actually feels like an alternate ending that was tacked on when a test audience vetoed what Spielberg really wanted to show us. If this was in fact Spielberg’s first and only choice for the ending, then jeers for not sticking with the tone of the film through its entirety.

But, you know, other than that.

I managed to see three - yes, THREE - horror movies last Sunday.  It was a crazy day.  And now I shall write belated, sloppy reviews of them. 

1.  The Burrowers:  I rented this from Netflix on pgtremblay's recommendation.  And it was sitting on the microwave unwatched when my mom said, "I'm going to start putting dates on how long you can not watch these..." (it wasn't disinterest!  but sports have been intense lately, and that tends to put a damper on watching DVDs) so I put it in.  The Burrowers sets itself apart from a lot of horror in a few ways: a) an Old West setting (specifically, the Dakotas in... um... the 1800s), and b) quite an artistic little camera.  Moody looks through the grass, sensitive and subtle flashbacks.  All very nice.  And when the monsters first show up - it's "burrowers" killing and kidnapping settlers, not Indians - they are very creepy.  They've got an unusual hunting style and an interesting ecological history, and they've got people pretty much outsmarted.  The melancholy, brooding-in-the-wilderness tone persists until the final act, when the filmmakers remembered they were making an action-horror movie and went all SciFi Saturdays on me.  Suddenly this clever little gem is making two big mistakes: a) showing the monster full-on when the movie did not have Jurassic Park's budget, and b) making the monsters VERY easy to kill.  That said, this is an atypical horror movie - it is very unkind to its characters (especially the sympathetic ones).   I actually felt it was so nasty to these people that the ending felt abrupt and unsatisfying.  I know, I know.  I usually reward bleakness in horror movies.  Maybe the risk/reward ratio in this one was too high; or maybe the characters were well-developed and real enough that I felt bad for them being sloughed off by the narrative for no apparent reason.

2.  Sorority Row:  I went to see this with friends later that afternoon.  I had very low expectations for this one.  But you know, it surprised me.  I mean, the acting was pretty bad.  There was, of course, gratuitous sorority-related near-porn.  I found the initial set-up - sorority sisters trick another sister's ex into thinking his roofies killed the sister, while the prank's still on he kills her for real, they dump body down a mine shaft - damn ridiculous.  The murderer, who runs around silently in a hood, is pretty generic and stale.  But the sisters are actually pretty entertaining - a nice blend of bitchy and justified - and aren't nearly as annoying as you would assume they'd be.  In order to explain what made this movie so different, however, I must supply spoilers - sorry.  The killer isn't a victim.  The killer isn't out to revenge some wrong.  All the bad guys here are male.  We've got: a) the original guy who killed his girlfriend - the fact that he thought she was already dead makes his stabbing her through the chest even more psychotic, b) the snotty and artificial senator's son, who berates and cheats on and hits his girlfriend (who finally realizes it's not worth marrying into this family), and c) the valedictorian and main character's boyfriend, who's the real killer.  He's just trying to keep his girlfriend away from her trashy sisters, and is furious when she chooses "her girlfriends" over him.  I won't say this is a feminist tract, because you know, it's not - but I do appreciate the Hos Before Bros gesture (so to speak), and the fact that all the "psycho killers on the loose" here are the people with all the privilege. 

3.  Clive Barker's Book of Blood:  Apparently this is a movie-that-never-found-a-home that eventually got aired by SyFy, based off "The Book of Blood" in Volume 1 of Books of Blood, and some other "postscript" story in Volume 6.  I haven't read the second story, so suffice it to say I was totally confused by the fact that this movie - which should have been a 30 minute Tales From The Crypt episode - was 2 HOURS LONG.  They dragged the first story out to about 90 minutes, embellishing wildly and adding unnecessary subplots and taking away scenes they didn't want to try and film, and then added another 30 minutes that looked like pure overkill.  Apparently the extra 30 minutes is truly based off of "On Jerusalem Street (a postscript)."  I kind of can't believe Clive Barker wrote this unnecessary addendum to the first story, but I guess I can't fault the movie producers for that one.  The thing is, I don't think even "The Book of Blood" is THAT great of a story.  It's about how this one house is a big intersection of the dead, so it's filled with ghosts, and the ghosts are all about telling their stories - on whatever surface they have.  It all just feels kind of pointless and even contrived.  Clive Barker's opening for the whole volume is way better: "we are all books of blood... whenever we're opened, we're red."  That's all you need.  You don't need two hours.  You especially don't need two hours of weak characterization and painfully slow and laughable ghosts (a park fountain of blood, with blood ghosts a la The Invisible Man dancing ring around the rosy?  really?). 

No Such Thing (2001) is not a cohesive movie.  The first third of the movie - about a tabloid journalist (played by Sarah Polley, which is always a plus) who goes to Iceland to find out if a monster killed her fiance and the rest of the film crew - is very strong.  Very moody, very dark, almost keeping itself at a bit of a distance from its subjects to allow for the landscape and minor characters to add to the movie's feel.  Iceland, of course, is a commanding presence.  There's even a plane crash involved, wonderfully handled.  Parts of it feel like the first movie I saw Sarah Polley in, Atom Egoyan's soul-shaking The Sweet Hereafter.  An early scene between the locals and the monster is all dry wit and a rocky ocean, like a gritty Nordic fable, like Egil Saga.  Hell, even like Ragnarok.  This is how the movie should have stayed.


Then we meet the monster, who has woodenish horns and breathes fire and lives on a rock in the ocean.  He is a people-killer, but all we see are the skeletons on his rock-island - he doesn't actually kill anybody during the movie.  The monster is a gruff, sensitive type, a hard drinker who greets the journalist with "what the fuck are you lookin' at?"  He wants to die because he's been around since the beginning of time and is tired of watching human civilization, and only one doctor knows how to kill him, so he and the journalist head off to try and find this doctor.  By this point the movie's already taken a bit of a dip into pop-camp territory, but there's some really nice scenes where the monster and the journalist are trekking through Icelandic villages, awkwardly sitting with the locals.  Once they get back to New York, however (the journalist's bosses have usurped the project), the movie becomes totally pop-camp.  Some of this - the absurdity of the monster as a pseudo-celebrity, still smashing televisions and spewing sarcasm - is really funny, though very emotionally shallow in comparison to the beginning.  The characters - who I originally felt were very real - are reduced to punch lines.  Then the doctor comes into the picture, and he's a disappointing non-entity.  Then the military steps in to run experiments on the monster, and the journalist has to rescue the monster from the evil scientists and the movie teeters into a very tired cliche.  Apparently this is the filmmaker's (Hal Hartley) attempt to make Beauty and the Beast (and that is about how long this cliche has been around, it was in the original fairytale).  Note that the abused, misunderstood monster cliche only feels like a cliche when carried out insincerely, without emotional resonance - that's when it becomes a throwaway gimmick, an obligatory "moral to the story", similar to the way every Disney movie ends up with the characters learning that friends should stick together and we should all follow our dreams.  The outsider-insider-who-is-the-real-monster set-up is an important issue for any community.  This kind of treatment belittles it. 

It's a shame, because I think if Hal Handley had stuck to his original setting/cinematography, he probably could have made a movie with a similar message about monsters and people that felt like it meant something.  They get back to Iceland in the end, but it's too late.  Save a few moments of slow-going, understated honesty between the journalist and the monster on the journey home, it's drivel, and a big let-down given the way the movie started.

Here's testament to how much of a Carrie I am: I watched The Exorcist on my senior prom night.

And even though I'm not a believer, The Exorcist is a very disturbing movie.  It does not rely on religion to be scary - it relies on image, sound, and cinematography.  Personally, I'd call it more grotesque than scary - oddly, more along the lines of The Hills Have Eyes and "torture porn" - precisely because as far as the story goes, random Mesopotamian demons that were probably good guys to begin with but were turned into demons by the Church... not really high on my list of things to watch out for. 

But, because it's a good movie, I decided to watch Exorcist the Beginning on AMC.  Summary: After WWII, former priest Merrin goes to Africa to dig up a relic.  Turns out the archeological dig has this big winged demonic statue inside, and bad shit is happening to the little colonial African community because the demon is "touching" people.  Yeah, yeah.  So Merrin has to get over his issues and pick up the priesthood in order to exorcise the demon. 

Positives: The setting is great.  Basically Indiana Jones without Indiana Jones (so in other words, an Indiana Jones I might actually enjoy!).  The colonial Europeans are down-pat - the evil soldiers, the psycho drunk guy, the woman who's sent herself into exile, the weak do-gooder priest.  And the Africans were fantastic too - the demon was thought to have possessed one of their little boys (who has a pack of hyenas kill his older brother - really disturbing scene) so they basically go into a full-on revival of their own exorcism strategies (which don't work, but good try) involving leeches and chanting.  At the end the Africans are on strike from their work at the dig site and the soldiers have come in to enforce order, and they do battle in this giant, blinding sand storm, so both sides look like ghosts coming through the sand.  Great scene.  All the archaic medicine and mosquito nets and lights going out and hyenas in the house... the whole thing was beautifully textured.

Negatives: The cast had accent problems.  Skarsgard never seemed to be "in" the movie, despite playing the lead (they had Liam Neeson originally lined up for it, but he quit - he would have been like 10,000x better).  He reminded me of Stephen Baldwin occasionally, and that's always a bad thing.  His tragic war memories seemed both gratuitous and irrelevant, and not fitting for an Exorcist movie.  Sometimes the CG was not so good.  The plot was kind of convoluted - are you "touched" or "possessed", what's the difference, etc.  The demonology was a little weak in the mechanics.  And I will say this - I think it could have been a lot scarier.  There were a lot of scenes where something seemed to be building, and I would get all tense, but then nothing would happen.  I mean, huge opportunities - opportunities I could see coming - and it's so surprising to see a horror movie pass on those shots.  That and the climax seems too far removed from the rest of the movie.

I later discovered that this movie has an 11% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  I think this is undeserved.  The movie is not that bad.  In fact, I've been trying to figure out what makes it a shit movie - because it's certainly not an awesome movie - and I've decided it's more like a poo movie, but I'll make a new tag called okay movies anyway.  I know I'm soft on horror movies, but the setting was just too good to punish this movie with a shit movies tag.