From Zombos' Closet

Digging to Death (2021) Not Quite Enough Digging or Is It?

Zombos Says: Good-. Not quite good enough, but worth your attention if you like art house style with your horror or just something different. Add a good wine--a sweet one would be best--and you're aces.

The IMDb rating is 4.8 and Rotten Tomatoes is not on the meter yet due to insufficient reviews for Digging to Death. That is a shame. While the acting is a tad as slow as the pacing, this art house styled entry in psychological horror that wraps itself around the Jungian Shadow of the poor programmer, David (Ford Austin), who finds three million bucks in his back yard is rather engrossing. Sure, you'll watch it thinking it will neatly wrap up the plastic bags (body bags that is) eventually, but it doesn't. And sure, you'll think back and forth on whether he did or he didn't, it was or it wasn't, and who the hell puts in their own septic tank anyway?

The puzzle starts with what's found in the basement. Yes, I know, there's the corpse and the money, but the real puzzle begins in the basement, when he pulls the keys off of the corpse to open the small door in his closet that leads to the basement steps. How did they get there? Who put them there, the corpse guy? It's all sort of like a cart before the horse problem or maybe more like a Japanese-styled horror element of recurring terror like The Grudge. Only you never will quite know, which can be a bummer; but we do know the problem is not just the plastic bag filled with lots of hundred dollar bills. 

More questions arise: was the production budget so lean that they couldn't actually bury the damned box that held the money and the corpse? The corpse, by the way, is makeup-fresh straight out of Carnival of Souls. Wonderful job there and perfect for the tone of this movie. I mean, who sinks a huge box like that, with lots of money and a fairly fresh corpse, so close to the surface? 

Either way, David, who works for Mind Crash, the software game he's managing the programming on, keeps returning to the box and the money and the corpse. It's when he takes a few hundred dollar bills that things start to really sink a lot lower than that box. The corpse apparently wants to break that old adage of not being able to take it with you. David's daughter, Jessica (Rachel Alig), is worried about him after his divorce, and David is more worried about paying for his new home, helping her with her medical bills, and moving up in his long-held job. And he needs to put in the septic tank and finish his software project sooner than later. When that money shows up he was already all over the place mentally. The money just moves him more into all over and further from a mentally safe place. 

Let's be clear about one thing up front. This is not a horror-comedy. There are some black comedy bits tossed in, some social commentary about working your ass off for a job that only cares about what you did for them in the last hour, and how really annoying it is when you just want to spend a lot of hot hundred dollar bills and even the bank says to open a trust fund or the feds will wonder where all the cash came from. Oh, and that corpse (Tom Fitzpatrick) that keeps showing up, who turns out to be more lively than David, makes digging a septic tank a cakewalk. 

Being a geek, David fights back with tech. But is he fighting an ambulatory corpse wanting its money back or is he fighting himself? Or both? Depending on how you look at it, the ending scene either puts this movie firmly into The Grudge or the shadow territory. Either Michael P. Blevins, the writer and director doesn't write good screenplays, didn't have enough money to show us everything, or he is showing us just enough to keep it vague or abundantly clear (unless you're a horror buff overthinking everything), I can't say with certainty. 

But I do like horror movies that make me think this much about their stories. I hope you find it as engagingly puzzling as I do.

Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018) Arrives September 18th

Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum arrives on DVD/Blu-ray September 18th, 2018. Here's the neatly pressed info for you for this South Korean horror. I like haunted asylum ghost stories, but found-footage, not so much. But I'll still catch it and let you know how it goes.

News Flash! – The crew of a horror web series travels to an abandoned asylum for a live broadcast. They soon encounter much more than expected as they move deeper inside the nightmarish old building in the horror  thriller GONJIAM: HAUNTED ASYLUM, terrorizing on digital, Blu-ray^™ Combo Pack and DVD September 18 from Well Go USA Entertainment. An updated take on the “found footage” genre of thrillers, Director Jung Bum-Shik (Epitaph, Horror Stories) assembled a cast of mostly newcomers for GONJIAM: HAUNTED ASYLUM, including Wi Ha-Jun, Park Sung-Hun, Lee Seung-Wook, Oh Ah-Yeon, Park Ji-Hyun, Yoo Je-Yoon and Mun Ye-Won.
 
The Story: 

Based on the local legends and stories of people who’ve visited the real-life abandoned hospital, GONJIAM: HAUNTED ASYLUM follows the crew of a horror web show who plan to stream live from inside the asylum. To attract more viewers, the show’s host arranges some scares for the team, but as they move further into the nightmarish old building, they begin to encounter much more than expected.

Death Passage (2017) Movie Review

Zombos Says: Fair Plus

A confounding script mishandled by inexperienced direction. 

Frustration is more likely to occur watching Death Passage (originally Lemon Tree Passage, 2014) than chills. James Campbell's direction is a jumbled mixture of mystery, bewildering ghostly occurrences, and insufficient clarity to progress the story where it would have done the most good to build suspense instead of confusion. It's a ghost story loosely built around the Australian Lemon Tree Passage Ghost, but the ghost here has nothing to do with that other ghost, so you may wonder why they even bothered. 

Once again, American tourists in Australia get into mischief. Of course, American tourists in horror movies always get into mischief and usually die horribly. In this movie, the mystery is whose death is fostering more death and why. Slasher film dynamics, urged on with a Grudge overlay, begin the victim pile up while the camera can't decide which one to focus on more--the slashing, the mystery, or the jumble of victimizations, familiar dialog, and murky flashbacks through it all. Given a pacing sensibility that would be more at home in the 1970s (or perhaps even a VHS shelf-warmer in the 1980s), there isn't much to engage the eye or the mind here, although the production is more than competent and the actors do provide the necessary energy, even if their characters are so much the worse from horror movie character-template wear and tear. More style, less muddle, now that would have greatly helped the storyline.

The muddling begins when American brother and sister Toby and Amelia (Tim Pocock and Pippa Black), and along-for-the-trip Maya (Jessica Tovey), befriend Aussies Geordie and Oscar (Tim Phillips and Andrew Ryan) at the beach. True to quick-scripting form, Geordie is the soft-spoken, sensitive type and Oscar is the loud, carefree sidekick who builds big dicks out of sand. Which, as we already know, is a great way to break the ice with American tourists. A quick round of cricket and some ghost storytelling by a bonfire ensues. The Lemon Tree Passage Ghost comes up and soon they are driving down that road to see its ghostly light. A flash of light does appear as they speed along the road, but that is all they, and we, see of that roadside ghost. It's the other ghost they pick up that commands the storyline from this point on. 

What could have been a refreshing switcheroo is quickly not. Not enough sense or terror is generated as the mystery progresses but does not deepen. Maya starts flipping out from frenzied visions (shown in too much closeup motion) as she becomes possessed. Sam (Nicholas Gunn), Geordie's brother, is bedeviled by an unseen force. Maya's new found friends and fellow travelers start flipping out and eventually dying around her. (What, spoiler? This is a contemporary horror movie silly. Victims die; get over it). Sam's off on his own most of the time, dealing with his own nightmare. What is happening to Sam and to Maya is kept separate until most of the running time is spent, then slammed together for a quick denouement.

When the explanation for all this mayhem finally comes it is a letdown, leaving you with the feeling that too many rewrites had left it mostly stuck in the keyboard. One curious thing: aside from the overuse of fade to black scene shifts, a quick scene switch causes a bewildering how did that happen moment, with someone suddenly tied to a tree.

Now that was spooky.

A screening link was provided for this review, courtesy of Breaking Glass Pictures.

The Forest (2016) Movie Review

Zombos Says: Good (but  not scary)

Director Jason Zada's camera framing is chokingly tight in The Forest, opening up once for a drone mounted camera overhead view that tellingly follows Sara (Natalie Dormer), Aiden (Taylor Kinney), and Michi (Yukiyoshi Ozawa) as they walk a path through Aokigahara Forest, at the foot of Mt. Fuji. The forest is a notorious place for hikers looking to commit suicide, and legend has it, is filled with Yurei (spiteful ghosts), who play deadly tricks on those who stay after dark. So you must not leave the main path and you don't stay in the forest after dark, or so goes the warning. But this is a horror movie and warnings are always ignored in horror movies. Sara meets Aiden, a reporter, who in turn knows a forest guide, Michi. Michi takes regular hikes through Aokigahara looking for suicides, and Aiden goes along for the walks, looking for a potential story.

The story Aiden finds in Sara is that her sister Jess is missing, last seen in this potentially scary forest. Being twin sisters, Sara knows Jess is still alive because she feels it. They share a preternatural ability of knowing when something is wrong with the other. It's not much help beyond that since it doesn't work like GPS, and after the few times Sara keeps insisting she knows her sister is alive because of it, you wish it had been left out of the story. It's not used well or needed. (This is when I noticed there are three credited writers, so maybe an undeveloped thread?)

Sara convinces Aiden to convince Michi to take both of them along on his jaunt through the forest. He's not happy with the idea, but agrees to help. He explains that those who are sad are most vulnerable to the dangerous spirits that lurk there. The question that unfolds and eventually is answered for us is who is actually the sad one: Jess, who's had a rocky life, or Sara, who has a happy marriage but seems to worry a lot about her sister? This becomes the underpinning for the story and provides a layer of involvement missing from the visuals. It's also an essential element within J-Horror: the character who doesn't know herself or himself and who is taken advantage of because of it.

We travel with Sara to Japan fairly quickly, slow down once we get there while she languishes lost in thought, then take the train ride and long walk to the forest with her, where we slow down again for a somewhat confusing (is she dreaming, is this real?) stock scare in the basement of the tourist cabin, and another half-hearted scare at the inn she's staying at. Then Zada jumps out of his routine by capturing the essence of Japan in a scene at twilight, involving schoolgirls crossing her path while she's, once again, lost in thought, snapping her out of her reverie to notice the inn she's standing in front of. An evocative scene that stands out among many less memorable ones. 

Finally walking through the cheery forest (those chirping birds do sound cheery), Sara ignores all of Michi's warnings and insists on staying the night after she finds her sister's yellow tent. And this is after they find a somewhat gamy suicide hanging from a tree. Aiden agrees to stay with her. As night falls, the Yurei come out. The scares do not. Either I'm too jaded or Zada hasn't seen enough Japanese horror to realize breaking a tradition or two here would have made a smarter movie. We didn't need to travel to Aokigahara to see his spirits, we've seen them often enough elsewhere. After getting us and Sara into the forest, he doesn't make us lose our way in the creepy darkness with the visual or stylish flair promised by his birds-eye view or twilight scenes earlier. What he does do well is build the paranoia Sara feels as she questions what's real and what isn't, while opening her backstory to us.

It's infectious. Why did Aiden stay with her? Does he know what happened to Jess? What exactly happened to her parents? Is Sara being tricked and lied to by malevolent spirits dressed as Japanese schoolgirls? Zada reaches a good level of uncertainty but fails to really sell it without more visually unique horrors. What he shows are standard images, within standard events, and providing standard clues. The story unfolds as it should, and there's a nice twist ending--just who exactly is the lost one here?--but it all boils down to an often seen horror scenario presented without enough visual flair or tricky timing to make it more than simply good and not nearly good enough. 

Movie Review: Lady In White (1988)

Zombos Says: Very Good

As the sun waned, I moved into the study and popped the Lady in White into the DVD player. After our Hostel experience, I wanted Zombos to watch a more subtle and traditional horror movie: one that treats murder and depravity in a respectable and nostalgic way.

It’s 1962 in Willowpoint Falls, and in the opening montage, director Frank LaLoggia introduces us to the small town during Halloween, and to the Scarlatti family’s eccentricities. Told as a flashback by the older Frankie Scarlatti (played by LaLoggia), we see the story lightly filtered through his memories as the sensitive young Frankie (played by the big eyed and big eared Lukas Haas) let’s two bully boys trick him into getting locked into the classroom’s foreboding cloakroom. All alone, and a stone’s throw away from a cemetery to boot, Frankie soon falls asleep on the top shelf of the closet, by the window.

An in-camera time lapse shot, done through the half-moon window of the cloakroom looking onto the cemetery, reminded me of a similar effect used in Hammer’s Horror of Dracula, where the sunlight rapidly fades to darkness as seen through the tomb’s window. Darkness is not a good thing when facing vampires or when locked in ominous cloakrooms on Halloween night, to be sure.

When 10 o’clock rolls around, it’s quiet, darker still, and also time for the murder mystery and ghost story to begin. Right off the bat I can identify with Frankie: he’s wearing a black cape and a Bela Lugosi mask. In a later scene in his bedroom, he also has the Aurora monster model kits displayed in all their magnificence.

That certainly brings back memories for yours truly. But I digress.

An eerie reenactment begins as Frankie wakes up from a bad dream involving his dead mother. A cold blast of air enters the room, along with the ghost of a little girl, laughing and playing. An interesting touch here is that this is not an atmospheric haunting, where events merely play over and over again, but the ghost of the little girl responds to Frankie’s presence in the room. She seems as startled to see him as he is to see her. But past events must still play out, and soon she is callously murdered by a shadowy adult figure.

Using a black screen process to create the transparent apparition of the girl, the scene is a harsh contrast to the lighter tone presented earlier in the movie, and sets up the next, more violent scene, where young Frankie finds himself in the unenviable position of sitting on the top shelf of the cloakroom when the real child-killer enters, looking for something that he had dropped into the floor grate after strangling the girl.

The killer realizes he is not alone and shines his flashlight onto the small black caped form, wearing the Bela Lugosi mask, sitting in the corner of the top shelf. Frankie tries to escape, but quickly has the life nearly choked out of him. An effective out of body experience has Frankie meet Melissa Ann, the ghost of the little girl so cruelly murdered long ago. He finds out she is trying to find her mom. Frankie is brought back to consciousness and he is soon delving deeper into this mystery for us.

True to form for the 1960s thematic, the school janitor, an African-American, is found drunk in the basement and is immediately blamed for the attempted murder of Frankie and the murders of 11 other children, including Melissa Ann, who was the first.

Reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird, the movie maintains a good balance between the fanciful, Frankie’s adventure with the ghostly Melissa Ann against the blue-lit night scenes in the fairy tale stylized woods, and his coming of age and the painful loss of his mom. This theme of loss is borne also by the ghostly Melissa Ann who is looking for her mother, the ghost of her mother who is looking for Melissa Ann, and not to give too much away, one sister mourning the loss of another.

LaLoggia, who oddly enough grew up in an urban environment, creates a charming small town nostalgia and through the use of carefully controlled colors and lighting brings the hues of autumn inside to his interior scenes. The pharmacy window decorated for Halloween and the classroom scene where Frankie reads his monster story to the class is filled with shades of orange, yellow and the various colors of crisp autumn leaves.

In stark contrast, he uses reds and blues to denote the darker side of this story, and effectively uses dimmer panels to bring the light down or up to transition between important story points in the scene. The overall mood of the movie changes from charming to alarming and back to charming as the story unfolds to its incendiary ending atop the cliffs by the white cottage. LaLoggia’s simple, old-time, approach using in-camera effects combined with basic process shots build his story in an economical but creative way. Like a good ghost story, simple elements combine to create an ethereal dread, making Lady in White a memorable movie.

 

Movie Review: The Woman in Black (2012)

Zombos Says: Very Good

Hammer Film Production's return to period supernatural horror is a strongly rendered traditional ghost story set in Britain's Edwardian time. While not as scary as Robert Wise's The Haunting, or as surprisingly twisting as John Hough's The Legend of Hell House, director Jack Watkins conjures cheerless environs, a foreboding decaying mansion, and a pervasive malevolence poised to strike, in this adaptation of Susan Hill's novel. Most striking are the period sets; I kept fancying Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee would tumble out of a room at any moment with Lee baring his vampire fangs and Cushing crossing two iron candle sticks together.

The oppressive atmosphere of London's oily, sooty fog, changes to the oppressive dreariness felt when Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) arrives at Crythin Gifford, a small town of frightened adults beset by a vengeful spirit murdering their children. Kipps, a lawyer still grieving from the loss of his wife, with a son to support and a job in jeapardy, is tasked with settling the immense amount of paperwork left behind by the late Mrs. Drablow of Eel Marsh House. The desolate house is only reachable by Nine Lives Causeway, a long stretch of road that, at certain points, becomes submerged under water during high tide. Surrounding the causeway are marshes filled with impassable, dark, viscous muck, and impenetrable fog.

At Eel Marsh House, Kipps finds Victorian stuffed monkeys, dusty tapestries and faded carpeting, creaking floorboards, thick cobwebs, peeling wallpaper, and lots of papers to go through. The phantom sounds of a carriage accident and cries in the fog, as well as seeing a mysterious figure of a woman dressed in black, put him on edge. Tragedy soon follows and the villagers want him to leave, except for Sam Daily (Ciaran Hinds), a wealthy landowner with the only car (a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost) for miles around. Invited to dinner by Daily, Kipps learns that Sam and his wife (Janet McTeer), have lost their son when Mrs. Daily enters an automatic writing trance she says is her son's way of communicating with her.

Kipps decides to spend the night at Eel Marsh House to finish his business. Sam lends his dog to Kipps for company. The Woman in Black makes sure he and the dog don't get much sleep. Apparitions, ghostly wet footprints, a very disquieting nursery, and the revealing letters Kipps discovers in a window bench keep his attention, and his wits, alert. The next morning more tragedy strikes, and worse still, Kipps learns his son and nanny are coming to Crythin Gifford and he can't stop them.

The ending of Watkin's movie is not the same as the novel, so devout readers of Susan Hill's work may be surprised. Daniel Radcliffe is superb as Arthur Kipps. The wind-up toy animals, monkees, and clowns in the nursery are quite creepy. The story has an atmosphere Ti West can only dream of. It isn't in 3D.

And as for Hammer Film Productions, you can rest assured that Hammer Horror is back with a vengeance.

Movie Review: Grave Encounters (2011)

Zombos Says: Fair

You can sum up Grave Encounters by saying "the joke's on them." 'Them' would be the Grave Encounters ghost-hunting team, a band of charlatans bolstering their television show with bought sightings of ghosts and the melodramatics of a pretend psychic (Mackenzie Gray) hamming it up for effect. After five bogus shows, they unexpectedly meet the real deal in the Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, an abandoned structure harboring a dark past and soon to be discovered irritable inhabitants. Or is there just one joker tricking them, like the evil Emeric Belasco in Hell House?

Initially starting out with the usual furnishings moving ever so slightly and unnoticed, the team experiences more aggressive activity, then physical atacks by a demonic force. This is where the movie breaks down, abandoning the more traditional--and demanding--scares of ghostly fright that rely on subtlety and vagueness for in-your-face phantoms with CGI facial ticks and a building that refuses to let them leave.

If you recall the terrors in House on Haunted Hill (1999), the time trap of The Sick House (2008), and the standard modus operandi seen in Ghost Hunters on the Syfy channel, you already know what to expect. Like 2006's The Gravedancers, the story loses credibility by pushing its special effects beyond the story's required contextual belief, then ziplines J-horror-styled attrocites in and out of night-vision camera views, sending the Grave Encounters team screaming and running in all directions, and us watching it all collapse into the standard divide and conquer scenario. The mystery of the open window only tantalizes us with possibilities that never transpire; the room tucked away in the tunnels hints at black magic, but to what purpose? And the force stalking the Grave Encounters team never bothered the solitary caretaker, so why pick on them now?

Even if you aren't already exhausted by the cheap to produce found footage, point of view, movie schtick, this one would have been better filmed without the handheld shakycam pyrotechnics. It's a classic story: a group of unbelievers are trapped in a haunted house, teach them a lesson they won't forget (or survive). It's also the type of storyline you can fritter away when you overstep the reality-pretense of POV by squeezing it to bridge sub-genres. Grave Encounters starts as a haunting, then veers into demonic stalking, where the rules of engagement require more visual frenzy, setting up a plot contretemps that skewers the more suspenseful, understated unfolding of ghostly phenomenon. Oddly enough, when the sinister force in the hospital exerts its influence over time and space, there is no religious counter within the Grave Encounters team, a fault many horror movies that play the occultism card fail to take into consideration. Atheist or believer, when confronted by demonic activity and the breakdown of natural laws, there's a natural tendency to become very religious, very fast.

Sean Rogerson as Lance Preston, the team's leader, self-consciously chews up his role  instead of allowing it to digest. White (Juan Riedinger), the tech expert, wears a KICK ME  sign early on, so we know he's going down first. Sasha (Ashleigh Gryzko) is the token screaming female; not much hope for her, either. The camera guy, T.C. (Merwin Mondesir), acts like every other black camera guy character named T.C. is supposed to do--anger, frustration, despair, and done. Mackenzie Gray's psychic is the only character to play it evenly. He looks like a psychic should look, a little weird, a lot of Hollywood groom. He should have had more to do.

Grave Encounters should have had more for its characters and story to do, too.

Movie Review: Whispering Corridors (1998)

Zombos Says: Very Good

Of all the places to die, why choose school?

 

Ki-hyeong Park's Whispering Corridors (Yeogo Goedam)  balances commentary on the psychological and physical abuse found in South Korean girls' schools, sympathy for a lost spirit dwelling equally in daylight and black of night, and a symbolic use of pouring blood to tell a story of loss, brief redemption, and continued loss.

It opens with the ghost prowling school grounds at night, seeking vengeance on a teacher who mistreated her.  The discovery of the teacher's hanging body the next day is seen first in the surprised face of the student who finds it, then next from behind her as she views it, but her head blocks our view. Finally, a step to her left and we see the entire body in the farground with the back of the student in the foreground, side by side. Other student's reactions are then shown in still shots as they come upon the body.

Muted, somber colors inside and out lend starkness to the secrecy unfolding to discovery in the school, toned by the callous mistreatment of the students and the teachers' indifference to their emotional needs. Male teachers in the school are chauvinistic and condenscending, and become violent with little provocation. Mr. Oh (Mad Dog, as the students call him), with his stick and sarcastic temperament, reminded me of a math teacher I suffered through one semester in grade school. He also carried a stick and whacked us on the head with it at little provocation. It is in this restrictive, competitive, and individuality-stifling environment the ghost haunts day and night: by day, as one of the students blending into class for years without any teacher realizing she's hung around year after year, and by night as a vengeance spirit, murdering those teachers who mistreated her or mistreat other girls.

It isn't impossible for a student to attend classes for years and not be noticed: I sat in two college classes, back to back, with the same boring professor and he didn't remember my name or that I had taken another class with him the previous semester. And I sat in the second row, directly in front of him all that time. Park is simply emphasizing how teachers are more involved with keeping authority and class order instead of attending to students' individual needs.

The ghost just wants to be normal, to relive her classroom life again and again in hopes of getting it right. She doesn't want to harm anyone, but vindictive and sadistic teachers keep mistreating the students, bringing on her vengeance-side. While it appears only three times, each occurrence is heralded by supernatural events, leading to a bloody attack, but without gore. Blood isn't used for shock value, especially at the end when a classroom becomes inundated with it, but to convey the flow of life can be either positive or negative, given the ghost of a chance either way.

Movie Review: The Haunting In Connecticut (2009) Boo Who?

Since its inception in the field of spiritualism, the concept of ectoplasm has escaped to become a staple in popular culture and fictional supernatural lore. Notable examples include Noel Coward's 1941 play Blithe Spirit, and the 1984 film Ghostbusters, in which "ectoplasmic residue" secreted by ghosts is portrayed as viscous, cloudy and greenish-white, similar to nasal mucus, famously referred to in Bill Murray's lines "Your mucous", and "He slimed me!" (Wikipedia).

Zombos Says: Good

Right before I drove to the theater last night, to watch a late showing of The Haunting in Connecticut, a lightning storm sparkled and boomed through Westbury, dropping pea-sized hail and fat raindrops by the bucketful. Perfectly horrid weather for, as it turned out, a not so perfect horror movie. While director Peter Cornwell and writers did manage to startle me twice, The Haunting in Connecticut has more in common with Tobe Hooper's energetic spookfest Poltergeist than the lingering, atmospheric scares in Lewis Allen's The Uninvited or Robert Wise's The Haunting, but not enough in common to make it as good.

The Snedeker family's travails with a reportedly true-life demonic haunting in Southington, Connecticut have been documented (I'll leave it up to you if you'd like to put quotes around documented or not) in an episode of A Haunting, which aired on the Discovery Channel, and in Ray Garton's book, In A Dark Place. Taking the cheerless funeral home ambiance and malevolent presence aspects of their paranormal experience, the movie embellishes it with necromancy, runic magic, angry earthbound spirits (earthbound spirits in horror movies always seem to be angry), and spiritualism. This backstory, involving seances run by the sinister Dr. Aickman and his reluctant medium, Jonah, would have made a more effective and terrifying movie entirely on its own.

Movie Review: The Victim (2006)

Zombos Says: Very Good

"Maybe you can reenact the mystery?" said Lawn Gisland. He stretched his unusually long legs out in front of him and yawned. "Like Ting, 'cept less'n the melodrama a mite." He pulled at his cookie duster. "Say, Zoc, squeeze me 'nother one of those cappurino's, por favor."

"Sure pardner," I said, firing up the old cappuccino steam engine. The sound of pent-up steam escaping echoed through the cinematorium.

Zombos continued to look high and low for his eyeglasses, holding up our viewing of the Thai horror movie, The Victim. We were half-way through it before Zombos needed to hit the toilet; three large mocha cappuccinos were a record for him. When he came back he realized he misplaced his second pair of eyes.

Lawn stood up, all six feet and three inches of him, and joined the search. Having starred in numerous Westerns on the little screen during the 1950s and 1960s, he and Zombos went way back together. He had hung up his spurs and retired to Florida to wrestle gators for the tourists. Getting bored with that he scratched his itch by touring as a circus cowboy, doing trick shooting and fancy riding. He was visiting the mansion while the Smith and Walloo Brothers 3-in-1 tent show set up in Long Island. For a man his age, he didn't show it. Zombos often joked that Lawn must have a decrepit looking portrait in his attic like Dorian Gray.

I bet he did.

"Here. Wet your whistle while you search." I handed the cappuccino to him. He downed it in three gulps. Something crunched sharply under his right Black Jack Hornback Alligator boot heel as he handed me his empty mug.

Zombos froze, his eyes widened.

"Found them," said Lawn. He stooped to pick up them up and handed the mangled eyeglasses back to Zombos.

After I hastily retrieved Zombos' second pair from the library we continued our viewing of The Victim.

Considering Thailand's strong superstitions about ghostly phenomena, it's a wonder Ghost Hunters Jason and Grant haven't visited that country yet. In The Victim, spirits are everywhere, especially as the sprightly aspiring actor Ting (Pitchanart Sakakorn) goes around reenacting the victims' parts in real-life crime scene recreations, places where bad karma is rife.

One spirit in particular piques her interest, and challenges her acting skills to the fullest as she reenacts the circumstances surrounding the disappearance and death of Meen, a former Miss Thailand.

It soon appears that Ting is losing herself as she prepares for the reenactment of the crime, succumbing to violent flashbacks involving Meen, and disturbing, sometimes bloody, visitations by earthbound ghosts looking for help or vengeance.

The ghostly imagery, directed by Monthon Arayangkoon, moves between poetically eerie glimpses of a genuinely unnerving twilight world filled with pitiable and vengeful spirits at arm's reach, and the usual shocks we are now accustomed to. The pacing slowly moves the story along, and the interplay of bright colors across light and dark scenes, contrasting with darker-toned scenes earlier in the movie, provides visual cuing for the sudden story within the story transition. Just when you think you know what's going on, bingo! you scramble for the remote to go back and see if you missed something.

In an unusual move for Thai horror, Arayangkoon pulls the rug out from under Ting, Meen, and the whole criminal scene investigation storyline by beginning a new storyline, creating a story you thought was happening within the story that is happening. While it starts out as a ghost story, it morphs into a "who's the ghost?" story, and even then, not satisfied with changing Ting's role completely, and meddling with the principal ghost involved, the reasons for all the vengeful havoc befalling Ting and others is revealed to be entirely different from what it seemed to be.

The Victim is an ambitious, more complex movie than usually comes out of T-Horror cinema, and it can be confusing, especially with the little helpful English subtitles that fail to capture the nuances of the Thai language; but it's still a pleasantly surprising departure from the usually straightforward horror fare we've come to expect from Asia. The cultural oddity, for us, with Thai police reenacting crime scenes using actors and the alleged criminal to provide the press with a photo op, and perhaps the spirits of victims with a modicum of peace, separates us from the business as usual horror shown in American cinema, and puts us off-balance immediately.

Drawing strength from its cultural perspectives, the movie draws on real crimes, and was shot on the actual locations where victims met their violent deaths. Building on this unpleasant reality, the movie's artificial reality has an earnest sense of its supernatural underpinnings. The carefully accentuated coloration of these locations, Ting's flashbacks, and the ghostly phenomena that befalls unsuspecting victims creates stark contrasts against each other, especially the later scenes, using a carefully executed palette that is above the over-used blanched fluorescent lighting simplicity seen in Saw, Dark Corners, and other American hard horror endeavors.

With the revelation of the second story, entering on the heels of a revealed lesbian relationship, the movie becomes a who's next? more than a whodunit?, and characters are powerless against a malevolent spirit that neither a traditional Thai spirit house or magic-bestowing tattoo inked with a bamboo needle will appease or avert. In one notable scene, framed through a narrow doorway, a pair of ghostly hands, at the ends of stretching...stretching...stretching arms, reach out to grab one unsuspecting victim.

Watch this movie late at night, when all is quiet and the world is right, and you just may find yourself checking to see if the front door is locked. Again, and again.

Just remember that doors don't stop ghosts, especially when you're alone and in the dark.

With them.

 

Movie Review: The Gravedancers (2006)

Zombos Says: Good

Step on a crack, break your back.
Step under a ladder, fall with a clatter.
Dance on a grave, get your ass kicked.

Zombos and I were out in the family cemetery, in the tepid air of a late summer night, prowling around for blurry apparitions to capture on video and unintelligible but spooky noises to record on our digital recorders. He was so excited after watching the new episodes of Ghost Hunters and the Haunted Collector on the Syfy Channel he went online and bought a bunch of spirit-busting gizmos.

"I think I have Uncle Clarence on the thermal imaging scope," he said with glee. He pointed to a pink blob in the lower left corner. It was bent over at an odd angle; Uncle Clarence was always bent over from the weight of his hunchback.

"That's your thumb," I finally said. He grunted his disappointment and moved his thumb out of the way.

"Hullo, what's that?" I pointed to a dark shape floating just above Cousin Shoemaker's tombstone. The Ghost-Mart Smart-Budget EMF reader's numbers were jumping into the high digits.

We cautiously approached the globular shape that quietly hovered above the grave.

"Quick, ask some questions so we can capture its voice on the digital recorder," Zombos directed.

"Are you Cousin Titus Shoemaker? If so, where did you bury your fortune in the mansion? And how much is it worth? And is it true that Aunt Matilda hit you in the head forty-one times with that meat cleaver Chef Machiavelli still insists on keeping in the third drawer to the right of the triple sink just because you snored?"

"Oh, bugger!" Zombos had gotten close enough to touch the floating shape. "It is not ectoplasm. It is a Barney helium balloon."

"Damn." I turned off the digital recorder. "Well, perhaps we should just watchThe Gravedancers instead?"

"Capital idea!" someone said.

Zombos looked at me. I looked at him. We looked around the empty cemetery. We kept looking back at it as we ran to the safety of the mansion.

 

While the smartly dressed paranormal investigators in The Gravedancers aren't exactly the plumbers by day, fearless supernatural inquirers by night kind, they still manage to do a few things right. But in the end, when you go dancing on other people's graves, you might as well stick a "Kick Me" sign on your back and be done with it.

The nearer to death among you may remember the 1942 Lights Out radio drama, Poltergeist, about the terminal effects from gravedancing. Building on this premise, Mike Mendez' movie is a tidy little romp in the spirit world that draws inspiration and visual styling from such gems as Night of the Demons, The Frighteners, and Poltergeist.

Unfortunately, it also draws a bit too much from the over the top remake of The Haunting, and that's where it loses the scary-cred it builds up in the first two-thirds of the story. For a low-budget fright-flick, however, it's stylish, has good acting, and has coherent—if not always best for the situation—dialog. Toss in its few good shocks and you've got a good ghost flick to add to your Halloween viewing list.

Three long-time, but haven't-seen-each-other-in-a-while friends get together for another friend's funeral. Oddly enough, the funeral has nothing to do with the now obligatory horror movie shock opening in the first few minutes. It's thrilling and chilling, but don't expect it to tie in anytime soon with the rest of the story. At the goading of the friend who's yearbook photo has noted "voted the most likely to succeed at Kinkos," they wind up back at the grave in Crescent View Cemetery, late at night, and stone-cold drunk.

Oh look! Someone's left an odd card at their friend's tombstone.

It reads to party all night, and dance over as many graves as possible to loud rock music.

Sure, why not?

Their luck goes downhill from here. The camera nervously peeks around at the shocked tombstones as our bunch, led by that Kinkos ne'er-do-idiot, dance on the resting spots of the town's worst former inhabitants: an incendiary child guilty of multiple homicides; a pillar of the community who tortured many women tied to it; and a piano teacher who chopped up her lover when not playing Chopin; making that a neat one ghost each for them and their death-mocking dance.

In the weeks that follow, creepy sounds, flickering lights, doors opening on their own, a frightened cat, and a piano playing by itself spook Harris McKay (Dominic Purcell) and his significantly-spooked other, Allison (Clare Kramer). They follow up with Kira, another gravely afflicted cemetery party-goer, who has been having her own ups and downs with a spirit that alternately bites and molests her. They bring her to a hospital; a setup for a wonderfully frightening encounter with a spirited gurney.

Their third dance partner, that Kinkos guy who got them in this mess, has been having some hot issues of his own. When they go to visit him, he's already called in the local college's paranormal investigation team (all the rage now, really) headed by Vincent (Tcheky Karyo), and his comely assistant, Culpepper (Meghann Perry). It takes the investigators little time to figure out it's the old dancing-on-graves curse at work, which persists from moon to moon, or until the cursed person dies. I bet Jason and Grant from TAPS never heard of that one.

So it's back to Crescent View Cemetery, in the dead of night (of course), to rebury the remains of the antagonized ghosts in hopes of putting them to rest—again. What ensues is a nicely choreographed example of why you shouldn't jump into graves with very spiteful ghosts itching to bury you, too. It gets worse when one of the investigators decides to do something very unprofessional, leading to more animatronic special effects, surprisingly well done on such a small budget, but somewhat over the top for what started as a more intimate haunting.

Everyone regroups at the investigators' stately mansion (Jason and Grant, eat your heart out), but soon they're bickering over who slept with whom and arguing over old relationship issues. You know, the sorts of things every potential victim in a horror movie does just before he or she dies. An unexpected rearrangement of the landscape keeps them locked in the mansion, trying to fend off their three ghostly antagonists who keep coming on strong.

The climax is a heady mix of really big, ghostly CGI animation, a determined floating bloody corpse wielding a very sharp axe, and a skillful product placement for HUMMER—I'd like to see a Prius save the day like that.

After this movie, I guarantee you'll not dance on any graves any time soon, and you'll pay more attention to Jason and Grant on Ghost Hunters, looking for as many useful pointers as possible to ward off vengeful spirits.

You never know.

 

Movie Review: Naina (2005)

Zombos Says: Good

It took a few attempts to get Shripal Morakhia's Naina into the DVD player. After the first bottle of Claret, my coordination deteriorated rapidly. I finally loaded the disc and Zombos and I were soon watching this intriguing Bollywood Horror remake of The Eye.

With a matter-of-fact tagline that reads, "Twenty years of darkness, seven days of hell, no one could survive it, SHE DID," we did not have very high expectations. But the Claret made us stronger and more daring.

Then there are the cultural differences: how would a Hindi version of The Eye fit in with the melodramatic and religious aspects of Bollywood cinema? And most importantly of all, would there be singing and dancing?

"Bring on the dancing and singing Gopis," hiccupped Zombos. "If I could stand it in Rocky Horror, I can stand it here."

"There were no Gopis in The Rocky Horror Picture Show," I told him.

"Not dressed as such, but the premise is the same."

"Point taken," I conceded. "But there are no Gopis, nor singing or dancing in this movie."

"What? Impossible! I thought that was a contractual requirement for every Bollywood movie?"

"Apparently horror movies are excluded from that requirement." I said.

I started the movie.

The opening shows the accident that leaves young Naina blind, intercut with a bloody cesarean-section of a still-born baby girl that suddenly comes back to life just as Naina's parents are killed in an accident. Then there is an eclipse of the sun. We move ahead years later to a point where Naina is ready to undergo a cornea transplant operation.

"I am already confused," said Zombos.

I refilled his glass. "There, that should help."

Urmila Matondkar plays Naina Shah with a touch of melodrama—after all this is a Bollywood movie—and grandmotherly Mrs. Shah (Kamini Khanna) is constantly by her side. Yet the coloration of the movie, the cinematography, and, to some extent the somber, bittersweet, piano score give this movie a J-Horror style.

Naina speaks briefly to a boy in the hospital who is undergoing numerous brain operations, before she undergoes surgery to restore her sight. After the operation she begins to see dark figures through her blurry vision. These figures lead patients away. She also hears spooky sounds and sees dead people. Every dead person she sees is dressed in crisp white, neatly-pressed, clothes. It's comforting to know there are laundries in the after-life.

Mrs. Shah quickly pulls out the eligible bachelor photos for Naina now that she can see, and starts working the old marriage magic on her. But Naina is becoming more and more distraught as her visions become more frightening. As Hindi cinema tradition would have it, the psychiatrist Mrs. Shah brings Naina to for help is handsome, eligible, and immediately infatuated with her loveliness—it's love at first sight for both of them. A somewhat derailing Love Boat-styled romantic montage ensues and the horror is put on hold while love is in the air.

"Wake me when we get back to the dead people," said Zombos.

I took a long sip of Claret. And another long sip of Claret.

Eventually Naina sees more and deader people and now they see her. From hanged men dressed in clean white clothes in restaurants, to little girls with little curls in hallways asking, "Have you seen my mommy?" Understandably, she becomes more distraught. Her psychiatrist boyfriend thinks it's all in her mind (no, really?) and she can't convince Mrs. Shah that those creepy black figures and talkative dead people are driving her to new heights of over-acting.

Then there's the elevator scene.

It works well and puts you on the edge of your seat with its scary encounter in a tight spot. After that she's back in the hospital and seeing more creepy black figures. A walk through the morgue as she follows eerie sounds and black figures is done with her as the only moving figure in a frozen room of doctors, nurses, and bodies in various stages of dissection. Gruesome.

At this point in her travails, she begins to question God. You don't see much questioning of God in American horror movies unless some victim or madman is yelling expletives. She questions why God is showing her these sights. He tells her it's time for the intermission.

No, I’m just kidding you, but the movie does stop—remember this is a DVD—with a big "Intermission" shown onscreen. You certainly don't see this in American Horror DVDs or movies either.

I waited to see if a dancing bag of Buttery Sally Popcorn and Mr. Straw jumping into a cup of Coke would appear, singing "Let's all go to the concession stand and have ourselves a snack."

"Thank god," said Zombos. "I really need to take a p—"

"I'll get more Sherry and Coke."

"Capital idea!" he said, hurrying to the bathroom.

 

INTERMISSION

While we wait for intermission to end, let me direct your attention to how this movie caused a lot of concern when it was released:

 

NEW DELHI (Reuters, 2005) – Indian eye doctors have asked a court to ban a movie in which the heroine sees ghosts after a cornea transplant, saying it will scare off donors and patients. The All India Ophthalmological Society complained to Delhi's high court that the movie "Naina" (Eyes), starring Bollywood bombshell Urmila Matondkar, would reinforce myths about cornea transplants, The Times of India said Friday. "This movie could create a fear psychosis among cornea recipients and their relatives as well as among potential eye donors," ophthalmologist Navin Sakhuja told Reuters. Would-be donors could be frightened off, afraid their eyes would "live on after they are dead," said Sakhuja, a member of the society. "We have a huge backlog of people, particularly children, waiting to get new corneas. His movie adds to misconceptions and could hurt efforts to get them those corneas." Naina's director says the heroine's visions after the transplant following 20 years of blindness are caused by what the donor had seen and experienced in life. "If such objections are taken into account, no horror film will ever be made," the Times quoted Shripal Morakhia saying. The court is due to hear the case Wednesday, but the movie was released nationally Friday. India needs 40,000-50,000 corneas a year but only 15,000 are donated. Hindus believe in reincarnation and that what they do and how they behave in this life affects the next. Doctors say some people fear they will be reborn blind if they give up their eyes.”

 

END OF INTERMISSION

 

Now let’s back to our movie, shall we?

Naina is riding the train, talking to the psychiatrist boyfriend on her cell phone, when a revelation occurs, forcing her to suddenly question not only God, but who she is and the person who donated the corneas. Naina drags her reluctant boyfriend along to a place she's seen in a vision. She stops being a victim and becomes resolute in finding answers. This sudden shift in the story is surprising and suspenseful, and adds an intriguing layer to it. Naina overcomes her fear as she investigates what happened to the eye donor, learns why dead people are attracted to her, and seeks to complete a broken cycle of reincarnation, even as those black figures begin to congregate in larger numbers.

Naina is similar to Premonition and Sixth Sense, but the mixing of J-Horror elements with Bollywood-Horror makes a story that’s part horror, part mystery, part ghost story, and worth a view by any horrorhead looking for something out of the ordinary.

And there's no dancing or singing, either.