The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[colinr0380]

Veering a bit off-topic, but while I find Ito can do wonders with unusual premises (Uzumaki, duh) I think Gyo is just quite silly, although I found that shark attack sequence pretty well-done.

Gyo is quite silly but I thought it was quite an eye-opening example of taking a quite simple idea and riffing on it wildly. It looks as if an anime of Gyo has just been produced - I found a brief runthrough of it on YouTube (although the uploader has added some 'wacky' comments and Curb Your Enthusiasm music over a couple of sequences!) and it looks as if they have let the main couple both survive most of the way and introduced some friends into the situation to fight off the sharks or bloat up wildly instead. If you have a strong stomach, here it is.

Really loved the film which I only discovered idly flicking through Exploited Cinema's catalogue years ago so your comments about the Manga interest me. Is the three book version Amazon advertises complete? And in colour (the version on Mangashare is. or starts out that way)?

I read a copy online a few years ago, so I don't really know if it is still available and how the volumes break down. I seem to remember it being twenty chapters or so, if that helps at all. From what I read though only the chapter page and the first couple of pages of each section are in colour and the majority is in black and white.

In the meantime, here's The Mystery of the Amigara Fault which puxzkkx talks of.

[domino harvey]

Bram Stoker's Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola 1992) I'm not all that sure Stoker'd want his name on this… Repeatedly veering close to laughable broadness, this fervent, non-stop style machine (which gave birth to a hundred bad industrial music videos) walks a fine line between audacity and embarrassment. The film is less a narrative and more a collection of loosely flowing moments bound by art direction and special effects, and the sensuality is regrettably treated on the more ludicrous spectrum of the film's tones. At least all the actors seem to be having a grand time hamming it up.

the Crazies (Breck Eisner 2010) I haven't seen the Romero original yet but boy this remake is one tidy piece of business. Timothy Olyphant plays the Iowan sheriff who discovers the government has "accidentally" exposed the town's drinking water to biological weaponry and attempts to flee the ensuing melee with his pregnant doctor wife, Radha Mitchell. For all of Contagion's presumable realism, there's something to be said for the sad likelihood of the film's view of the government response to the prospect of infection: containment at all costs. The film is ingenious in how it assaults our heroes from three fronts: the violent infected, the ruthless soldiers, and, on the outskirts, a group of local hunters who see the opportunity to sport-hunt a new target. Without seeing it, I can guess the original's political aims from its release date alone, but this remake is a very effective treatise on American Isolationism that does a better, subtler job at allegory than most similarly-aimed horror films I can remember. Told with rare clarity and straightforwardness, this is an artful plague film of apocalyptic ruination that, for all its downtrodden messaging, is never prurient in delivery. Indeed, one of the film's great pleasures is its dark wit, which leads to moments like Olyphant's quick solution to being pinned to the floor with a knife or the film's most gleefully entertaining sequence involving an errant skull saw. Highly recommended, especially if you're like me and generally roll your eyes every time zombie films get trotted out as Like Totally Deep.

the Frighteners (Director's Cut) (Peter Jackson 1996) I always wondered why everyone hated this film and now having seen it, it's somewhat obvious: the breakneck speed and goofy humor that served Dead Alive so well is just obnoxious and abrasive here. On paper the premise of the film doesn't seem all that objectionable, but something about the mixture of the actors (all played to wrist-slitting broadness) and the increasingly salacious storyline makes this a thoroughly unpleasant disaster. What was Universal thinking throwing so much money at this? Also, Peter Jackson, stop twirling the fucking camera.

He Knows You're Alone (Armand Mastroianni 1980) Often remembered more for Tom Hanks three minutes of screentime, in which he manages to be charming and funny and energetic in a way no one else on screen can muster, this is one of the worst slasher films I've ever seen-- and that's a low bar already. This thing doesn't even have the courage of its premise: a psycho attacks brides to be, in theory-- he only manages by my count one present day bridal victim and seems far more focused on forgettable people in the periphery of the intended victim. Yet another film that proves a slasher film won't set up a fishtank without later putting a head in it.

Rogue (George Maclean 2007) Being that this Australian killer croc flick comes from the director of Wolf Creek, I expected the worst: a nihilistic monster pic with one winner, non-human. But to my delight Maclean's approach, while a 180 from the sarcastic fun of Lake Placid towards seriousness of plot and heightened danger, is towards a small scale blockbuster, and he succeeds-- this entertaining film seems primed for a much larger audience than it was ever granted, at least on our side of the pond. Radha Mitchell, vogue as ever, does typically nice work as the outback tour guide who accidentally maroons her charges in an angry crocodile's swampy alcove, with pre-fame Aussies Mia Wasikowska and Sam Worthington on hand as potential bait. The jump scares are surprisingly spare but effective, the focus is on suspense, not gore (though dog lovers might want to stay away…), and the pummeling sound design in the finale gave me quite a workout. Either I caught two superior flukes in close quarters or maybe there's something about the killer croc subsubsubsubsubsubgenre that lends itself to quality product?

30 Days of Night (David Slade 2007) Slade's follow-up to Hard Candy (Which, come to mind, qualifies as a rape revenge of sorts and is perfectly in line with this project) opens with twenty minutes or so of delightful set-up so beautifully paced and photographed that expectations were running to impossibly high levels by the time the carnage started. It's a great premise: A group of roving vampires target a remote Alaskan town which insulates itself annually for the event of the title. For all its proficiency, however, the film's biggest problem is the ugly Eurotrash vamps at the heart of the violence. Slade wisely hides them from view in the first half hour and the film turns down when they suddenly take on unwanted full supporting roles in the picture. That being said, the film mostly overcomes the negative weight of its villains due to some creative set pieces (I particularly loved the baddies' quick answer to the threat of Hartnett and George's vehicle) and Slade's overall aesthetic flair makes the film seem far better than it probably is (especially since the action feels like it unfolds over twenty-four hours, not seven hundred and twenty). Melissa George, so powerful and talented on In Treatment, is only called upon to look stoic and hott in equal measure here, and the rest of the cast is negligible. I can't remember if the color timer got a main credit again.

I also revisited a handful of films I hadn't seen since I was a kid. Some held up remarkably well, some, as expected, didn't

Beetlejuice (Tim Burton 1988) Ultimately the only Burtonesque Tim Burton film anyone needs. I had forgotten just how funny the film is, and Burton's broad brush gets in some hilarious strokes thanks to the BoHo interlopers absently tormenting the Cracker Barrel newlydeads. That most of the actors are able to compete with the German Expressionism by way of Tex Avery art design is impressive. Above all the stylistic crutches, I think Burton's real talent here is how he allows what is essentially morbid and grotesque story elements to manifest into a cheerily upbeat comic narrative.

Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman 1984) Like most kids, I worshipped this movie as a kid. As an adult, though, I was saddened to find Bill Murray's persistent flip attitude more tiring that amusing, and the special effects sequences ground the film to a halt over and over again. There are moments that work-- I liked the opening sequence with Murray hitting on a girl by exaggerating her psychic powers, which is one of the few sequences where Murray's arch dick attitude works in the film's favor (another being his tormenting of William Atherton, of course)-- but after a while the film seemed more and more serious the sillier it got.

the Monster Squad (Fred Dekker 1987) Yikes. Another adoration piece from childhood, the saddest thing about this lame Goonies ripoff is how low-rent and slight it all feels. I will give props to the film's finale, which is a nice if convenient parade of terrors existing solely to give each member of the titular group a moment to shine as hero, but otherwise I should have kept this one a fond memory.

the Relic (Peter Hyams 1997) Colin got me thinking back on this one a few months back and sad to say it did much less for me now. There's something perverse about setting a monster movie inside the Chicago Natural History Museum and then making most of the film take place in the sewers and basements beneath it. The film also begs the eternal question: How many different tunnel sequences can one film possibly offer a viewer? You don't want to know the answer. The film has its share of comeuppance slayings and jump scares and gory deaths and psuedosciences and special effect overloads, so I guess anyone would probably get their money's worth here even if the end result is lacking.

Species (Roger Donaldson 1995) Much worse than I remembered, this is a film that suffers most from a total lack of inquisitiveness into its premise. Aliens send us instructions on how to combine our DNA with theirs and then the end product first looks like Michelle Williams then Natasha Henstridge. Then Good Lookin' runs around LA sexing and slaying assorted suitors. So many questions are left unanswered: How can she drive a car? How does she know how to talk? How does she do, well, anything else she does in this film? Why are there so, so many stars in what should rightfully be a straight-to-cable dud? That being said, I maintain earlier praise for Henstridge's presence and despite/because of its flaws, this would still be the anchor text I'd use to illustrate the Nineties Horror Film subgenre.

Tremors (Ron Underwood 1990) This probably exists outside the realm of objective appreciation, as I grew up watching this seemingly weekly on USA, but I do think this is a novel and concise distillation of the classic monster movie small group dynamics told with good humor and thinly-sketched but likable victims/victors. Really, I was just glad to see this live up to the lofty place it held in my childhood.

[zedz]

the Relic (Peter Hyams 1997) Colin got me thinking back on this one a few months back and sad to say it did much less for me now. There's something perverse about setting a monster movie inside the Chicago Natural History Museum and then making most of the film take place in the sewers and basements beneath it.

Particularly as the preparation lab at The Field is one of the most hair-raising places I've ever seen (or smelt). Macerating corpses, all those Dermestid beetles swarming over bird carcasses: that sort of thing would be a gift to a horror movie.

[colinr0380]

The Crazies is one of the very few horror remakes of this recent cycle which I would fully endorse. I like the original Romero film but it is extremely rough hewn (far rougher than Night of the Living Dead) and has some quite problematically edited sequences. The remake rectifies this to a great extent and still gets at most of the ideas within the original, presenting them in a much clearer way. Which I think goes to show that you should remake the films that can be approached from a different angle or have aspects which can be improved upon, rather than ones which were already classics and can only be ruined or have their original point missed in a spectacular manner (I'm looking at the Dawn of the Dead remake here in particular)

Although the original does have some plus points: Lynn Lowry (in Cronenberg's Shivers around the same period) is great in it and Richard France as the doctor working out the cure but then being rounded up with the other madmen creates a nice Night of the Living Dead-style political and police state ironic frisson. Plus if you have seen France's role in The Crazies it makes his appearances as the scientist on the television explaining the zombies and then trying to hold onto a shred of hope at Dawn of the Dead's lowest ebb (the point where Roger dies and resurrects) resonate much more.

He Knows You're Alone (Armand Mastroianni 1980) Often remembered more for Tom Hanks three minutes of screentime, in which he manages to be charming and funny and energetic in a way no one else on screen can muster, this is one of the worst slasher films I've ever seen-- and that's a low bar already. This thing doesn't even have the courage of its premise: a psycho attacks brides to be, in theory-- he only manages by my count one present day bridal victim and seems far more focused on forgettable people in the periphery of the intended victim. Yet another film that proves a slasher film won't set up a fishtank without later putting a head in it.

Add Night School to that list - heads end up in various watery locations including an aquarium fish tank. In terms of marital horror I quite liked that recent Harper's Island TV series based entirely around a wedding on a spooky island with lots of 'who is going to wander off for a morning jog or pre-wedding hanky panky and get killed off this week?' thrills (even if for a while Harper's Island feels as if it owes a lot to Kevin Williamson 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' antics)

Either I caught two superior flukes in close quarters or maybe there's something about the killer croc subsubsubsubsubsubgenre that lends itself to quality product?

Have you tracked down the John Sayles-scripted Alligator yet domino?

Also, if you want another Radha Mitchell horror film to view I would definitely recommend Pitch Black. That film has a great 30 Days of Night-esque premise of a space shuttle crash landing on a planet in bright sunshine only to find a deserted colony and a small model of the solar system showing that there is about to be a conjunction of the planets resulting in literally years of darkness. And unfortunately the planet is inhabited by a species that only comes out at night!

The film is probably best known as part of the trifecta of movies that made Vin Diesel a star along with The Fast and The Furious and xXx, but it has a fantastic cast supporting Diesel's cat-eyed murderer including Keith David, best known from the John Carpenter remake of The Thing (not the more recent one!) and degrading Jennifer Connelly's character in Requiem For a Dream, as an Imam (a rare example of a sympathetic Muslim character in a horror film, though all of his sons get used as expendable pawns early on). Plus Claudia Black (best known for her heroine in the Farscape TV series) has a good part too. Cole Hauser is a rather ineffectual hero, though he understandably makes little impact due to the emphasis being on Vin Diesel's anti-hero Riddick and his relationship with Radha Mitchell's character.

Radha Mitchell gets by far the best developed character in the entire film as a someone quickly promoted to pilot of the ship in the initial excellent crash sequence, who had made the decision to jettison all of the passengers but had not been able to due to a malfunction and then has to wrestle with that knowledge throughout the rest of the film, eventually finding a kind of kindred spirit in Riddick and a quite moving, if bleak, redemption for that initial callous act.

The film has a few excellent sequences, particularly the opening crash and the ten minute long sequence of the characters racing against the setting of the sun(s) back to the supposed safety of their ship. The film also uses the Cooby Pedy locations in Australia well - a location often used for its bleak desert settings in films as diverse as Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Until The End of the World and Red Planet.

The director David Twohy attempted a similar kind of claustrophobic supernatural story with moral undertones a couple of years later with the Second World War submarine set ghost story Below to lesser effect (it unfortunately keeps bringing Das Boot to mind in its setting and The Sixth Sense to mind in its ghostly shenanigans. Plus I also kept thinking of The Final Countdown as well, in the sense that we have the culture clash between a group of refugees and the officers and men on board a ship) and then returned to the world of Pitch Black with The Chronicles of Riddick, which is much more of a sci-fi story than a horror one. Although The Chronicles of Riddick does feature Judi Dench in one of her more unique roles!

[colinr0380]

Following the recent talk in the main lists projects thread about spiritual films and the Stan Brakhage autopsy film The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes in particular, I thought this might be the best time to discuss what I consider to be the horror project flipside of the Brakhage film, Nacho Cerdà's short film Aftermath. Though in a strange way the series of which it is a part is no less spiritual in its own way.

Unearthed Films have put out a really nice Region 1 US DVD which links up Aftermath with its two semi-companion films and places what is a gory, transgressive horror film into a deeper context with the other films that surround it. I'll tackle each in order:

The Awakening (1990)

This is a very short ten minute, roughly shot black and white piece about a student in a classroom who gazes dreamily at dollar bills, gets an F grade from his teacher and then falls asleep during a lecture and finds when he jolts awake that time has somehow stopped. The echoey, overdubbed quality of the dialogue here adds to that sense of otherwordliness, much as it did in Carnival of Souls...and just by the Carnival of Souls reference I'm afraid that I've spoiled the twist!

The student while wandering around the static classroom gets epileptic flashbacks to himself as a baby and his childhood (much quicker and effective than those in the drawn out Enter The Void even if the character is a much of a cypher here too, with the flashbacks taking a similar form of quickly audience graspable elements like being breast fed and seeing your parents across the table from a birthday cake!). Then as the moment of death approaches bizarre visions of the eye on the dollar bill appearing on the blackboard, and the other previously frozen people in the room are now looking straight at him.

Time then starts again and the student unnoticed watches the teacher and other students trying to give him CPR. Then what is probably an angel (she is described as such in the credits) appears at the door and beckons him to come with her.

It is quite a nice short. It is very rough but it contains many of the ideas that are being developed in the more celebrated later two films: the dissociation between mind and body that will be explored in Aftermath and the female angel figure who is both a beautiful guide into the afterlife and simultaneously a kind of siren beckoning a man to his death from Genesis. If there is a Twilight Zone-style moral lesson to be found in The Awakening it is probably not to fall asleep in class or this may happen to you! You may at least end up getting bad grades!

Aftermath (1994)

This is the gory central section of the death triptych. Instead of being concerned with the soul, this one is tackling the viscerality of the body and taking this to a necrophiliac extreme - the viscerality of the environment too in the sense that there is a lot of focusing on details of metal objects and fittings, of the almost tactile difference between flesh and fabric and so on. The film begins with sounds of an accident and then the mutilated remains of a dog before the credits begin (creating a kind of circular motif as we return to another dog later on...getting its revenge?).

Most of the film is set inside a gleamingly sterile metal autopsy room which steadily gets defiled. The clinical becoming used for the personal. The credits introduce us in flashes to the autopsy instruments as the credits play over ECG life signs and the film can finally begin. As the body is wheeled away the doctor returns the cross that the patient had been wearing to the grieving relatives (suggesting that the body is no longer under spiritual protection now that the soul has left?)

The 'clinical' (or daily work) section begins with a couple of autopsies on a male corpses, roughly undressed by the masked clinican. A curious orderly peeks in as one of the doctors opens the skull and gets wordlessly shoed away by one of the other doctors. The bodies are roughly, yet efficiently gutted apart by the doctors (including the touch of balling up a wet towel and placing it inside the head cavity after the brain has been removed). The unwanted parts, including the brain, just get chucked back inside the body cavity when everything has been examined.

The returns of the camera back to the dead, staring eyes of the corpses seems to keep accusing the pathologists in this section for their callousness. The pathologists are doing the exact same procedure on each of the two bodies, but one is slightly ahead of the other creating a disturbing 'round robin' sense that the bodies are interchangable, just meat to be worked on. And that the process never ends.

The second doctor though seems to be having some trouble and has moments of stopping to enjoy the viscera more. After hours he looks through the sheets, finds the recently arrived female car crash victim and thus begins the 'unclinical' autopsy section of the film.

If the unfeelingly clinical autopsies of the first section were almost unbearable, the sexualised slow removal of clothes from the body in this one are already much worse - they're just the first layer. In a scene to perhaps surpass Udo Keir's gall bladder one from Flesh For Frankenstein, as well as fondling the corpse the doctor manipulates himself over the eviseracted chest of the corpse, then takes photographs of the remains. Setting the witnessing camera down to capture him on top of the body.

We cut to the later 'clean up' seqence as the pathologist is collecting up all of the goop to put back inside the body, only to keep a couple of choice parts for himself. I think an influence here has to be Psycho - there have been many pans to plugholes during the film, but the long clean up scene has that sense too, along with the entire film being almost wordless.

Cut to the coda of the doctor at home, pureeing the heart he took from the corpse in a blender and giving it to his dog, with the papers underneath the dog's bowl showing the obituaries of the deceased woman. The circle of visceral life continues, eating itself, while the emotional and personal gets dismissed or forgotten with the next day's news.

Genesis (1998)

This film builds interestingly on Aftermath, providing the emotional, the physical and the personal dimension so distressingly absent from the clinically minded autopsy film. In this case the body is gone but the memories of the person remain.

A man (played by Pep Tosar, who also played the necrophiliac doctor in Aftermath) has lost his wife in a car crash and seems to spend all of his time creating sculptures of her, as if trying to recreate her from clay. But isn't the task impossible, as it is only dealing with the image rather than the real thing? There is also the slight sense of Dr Frankenstein's lab, as the studio is littered with 'failed experiments' of imperfectly sculpted heads and disembodied legs.

The antiseptic, coldly clinical autopsy room becomes the cluttered, dark sculptor's studio. The precise, sharp knives used to brutally eviserate a corpse become the blunt sculpting tools used to delicately re-create. The fondling of the statue, much as the fondling of the body did in the earlier film, seems to be a key scene. In this case rather than remaining an inanimate object to be used and discarded, the statute eventually starts to bleed, in a very Catholic fashion! The more that the sculptor tends to the statue, the more it bleeds.

The film feels a lot about the investment that an artist puts into a piece of work, or into a personal obsession. letting himself waste away while putting himself entirely into his project. The transsubstantiation which occurs works both ways: as the statute becomes more human, so the sculptor starts crumbing into dust. And willingly so! Is it guilt over the car crash that is pushing him onward to make sure that his wife returns to life, even if it kills him? Or is it a death wish? To return back to The Awakening, the statue of the wife takes on the form of an angel and he will only see her 'in the flesh', so to speak, at the moment of his death. (It reminded me a little of Ladyhawke too, in the sense that the two lovers have the tragedy of crossing each others paths very briefly, only meeting again for one moment until they are parted again)

I think Genesis really makes this set of films. It is great in itself but immensely more powerful when considered in context with the brutally callous (both in its clinical detachment and its personalised defilement aspects) Aftermath and the ironically moralistic, strangely coded Awakening. I think it is one of the most beautiful short films of the 1990s

Here's the Mondo Digital review of the set. Nacho Cerdà has gone on to make the feature film The Abandoned from 2006, which I have not yet seen. He also directed a film Coffin Of Light about Spanish horror (interviewing Paul Naschy, Jess Franco and Armando de Ossorio amongst others) and worked on a making of documentary for The Machinist (aka the skeletal Christian Bale film).

[Dr Amicus]

Bloodbath at the House of Death (Ray Cameron, 1984) I've been waiting to see this film since it was released as I was a huge fan of Kenny Everett's TV show - but since it died at the box office and got slated by reviewers I was always apprehensive. The fact that after a perfunctory release on rental vhs, it was never seen again didn't help either... Anyway, it's been released on DVD in the UK and I finally got the chance to see it. And, oh dear God, it's a load of old cobblers - but oddly endearing nonetheless. A group of scientists go to a haunted house where a massacre took place years ago and - well, there's Vincent Price involved but that's about as much as I managed to work out. Narratively and structurally this is all over the place (this is all set up followed by climax - nothing between - and it REALLY makes no sense at all) but that just adds to the charm. There are some mildly amusing jokes - the best is right at the end - and it's surprisingly gory, but I suspect that unless you grew up watching British telly in the 80s, this will mean very little.

Goke - Bodysnatcher from Hell (Hajime Sato, 1968) Somebody with more knowledge than me on Japanese SF / Horror can say how typical this is, but to me it seemed like a strange missing link between 50s Sci-Fi and 70s pessimism as an Alien vampire inhabits the body of a passenger on a crashed aeroplane. It's all enormously entertaining - and not in a kitsch so-bad-its-good way - and comes highly recommended. The UK DVD - fetching silly money on Amazon - is decent quality and Lovefilm has it for rental should that be important to anyone.

The Woman in Black (James Watkins, 2012) A really big hit here in the UK, partly the Harry Potter factor, but also really good word of mouth. Anyway, the resurrected Hammer gets its first big hit AND manages to get a few good scares in - although there is a remarkable lack of subtlety in the music (which seems somewhat appropriate). The result is a fairly standard period ghost story, generally nicely handled with a good supporting cast doing their best not to rhubarb excessively. I haven't read the book (I have a copy and it's next up in my to read pile), but I gather the ending has changed somewhat. Anyway, the film has fairly obvious antecedents and if not really reaching their quality, it's good to see something like this doing well.

The Awakening (Nick Murphy, 2011) And another new British period ghost story, this time with Rebecca Hall as a professional debunker called in to allay irrational (!) fears in a post WW1 boarding school. Subtler than the above (read - less scary), but enjoyably twisty by the end. What's particularly please is the use of the period to suggest an absolutely massive trauma to the British psyche. Like the above, it's nicely handled and performed - neither will make my final list, but they're both worth a look.

[Mr Sausage]

Eternal aka Eternal: Kiss of the Mummy aka Trance (Michael Almereyda, 1998): An often gorgeously shot and richly atmospheric movie that never seems entirely sure of where it's going or what it wants to accomplish. Its lyricism and its seriousness often don't work in its favour, either, since those things end up throwing into relief the absurdity and ridiculousness of so much of the movie. Christopher Walken is storing a druid mummy in the basement of his house, who of course wakes up when Allison Eliot and co. drop by for a family visit. At that point the movie becomes incoherent, with witches, doppelgangers, identity switching, and soul stealing all popping up without warning or explanation. Not helping is how inherently comical so much of it is: someone falls down a flight of stairs or gets bashed over the head with a bottle/board/teapot about every fifteen minutes, to the point where you start to wonder if this isn't a Three Stooges film. And when a strange man armed with an assault rifle randomly bursts through a window at an absurdly convenient moment, he explains his identity simply by saying, "I'm the gardener," to which someone replies, without missing a beat: "but there's no garden...". It's hard to tell if the movie intends these moments to be comic, and if it does, what it's trying to accomplish with such abrupt changes in tone. I'm not surprised this one never found a theatrical distributor; it's a weird mess of a film with serious artistic ambitions and talent behind the camera. I didn't know what to make of it and I can't imagine potential distributors did either.

[colinr0380]

I always get Goke mixed up with Matango, but both are great!

Dr Amicus I have somewhat fond memories of Bloodbath At The House of Death, although I haven't yet seen it! I remember as a six or seven year old taking the lurid video cover to my parents on one trip to the video store and asking if we could rent the film out. My parents told me no way, then went and rented it out for themselves! I suppose I should be grateful that even then I was providing a film advice service for other people, but I think that might have been my introduction to the adult world of hypocrisy as well!

Mr Sausage, isn't Eternal/Kiss of the Mummy/Trance the Michael Almereyda film, the follow up to the wonderful vampire film Nadja. Nadja I think is going to place on my list, how could it not with a Portishead soundtrack, with Peter Fonda as a modern Van Helsing and the 'vampire vision' sequences shot with a Fisher Price Pixelvision camera (I think the only other film to have a sequence shot that way is Slacker!)

[Mr Sausage]

Mr Sausage, isn't Eternal/Kiss of the Mummy/Trance the Michael Almereyda film, the follow up to the wonderful vampire film Nadja.

Whoops, forgot to put the director and date. So, yes, it is. Tho' I thought Eternal a silly mess, on the sheer strength of its style I'm going to give Nadja a try. If Eternal's visual sense were wedded to stronger material it could definitely produce something great, and it seems from your recommendation that Nadja is it.

[colinr0380]

Don't miss David Lynch's cameo in Nadja! (I think he had a hand in producing it) It has a great cast including Jared Harris (Warhol in I Shot Andy Warhol around this time) and Martin Donovan who at the time was a regular in Hal Hartley's films.

I sort of bracket that film in with Abel Ferrara's The Addiction - they are both urban, slightly noodly conversation pieces about the philosophy of vampirism (or vampirism as some kind of a lifestyle choice for jet-setting jaded Europeans in Nadja's case!) as much as full blooded horror films. While I feel that The Addiction is a better film, mostly down to the excellent central performance by Lili Taylor, Nadja plays around with genre and Dracula tropes more! Here's a nice music video that someone has created for the film.

Nadja is probably Almereyda's best known film, though his other well known one is the 2000 updating of Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke and Bill Murray. In a way it is doing the same thing as Nadja by taking a European set period piece and relocating it to an urbanised, amoral city, playing up the sense of privileged ennui with scenes such as Hawke soliliquising whilst browsing amongst the racks of VHS tapes in a local Blockbuster!

[zedz]

Nadja I think is going to place on my list, how could it not with a Portishead soundtrack, with Peter Fonda as a modern Van Helsing and the 'vampire vision' sequences shot with a Fisher Price Pixelvision camera (I think the only other film to have a sequence shot that way is Slacker!)

Don't forget the collected works of Sadie Benning!

[colinr0380]

zedz, I wasn't aware of Sadie Benning's films and her productions pre-date Slacker and Nadja by a number of years! I'll have to try and track them down now!

Hardware (1990)

I spent my weekend watching Richard Stanley's films. I had been interested in seeing Hardware for at least fifteen years before finally seeing it for the first time last year - a local video shop had been giving away their posters and I got Hardware (plus the poster for Defending Your Life!) to put on my wall. First I had been too young to see it, then the film became incredibly hard to get hold of and unlike Dust Devil never got a television showing (I guess because it was a British Sky Broadcasting production), so I only really had the image of the robot with the stars and stripes painted on its head looming over a post-apocalyptic cityscape to imagine a film from for the longest time.

I had been quite nervous of finally seeing the film because I was sure that it couldn't match up to my expectations. However the film turned out to be pretty good, a quite neat stripped-down action film which takes elements of The Terminator and sets it all in one claustrophobic apartment. It is not shockingly original but the post-apocalyptic, polluted world is neatly sketched in through a few brief scenes at the beginning and the idea of the heroine being an artist trying to shut the outside world away so she can concentrate on critiquing it through installation pieces. The robot skull picked up in the wilderness being brought back by her boyfriend as an object for her latest work sparks off all of the horror, and ends up working on a number of amusing levels - is it a comment about an isolated artist's work finally turning on her? Is it ironic that somebody who makes works attacking a militaristic society (which is why she spray paints the stars and stripes on the skull, making the heavy handed symbolism one of the main themes of the film!) ends up being the civilian that the military robot first becomes infatuated with, then tries to murder? Is the boyfriend being an ex-soldier with an artificial hand another comment on the line between human and machine?

Kudos also to the film managing to fit in such action horror tropes as a shower love making scene (which foreshadows the grand finale), a creepily murderous pervert from across the way who gets his just deserts (played by William Hootkins, who turns up in Stanley's Dust Devil as the South African police chief and had a number of surprising (though small) roles in his career such as the Colonel showing Art Garfunkle to his top secret desk in Bad Timing and the X-Wing pilot who gets blown up during the attack on the Death Star in Star Wars), and the heroine dangling above a precarious drop before the line breaks and sends her crashing through the window of the Vietnamese family downstairs! There is also a quite spectacular 'death by drug trip' scene which rivals the one from Enter The Void! And a very amusing end credits song!

The Region 1 Severin Blu-ray also features Stanley's Incidents In An Expanding Universe which is really rough but contains the bare bones of the plot from Hardware just without the killer robot! It tackles the difficult doomed love story between a crippled soldier and his girl in a futuristic warzone that gets pushed to one side in Hardware once all of the action starts - it feels very much in the style of the domestic scenes from the original Mad Max. The short wears out its welcome after a while (the sound is very muffled and the picture quality poor) but it has a really nice retro-style title sequence.

If you want to read the script for Hardware and its potential, wider-scoped sequel, they are both available on this site

Dust Devil (1992)

Talking of Hal Hartley alumni in horror films, Robert Burke stars as the title character of this film. Burke had been in a number of Hartley's films such as Simple Men and The Unbelievable Truth, and his role in Dust Devil came the year before he took over from Peter Weller in Robocop 3. But Dust Devil is I think the film that gives him (and Zakes Mokae also) really major roles.

This is a kind of serial killer film, but it is quite a novel one in that it involves a mythical figure (the titular Dust Devil) who seems to draw depressed, lost and/or suicidal people to him so that he can prey on them. It also uses its novel Namibian setting to reinforce this idea, showing ramshackle communities teetering on the edge of oblivion, with people about to abadon the settlements to return to the cities, and includes an entire ghost town half submerged under sand as the setting for its climax. Despite its African setting it therefore is perhaps as much a spaghetti western homage as a horror film, reinforced by Simon Boswell's rather too obvious Morricone-style cues.

I really like the circular structure to the film. We get the mythology introduced by a shamen figure (who hangs out at the local drive-in showing The Legend of The 7 Golden Vampires!), drawing spirals or making rock formations of the same, yet rather than a spiral the film feels structured as more of a series of concentric circles, with a circular theme being traced on both the largest level (the film ends in the same rootless wandering situation it began in) and on more minor ones (the dances that the devil figure does with each of his victims). There are also often shots of the camera circling around specific locations (the burning house, the couple at the canyon, the heroine struggling up sand dunes), though according to the commentary because the film crew only had the helicopter for a limited period they set up all of these big shots in the various locations and timed the action in each spot to coincide with the arrival of the helicopter! So those shots might have just all turned out that way coincidentally!

The film also manages to tackle racism (both of corrupt police and the ex-military boyfriend getting beaten to a pulp when he stumbles into an all black bar due to a mix up over a pinball table! It also has a great scene where the heroine asks a black labourer for help in digging her car out of a ditch and then drives off leaving him in her dust. I'm was very proud that my mother, who had also seen the film, brought that scene up later when we were talking and casually said "why did she just drive off without even saying thank you?" I think that casual unthinking callousness towards the black labourer by one of the main characters was a very important point in the film, perhaps more powerful than when the cliched sadistic white cops end up torturing him later on) and failing relationships, along with guilt at losing a son.

It is a difficult film to capture the atmosphere of in words but it is a really beautiful and unique one and is definitely going to place highly on my list, being full of stunning scenes and images. I especially like the way that water imagery, along with the inspector playing seemingly incongruous whale song tapes, gets contrasted with the arid desert landscape. And all of those animal close ups suggesting that the natural world is observing the events from a safe distance! And the extremely moving failed suicide attempt, followed the next night by the late evening seduction scene set to Hank Williams, which also features a telekenetically moved bottle of beer and military 'fireworks' to set the beautiful but threatening atmosphere! This video does not feature the music from the film but captures some of the imagery very well.

Plus it may be the only horror film to feature a scene which homages Tarkovsky's Mirror (the devil watching behind a chainlink fence as young soldiers are put through their paces on a rifle range, with some monks handing out the ammunition!)

[zedz]

zedz, I wasn't aware of Sadie Benning's films and her productions pre-date Slacker and Nadja by a number of years! I'll have to try and track them down now!

I'm pretty sure that Benning (daughter of James) was single-handedly responsible for the fleeting fashionability of PixelVision in the early nineties. She made a bunch of charming semi-diary films with the toy cameras, including scenes like a fantasy 'bad girl escape' illustrated by a toy car scooting around to 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone'.

EDIT: Dust Devil is a fascinating idea for a film, and has a fascinating production history, and there are plenty of good visuals in the film, but I find it just all collapses in a heap on the floor due to the muddled script and iffy performances. Richard Stanley is such a pompous git that I don't honestly know if he's capable of making a good film, but he can certainly talk one, so that exhaustive multi-disc set of the film is pretty entertaining despite the shortcomings of the feature.

[antnield]

zedz, I wasn't aware of Sadie Benning's films and her productions pre-date Slacker and Nadja by a number of years! I'll have to try and track them down now!

I'm pretty sure that Benning (daughter of James) was single-handedly responsible for the fleeting fashionability of PixelVision in the early nineties. She made a bunch of charming semi-diary films with the toy cameras, including scenes like a fantasy 'bad girl escape' illustrated by a toy car scooting around to 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone'.

Almereyda wrote a piece on Pixelvision for the third Projections book (the now discontinued Faber & Faber film annual) in which he fully admits to Bennings' influence.

[colinr0380]

I have somewhat of the opposite reaction to Stanley's features - I think the mythologising and symbolic aspects work beautifully in both Hardware and Dust Devil and add a huge amount of texture to both of the somewhat intimate main storylines, either sketching in a totally created futuristic world (seemingly only peopled by musicians doing their non-musical day jobs such as collecting scrap in the wasteland or driving water taxis!) or a beautiful repurposing of Namibian locations just post-independence from South Africa but with the legacy of apartheid still feeling as if it permeates every frame.

Whereas the documentaries on the limited edition set of Dust Devil I find are incredibly problematic. This might be due to the way that they are elliptically filmed or the lack of any engaging narrative created of the events but I think the mythologising feels much more thinly stretched when applied to 'reality'. The Secret Glory (about mountaineer Otto Rahn's relationship to the Third Reich's search for the Holy Grail), The White Darkness (Haitian voodoo rituals) and Voices of the Moon (an film of 1990s Afghanistan and the Taliban-Russian conflict) all deal with fascinating subject matter, and here I agree with you that they all work much better with Stanley's commentaries over them than with the original soundtrack, yet don't really work as engaging pieces in their own right, which the fiction features really do. I guess the difference is that Stanley has created the entire world in the fiction features, so all of the elements feel just right for the mood that has been created, and played out for the film camera, while reality of watching something is not like that at all - a voodoo ritual feels captured in a rather prosaic manner, observing distantly without really getting inside the meaning of the events being captured (similarly the Afghan conflict film is valuable for the images, but they eventually become just pretty images without something like Stanley's contextualising commentary tracks to supply some extra meaning to what is being shown)

Perhaps the attempt to capture the metaphysical and mythological through mostly observational documentary works (The Secret Glory is a little bit of a depature into talking heads intercut with stock footage territory) is something which was always doomed to fail? I mostly get the feeling that throughout the documentaries it seems as if the projects were much more valuable to Stanley himself in giving him the chance to visit these areas under a filmmaking pretext in order to learn more about the subject than they really end up being for the viewer watching from a further remove.

Although Voices of the Moon has some stunning visuals and perhaps the best Simon Boswell soundtrack! But, unlike Dust Devil, that is perhaps a better example of a film where that is all that it has going for it.

[zedz]

Oh, I also agree that the documentaries are even less successful as films than Dust Devil, but they do offer insight into Stanley's grandiose crackpot persona, and that's the thing I find most interesting about the whole set. I think you're dead right about the making of these films being primarily opportunities for Stanley to further his biography / self-mythology

[colinr0380]

Agreed and the documentaries seem to be perfect material to allow him to express that kind of auterist vision, but they sadly get tied up in irrelevant details confusingly presented (The Secret Glory) or feature very little to engage an audience in the onscreen action (Voices of the Moon and The White Darkness). As I say, they strike me as almost a filmmaker's research trip, apt material for Stanley but still feeling as if they are need of being shaped, although rather than putting me off I think that I would be very interested in seeing any fiction film that Stanley would make that would draw upon any of those three subjects, where he would perhaps be folding that material into a film aimed at a wider audience.

[colinr0380]

zedz, I wasn't aware of Sadie Benning's films and her productions pre-date Slacker and Nadja by a number of years! I'll have to try and track them down now!

I'm pretty sure that Benning (daughter of James) was single-handedly responsible for the fleeting fashionability of PixelVision in the early nineties. She made a bunch of charming semi-diary films with the toy cameras, including scenes like a fantasy 'bad girl escape' illustrated by a toy car scooting around to 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone'.

Almereyda wrote a piece on Pixelvision for the third Projections book (the now discontinued Faber & Faber film annual) in which he fully admits to Bennings' influence.

On rewatching the film tonight Sadie Benning gets the first mention in the "Special Thanks" section of the end credits presumably crediting the inspirations behind the film (followed by Andre Breton, Pablo Neruda, Sinead O'Connor, Sam Shepard and Derek Jarman, among others!)

And talking of Portishead contributing to Nadja's soundtrack, I assume that they must be horror fans given that one of their track from their 2008 third album, Machine Gun, uses a distinctive sample from the soundtrack of Tetsuo: The Iron Man! Someone has brought the Portishead track and Tetsuo together in this video!

[domino harvey]

the Beast Within (Philippe Mora 1982) Unpleasant special effects boat show about a were-cicada wreaking havoc on/in humans. Features not one but two insect rapes sandwiching a third non-insect threat of incestuous rape. Gee, what fun!

Chandu the Magician (William Cameron Menzies, Marcel Varnel 1932) All respect to Fox but I'm not convinced this belongs to the horror genre, but as a condensed version of a Saturday morning serial, it's as entertaining (and disposable) as these sort of things go.

Dr Renault's Secret (Harry Lachman 1942) Well, the twist for this silly b-pic was spoiled by the DVD packaging, but even knowing what was up going in didn't wreck the guilty enjoyment of this admittedly not very good programmer. Poor J Carroll Naish is given one of the most insulting roles in memory.

Hellraiser (Clive Barker 1987) Despite the limitations of his cast, a dopey (and no-doubt studio-tinkered) climax, and a somewhat rudimentary grasp on filmmaking, Barker still manages to bring his story to the screen with its most disturbing and compelling ideas intact. Barker's presupposition of sadomasochism's logical sexual extremes is a compelling track (though that much of its implementation here is non-consensual seems to miss the most troubling aspect of the premise), and his fiendish sexual sadist creations are used sparingly to good effect-- any movie where the guy being rebuilt Grey's Anatomy-style from the bones outward isn't the most memorable image is working on a higher plane of gory invention! It's interesting that "Pinhead" ended up being the most visible cenobite marker for the film's marketing seeing as how he's the least disturbing of the bunch, but maybe I just answered my own question: How likely were the others to make it on a poster little kids would walk past while exiting the Princess Bride?

[colinr0380]

Dark Floors (Pete Riski, 2008)

Since it was the Eurovision Song Contest last night, I think today might be the best time to tackle the only horror film to star a Eurovision Song Contest winner (unless Dana International was in the latest Hostel or Sandie Shaw did a giallo that I'm not aware of), Dark Floors starring the Finnish band Lordi!

Lordi were perhaps the most obvious Eurovision bands to do a horror film given that their (hilarious) winning performance in 2006 was a heavy metal number! (Music and lyrics by Mr Lordi!) They certainly seem committed to their demon personas, since they are in the same get up during the film! Surprisingly though, given the presence of Lordi suggests a tongue in cheek camp quality to any film that would be built around them, Dark Floors is a quite dark alternate universe tale in the vein of Silent Hill, and like Silent Hill it raises a lot more questions than it answers!

A chap is having his autistic daughter treated in a modern hospital, but she gets upset when put inside an MRI scanner. The father is persuaded by the beautiful nurse to keep his daughter overnight for more tests but decides to sneak her out. The nurse follows him into the lift to try and persaude him to stay but while in there something happens and the lift opens onto an abandoned hospital. The film then follows the group of people from the lift trying to find out what happened, all while going down each floor of the hospital, which gets steadily more decrepit. There are some neat elements, such as the view out of a window onto a city frozen in mid-lightning strike, or the time-twisting telephone call that the nurse has with herself at a later (or earlier!) point in the film. Lordi show up in their demon garb, with each member of the band getting a scare sequence (this is probably the best one) and start picking off each member of the cast one by one. As with many a 'trapped in a deserted office building' film (Trapped and P2 for example) this ends with the inevitable car chase in the parking garage, along with an admirably futile ending.

SpoilerShow

Though the circular structure kind of retrieves that dark ending. For some reason apparently the key to the whole story is the colour of crayon that the girl dropped!

It is a rather nutty film but far better than any film starring Lordi could have been expected to be!

[zedz]

I took domino's advice and watched Anguish and liked it a lot.

He's dead right that the sequence where the film within the film relocates to a movie theatre exhibits virtuoso editing. It's quite fascinating as an experiment in montage, as Luna preserves perfect clarity about which shots are from the framing story and which ones are from the film-within-a-film, so there's never any narrative confusion, and yet the principles of montage are so ingrained and involuntary that we're continually seeing phantom connections between narratively unrelated but adjacent shots. It's a great illustration of just how film montage manipulates the ways we make meaning, since we have to repeatedly consciously 'correct' our automatic responses.

That said, I was disappointed that a film that was so smart in so many ways had to rely on 'horror movie dumb' behaviour to play out its climax. I know that if you're irked by illogical behaviour that seems designed only to prevent the film from ending twenty minutes early, you're going to spend a lot of your horror-movie-watching time rolling your eyeballs, but I'm always much more impressed when filmmakers manage to keep their protagonists terrified and vulnerable even when they're not behaving like complete idiots. Also, my sympathy for complete idiots is vanishingly slight, so really stupid behaviour always throws me out of a movie.

The things that annoyed me most were:

SpoilerShow

You manage to escape from a movie theatre where a crazed gunman has locked the auditorium and is presumably going to kill everybody, including your best friend. Do you:
a) Find the nearest phone and call the police?
b) Waste your time trying to convince a skeptical passer-by that you're not a lunatic so that he can help you by, um, doing what exactly? (Apart from calling the police, naturally.) Oh, and then you should stand by while said skeptical passer-by goes back into the movie theatre to possibly confront the armed lunatic, get shot and be of no more help to you?

An armed lunatic has barricaded hundreds of innocent victims in a cinema and is picking them off one by one. Who should unbarricade the door to allow the people to escape the killer?
a) The one girl who knows exactly what is going on and knows that her terrified friend is inside? (Maybe not, she's still running for her life at that point)
b) The skeptical passer-by, who, poking around to find out what's going on, sees that the doors are barricaded and thus realises that everything the girl had told him is true (and that the killer is probably inside the cinema and no direct threat to him)?
c) The dozens of police who have surrounded the cinema, entered the lobby and are walking back and forth past the barricaded doors as they remove various bodies?
d) Nobody at all, because there's no earthly reason why you'd want to allow people being terrorized by a mad gunman to get out of his line of fire. And we've got to get this film up to the hour and half mark somehow.

[Siddon]

Documentary Horror Films.

I don't believe that their are to many horror documentaries out there. Most of the popular ones devolve from the documentary form to more parody. Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), Natural Born Killers (1994), and Man Bites Dog (1992) are all decent films but they pretty much say the same things, cover the same themes and are less about the documentary and more about a lead actors performance as a real person.

You also have the other extreme, the "found footage" sort of documentaries which generally tend to fall on the mediocre to terrible side of horror. At it's best you have something like Paranormal Activity(2007) which frankly the trailers are more evocative than the films. The entirety of the film is about slowly raising the tension to scenes that you already know are coming because they are in the trailer.

For me the films I would consider ranking from this sub genre on my list would be the sort of horror that merges the two styles of docu-horror.

The Last Broadcast (1998) - Personally this one didn't connect with me. I felt like the actors where really straight out of the actors studio. It builds up to a twist that's supposed to be a huge payoff but you see it coming fairly early on. It never gets beyond a student film for me but others might like it.

Blair Witch Project (1998) - The Blair Witch Project is what I consider to be an excellent start at the genre. I think it's a well made low budget film that handles it's subject matter very well. There's a quality to this film about being lost in the woods that translates very well. This is also a film that creates a mythology and that mythology is so good that it brings people in.

Lake Mungo (2008) - Lake Mungo is well made B movie of this genre. Like most modern Australian films it focuses on a crime and moves on to quasi spiritual sort of thing. A young woman drowns and their are questions as to the why and the how. While it feels very familiar what is enjoyable about it is how it plays with framing and images. If I could give an analogy I would say it's Twin Peaks stripped of Lynch's characterizations. It's played straight and that gives the horror when it does come a certain quality to the payoff.

Megan is Missing (2011) - If Saw was purely psychological it would be this film. Internet predator stalks a young girl and it is well executed. The movie told in basically real time from when Megan disappears to when her friend Amy deals with the consequences. This is one of those movies that really latches onto an original idea and makes your blood run cold. http://meganismissing.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Grave Encounters (2011) - Grave Encounters tells the story of a group of "ghost hunters" that actually encounter ghosts in a mental asylum. It has a Session 9 and Repulsion quality to the film so much so it plays homage to both films. It's not quite like most of the other films on this list it's more like Rec or Cloverfield but it does work and it's worth a viewing.

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) - This is a first person serial killer film much in the same vein as Man Bites Dog. Difference is instead of being a deconstruction of film this is a deconstruction of the slasher film. I fell in love with a lot of the ideas behind this film. This is one of those movies that plays with your emotions one minute your feeling joy because the lead is so charismatic, then it makes you think with some of the asides, and finally it builds to a great climax. It's a horror movie that has ambition to be something more...a franchise.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007) - This is my favorite docu-horror film and will make my top fifty cut. What I love about this film is that it treats it's killer as something that needs to be studied. You have a densely packed narrative that is told mostly by talking heads. One of the biggest issues in cinema is telling the story of an artist but then making the art worthy of being told. This movie doesn't try and depict the killer it depicts the acts. It merges this clinical analysis with tapes of the murderer murdering and doing other things. The mise en scene is just top notch where the scenes play out with absolute terror, but it never lowers it self to torture porn.

[Mr Sausage]

The Eye (Pang Brothers, 2002): If I were feeling uncharitable, I'd say this one was either a pilot for the Chinese version of Ghost Whisperer, or Kiyoshi Kurosawa-lite. It's about a blind girl whose sight is restored through surgery and consequently she sees ghosts. She hears them now, too, no doubt for reasons less biological than cinematic, since this movie owes most of its effectiveness to its sometimes overbearing soundtrack. It makes good use of sudden contrasts between unnatural silence and ear-shattering noise--mostly for the sake of (often very effective) jump scares. There are a couple of extremely frightening set-pieces (one taking place in an elevator whose floor numbers tick by with nail-biting slowness) that owe an enormous debt to K. Kurosawa without feeling any less effective for that. Beyond them, tho', there isn't much to the movie. Its ghosts are boring, mostly there to act creepy and then disappear, or embody some facile moral scenario; the dramatic situations are all over-familiar and treated perfunctorily, and the movie doesn't pick up a narrative thread until the last thirty minutes. The whole point of the film is to watch ghosts be creepy while the soundtrack blasts your eardrums. In that, there is little to distinguish it from the myriad Grudge/Ju-On and Ring/Rungu movies, even if its set-pieces best anything in those series. But mostly, it's hard not to compare it to K. Kurosawa's films and see how much it lacks when compared to even the latter's minor ghost films. Technically accomplished but with no ambition outside of that.

Uzumaki (Higuchinsky, 2000): This seemed like the perfect excuse to go absolutely wild with the visuals and effects, and yet the film is oddly reticent to go for broke. I don't know why, it's clearly just using its strange scenario about a small Japanese town falling increasingly under the thrall of spirals to indulge in bizarre imagery. And yet the total chaos at which it constantly hints is never allowed a full depiction. Most of the movie is taken up with people behaving oddly in the manner of a Saturday morning cartoon while the camera occasionally frames them from equally odd angles. Yet for a movie that exists mostly for its imagery, this is a bland looking film. The predominant colour is this drab green that doesn't so much saturate everything as oppress all other colours to the point where everything ends up looking the same. The direction varies between basic, unimaginative set-ups and unmotivated 'crazy' angles. But mostly there's no energy to the thing. It plashes around in its own quirky atmosphere without ever diving right in and indulging in the visual feasts it keeps hinting at. An all around disappointing movie.

[knives]

I find The Eye (along with a whole hog of other supernatural film) when you ignore it as horror and treat it as some other genre, maybe a romance in this case. Though I can't take it too seriously as I'm consistently reminded of The Frighteners.

[Mr Sausage]

I find The Eye (along with a whole hog of other supernatural film) when you ignore it as horror and treat it as some other genre, maybe a romance in this case. Though I can't take it too seriously as I'm consistently reminded of The Frighteners.

I think you left out a clause in there somewhere. Anyway, I'd rather not treat it as a love story as I would have to be constantly reminded of the fact that the romance involves a therapist seducing his patient!