Tag Archives: Horror

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DETENTION (2011)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Joseph Kahn

FEATURING: Shanley Caswell, Josh Hutcherson, Spencer Locke, Aaron David Johnson, Dane Cook

PLOT: A serial killer is loose in the halls of Grizzly Lake High, and there may be a connection with events 20 years in the past; only a pair of eye-rolling millennials, uncool vegetarian klutz Riley and popular slacker screwup Clapton, can save the day.

Still from Detention (2011)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Plenty of movies like to subvert audience expectations by mixing genres and deploying radical shifts in tone. Yet it’s hard to recall a film that pursues these goals with such ruthlessness, rapidity, and thoroughness as Detention. The filmmakers practically carpet-bomb the audience with twists, references, and backstories, producing a tale of such density the only people who could possibly keep track of it all are the men who made it. Detention is a movie that would make Dennis Miller say, “Whoa, Chachi, dial it back with the pop culture smorgasbord.”

COMMENTS: The opening credits of Detention are the essence of the whole film in microcosm: exceedingly clever, with names appearing in every possible location: sneaker brand, chocolate bar, upchuck in a urinal. (The director reserves that last one for himself.) Several have even been thoughtfully chosen to match, like the costume designer’s name stitched on a letter jacket or the sound designer appearing on a fire alarm. The flip side to this visual wit is that the names go by so quickly, amidst so much activity and chaos, that there is precious little opportunity to take the information in. The signal is overwhelmed by the noise, and you feel assaulted rather than edified. This will become a theme.

Even if Detention weren’t determined to be some kind of tonal chimera, it would still be a massive millennial snarkfest. The first five minutes play out as a kind of Clueless-meets-Scream, as a too-cool ice princess outlines the secret to high school success (complete with whip-pan edits and onscreen text) before having her head briskly removed from her body. It’s a whole postmodern vibe, and it telegraphs the desire of director Kahn and co-screenwriter Mark Palermo to pile on the jokes and references like so many hats on hats. But this is just an appetizer. The movie adds characters and plotlines like courses in a fancy meal. After introductions to our heroes, all the other high school archetypes get their turns in the spotlight, including the blond cheerleader, the lunkhead jock, the nerdy sidekick, the tech wizard, the bitter administrator… heck, even the stuffed bear that serves as the school’s mascot gets its own storyline. But Detention finds its own path by layering on incongruous genre elements that stupefy with their appearance. Time travel, UFOs, body swapping, predestination paradox, Cronenbergian body horror, and even a Minority Report-style touchless interface are among the twists and turns that arrive unexpectedly.

It’s tempting to view Detention as a parody or send-up of horror and teen comedy genres, and it does work on that level. But Kahn is such a committed nerd that you have to take all the sci-fi tropes as legitimate ventures into the genre. For all the seeming randomness of each new element, the film studiously connects everything in the end. No matter how arbitrary – a cheesy horror film within the film, a teenager obsessed with the 90s, a legend of a student engaging in sexual congress with a stuffed animal – it all ties into the plot. And cast’s commitment to playing every bizarre left turn earnestly (especially Caswell, who should have found a springboard to stardom here) helps keep you engaged, even as the dense plot pushes you away.

Kahn, an incredibly successful music video director, is excited for the opportunity to try his hand at the big-screen format. (He reportedly provided the bulk of the budget himself.) He’s willing to take his lumps – one student speaks disparagingly of his debut feature Torque, while another snarkily references the coke habits of music video directors – and he puts his experience to work on some appealingly offbeat setpieces. Easily the film’s highlight is a montage of one student’s 19-year-long detention, a one-shot tour backwards through changing fashion styles and popular music of the day. But Kahn also refuses to let a moment be a moment, and every bit of wackiness is decorated with more wackiness, so that there’s no real opportunity to take any of it in. Like a McFlurry with a dozen different mix-ins, it’s undeniably sweet, but dizzying and ultimately too much.

For a film as cravenly derivative as Detention, there’s honestly nothing quite like it. It stands as a fascinating artifact, a celluloid Katamari Damacy collecting genres and tropes and stereotypes into one big stew. It’s a piece of pop art, fascinating to observe even if difficult to admire.   

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A seriously (and unapologetically) bizarre piece of work… while Kahn deserves some credit for attempting something different within the teen-movie genre, Detention is simply (and finally) too weird and too off-the-wall to become anything more than a mildly amusing curiosity.” – David Nusair, Reel Film Reviews

(This movie was nominated for review by David. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

Detention

Detention
  • Blu-ray
  • AC-3, Blu-ray, Dolby
  • English (Audio Description), German (Subtitled), French (Subtitled)
  • 1
  • 93
Check Price
Capsules

CAPSULE: LONGLEGS (2024)

6 Comments

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Osgood Perkins

FEATURING: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Alicia Witt, Blair Underwood

PLOT: The FBI assigns Special Agent Harker to a 20-year-old serial murder case, triggering a serious of unsettling breakthroughs.

Still from Longlegs (2024)

COMMENTS: What’s that expression—Longlegs, short review? Some thirty-dozen reviews for this Cage-y bit of strange are out there, so let us dive quickly, and deeply, into the merits of Osgood Perkins’ latest outing. Be warned: we shall be heading far away into lands of the Pacific Northwest, and back in time to a magical period known as “the ’90s”.

The sights and sounds will be familiar to some; but none will be more familiar than the sight of Nicolas Cage being crazy-go-nuts. But come to think of it, he is rendered somewhat unrecognizable: invariably coated in off-white makeup, and buried beneath a chubbed-out face. Whenever Longlegs goes off on a spiel, though, we hear Nic busting out of this cage. Much of this film’s appeal manifests during the (shrewdly) intermittent dosing of this titular oddity.

What Longlegs gets up to is where the nostalgia comes in. (And—if I may editorialize a moment—not that tedious kind on display from a more famous filmmaker.) That special time, The ’90s, oozes from every pore—and wrapped within the main throw-back are bursts of the ’70s, as our baddy loves T. Rex, Lou Reed, and Duran Duran. Our heroine, Special Agent Harker (a spectacularly spectrometric Maika Monroe), lives up to her namesake: an eye for detail, quiet courage, a a pull toward the supernatural, and a fate that can best be described as “mixed.”

Satanic Panic, alas, can only be taken so lightly: in this corner of the US, Satan appears altogether too real. How does Longlegs do their thing? (I emphasize that pronoun: it’s not altogether clear just how Cage’s character views themselves.) However they do it, they perform their deadly spree amongst stark snow-lighting, cool-as-thriller interiors, and, one of my favorite flourishes, inside a house with twin-point front roofing which forms—you guessed it—the shape of longlegs legs.

So, bust out the Shark Bites, pop a straw in your Capri Sun, and take a dangerous walk through a valley of diabolic dolls.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Perkins combines the grisly realism of a crime-scene photograph with the startling surreality of a nightmare… Cage does his version of warbly-voiced weirdo crooner Tiny Tim – an affectation that would be bonkers coming from anyone else, but is just another day at work for Cage.”–Katie Rife, IGN (contemporaneous)

Longlegs [4K UHD + Blu-Ray]

Longlegs [4K UHD + Blu-Ray]
  • Longlegs [4K UHD]
Check Price

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE DEVIL’S CHAIR (2007)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Adam Mason

FEATURING: Andrew Howard, , Louise Griffiths, Elize du Toit,

PLOT: Having witnessed his girlfriend’s brutalization and disappearance by an evil chair, Nick returns four years later with a group of psychology students to recreate the experience.

COMMENTS: The Devil’s Chair could have been a pretty neat movie: a ’70s / ’80s throwback, telling a tale about evil science intersecting with dark occultism: about a sinister device crafted by a mad psychologist to separate the body from the soul in a manner most horrible. Alternatively, it could have been a decent exploration of criminal insanity, from a skewed perspective maintained up through until the very end, leaving us uncertain about the grisly narrative we’ve endured. Instead, it was a third thing, facetiously tossing aside and spitting on the better possibilities.

Despite this decision, The Devil’s Chair has glimmers of promise and possibility. Nick is hitting well out of his league with Sammy, a gorgeous young woman whom he takes on a date to an abandoned mental institution; the pair drops acid and things go pear-shaped. He convinces himself (and us) that the sinister device bloodily violates her before poofing her out of existence. The psychology department at Cambridge is intrigued both by his condition (it must have been a psychotic vision) and the occult possibilities (Dr. Willard knows more than he initially lets on). They take Nick to the scene of the awful for psycho-supernatural tests and observations.

What the movie does right is mostly in the title. The furniture piece in question is one prop I’d be happy to own. A combination of electric chair and sacrificial restraining device, it springs into action when a hidden needle pierces the skin of any finger foolish enough to rest within a cunningly-placed aperture. The doctor behind this machine is one of those classic “brilliant scientists gone wacky,” and the parallel world (with its requisite flickering lights, endless corridors, and gooey-boney demon thing) is derivative, but delightfully imagined. Matt Berry’s presence as an academic toff—at one point clad in a radiogram-skeleton shirt, long underwear, and cowboy boots—adds a chuckle.

But alas, the whole thing feels as if director Adam Mason watched too many movies. He constantly sabotages the experience through snarky asides and observations, rendering his protagonist not only unsympathetic, but also irritating. (This is only worsened by a tendency to freeze the frame as Nick spits out his dumb little witticisms.) There’s also an odd little tirade arriving at what should have been a stirring demonic climax, admonishing the viewer for watching this kind of thing in the first place. Still, The Devil’s Chair had enough momentum to carry me through the “Ahahah, gotcha!” bloody finale, and makes me hopeful that another filmmaker out there might swipe some of its better elements. Bring unto me the horror throwback about an evil chair and the dark arts behind its manifestations.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…The Devil’s Chair, alas, is dumb sensationalism that trusts blood-buckets dumped on thesps are enough to raise a fright, then undercuts even that via laddish, winking audience asides… The eventual twist only makes the scenario seem more crassly lacking in motivational logic.” — Dennis Harvey, Variety (contemporaneous)

The Devil's Chair (Unrated) [DVD]

The Devil's Chair (Unrated) [DVD]
  •  
Check Price

Capsules

CAPSULE: TOMIE (1998)

Leave a comment

富江

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Ataru Oikawa

FEATURING: Mami Nakamura, Miho Kanno, Yoriko Dôguchi, , Kôta Kusano

PLOT: Tsukiko undergoes hypnotic therapy to recover lost memories of a recent traumatic event as her downstairs neighbor recorporealizes the living head of a murder victim.

Still from Tomie (1998)

COMMENTS: The creepiest element of this Japanese Horror film must be the title track—not the living head (and its body’s strange developmental trajectory), not the protagonist’s blood-soaked nightmares, not the troubling young fellow with an eye patch living on the floor below. Those are, for sure, all pretty creepy, though I was relieved to discover the cockroach sequence late in the film didn’t go full-on Cage. I was relieved, too, that the depths of creepiness plumbed by the plaintive song to Tomie were the deepest found in Tomie. There is a lot of creep, and it is all most satisfactory.

The plot allows for a solid hanger on which to rest the film’s mysteries and, we learn later, the legend of Kawakami Tomie. Most recently, Tomie’s driven about half of a high school class to either suicide or a mental institution. Tsukiko was a fellow student, and mysteriously (and I’d wager, fortunately) has blocked out a lot of her recent past—though she’s trying to recover memories with the aid of a hypnotherapist. This therapist has an encounter with a chain-smoking detective (a charismatically odd Tomorô Taguchi) who has been burdened with the unenviable task of wrapping up the murder investigation of Kawakami Tomie, with a lack of the victim’s head being among his sundry challenges. Tsukiko’s boyfriend lurks in the background, cheating on his girlfriend, trying to hold a band together, and earning his pay at a rinky-dink café.

This being the kind of movie it is, most of these characters are doomed from the get-go. But while navigating the plot line, Ataru Oikawa keeps things stylish, and refreshingly within the special effects constraints of the late ’90s. (Even those who normally eschew early CGI will have no complaints.) And while exploring the pair of protagonists—Tsukiko and Tomie—there is space for a few interesting ideas: the nature of victimhood, the importance of forgetting, and where lies the responsibility when one person “causes” another to violently lash out? Calmly paced, often unsettling, and capably performed, Tomie is an utter delight—resting head and shoulders above the competition.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a superior slice of modern Japanese horror, and one that benefits from spending a large amount of its running time exploring both its human and inhuman characters, creating a fascinating mythos that gives the film a surreal, almost dreamlike atmosphere.”–James Mudge, Eastern Kicks

Tomie [Limited Edition]

Tomie [Limited Edition]
  • Limited Edition
Check Price