Tag Archives: Horror

CAPSULE: SPLICE (2010)

July 21, 2010 Alice Stoehr 3 Comments

FEATURING: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chanéac

PLOT: When two geneticists (Brody and Polley) mix some human DNA into a cloning

Still from Splice (2010)

experiment, they end up with a rapidly aging chimera child whom neither of them can control.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Despite some bizarre mutation imagery, most of the film remains solidly within the realm of the horror-infused family melodrama, and tends to be more icky than weird.

COMMENTS: Canadian writer-director Natali, best known for his low-budget thriller Cube, has created a love letter to mad scientist stories, from Frankenstein to Cronenberg’s The Fly. All the expected clichés are present and accounted for, from the sterile, blue-tinted milieu of industrial science right down to the Jurassic Park-worthy mantra of “What’s the worst that could happen?” In Splice, however, these trappings are refashioned to create a demented parable about the dangers of bad parenting, and much of the film’s commentary in this vein is delightfully on-target. The scientific method gets entangled with the geneticists’ emotional hang-ups as they try to raise the part-human Dren (Chanéac). This results in hilarious exchanges like one where Brody cries, “Specimens need to be contained!” and Polley responds, “Don’t call her that!”

However, as the story moves from the laboratory to a rural farmhouse, the film realizes its unpleasantly taboo-violating trajectory. From there on in, the film trades its humorous insights in for gross-outs and gore, with a climax so unnecessarily vile it makes you want to take a shower while bemoaning its reductive view of gender. Still, Splice has a lot to offer the weird movie fan, as certain images, such as a press conference that becomes a bloodbath or Dren’s development into a bald, feral adolescent, won’t soon be forgotten. Like his characters, Natali is a kind of mad scientist, deftly integrating the pains of child rearing into an age-old sci-fi premise; maybe next time, there’ll be a little more method to his madness.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s fascinating, sweet and especially grotesque – a distorted aspect of an overall analysis of post-millennial parental fears – all at the same time, and makes for some utterly bizarre imagery. In fact, I think I can say, without a shred of hyperbole, that this movie has some of the strangest moments you’ll see on film this year. If not in the next several years. Or maybe you’ve already seen a man dancing the waltz with a beautiful woman who is reverse jointed, has a mirror effect face, a monkey’s tail and a scorpion’s stinger?”–Nick DaCosta, Eye for Film (contemporaneous)

Canonically Weird (The List)

61. KWAIDAN (1964)

July 7, 2010 Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies) 6 Comments

AKA Kaidan; Ghost Stories

“A hundred thoughts suggested by the book might be written down, but most of them would begin and end with this fact of strangeness… many of the stories are about women and children,–the lovely materials from which the best fairy tales of the world have been woven. They too are strange, these Japanese maidens and wives and keen-eyed, dark-haired girls and boys; they are like us and yet not like us; and the sky and the hills and the flowers are all different from ours… in these delicate, transparent, ghostly sketches of a world unreal to us, there is a haunting sense of spiritual reality.”–from the original introduction to the folk tale collection “Kwaidan”

Must See

DIRECTED BY: Masaki Kobayashi

FEATURING: Rentarô Mikuni, Michiyo Aratama, Keiko Kishi, Tatsuya Nakadai, Tetsurô Tanba, Kan’emon Nakamura

PLOT: An anthology film telling four Japanese folk tales centered around ghosts or nature spirits. An ambitious samurai leaves his faithful but poor wife for a rich new one, and finds himself haunted by regret over his desertion. A winter spirit spares the life of a young woodcutter, on one condition. A clan of ghosts demand a blind minstrel play the tale of their tragedy for them night after night. The final story tells of a guard who sees an apparition in a bowl of water.

Still from Kwaidan (1964)

<br /> BACKGROUND:

The four episodes were adapted from Lafciado Hearn’s collections of Japanese folk tales (the two middle pieces are from his 1903 volume entitled “Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things”). Hearn was born Greek, educated in Ireland, and spent time as a journalist in the United States (causing a scandal by marrying a black woman in Cincinnati, which was a crime at the time). He later became a foreign correspondent in Japan and was naturalized as a Japanese citizen, taking the name Koizumi Yakumo.
Hearn offered “Weird Tales” as one possible translation of the Japanese word Kwaidan.
Kwaidan won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes (at that time, the second most prestigious prize after the Palme D’Or). It was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, but lost to the Czech war drama The Shop on Main Street [Obchod na korze].
The episode “The Woman of the Snow” was (unwisely) trimmed from the original American theatrical release in order to cut the runtime from three hours to just over two hours.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Although it’s hard to top the image of the minstrel Hoichi covered (almost) from head to toe in holy Buddhist characters or the ghostly court of samurai, it’s the expressionistic set of “The Woman in the Snow”—with its constellations of warped watching eyeballs set in a deep blue sky—that makes the eeriest impression.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Kwaidan illustrates the rule that, the better the movie, the less weird it has to be to make the List. Although on the surface it’s just a collection of bare-bones ghost stories, in telling these tales director Kobayashi wisely jettisons reality in favor of a stylized, expressionistic, visually poetic aesthetic that gently detaches the viewer from everyday life and floats him into an ancient spirit world that seems simultaneously to have never and always existed.

Original Trailer for Kwaidan

COMMENTS: In Kwaidan‘s opening credits black, blue, red and purple inks swirl around in Continue reading 61. KWAIDAN (1964) →

Guest Reviews

CAPSULE: THE CHAIR (2007)

June 29, 2010 Pamela De Graff Leave a comment

DIRECTED BY: Brett Sullivan

FEATURING: Alanna Chisholm, Lauren Roy, Nick Abraham, Paul Soren

PLOT: A new tenant in an old house is sucked into a sordid, violent riddle when she

Still from The Chair (2007)

discovers evidence of sick psychological experiments.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Chair offers a novel twist on the age old soul possession concept, as seen in films such as Child’s Play or The Skeleton Key. That twist is perverse and unsettling. The movie becomes puzzling when parts of the story are told non-sequentially, from changing perspectives. While it may have an unconventional feel, The Chair is still a more or less standard horror story about a soul seeking a new host.

COMMENTS: Don’t be fooled by the opening shots when you watch The Chair. It is not as customary as it appears to be. It tricks the viewer. Not fast-paced enough to be a horror-thriller, The Chair is an imaginative horror-mystery with puzzler and shocker elements. The film develops it’s storyline differently than other supernatural vehicles.

Here is the setup: Danielle rents a creepy Victorian house (is there any other kind?) where slightly sinister things start to occur—slowly. Due to the mildness of the events, and because the movie would last all of five minutes if Danielle left, she doesn’t think of simply moving out.

Oh, and conveniently, Danielle is a psychology student with an interest in the paranormal. She wants to capitalize on the spooky bumps in the night and investigate them to have material for her senior thesis. (Apparently Danielle has enough imagination to take an interest in parapsychology, but not enough to pick a no-brainer psychology research topic like ‘partial reinforcement similarities between cocaine and World Of Warcraft.’) Lucky for us, because someone has to stick their neck out or we would be watching another mild-mannered Poltergeist retread.

And so Danielle pokes around the creaky manor and turns up eerie hidden rooms, bizarre metaphysics documents, disturbing furniture, and puzzling mechanical parts. All of this leads her to discover that an occult scientist a century before found some very interesting uses for mesmerism when he dabbled in suspended animation, the trapping of souls, and other funny business. The results of his efforts created a lasting malevolent Continue reading CAPSULE: THE CHAIR (2007) →

Guest Reviews

CAPSULE: THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS [LA CASA DALLE FINISTRE CHE RIDONO] (1976)

June 22, 2010 Pamela De Graff 2 Comments

AKA The House of the Laughing Windows

DIRECTED BY: Pupi Avati

FEATURING: Lino Capolicchio, Francesca Marciano, Gianni Cavina, Giulio Pizzirani, Tonino Corazzari

PLOT: An art historian becomes embroiled in a sick mystery when he arrives in a rural village to restore a religious painting.

Still from The House With Laughing Windows (1976)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Giallo films always tend to be a little bent when compared to U.S. horror movies. Despite the strange characters, unsettling tone and death-fetish subject matter, La casa dalle finestre che ridono is not weird by Euro-thriller standards. In fact, it plays out like a conventional mystery,

COMMENTS: Producers of Italian Euro-thrillers have rarely constrained themselves by strictly adhering to regimented structure, timing and consistency. La casa dalle finestre che ridono, aka The House With Laughing Windows, like Suspiria or Baba Yaga is an exception. It retains the feel of a giallo film, yet stands up to conventional Hollywood standards. This makes it a candidate for conventional thriller audiences. The House With Laughing Windows is more of a mystery than a horror movie, yet still qualifies for the “shocker” designation. As a puzzler, it is not exactly up to Agatha Christie standards of construction, but what it lacks in precision, it makes up for in color and atmosphere. There are a couple of slow spots, but overall this gory film demands attention with its curious plot, steady, brooding pace, and consistently suspenseful, creepy feel.

Stefano (Capolicchio) is an art historian and restoration specialist who is summoned to an eerie parish to complete a long unfinished fresco in an equally eerie church. The painting was supposedly never completed, but closer examination reveals that certain parts were intentionally obfuscated by being painted over. The seeds of Stefano’s undoing lie in his urge to uncover what lies beneath.

The grim fresco depicts the violent torture death of Saint Sebastiano. It is the work of Continue reading CAPSULE: THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS [LA CASA DALLE FINISTRE CHE RIDONO] (1976) →

Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: SOCIETY(1989)

June 15, 2010 admin 1 Comment

Our first entry in the June review writing contest: submitted by J.S. Roberts.

DIRECTED BY: Brian Yuzna

FEATURING: Billy Warlock, Devin DeVasquez, Patrice Jennings, David Wiley

PLOT: Teenage Bill Whitney (Warlock) ostensibly lives on easy street. He lives with his filthy rich parents and hottie sister in posh Beverly Hills, plus he has a babe cheerleader girlfriend and is reasonably popular. His future looks bright. For Billy, all this makes him “uneasy”. He tells his shrink that he thinks something very weird and possibly evil lurks under his upper-class society. As he tries to scratch the surface to uncover what’s beneath, he soon finds something unlike anything ever. In the history of society.

Still from Society (1989)

WHY IT DESERVES TO MAKE THE LIST: Simply, the bravura finale. Society takes it’s time towards it but when it comes…watch out! Surreal, disgusting, unique, and an absolute must see. People melt, melt into each other, melt into…things . To continue would be giving away the film’s powerhouse trump card placed securely up it’s sleeve. But I find the film’s overall tone to be the second weirdest aspect. It plays out like a made-for-TV melodrama and keeps you intrigued enough to stick with it, then the “shunt” (ending). Powerful stuff, the shunt is.

COMMENTS: Society really is an (purposefully?) overlooked gem. Perhaps it’s greatest shortcoming , and maybe the reason it doesn’t have a greater cult following, is that for most of it’s run time it plays like a queasy hybrid of “The Hills” and “The Twilight Zone.” Bland, beautiful people with bland problems living in a sort-of alternate universe; Society is a not so subtle satire on the lifestyles of the rich and shameless. Society is a rare, off-the-wall, and greatly satirical American film that offers a lot of food for thought. Which is a good thing, because you’re not going to be hungry after.