HOW THE NEW HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE FAILED ME

I didn't want a new version. Advance word was that it was a complete retooling. So, why still give it that title? Advance word was good so I gave it a go. What I found was that it's an interesting take but it doesn't resolve its own tension. I'll get to what I mean by that but for now I'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't like horror who might see some of its lesser sung possibilities.

I'll start with what I liked. When I watch a horror story new to me I start looking for the metaphor. All good horror runs on metaphor and is happy for everyone to know that. Poor horror keeps that down and stitches scares together. I should note that by "poor" I do not mean low budget. The overwhelming majority of poor horror movies I've seen over the last twenty-plus years have been the production of major studios with big budgets. They're poor because they leave the metaphor flat and fill the screen with production and have bloated running times. The descent of illconceived ambition that plagues the students in the Blair Witch Project got to the screen with a lot of maxed credit cards and a canny way with the young popular internet. It remains great horror.

So, is The Haunting of Hill House great? It's metaphor is served with depth and grace and it is sustained. The straining dysfunction of a family that has known trauma didn't need a haunted house but it was a bold choice to reimagine an American classic with an insistence on that. The stories of individual characters and the growing complexity in the series can be impressive. but there's a problem. It has to do with look and feel.

Hill House (which is what I'm going to call it) runs on two basic aesthetic schemes. The present day timeline is given a sombre pallet. Jade greens, greys, pallor on the faces of the Caucasian characters, a kind of constant rainy day sadness. The world of childhood and the House is made from a kind of Disney gothic, rich colour pallet but desaturated, cobwebbed, dark and endless. This is where almost all the ghosts appear and there is a legion of them (including all the "hidden" ones). At one point a character walks down a hallway in the present and enters the House and the change is done by him going through a door. Otherwise, for most of the series, the two timelines are separate and distinguished by these aesthetics.

This is understandable but it means that the cold realist drama of the present day needs an extra strong reach to keep the viewer in touch with the wildly supernatural world of the past. What you get is jump scares, heavy makeup and truckloads of digital effects that look the same as the ones used in forgettable blather like Mama, The Woman in Black (2012) or Darkness or the clueless remakes of J-Horror from the 2000s. This is meant to inform the behaviour of the grown up children in the present day timeline. It just looks like they lived in a carnival ghost house.

All the spectres (with a very few notable exceptions) have the dessicated skin and boiled eyes of all the ooky spooky ghosts of those crap movies I mentioned above. I was enticed by reports of scares that the cast themselves found too scary or some audience members vomiting from them. Really? Have these people never seen a mainstream horror film from the past two decades? If they have ghosts they ALL look like that and emerge suddenly with giant orchestral stabs. There is just no fear left in me for this kind of presentation. It might as well be the Thriller video. There are, as noted, exceptions to this and their effectiveness completely eclipses the main ones and renders them goofy and try-hard. I do not believe anyone would emerge traumatised from such a derivative supernature (I know, the trauma is primarily from something else but the line was too good not to use).

What this does is highlight how laboured the rest of it is. The present day drama is plodding and overstretched. Even when it picks up and offers characters that aren't a trial to try and care for (i.e. the twins) you get the feeling that one rather than two hours might have done a fresher feeling job. The celebrated episode 6 done in an effectively faked single take (nothing wrong with that: it's been good enough for Hitchcock and Gaspar Noe in their time) begins compellingly but soon feels exhausting and strained (not intentionally). Some of the dialogue and a great deal of the performances in the series are superb but both are let down by an apparent mistaking of screen time for depth.

Shirley Jackson's novel puts an uneasily assembly of ghost hunters into a situation that grows increasingly menacing. There is no resolution of the reality of the ghosts and while there are manifestations nary a one is seen. It is a psychological horror and when the least stable character emerges as the one with the greatest affinity with the big threatening place and feels progressively at home there you feel a downpour of her history and the heartrending sense of fate she feels it gives her as the worst happens. The Robert Wise film from 1963 honours this. Even if it leaves much of the novel out it stays true to it and offers a single realm to which we offer without effort our suspension of disbelief. The Netflix outing makes hard work of the imagination (around the cliched effects) and then tries our patience with unlikeable characters. And then it betrays everyone who has read and loved the book and seen and loved the 1963 film with a goofy nice ending. There are no rich horror fiction metaphors here or if there are they have collapsed under all that positive thinking. Not one for me.

Review: GHOST STORIES

Professor Goodman, a professional skeptic dedicated to exposing charlatans, is given a task to explain three cases that stumped his predecessor. He meets a nightwatchman whose shift at a former women's asylum is disrupted by a strange girl ghost. Next up is a teenage boy who tells of an encounter with what might be a demonic figure in the woods at night. Finally, there is the tale of a well to do man whose wife died giving birth to a monstrous child who might be the work of a poltergeist.

The stories lack resolution but all seem to have easily provable rational explanations. Goodman returns to the man who gave him his assignments and confronts him with this only to be reminded of a phrase the man was famous for: the brain sees what it wants to see. Things then turn very strange as Goodman is given a series of tough lessons in the idea.

This film began life as a stage production devised by co-writers Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman (who plays Goodman). Dyson was the non-acting member of the team behind the uncomfortable comedy The League of Gentleman, all of whom were fans of classic British horror, from Hammer to BBC Christmas ghost stories. This film follows the pattern of the Amicus studio anthology films by having a connecting character uncover weird tales from a number of people, often strangers.

The homage ends abruptly at the basic form, here. There is no attempt to have the segments resemble '60s or '70s films. The irresolution of the stories is deliberately disturbing as we expect a tidy conclusion that we are not given. When the overall story widens to examine Goodman's own role and his motivation the trope of the travelling tale collector is anti-generically reversed. Where this leads I'll leave to the ticket buyer.

So does it work?

Well, it's scary if too reliant on jump scares. There's a lot of work put into the kind of atmosphere familiar from both the Amicus movies and The League of Gentlemen's homage. Apart from the third story's very effective quote of the bizarre '60s short Whistle and I'll Come to You and its insistence on the uncanny in a socially privileged  setting, we are left with a string of sudden shocks accompanied by jolting stabs from the soundtrack. The disappointment that the tales don't seem to go anywhere and aren't as baffling to a skeptic like Goodman eventually give way to questions about what might be in store for him. The resolution provides a neatly tied bow but suggests we do our own thinking over what it's fastening. The nearly female-free cast offers a clue but the film's own push back at the viewer challenges them to care enough to do this thinking.

So I'm torn between appreciating the textual complexity of what I've seen, the great atmosphere, the promise of a sinister undercurrent, and wondering if I left the gas on.

Review: HALLOWEEN (2018)

Horror sequels have it tough. Imagine if celebrity kids were expected to outdo their parents. Pick your favourite and be honest about the circumstances of their fame and the breaks in good movies or great bandmates to spur them. You'd need to do a Boys From Brazil job and recreate the wounds as well as the triumphs of each one. There'd still be no guarantee that the new breed would turn out anywhere like the original. With horror sequels the fans want more and better but the same. Kill more scare more but be as innovative. With Halloween that's a very tough call. I'll get into why that is later. So, how does this one go?

It's forty years later and Michael Myers is taunted by a pair of murderable podcasters in a mental health facility that could not exist in 2018. They bring out the white-face mask that gave him his look in the first one but he doesn't respond. All the other chained rent-a-character-actors do, though, writhing and squeaking just like their drama group teacher taught them. Meanwhile a psychiatrist who does a bang-on Donald Pleasance impression (he actually gets called the new Loomis halfway through) encourages the baiting twits for his own purposes.

Meanwhile, the aged Laurie Strode (welcome back Jamie Lee) in her backwoods fortress takes practice shots at a group of mannequins that justly give a character later a hell of a creep-out moment. We see her kitchen has a secret basement filled with survivalist preserves and probably an arsenal of lethal stuff. She's grandmother to teenaged Allyson and mother to Karen who is furnished with a series of flashbacks of Laurie's survivalist training. Allyson goes about her day like the highschool kid she is, getting hyped up for the Halloween party.

Laurie breaks out of her nervous self-incarceration on hearing the news about Michael escaping from captivity to warn her descendants about the threat. They are sick of hearing the old woman rant about this thing from four decades ago and try to steer the conversation back to more soap opera style dialogue. But it's no good. Michael's on the loose and killing like it's last years shirts. And he headed for Hadonfield in a fast car. You know where it's going. There are twists but not in this review.

But is it any good? As a sequel? Yes, it's good. The kills are brutal and jolting. The suspense is frequently white knuckle. There is a final tableau guaranteed to delight. And, simmering beneath the action and the violence, there is a sadness as we get increasingly familiar with Laurie's prison of trauma and its effect on the generations that followed her. The monster's resurgence carries a weight bearable only through cartharsis and, if anything, that is the overriding theme of the piece.

Is it any good as a horror movie? Easily as good as H20 was which demonstrates the worth of calling key creative figures form the original back into play. The score is tastefully upgraded though in some moments annoyingly like the ones they grab off the shelf for James Wan movies which can work against the great tension of Carpenter and Howarth's 1978 groundbreaker. There is a twist with one character which is bewildering and wasted. The scenes at the hospital are intended to be digetic rather than filtered through a character's warped point of view and are a throwback to the worst excesses of mental illness = evil. Loomis in the original talks about Michael like a priest about a demon because Michael scared him beyond objective treatment which was the point of his odd dialogue. The "new Loomis" (Jaime Lee gets that line) attempts a kind of scientific curiosity about it but, by contrast, it just comes across as hokey and ill-conceived by the writers.

Am I being harsh? Well, I did enjoy it and appreciated that it brought a few new things to the table (and a lot of references to earlier entries which I just find tiresome these days). It is streets ahead of the Rob Zombie movies with their always mistaken attempt to provide back story to what is essentially a bad guy chasing kids. That's the thing, though: Halloween is blank enough, like its monster's mask, to have been claimed by every political or cultural agenda out there and it's still, at heart, a lean and solid effort that feels by turns featherlight and heavier than granite. To do as well at being that anything with the title needs to do as well and then better or just knuckle under and trot out the kills like Friday the 13th from its original onwards. This version doesn't quite get to as well but it doesn't just crank everything down to routine either.

Do we still need slasher films? A character in this one wonders at the fuss of the original murder spree when it has been so grotesquely trumped by mass shootings and terrorism since. Even in the movies where the '90s swung between self-aware postmodernism like Scream and the increasing sleaze of serial killer movies (which eventually even threw the token morality aside - or altered it to a new sociopathic one - to become torture porn) the scene seemed to squeeze out the old knife-wielders. But, of course, the point is in the selection and the stealth and the suspense, the hunt and the reality-defying indestructibility of the monster. They are the bits that this movie does well. At least you won't hear your own popcorn crunching over a lot of it.

Review: BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE

A single shot prologue shows a man coming into a motel room moving the furniture, the carpet and the floorboards and then hiding a bag under them. The 50s classic 26 Miles plays on the track. This ends badly.

Ten years later, as a title card tells us, the motel is visited by four people who are strangers to each other and we learn that the area of the motel is divided between the states of Nevada and California. There's a thick red line on the ground and the motel floor with each state written on its side of the line. When the guests rouse the clerk he tells them that rooms in California cost a dollar more but gambling is allowed on the Nevada side (and drinking only on the California side). After some picketty persnickety choosing of rooms they retire to them.

Here we learn who each one really is, every one has a story that doesn't show up at first look. This leads to a discovery which I'll leave to the viewer. A series of snap-to causes and effects transform this into a kind of Petrified Forest deal with a charismatic bad guy holding the characters and grinding them through sadistic games to get information of the strange scene he has burst into. Sorry, no spoilers.

This outing from Drew Godard piles on the visual style with a trowel and it is never less than stunning to watch. As a kind of '90s meta-nostalgia we also get a series of hi-cal pop songs from the days of yore (there's even a juke box on set to facililtate this) to juice up proceedings. And after a chunky showdown that will also remind you of a lot of movies you saw in the '90s we're done. Coda, credits, end.

The cast carry themselves well through this. Veteran Jeff Bridges dominates as the priest with a past sliding into dementia. John Hamm works as a kind of amped up Don Draper. Dakota Johnson does what she can with the slighter role she gets and relative newcomers Cynthia Erivo and Cailee Spaeny are standouts. It's Chris Hemsworth who gets the most fun out of his Charles Manson type character (perhaps a little more David Koresh but both are in there) and in the moment when Darlene lets him know why she's not afraid of him with a perfectly sculpted line shows both vulnerability and self awareness which soon will turn to violence. It's a standout performance.

But the problem is that it's well over two hours long and feels like it should have been about ninety minutes. While it is never slow it is repetitious and we get a strong sense of revisited information as the third act tightens up. A sudden revelation that answers an only mildly interesting character thread lets us in on a game changing development towards the end and by that time you might be thinking didn't Tarantino wear this one bare two decades ago? Well, no, as formulaic and self-parodic as he got Tarantino could still deliver a lean loaded gun in both senses. This will pass the time but I bet you won't remember much about it a week after you see it.