31 Nights Review: THE CLEANSING HOUR

 

A man strapped to a camp bed is being yelled at by a hot young priest. The bed rises and the many-voiced man in it hurls verbal filth at the priest. Violence, blood and noise until everything works and the demon is exorcised and, except for the viewers at home, it's a wrap. The Cleansing Hour is a web show in which the actor playing the priest performs a new exorcism every episode and offloads merch while he's at it. Stream no. 1.

There's a growing irk between the star of the show and the producer which extends to the latter's fiancé who can't stand "Father Max". Well, she's soon off to a tv audition so she might not have to live with her contempt for much longer. Next ep comes along and the actor playing the possessed doesn't show (minor spoiler as to why but I don't need to reveal it) so Lane (aforementioned fiancé) steps in to play the demon haunted girl. A few minutes into it she goes off script. It's a real demon. Stream no. 2.

Right, so what we get is a play between global scale entertainment culture with its fickle, ravenous audiences and the horror of demonic possession. How does that work? Well, the demon knows all and who's lying about what and how easily that could all change with a few extortion tricks. It does happen so we also deal with what's at stake in the realm of "reality" entertainment. So far, that's a pretty good mix with something current brought to the table. Production values are high and the practical effects are superb. So why doesn't this work?

Well, because, for all those good things I just listed there are two problems that, once visible, don't go away. The first is that the mould on exorcism movies was broken way back in 1973 with The Exorcist and every single reiteration looks like that one, so however good you make it all the writhing and re-voicing are just going to come off as generic. The second problem has to do with what is done to offset the first. Whether you add comedy (all those horror parodies) or commentary  you need to make that weave in and so tightly that the two become indistinguishable. That kind of happens here but the more delving done into the characters' pasts that render them vulnerable to attack the less important it becomes that it's a demon doing it. There's another narrative crossroad but it's not addressed. What ends up happening is a choice made that blends the two streams on a level so superficial that it ends up as naïve on one hand and clunkily generic on the other.

The problem here is one of indecision as no amount of higher production values are ever going to mask writing that can't make up its mind. It's funny, it's cynical, it's scary except that it's none of those. Contrast with found footage movies made with such concentration on their missions that for all the glucky video look to them and stammered improvised lines of the actors are often far more effective than this quite lavish production. Maybe the time has come when a return to committed genre does a better job at justifying itself as cinema. Because the best of horror is always allegorical, regardless of whether its audiences acknowledge that: the theme should emerge through the horror rather than accessorise it. The demon through Regan attacks Fr Karras by sounding like his mother and getting to him through his guilt as it is his faith that is at stake. Possessed Lane sounds pretty much like lunchtime Lane ranting against Max.

Seen on Shudder

31 Nights Review: HELL HOUSE LLC

 

Three threads of narrative are displayed and then woven as a disaster at a horror themed attraction is investigated. There's no spoiler in telling you that the showbiz gets real and the punters are running from real nasties. Oh, it's a found footage film.

Twenty-one years after The Blair Witch Project kicked the sub-genre off (yes, I'm discounting Cannibal Holocaust as it isn't the source point) the conventions for found footage are firmly in place. They have become so much a part of the manual that the requirement that characters on screen still give a reason for keeping the camera on all the time. Another is something that Blair Witch didn't include as it didn't know it had to: a real world framing device, usually in the form of interviews. 

Hell House LLC does the first more than once but shouldn't as the wishy washy answer just gets less convincing each time. Surely it has long been time (even in 2015 when this was made) for this aspect to get self-parodic. It almost does this in the logs that the otherwise unseen camera operator delivers to camera at the end of the day. The replay trope is also given more air than usual which saves a lot of time in credulity test scenes. So, that is a levelling.

It's the framing that detracts from the film as a whole as the casting of the interviewees is too uneven. The reporter and her crew hold their own but it really only takes one to break the spell (this even happens in the mostly mighty Ghost Watch). What does work is the signposted development of the team's involvement as their investigation takes them to an extended interview with one of the house's founders and thence to the house itself. 

All this works fine but I'm left with the faint praise of calling it competent rather than outstanding as the differentiation of character in the core footage can leave the action muddled, giving us less of a stake in the action than we should have. This makes some of the effective chills along the way (and there are real  ones) unsupported by the characters and allows too much control to the viewer to function well as horror. Eventually, the empathy for the people under threat on screen drains so we are left with a string of decent scare setups, much like they would have been in the attraction to one of the paying guests.

This will sound flippant but it both criticises the execution and celebrates the idea: I was less scared by the film than nightmare it engendered. I dreamed I was back in one of the shared houses of the '90s. Everyone else in the house was getting quietly bitchy with each other and I was losing motivation to deal with it. Eventually it came to the point where I realised I'd just paid the rent for everyone without thinking about it. This caused a profound sadness in me as, under the dream, I knew it was something I would never do unless desperate, something I would never do in real life but that's not the way dreams work. And it was one of those dreams where the main emotion lingers into wakefulness until reality cleans up the psychic mess.

So I wonder what the sequels are like.

Seen on Shudder.

31 Nights Review: THE WITCH IN THE WINDOW

Simon picks up his young son Finn. Beverly, Simon's ex, is fraught because Finn broke into her computer and saw bad stuff. So, he's on zero screen time, including the phone, and in disgrace. Simon welcomes the chance to bond and takes the boy out to the house in Vermont that he's flipping. Bit of rustic air and some old fashioned slog will do the lad a world. Finn is sullen. He's on the 13 side of twelve.

Father and son work a slowly thawing truce while getting into the house repair but hear odd noises. The electrician arrives in the first jump scare and lets slip the story of the family that lived there and the woman, thought a witch, who by legend did the husband and son in and now haunts the place in anger. She can be seen in the upper floor window on a bad day. Not twenty minutes in and there's your title.

A later chat between Simon and Finn features a blurred shape of a woman in a mirror in the background. When you see it you shiver as they don't and it just stays there. A few more appearances and this thing is really picking up and then, at the point of crisis between the pair the ante's upped to maximum when she, Lydia, the witch, appears in the upper floor chair by the window. Beyond this point spoilers so that's that for plot.

I'd put this aside because of the phrase Hallmark film that I read in an IMDB user review. I know, I know but it stuck. Well, I can see what prompted that but it's a criminally inadequate description of this tale of communication and the gravity of acceptance. Simon's work on the house has a motivation I'll leave you to discover but it has nothing to do with sales. At first you might think of how futile his plan is but increasingly you have to understand that it only works when he thinks it, not when you do. His commitment to the house has profound consequences.

So where's all the horror? Well, the build up to Lydia's activation (let's call it) is so deftly done that the moment it bursts into ignition I cursed the movie for its jump scare as I felt a full body shiver and admitted how good it was. See, I hate most jump scare movies as the jolts are unearned; they are the difference Hitchcock drew between suspense and surprise and how he preferred the former. Apart from the first two in this film (both are mild and fun) all of the jumps are hard earned. The worst feature white knuckle suspense. I cried out at one of them. They are earned not just because the suspense is so well built but built upon character and the weave of essential information. While she is a distant apparition in a window or a mirror she will send shivers but when she breaks from this her power and malevolence render her terrifying.

So, here we have a horror movie that earns its shocks through expert atmospherics and a sombre determination to stick to the growing sadness of its central story. See also, The Innocents, The Haunting and Dark Water. Hallmark film? Hallmark IMDB review, more like. This one works and works hard, even delivering a soft and puzzling chill at the end just for value's sake. That's not a sequel setup, it's class.

On Shudder.

31 Nights Review: DARLING

Darling, a young woman, gets a job in a house deep in darkest Manhattan. The owner, about to flee to vacation, tells her that the previous house sitter threw herself from the top floor balcony. Oh, anything in the fridge is fine, call you when I get to the Hamptons. Bye. Darling sets to discovering the house but is soon beset by hallucinations and a twin curiosity and dread about the locked room at the end of the hall.

There are violently scratched messages in the bedside cabinet and muffled movement throughout the house. Her visions start coming in stabbing flashes and seem to involve her in bloody violence. While out on the street one morning she is stopped by a suited man who returns the crucifix necklace she dropped. She looks back in silent gaping fear. She follows him and locates his nest before primming up and luring him back to the house. The rest you will have to see for yourself (it's 76 minutes long; it won't kill ya)

What might have been a heavily derivative genre exercise smothered in student affectation becomes a lean and effective tale of mental disintegration. Yes, it's archly arty with its chapters and hipster ironic title font and ... whatever, man. But it also gets its work done. If it uses strobing it's unusually subtle. If the black and white reminds you of too many other movies it might be aspirational but it's still effective. The score is electronic and variously droning and screeching but it's appropriate. Is it a hip New York cover version of Repulsion? Pretty much, but you don't have to know that.

I don't want to damn this effective urban gothic film with faint praise, so instead of going on anymore about its self-aware style I'll mention the oddly icy warmth of its centre, young actor Lauren Ashley Carter. I have seen Carter in two other films and they and she are both impressive (The Woman and Jugface) and a look over her filmography bids me seek out more. From her Deneuve ice-slacker entrance to homicidal maniac, she takes us with her and we happily follow on behind. Like Deneuve in the earlier film, Carter presents her flawless beauty as a starting point to an arc that alienates us from it. We discover something (but not too much) of her history and where it has left her and if we are still hankering that a girl as cute as she should ruin it all with stuff like that we should take note of our own response as it is a major part of how this film works.

It might seem odd to say but this restlessly stylish film, in committing to its horror, is, for all its affected quoting and self consciousness does more to earn its genre stripes than many more self-avowedly unpretentious pieces from the last ten years. It might be pretty but it works.

Seen on Shudder

31 Nights Review: LAST SHIFT

Jessica, a rooky cop is put in charge of staffing her dad's old police station for one last night to cover the changeover to the new one. She gets a call from a distressed girl who hangs up before vital information can be passed. She ejects a homeless man after he urinates on the foyer floor. It's not going well already but it gets worse and weirder. Compactus shelves move by themselves. The lights go out. Bizarre figures appear out of nowhere and disappear just as suddenly. The girls keeps calling up and her situation is getting worse. Piece by piece, Jessica learns of the background of the station and it's not good and will probably only get worse. Ok, it does.

This haunted house in a cop shop tale shows its M.O. from the off and keeps its effects within easy reach at all times. It's a sizeable building with a lot of corridors and confined spaces. Once you see a distant shadowy figure move across a doorway or see a compactus bay (a big metal cranked bookcase on rails) move by itself you know you are not going to be able to look at most of the backgrounds easily for the next ninety minutes. The pallet is kept on the cold side, recalling time spent in official buildings not designed for ease. I had a full body shiver at sight of a moving inanimate object within a few minutes of the start. Just what the doctor ordered.

And for a good deal of the run time that dread of unseen forces was pursued. The haunting is from the dispatch of a Manson-like cult who came to a bad and bloody end at the hands of cops from this station (including Jessica's father who came to his own violent end). Well, they're back. The girl in trouble keeps calling there rather than the new station or the emergency number and her situation is getting worse. The paranormal monster party is getting cranked up, too and it gets hard for Jessica to tell real from hallucinated.

But it's at this point that the film loses pressure. While there is a laudable restraint from the kind of lazy jump scares that the setting might beg for with its obstructed lines of sight there is increasing repetition of certain tropes after the point (in a very well staged scene that mixes exposition with chills) that Jessica is aware of the possibility that she is only imagining things. It looks less like the things are going to torment her forever and more like her failure to mount an offence against them. But it suffers from repetition. So, as the Jacob's Ladder-headed ghosts wobble away we are allowed to get used to them. So is Jessica. The night of terror becomes more of a bad trip. When the girl on the phone motif reaches its own climax it's creepy from the break in repetition as much as the denouement. 

One other moment is worth mentioning: a grotesque figure appears and seems to stalk a freaked out Jessica who hides in the compactus: we get a few shots to suggest that we're about to get a jump scare and a properly earned one but this doesn't happen and we have enough time at the apparition to recall a significant detail from earlier and we understand why we don't get the jolt. 

The third act turns the looping phenomena off as Jessica faces the bad things down and goes in pursuit. If the ending is unsurprising it is at least committed and offered as a hard conclusion. As such, it doesn't disappoint. That sounds like faint praise but really, I am only recognising something that too seldom rewards the idly taken chance on an unknown film. It helps that Juliana Harkavy's Jessica is a credible and nuanced protagonist who (although the writing can let her down) carries us through the proceedings with an unexpected warmth, not a thing you'd think to demand from a film like this.

Seen on Shudder.

31 Nights Review: CLINTON ROAD

We begin in a busy night club run by Ice T. Four young friends cram into a booth and chew the fat and plan to go out to where the wife of one of them died and perform a seance. Too long for a prologue but too briefly presented to do more than suggest a lifestyle that will have no bearing on the rest of the story. There is one good moment. Eric Roberts comes to the doorbitch and says he's on the list. The doorbitch doesn't believe him so he flashes his licence and she apologises. She'd thought he was one of them pesky Eric Roberts impersonators again.

Then we're out in the bush on Clinton Road and the psychic falls to the dirt by the fire and does the funky gibbon which freaks everybody out. It freaks one of them out so much that he goes to the car to get his phone (and then just opens the door without the key). He's interrupted by a  ranger/state trooper/guy in a uniform who tells him to skedaddle. After the uniformed one vanishes things start happening like a big ginger incel with a blunt instrument (nyurk nyurk) who lumbers around roaring and hitting folks and a little girl who is not as scary as most under-tens who want to stay up past eight p.m. goes strolling around the woods with a security blanket.

The location of the title is a real place on a real map and subject to a lot of folklore, every item of which is included in a kind of tourist sideshow re-enactment. At some point they're in a building and then they're not and then it ends. 

I am a champion of the notion that cinema should be seen as a blank canvas with each new screening. It's difficult to dispel one's own experience of elements like plot and genre in order to do this but a little effort can add a sense of newness to any film you see. Apart from the bizarre night-club to backwoods trek we make here all we really get is a series of set ups shot with the cleanest looking digital video imaginable. There is no suspense. There is no sense of development. Nothing builds or mounts.

I did some Googling on this title and got far more than I expected. Articles in Variety and other trade mags mention Ice T being in the new supernatural horror Clinton Road. So, someone got a Go Pro and had some dirt on Ice T (and probably just knew Eric Roberts' mobile number) and asked Tommy Wiseau to fund the pre-press. 

It's my own fault. I go into Tubi and find things I haven't seen that I really might want to see. I tend to stay away from most of the genre fare as it's mostly knock-offs. You know that person who dresses with labels like Praba or Pierre Cordin after a holiday in Bangkok? Well if you go to Tubi you can feast on epics like Paranormal Phenomena or The Amityville Terror. This movie isn't a knock off of any specific movie and is unlikely to generate knock-offs. My mistake in choosing it discounted that important consideration. I broke out the old Val Lewton number Isle of the Dead afterwards which crapped all over it and got outta there.

I read the synopsis of Clinton Road and then flipped through the IMDB. The first page of user reviews are all shills who give it 10/10 or 9/10 if they want to throw you off the scent. The next page's ratings all plummet to the under 3/10 end of the spectrum. So, if you liked the cover art of this one, do like the ranger man says: "get off the road and go home! NOW!" Before he disappears.

31 Nights Review: BEYOND THE GATES

Night Eight rolled up and I decided to find something unseen on Shudder. A few synopses later I chose this for the premise: two brothers meet up to deal with the estate of their father, starting with the video shop he ran while drinking through his guilt over his wife's death. As they go through the old stock and we meet some more of the cast, they find an old fashioned board game plus video in the locked office. Putting it on they get freaked out but they're intrigued: it might hold a clue to their father's disappearance and it looks neat, anyway so they take it home. The game binds them into playing it which will lead to them going to where the title says they will.

This is the kind of thing that people who are snobs about horror claim to let through: well produced, character development, considered plot and credible performances. I know, such people still think that horror movies are all hockey masks and teenage death-sex but they will all claim to hold genre films to values that are often irrelevant to them. That said, put to the test I don't think any such people (and I know a fair few personally) would get along well with this. Why? Well, it's like when someone who thinks they are witty hears a pun and calls it a bad pun. If you ask them for an example of what they think is a good pun they will often just dismiss it with: all puns are bad. Really? So, they've never read any Shakespeare or James Joyce or ... any novelist in or out of an airport newsagency who cares about delighting their readership. But I digress. 

The reason such folk won't get on with this is that it takes its time to get to where its going. We get to know these characters with nuanced performance supported by solid writing. Everything required of a creditable drama is on screen. Only at the very end (and I mean the final ten minutes) does it break out into what might be described as generic action and in those moments it does falter as they feel more perfunctory after all the world building of most of the film. The story needs it but it feels too sudden and lacks the power it might have had with more construction. This is why horror fans might find it lacking; they'll want the game tighter and faster. But while I am as subject to consumerist itching as any movie goer I let this pass as I was so impressed at the immersion I was offered. I felt the dread and dominance of the face on the television screen (Reanimator's Barbara Crampton) whenever they were in the room and then wherever they were. It's the world of it that's creepy, not the Ghost Ride action at the end.

If you do give this one a click, watch with patience and stay until after all the credits. You'll want to ask your tv a question. Out loud. But you won't.

Review: THE WIND

This is the opposite of the experience I had during last year's 30 nights o' horror. The movie Satanic not only has a goofy title for a horror movie made in 2016 but its promotional art looks like it was done by a child trying to be scary. I took a chance on it expecting only cheap knockoff rubbish so I could fill my quota without overthinking. It turned out to be a strong, well considered movie about youth and bad decision making. The Wind, on the other hand has a powerful image of a prairie woman seen from behind brandishing a shot gun at the doorway of a shaky wooden house, ready to repel the worst. It had reappeared on SBS on Demand after months of absence during which time I considered it lost. Now it's back.

Lizzy and Isaac have gone west in the expansion of the USA in the 19th century and are eking out an austere but effective life on the land. Another couple move in to the nearby abandoned cottage and the two pairs form a workable if tiny community. And then jealousy and hardship take their toll and bad things happen. Bad things have already happened but we learn them after the present bad things as this out of sequence grimoire tries to herd its themes together to form a second timeline motivated by dramatic importance.

The problem is that it gets so convoluted that I had to face the fact that I stopped bothering to unravel it through a lack of empathy with anyone on screen. There are well presented points here and good performances to support them. There's a readiness to step outside genre parameters and reorganise elements for a new kind of horror film. But the horror isn't scary, the tragedy is unaffecting and the players are betrayed by undercooked writing. This, for me, wipes all the impressive production values  off the board, because in the end I stopped caring. In some movies this wouldn't matter: this one depends on empathy which far too soon reduces to a plea for indulgence.

A waste of good atmosphere.

Available on SBS on Demand until November 30

31 Nights O' Horror 2020

2020? Why stop at 31? Well, I started doing the horror movie per night last year and found it easier that I'd feared. Anyone who's read this blog even casually will know that this is my genre of choice so a full month of it should appear kind of heavenly to me, no? Well, yeah, but how to choose and when to play? It's a lot easier this time as I have been saving up a few things from recent acquisitions and keeping an eye on the VoDs. I made a short list the other eve and it was huge. I could do it just with new, unseen titles. 

So, it will be a mix but I can choose more carefully. The 4K Suspiria gets a place of honour somewhere on a weekend and titles like The Haunting or Invasion of the Bodysnatchers can be slotted anywhere at all when comfort viewing is the thing (oh, that one, too, either 50s or 80s Thing works well for me). But the real discovery lies in the ones that vy for my remote click with good tile art and engaging synopses. Again, still, I will choose something that presents itself as dire generic dreck. So what, it will probably be under 90 minutes and I can at least complain about it in a review. This is how I clicked on Satanic last year and was almost disappointed to find how good it is. The cruddiest Netflix tile and a goofy worn-numb title promised garbage but it's an increasingly poignant story of bad decisions and the fragility of youth and ends up both genuinely terrifying and heartrending. So, there's that.

Like last year, I'll be playing it by ear so I won't be listing recommendations here. I will, however, be reviewing hitherto unseen titles on the blog. Last night I started with the curio Night of the Demon. Recently released locally in Australia on Blu-Ray I saw the full UK edit for the first time. Beware, though, our release is the unrestored extra from the 2 disc set so, while it benefits from a higher resolution it's also quite rich in old print artefacts. Dig that? Well, it's a nice mid priced disc that will take you straight to the feature with zero fuss. Anyway, this was a fine and comfortable start.

Tonight? Who knows? You will, if it's new to me.

See you on the couch.