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.

 

Review: LADIES IN BLACK

Teenaged Lisa starts work on the cocktail frock floor of a big department store in Sydney at the end of the '50s. She quickly proves more capable than the slave status normally accorded a fresh school leaver and is soon head hunted by the even ritzier section of model gowns, presided over by the mysterious mittel European Magda (a superb Julia Ormond) whose quotable savoir faire promise much more and tastier wisdom than the Anglos at the cocktail dress counter. Things look good.

At home Lisa is Leslie, girl from the suburbs whose mum (Susie Porter) makes her clothes for her using the same patterns she used when Leslie was ten. Dad is a burly lug (Shane Jacobsen) who needs a little schooling if he is to survive the decade to come. Leslie eventually must decloset herself about her name change but for the nonce she lives a double life.

Elsewhere at the counter Myra is having trouble getting her husband interested in her and we will hear the gamut of the euphemisms for homosexuality suitable for mixed company until matters get crucial. Her counter mate Fay is bored with the oafs she encounters but doesn't quite know what she wants. Magda's homelife is a pleasantly managed continental European series of fine breakfasts and soirees. The 2018 audience knows the reffo tag for racism and the story will negate the power of it through love of various kinds.

Even the darkest of these themes is blended like the ingredients of mock chicken in an old Home Ec text but lest I give the impression that this is a twee piece I should point out that veteran Bruce Beresford keeps a firm hand on the helm and takes what is essentially a feelgood tale of a girl watching the times around her change and smuggles in a fair amount of contemporary observation to allow some harder corners to poke through.

The xenophobia is not surprising of itself but its casualness might remind an Australian audience of recent speeches on the floor of the Senate that might well have been made during the film's setting. The scenes of mother and daughter negotiation feel natural and pointed clarifying the kind of sexual politics to come. The sexuality of Myra's Frank has a bizarre conclusion, all the more considering that the source novel was not written in the '50s but he '90s. The subplot's wrap-up could have come out of a British grim-oop-north family saga. Source material or hasty writing? It's hard to tell.

Beresford stitches a lot of post war Sydney on film into the palette and we're allowed to see enough of the work to mentally comment. It's a pleasant way of letting us join the real past with the detailed construction of it for most of the screen time.

I kept wincing at the score, though. The mallet approach to emotive orchestral scoring with a piano tinkling in cutely came so close to being embarrassing I wondered if it were irony. But, no, I suspect that the '70s chick flick tweets on the 1001 strings of Bartholemew Cubbins were paid for and delivered without a smirk. I can't fault it for not sounding like John Carpenter but couldn't help feeling that most of the intimate and weighty moments between characters would have meant more if the music was ditched. This kind of jobbing film music neither serves the period of the setting nor this one.

However, I wonder how many people will care about that. Why should they? What they get is a radiant cast performing a frequently amusing and engaging story about a society on the turn that ends, as it must, on a note of naive optimism. Cynicism need not apply here. It's just the adaptation at work. I wasted neither my time nor money on this ticket. I just kept thinking of the similar and more exhilarating earlier Beresford film The Getting of Wisdom. I guess I missed the struggle.

Review: BEAST

Moll is a young tour guide on the Isle of Jersey, bored but boxed into mundanity by a mother who treats her like hired help while the other daughter is showered with favour. Even Moll's birthday party is deflated by sis who announces a pregnancy. Moll strays to a dance, stays all night and is saved from date rape by a man who seems to have appeared from under the soil. His name is Pascal and he is everything Moll's mother hates and fears with an equal fury. Pascal is nature. Moll is in love.

Oh, and there's a murderer on the loose, abducting teenaged girls, raping and killing them and leaving them in shallow graves for later discovery. When they're not betting on the Portuguese farm worker their money's on Pascal. Pascal is golden blonde, sweaty and as dangerous as all freedom but understands he must earn Moll's trust. Both of the pair have a past and it's violent and guilty. But ... is he the killer?

Michael Pearce's intense debut feature is a study in contrasts. It's not just the wild nature vs corsetted civilisation on either side of the love story. It's also in the stiff and brutal motion of the fearful villagers and the strange balletic movement of the lovers when they are alone. And, while Pearce strives for a balance between these elements he seems to have found a need to prefer to write the symbols large. This never feels clumsy, though, it gives more of a sense of these things, images and actions, needing to be stated with strength. When you see the scene with the rabbit you know you'll see it again with higher stakes in allegory. This is not the self-conscious severity of a Bruno Dumont but neither is it subtle. It assumes you recognise it plainly. The gleeful shaky cam moment on the golf lawn with the roaring nocturnal beach punched in does what a lazy film leaves to an orchestral score. The nuance is elsewhere.

Most of it is in performance. Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn in the lead roles stun with their range and can be at their most menacing or eerie in the quietest exchanges. Geraldine James as Moll's mother is the embodiment of interpersonal domination, changing course on a five cent piece to control the mood and output of everything living within every cubic centimetre she surveys. Her interactions with Moll are sobering in their efficacy. In one of those unsubtle but strong touches mentioned above Moll's mother has another incarnation in the form of a flown-in police officer whose gothic interrogation scene comes from an even deeper nightmare. Yes, Moll is seeing and hearing her mother in the interrogator. We know. But we are still compelled.

When I see any film I look for its statements. Sometimes these can be and remain obscure but now and then they are so certain that the next task of seeing how the film expresses them is part of a more unconscious process. And then at the third act I wake this up and prepare to relish the taste of it. An '80s horror movie ends with the wink that that monster is still with us. A good rom com gives us a sting that the reconciled lovers have issues they haven't even dreamed of. But here, following each unfolding revelation I honestly had no idea of where it was going. It did. I didn't. Because of that alone it will be among my best of this year. But there's so much more. It's beautiful. It's ugly. It's good.

Review: THE WIFE

Melodrama is too much maligned, dismissed as cheaply emotive but without it we don't get the great American films of master Douglas Sirk, a lot of '50s Hollywood, the British kitchen sink realism of the '60s, that's before you get to silent cinema which required an appreciation of melodrama on the part of its audiences to work at all. As I see it, melodrama in cinema is a moral setting against which the emotional conflicts are given licence to bloom. The Wife is a story in which the secret of a marriage and literary career burns slowly and then quickly and brightly until you almost hold your breath for the explosion you know is coming. It's a good example of a contemporary melodrama.

Glenn Close is the wife of the title. Her husband, narcissistic and wayward, has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. They trampoline on the mattress, hand in hand, singing:"I won the Nobel. I won the Nobel" until she trails off and leaves the room on a pretext of something familial. Thereafter, through the first two acts, each time he speaks about the prize publicly the camera's gaze shifts from his anodyne glow to his wife's increasingly strained loyalty smile. We get many indicators that he, Joe (Jonathon Pryce) is a monstrous father, having a history of affairs, making a clear and humiliating preference for his daughter over his son in the presence of both, and carrying the secret that is telescoped in a very early scene: did she, Joan (Glenn Close) sacrifice her own writing career to support his or does it go deeper into ghost writing of his works which have delivered him the apex of literary recognition?

Most of the story is set outside the comfort of their home in America, in the salubrious surrounds of ceremonial buildings and five star hotels in Stockholm so they are on notice to perform for the public as the private shaking resentment festers in Joan's bosom. She must sit beside Swedish royalty as her husband pays her the kind of tribute given the long suffering rather than reveal the truth. How will this end?

I first remember Glenn Close as the self sacrificing earth mother in The Big Chill where she quietly commanded the self-licencing gaggle of old friends until giving up her husband for a single night to another woman. She did a lot of those. But the turn she made of her role in the retro-ethical Fatal Attraction or the end title sequence of Dangerous Liaisons where she scrapes away the powder and makeup of her doomed aristocracy are what I recall her for most of all and they are the ancestors of this one. This is a melodrama so it is allowed to emote beyond the bounds of naturalism but that doesn't mean overacting here, it means clarity. Close's wise and durable beauty is stretched to breaking with anger but restrained by her sense of the order of things. Pressed to a detonating fury in the third act, she knows the effect she has been fearing this will have is happening before her eyes and, after an extraordinary circular parallel track on her face against the gaudy coloured wall as it moves in sickly patterns behind her, she knows how she must end it. So do you and, whether you'll admit it or not, that's why you like melodrama.