Stephen King’s It

If you know the novel on which this two-part made-for-tv film is based, you’ll know it’s impossible to transfer the story from one medium to another. I guess we should give Warner Bros. kudos for even trying. The result, though, is neither scary nor compelling. I imagine that if this were the first horror movie you ever saw when you were a teenager it might have been quite creepy – and you’ll be traumatized for life by that clown. “They all float down here!” The story follows a group of kids, “The Loser Club” (later re-baptized as “Lucky Seven”) during a life-changing summer in 1960 – and their reunion thirty years later. In that fateful summer in some New England smallville, all of them have frightful encounters with their worst nightmare in the form of shape-shifting Pennywise the Dancing Clown, who also appears as a werewolf, a mummy, and whatnot. Children disappear in sleepy little town of Derry, Maine, but no one seems to care or do much about it. Grownups apparently don’t notice what is going on in their town every thirty odd years. The losers’ leader, Bill is determined to avenge the death of his younger brother Georgie. When they all have shared their encounters with “It” they agree to help him. Obviously they have no idea how to go about, but the bonding experience is the heart and soul of the story.

Unable to kill the monster, they vow they will one day return to finish “It” off should it ever come back. And coming back it does, as children sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and disappear again thirty years later. Mike Hanlon is the only one of the Lucky Seven who remains in Derry and contacts the others; Bill Denbrough (doubtless modeled after Stephen King himself) still tells scary stories; Richie Tozier now makes a living cracking jokes as he always did; that little fat kid, Ben Hanscom, who used to build dams so well, is now a slim, successful architect; hypochondriac Eddie Kaspbrak still lives with his overbearing mother; the only girl among the Losers, Beverly Marsh, has found a man to replace her abusive father; Stan Uris, once the goody-two-shoes boy scout and now a successful businessman, rather commits suicide than face “It” again. There’s no explanation why they are still able to see that freaky Pennywise the Clown now that they’re adults, and there certainly aren’t words to explain the dramatically poor ending. Somehow the clown’s true earthly shape is that of a giant spider that feeds on humans. Mike and Eddie die, while Beverley slings silver slugs at the monster, while Bill, Richie and Ben disembowel “It” and rip it’s heart out. What a letdown. After sitting through three hours of build up, this crock o’ shyte is a real anti-climax.

There are some obvious staples of Stephen King’s usual fair in the film: the everyman smallville setting in Maine, the coming-of-age of a group of misfit adolescents over a summer in the 60s, the inexplicable terror, and so on. The scenes with the teenagers are perhaps the most interesting, while the adult actors remain stiff and unconvincing. Watching it now, the movie also suffers from its painfully out-dated effects. But what bothers your Cricket most are the blatant rip offs from J. R. R. Tolkien and H. P. Lovecraft. The giant spider in the subterranean cave, feeding on humans paralyzed in cobweb cocoons, clearly derives – however unconsciously – from The Lord of the Rings’ Cirith Ungol’s Shelob. (And if you’ve seen both movies, you’ll probably agree that Peter Jackson stole it back for his version.) The cosmological back-story about the ancient extra-terrestrial monster terrorizing New England, hunting small towns for prey, taking shapes and forms that will terrify anyone who dares looking straight into the “deadlight” of its very being so much their stupefying madness will kill them, certainly comes directly from the Cthulu Cycle, which itself in a way was inspired by Arthur Machen. Moreover, there’s no subtext, no deeper meaning, beyond the great adventure that bound the Losers’ Club in their quest to fight Evil incarnate. And we already knew that clowns are Satan’s spawn. No cheeping chirps for this one.

Paranormal Activity

This is the kind of movie that’s easy to love or hate. The plot is ridiculously simple, the cinematography non-existent, the dialogue basically improvised. In essence, it’s a low-budget remake of Poltergeist without special effects. Much of the time nothing happens, and half the time we’re watching two people sleep. Having said that, the Cricket is leaning towards giving this a tentative thumbs-up, because within this sparse set-up director Oren Peli and his two main actors, Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, are able to pull you in. It really is a worthy feat that you won’t be bored for a minute. The tension builds up rapidly, even if you can see through all the clichés. At first little things are moved in Katie and Micah’s house; then doors open and close; they hear strange noises; footsteps on the stairs; lights go on and off; the chandelier swings on the ceiling in the middle of the night; Katie gets out of bed standing in the bedroom for hours in a catatonic state. Micah shares the audience rational skepticism about paranormal activities, ghost and demons, and he has a hard time empathizing with his girlfriend’s fear for the inexplicable occurrences around the house. He has set up an audio-visual system hoping to capture whatever is plaguing Katie. At first he jokes it’s probably one of the neighbors. He is not particularly receptive to a psychic who Katie invited. He refuses to admit that he is starting to get scared, too, and acts as if he is dealing with the schoolyard bully. He just wants to protect his girlfriend.

I’m no fan of the Blair-Witch faux-documentary style, with the bouncing camera, as if we are watching real footage. But it does add to the effect-free allure. It all makes it easy identifying with the two main characters. We’ve all heard strange noises, and we are all spooked out sometimes by inexplicable occurrences. The interaction between Katie and Micah is easily recognizable, too, as many of us will know someone who’s a little more gullible about the supernatural. And what if you were in their position? Wouldn’t you flip the freak out? The film cleverly taps into our fear of the unknown. How would you react? Would you try to record every demonic move and utterance, taunt forces beyond your control, would you run and hide, or call an exorcist in desperation? Micah hopes to communicate with the pestering ghost through an Ouija board, but merely gets the name Diane or Nadine as reply. Searching the internet, he finds a story about a woman who experienced all the same incidents as Katie, invited an exorcist and died. You know where this is going. Alas, the ending disappoints. Not surprisingly, there are actually three endings in circulation – and none of them are profound. And that illustrates my hesitation, there’s no message, no subtext, hardly any metatext, no substance – just two people being scared to death.

Fright Nights

Over the summer the Cricket spent a couple of nights with the kids watching some of the most atrocious horror garbage you should save yourself from even getting anywhere near to. They were that bad. So that you won’t make the same mistake, here we go. From the premise, you’d think Catacombs (2007) has the perfect setting for a Slayer video: subterranean cemetery below the streets of Paris: the realm of darkness underneath the City of Light. This empire of the dead is the last resting place of millions of skulls and bones, often artfully arranged in a labyrinthine structure of chambers and corridors some sixty feet underground. It is in this morbid maze that an unsuspecting naïf (Shannyn Sossamon) gets drawn by her abrasive sister (P!nk). I can already hear your eyes roll... The Second Act consists entirely of the girl running in the darkness to evade the clutches of some evil serial killer... No Third Act can make up for that, but this ending stank so bad, I won’t even begin to tell you. Awful!

Next, we have Buried Alive (2007) – even the title is a rip off. Here we’re dealing with some family curse and ghostly apparitions. The film is plagued by common horror tropes: college initiation insanity, gratuitous nudity, inexplicable acts of random violence, a curious family history, a road trip to a remote cabin, a frightfully misanthropic caretaker who enjoys stuffing dead animals, dysfunctional mobile phones, flying axes, power failures, sabotaged cars, and after everyone else is slaughtered, the two remaining teenagers are, of course, buried alive... yawn... I needn’t say more.

Lastly there’s The Ruins (2008), another stinker of a movie. Here we join two American teenage couples with some recent friends to the ruins of a Mayan temple in the remote Mexican jungle. Angry villagers kill off one of them fast. Atop the ruin their cell phones have no signal, but they can distinctly hear a cell phone ringing down the mineshaft. Naturally, as one of them is lowered down, he has a fall and breaks his back. They are able to get him out, but then next morning the vines that cover the ruin have eaten into the guy’s leg. Desperate to get to the cell phone in the shaft, the two girls go back down, only to find the dead body of the cell phone’s owner – and to learn it’s not the phone they hear ringing, put the vines! (?!?) You get the picture. They all die, but for one, who in the alternate ending still has vines crawling inside her. Yuck!

Planet Terror

In the spirit of Halloween, the Cricket thought it would be appropriate chirping on some over-the-top zombie horror action flick, like Planet Terror (2007), Robert Rodriguez’ contribution to the Grindhouse double feature. This is a textbook example of disgusting sore and rotting gore, and an all-out splatterfest. Nothing spells over-the-top better than a former go-go dancer (Rose McGowen) with a machine gun for a prosthetic leg. Then there’s the botched military transaction with some Indian biochemist who likes to cut off testicles. A green fume is released, prisoners escape, and soon radioactive blistered zombies are attacking stranded damsels (including Fergie). We also have a paranoid doctor who is treating the affected townspeople – and who is suspecting his anesthesiologist wife of cheating on him (with Fergie! Nice. But she’s dead.) Before you know it all hell is breaking lose in all its fiery rampage. And amidst such terrifying insanity, the only natural thing to do is having sex. The faux-seventies air, with the weird new-age synthesizer soundtrack, is annoyingly distracting. Never mind it’s supposed to be a “tribute” to the grindhouse fare of yesteryears. The story obviously takes place in this millennium, what with the cell phones, rifles with night-goggles, video games, references to the “Food Channel,” Jesse James the motorcycle guy, and even Bin frikken Laden! It would have been fun if I could turn my brain off, but I’ve seen worse.

Danger After Dark

Not too long ago, the Movie Cricket borrowed a box set of Japanese movies. The one that I really wanted to see again was Suicide Club (Jisatsu Sākuru, 2002). That film, directed by Sion Sono, opens with one of the most memorable cinematographic scenes you will ever see: young girls come walking down the stairs onto the train platform, in their school uniforms, they step up to the edge, hold hands, and on the count of three all fifty-four jump in front of the train together, blood and body parts gusting all over. With more and more suicides happening, the police are left clueless about their connection. Are they dealing with a cult, or a fad? In that respect, the story is a murder mystery, but one larded with tropes of the horror genre: rainy nights, dark and empty office building, curtains flowing in the breeze, power failure, splatter and gore, strips of human skin. Then there’s the all-girl idol-group Dessert, who sing about e-mails and jigsaw puzzles. Gradually things get more and more weird, to the point of a psychedelic trip into delirious hallucinations and delusions of glam-glitter grandeur. “I want to die as beautifully as Joan of Arc inside a Bresson film,” some psychotic freak sings, “Lesson one: apply the shaving cream – and smile as you then slowly slice away the heart.” In all, this is an exploration of isolation in urban Tokyo, of alienation in modern society; a social commentary of the dehumanization of online interacting and pop culture mass media; and about people finding meaningful relationships in committing mass suicide.

Next up in the box comes 2LDK (2002), directed by Yukihiko Tsutsumi, about two roommates (played by the beautiful Eiko Koike and Maho Nonami). (The title is a classified ad abbreviation for a 2-bedroom apartment, with shared living room, dining room and kitchen.) One is a neat, reclusive country girl who only recently arrived in Tokyo; the other is a fabulous hip chick with money to burn on Gucci, Miu Miu, Chanel and Hermès. One is a well-educated lover of theater; the other is an air-head beauty pageant queen who began her acting career in porn. One plays classical piano; the other listens to heavy metal. (Guess who the Cricket was rooting for.) They find out that they are competing for the same lead role; the extrovert Lana taunts the introvert Nozomi about a man she has a crush on; but Lana is also jealous about Nozomi’s bigger breasts. In the close confinement of their apartment (the whole film is set within the titular 2LDK), their petty quarrels soon escalate from insecurities and envy to mutual murderous hatred. Thematically there are some parallels with Suicide Club, in that 2LDK also deals with isolation in urban Tokyo, but rather than turning that social seclusion inwards, this film unleashes the claustrophobic and paranoid violence outwards between the two young women. And that violent rivalry is brutally ugly. For a film shot on one set within a week with only two actresses, it is quite an achievement to keep the viewer engaged, but the performances, the dialog, and the cinematography and offering excellent, though gory, entertainment.

The last movie of the set is Moon Child (2003), directed by Takahisa Zeze, and stars J-pop idols Hideto “Hyde” Takarai and Gakuto “Gackt” Kamui (who also co-wrote the script). This film is a futuristic science-fiction martial-arts gay-glam vampire organized crime action horror thriller comedy drama. It follows the life of orphaned Sho (Gackt) and his friends through the first half century of the 21st millennium, when Japan has suffered a major economic collapse and many people have taken refuge in the multi-ethnic “Asian Special Economic Zone” of Mallepa on mainland China. The Mallepa Orphans make their living through robbery and in so doing run into conflict with the Cantonese mafia. The orphans have one advantage, their guardian Kei (Hyde) who happens to be a vampire. Gradually the group of friends falls apart, while Kei is imprisoned. In essence, then, this is a story of love and friendship, the ties that bind. Kei provides the common trope in vampire stories, that is, the loneliness that comes with immortality as friends become mere drops in the ocean, tears in the rain, that wash away in the sad agelessness of the undead. Unfortunately the movie employs those musical interludes – when the writers have to move the story forward, but can’t write a script for the scene. The film also drags on for two full hours, resorts to the cheap and cheesy ploy of cancer to bring Kei and Sho together one last time, and ends with a dual suicide at sunrise. In all, it’s not an awful movie, but it isn’t one that comes with the Cricket’s chirpiest recommendation.

You may now find a follow up of sorts: Danger After Dark II!

[A special shout out goes to Anthony and Sander!]

The Box

The premise of The Box (2009) is fairly simple, as you probably know even if you haven’t seen the film: Would you accept a million dollars knowing that by accepting it you will cause the death of somebody, anybody else? It sounds simple enough. Most of us would probably say “yes.” But think of the altruism coefficient (or rather the opposite): if too many people are unable to sacrifice their individual desires, humankind would not survive. That is the message that comes late in the movie. Few of us can see beyond the temptations dangling in front of us and cannot foresee the consequences of our actions. Profound as that sounds, it is at this point that the film unfortunately fails – offering no other resolution than the rather Stoic moral of resisting temptations. In that respect, the movie smacks of Puritan Protestantism. Nevertheless, the story is a real thriller with a dash of science fiction and a hint of horror – and it is unsurprising that the short story on which the film is based (“Button, Button” by Richard Matheson) has also been adapted for The Twilight Zone.

The Lewis family receives a box with a red button under a glass hemisphere and a note that Mr. Steward will call upon them that afternoon. Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) works for NASA, where he developed a 360-degrees camera, but is notified that his application for the astronaut training program is rejected. His wife Norma (Cameron Diaz), a private high school teacher, is informed that faculty will no longer get a tuition waiver for their children. With these setbacks fresh on their minds, Mr. Steward’s offer of a million dollars is a tantalizing temptation. They have one day to make their decision – and after much deliberation, Norma pushes the box’s button to accept the money. Steward arrives to deliver the cash and retrieve the box. He tells them it will be reprogrammed but they do not know the person who will next receive the same offer. Meanwhile, NASA employee Jeffrey Carnes has shot his wife point blank. From that moment, events take weirdly mysterious turns in their life. People show up with secret messages and nosebleeds. Steward seems to know their every move.

It is 1976, Lynyrd Skynyrd is at the height of their fame, President Ford is on television, and the Viking mission is broadcasting images from Mars leading to speculations about life on Mars. Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), it transpires, was once hit by lightning while working at NASA’s Langley Research Center. Considered dead, he revived, regenerated at ten times the normal speed, his cell degeneration halted (implying he no longer ages), but his face still displays a scar the shape of the Face on Mars. He is now a vessel for “those who control the lightning” – apparently divine or extraterrestrial beings who are putting humankind to some twisted test. There are references to salvation and eternal damnation, to Sartre and 70s culture in America. There are drones moving like zombies who apparently do Steward’s bidding. With all these conspiracies, plot twists and complications abounding it is disappointing that so many threads remain dangling at the end. With a different ending, I would have said it’s a good movie, but as it is I felt we were bombarded with questions but received unfortunately few answers to anything.

The Host

Your Chirping Cricket was recommended to watch The Host (Gwoemul, 2006), the highest grossing film in South Korea. In the horror genre, this is a great monster movie, with a sense of humor and an actually sensible plot. The story revolves around a rather dim-witted man who loses his daughter to an amphibian monster from the Han River. Believing she has died, he grieves with his father, brother and sister. On the last battery power of a cell phone, she calls to tell she is somewhere in a big sewer. The remainder of the film, we follow the family in their chase to find her, while they break out of quarantined hospitals, obtain a truck and a map of the sewerage system with the family’s savings, and attack the monster. It kills the grandfather and the three siblings get separated. The brother is able to trace the girl’s call to the north side of Wonhyo Brigde, but he is betrayed by people who are chasing him for reward money. Meanwhile the young girl remains trapped in the monster’s lair with other victims. The only other one alive in the pit is a homeless kid who is even more scared than her. She tries to climb out by making a rope of clothes, but it catches her again with its tail and then gulps her and the kid in its ferocious mouth.

At this point, Seoul is in uproar as the government has decided to employ Agent Yellow to eradicate the monster and the deadly virus of which it is supposedly the host. The monster attacks the protesters but is incapacitated by the chemical fumes. The three siblings reunite and the girl’s father takes his chance to pull out his daughter as well as the little kid from the monster’s hideous mouth. She has suffocated despite holding on to one of the monster’s teeth. In his anger the father attacks the monster with a street pole, but all that achieves is that it wakes it up. The brother attacks it with fire bombs made of soju bottles. Then a homeless man pours gasoline over the monster, and the sister, a national arching medalist, shoots a flaming arrow into its eye, while the girl’s father rams the pole through its mouth and pierces its brain. With the monster dead, he checks on the little kid and finds that he is still alive. He decides to adopt him as he was with his daughter in the monster’s pit. Months later, when they are having dinner, the news on the TV announces in the background that the “disease crisis” was a case of “misinformation.” They just turn it off.

In fact, we knew from the beginning that the monstrous creature was a mutant amphibian caused by deliberate formaldehyde spillage into the Han River. And that is the running political commentary in this film. For it was an American military pathologist who ordered the formaldehyde to be dumped down the drain; it was the American military that quarantined everyone who got near the monster because of a deadly virus that never existed, and then ordered to perform a frontal lobotomy on the girl’s father; and it was the American military that employed Agent Yellow (a thinly veiled reference, of course, to Agent Orange). The monster, in other words, is a metaphor for America’s military presence in South Korea, and the family’s resilience is an ode to self-reliance and national sovereignty. The monster itself is quite a marvel of a mutant hybrid, with its elegant acrobatics, its clumsy legs, its ugly jaws and frightful tail. Interesting, too, is that the monster creature appears almost at the beginning, unlike in so many other films of the “creature from the deep” genre. The film is not screaming bloody gore, it has intelligent drama at the heart of the story, and the action scenes are highly entertaining. You might want to watch it, too.

The Isle

A while ago I saw another one of those weird movies, The Isle (Seom, 2000), a Korean, psychological horror flick by Kim Ki-duk. The setting is a poetically ethereal lake, a remote fishing resort with small floating cottages on the water. A mute Hee-jin ferries her customers back and forth, providing them with baits, supplies, hookers, and occasional sexual favors of her own. It certainly helps that she vaguely reminds me of my ex Paula (but I guess you’re tired of hearing me say that by now – and rightly so). The lyrical serenity of the scenery offers a stark contrast with the psychological and physical horrors that ensue. Hee-jin exhibits some kind of extreme bipolarism, showing dispassionate acts of kindness one moment, and demonstrating acts of gruesome cruelty the next. She slowly becomes intrigued with one of her customers, who’s suicidally depressed and on the run for the law. She saves his live one time, refuses his violent advances, calls in a girl for him, but then grows a passionate jealousy for the hooker. Eventually, Hee-jin ties the girl up and tows in her one of the floats to the farthest side of the lake. In her attempt to catch someone’s attention, the girl accidentally drowns in the water later.

Like the scenery, the iridescent cinematography contrasts severely with the torturous brutality appearing right in front of us. Acts of animal cruelty are depicted in the same unmoving stillness as scenes of rape, mutilation, attempted suicide and murder. The most excruciatingly troubling moments involve two complementary attempted suicides. In the first, Hee-jin’s lover swallows half a dozen fishhooks and has to be saved from the water by Hee-jin pulling the fishing line that’s stuck in his throat. She carefully pulls out the fishhooks, and then has sex with him to distract him from the bleeding pain. When the guy later tries to leave her, she imitates him, by inserting fishhooks into her vagina and falling in the water. She, too, needs to be towed out of the water by the fishing line caught inside her, and then the guy has to carefully remove the hooks while blood flows all over the float. The film ends enigmatically, after police officers discover the body of the hooker and her pimp, who Hee-jin had killed. She takes off with the guy on his float and they hide out in a patch of reeds...

The gory aesthetics of The Isle work on many different levels. The gruesome cruelty reveals primal instincts of basic human and animal emotions. Human relations are no more than fish caught in bait and eaten raw. It’s an allegory of extremes, like the serenity contrasting with the horror, where the shore and the floats represent life and death, love and hate, where sex can be as meaningless as eating fish or releasing oneself, or be as passionately primal as the struggle for life, the all devouring desire for connectedness in a remote lake of isolated isles between misty mountains. The poetics may be violent, but they serve a distinct purpose. The image of a dangling fish recalls the miniature of a hanging man that Hee-Jin’s lover made out of wire, which itself recalls Hee-jin enjoying her swing in front of her store overlooking the lake. Such intricate imagery makes this film a quietly disturbing, but delicately profound contemplation. If you have the stomach, you might enjoy The Isle, too.