Crack’d

Mirrors 2 (2010)

Our story centers on Max Matheson (Nick Stahl) who is recovering from a devastating car accident in which he lost his fiance and was pretty banged up himself. He was was driving and so blames himself – he swerved to avoid an oncoming car and crashed into a telephone pole.

His father, Jack Matheson (William Katt) calls him up and asks for his help. Daddy-Katt is opening a department store called The Mayflower, and the night watchman that was hired went a little crazy and cut himself up. So now Daddy-Katt needs someone to mind the place for him. Max agrees, but doesn’t seem too enthusiastic about it.

Daddy-Katt say whaaat?

Well, his first day on the job Max has a vision of a sinister up-to-no-good looking girl with white ghosty eyes in a mirror at the store. He immediately tells his therapist. His therapist thinks this is all a reassuring sign, and says not to worry about these hallucinations because it means he is getting his life back in order and finally dealing with his guilt and the effects of his fiance’s death. OK? So hallucinations are a good thing? She also asks Max if he is taking the pills she prescribed. He says he took one. She says: Just one? Max says: Yeah, I wanted to take more but I didn’t. Therapist: Very good. What the hell? Who is this therapist? Why is she giving him pills she doesn’t want him to take? She goes on to talk about Max’s history of abusing alcohol and drugs and how he is now sober. Was she testing him to see if he’d start popping the pills like candy? Did she prescribe him the pills before she knew his full history? This whole scene kind of blew my mind, but maybe psychiatry has changed a lot and no one told me. Ugh, how much movie is left?  Oh, Christ, I’m not even twenty minutes in yet.

So Max is back at his job, and what a fibber, he is taking the pills. And now he has a vision of one of the store employees that he met his first day. She is in the mirror and she is naked. Oh, look, boobies. And boy do they look fake. But the vision turns from soft core to headgore. And damn, these effects are horrible.

Some detectives arrive at the house of the naked and now dead employee and they’re pretty clever. Detective # 1: How do you think this happened? Detective # 2: I don’t know, it looks more like just a terrible accident. But maybe someone killed her. These are like the cops from Mulholland Drive only here it is supposed to be serious.

Max has more visions, and this time he acts on them and like an idiot who wants to be implicated and go to jail, runs to the intended victim’s apartment. Where the police already are because the guy is already dead and of course they notice Max and think “Hmmmm… a person of interest.” Because they don’t say “suspect” anymore. These cops are stupid, but I don’t think that they’re stupid enough to believe that he showed up because he saw a mirror death.

So this film is set up as if Max is going to fall off the wagon, and everyone will start doubting his sanity. But he doesn’t tell anyone. It also seems that the police are going to target him and it will be all The Wrong Man but that doesn’t happen either.

What does happen is he asks the mirrors what they want, and his reflection guides him by the beam of its flashlight to the poster of a missing girl who used to work at The Mayflower and disappeared two months ago. Her older sister has been searching for her and putting fliers all over town asking anyone with information to contact her. So Max does. Maybe her sister is the girl he keeps seeing in the mirrors! Ah, it is all falling into place now!

This is your typical someone was killed in an “accident” and now wants revenge and the truth to be known story. It feels almost like this could have begun as a non-Mirrors entity but the studio wanted a sequel so they folded that element in. I did not see the original 2003 Korean film Into The Mirrors or the American remake Mirrors, so I don’t know what the story was there. The girl is tormenting those who had a hand in her death, but she also goes after Max’s father, who had nothing to do with it. Maybe to show Max that she is serious about getting resolution and if he didn’t help her she kill those he loves? I don’t know. Neither does this movie. The girl doesn’t appear to those that she torments as herself – she appears in mirrors as their reflections, and the reflections then proceed to murder themselves. Me, if I was her, I’d want these people to know I was the one coming after them for what they did to me, and I’d sure as hell show up as my own spectral self.

I like his tattoos more than I like this movie.

Most of the “thrills” are generated from oblivious characters walking around talking on the phone or waiting for an elevator with their reflections out of sync and doing super creepy things like glaring moodily.

There are a few scenes with some gnarly carnage, but these set-pieces are so poorly conceived and executed that they don’t satisfy. When I found out this was filmed in Baton Rouge (where I was born) I had a YAY! moment and that was the only YAY! moment I had about this film. C-

Pitchforks and roses and Glenn Miller.

The Prowler (1981)

Directed by Joseph Zito, the man who brought us Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter, one of the superior entries in the series, this film was made before he helmed that installment. It is easy to see, watching this, why he was hired for that job.

Our final girl is Pam (Vicky Dawson) and she reminds me a hell of a lot of Amy Steel from Friday The 13th Part 2. In fact, they could be sisters – or cousins… “they laugh alike, they walk alike, at time they even talk alike -” As the Patty Duke Show theme song whizzed through my brain, I imagined Amy and Vicky starring together in a similar show… on this week’s episode: Amy goes to summer camp and Vicky organises a graduation day dance! There are several scenes in The Prowler quite similar to scenes from Friday The 13th Part 2 – hell, Pam even gets to brandish a pitchfork at the climax the same way Amy did. I was convinced the makers of this film had cast Vicky because of her resemblance to Amy, and that they had stolen paid tribute to Friday The 13th Part 2 by replicating some shots. But then I looked up the year The Prowler came out and it was 1981. Wait, a minute, Friday The 13th Part 2 was the one who copied off The Prowler! No, wait… what year did Friday The 13th Part 2 come out? The same year as The Prowler. Funny, huh? And what an idiot I felt like when I saw that numerous other websites had already drawn similarities between the two. Well, that is one reason I love fans of horror movies – they pick up on everything!

The film begins in the 40s with a bunch of soldiers returning from WWII to the town of Avalon Bay in New Jersey. One of the soldiers receives a letter from his love Rosemary, effectively ending their relationship. But he takes care of her and the boy she has replaced him at the graduation day dance!

Zoom ahead, thirty-five years, and Avalon Bay hasn’t had a graduation dance since the killings. But this year that will be different! Yes, this is another one of those so popular in the 80s slashers, where something tragic happened years ago on a certain day or at a certain event – Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Arbor Day, a Bar Mitzvah – and so the town decides – no more heart-shaped boxes of candy, no more trick or treating, no more planting trees, no more circumcision. But the kids graduating this year have finally managed to stage a resurrection so they can get their celebratory on. 

Well, you know how history repeats itself, and as Pam primps in front of a mirror, someone is putting on their old army fatigues, and before the punch has even been spiked somebody gets a knife through the top of their head, somebody is pitchforked in the shower, and Pam is getting chased through the halls of the empty sorority in one very tense and effective sequence.

Pam tells her main squeeze Mark, the town’s deputy sheriff, about her little encounter, and the two go Nancy Drew-ing around.

Oh, Pam, I think you can do better than that dumbass deputy sheriff. Dump him, he’d driftwood. And probably the killer. Also, why is the killer, dressed as a soldier, using a pitchfork as one of his weapons of choice?

Well, there is a dance going on after all, and the band at the dance is just bitchin’. One of the songs they sing has a lyric that goes: ‘But I want to see blood on the floor.’ Who are they? Is their CD on Ebay? God, the dances I went to were never this cool. I guess everything WAS better in the 80s.

Lisa, the skanky girl who looks a little like Carly Simon, and has been flirting with Mark all day and danced with him earlier – RIGHT IN FRONT OF PAM – is pissed because her date is puking in the bathroom and she is not having any fun. Deputy and Pam arrive, having decided everyone should stay there so they can stay safe… though Lisa walks right past them and out the door two seconds after they walk in. Deputy and Pam talk Miss Something-Or-Other, who seems to be in a position of authority, into interrupting the band (boo!) to make an announcement about a prowler on campus and that everyone should stay put for their own well-being.

Well, Lisa is at the pool, swimming, and surprisingly she is not naked. But soon, she is dead. I guess Miss Something-Or-Other was right about the prowler being potentially dangerous.

A lot more stuff goes on – some hooking up, some finding of a dug up grave, some hiding under a bed, some killer unmasking… the identity of the lunatic isn’t really that exciting. The film would have been great if it didn’t have so much downtime where we’re just… waiting… for… something… to… happen…

Not the worst slasher around, but not on the shortlist either. C

Oh, baby!

First Born (2007)

When I wrote my review for Piranha 3D I said that I’d love to see Elisabeth Shue in more genre work – well, my wish was granted before I even made it! How is that for some instant gratification? And Mrs. Shue has a leading role!

This could almost be a Rosemary’s Baby remake. We have all the same elements – woman getting pregnant, woman moving, woman cutting her hair really short, woman becoming paranoid, woman believing outside forces are influencing the life and fate of her and her baby, woman running around in her nightie with a butcher knife. Think Rosemary’s Baby without the witches, and you have something akin to First Born.

This film was released with no fanfare and seems to have gotten generally awful reviews. I was expecting something really unwatchable, and I was rather surprised when it was quite the opposite. I’m not sure why so many people trashed this movie – is it because it really has no fresh elements of its own and that it cribs (ha, ha) almost everything so liberally from other sources? Well, name me a movie that doesn’t do that these days. This is one of those GROWN-UP thrillers, where the threat is more psychological and there is next to no blood.

The tag line is “Beware the baby” but a more fitting one would have been “Beware the baby… doll!” This is not an evil baby movie, it is a mommy-goes-crazy movie.

Elisabeth Shue plays Laura, a dancer, who lives with her husband in the city and becomes pregnant. This leads to the buying of a new house, which the current owners are DYING and desperate to get rid of – CHEAP is the name of the game – first warning sign, no? The baby comes and Elisabeth Shue begins experiencing some awful Brooke Shields level postpartum depression. There is also the problem of these mice that seem to have overrun the house… when the exterminator comes to take care of it, he finds a diary hidden in the basement. The pages are all blank. Yet, later in the film, they somehow fill themselves in.

The clerk in the local supermarket tells Elisabeth Shue that she used to be friends with the girl who formerly lived in the house, until the girl moved away to go to NYU and no one has spoken to her since.  And this doll… the day it was suggested that Elisabeth Shue may be pregnant, she took a ride on the subway and spotted a young girl with a baby. When the girl got off the subway, she left the baby behind, and Elisabeth Shue going to investigate, found it was just a plastic doll wrapped up in a blanket. And for some reason she decided to keep it. The family dog, however, thought she should not have, and he drags it into the woods, before meeting his untimely fate.

The husband hires a nanny to help Elisabeth out, and the nanny who seems to be of Romanian descent, can tell that Elisabeth isn’t happy. The nanny speaks of how miserable she was when she had her first baby, and how she often had thoughts of death. When she spoke to her mother about, her mother wondered if she had been cursed. The nanny goes on to say that when a mother has a baby, the mother is cut in two pieces, one piece is the baby and one is the mother. Sometimes the baby takes too much and the baby steals the mother’s soul and the mother begins to die. The nanny says she went to someone who was known as a person who could remove curses and the nanny says she got her soul back.

So Elisabeth, looking for a how-to-get-your-soul-back-and-remove-curses primer, heads to the bookstore. She gets a book on witchcraft and inside finds a picture of mice, with a caption that says they are often the familiars, demon spirits that take on the form of vermin to aid a witch. And she also finds a picture of a doll that looks just like the one she rescued from the subway and has in the house again. (She saw the doll in the woods after the dog hid it, and going to retrieve it, her water broke.) So what is going on? Is the doll cursed? Is someone putting the voojoo on her?

The ending is by no means explicit, but is starling and disturbing. It is not a surprising outcome as the film gives us several visual clues that this is where it is heading, but it is a rather bold denouement and maybe that contributes to why this film isn’t really popular or well-liked – it is hard to say one “enjoyed” a film like this.

From a technical standpoint this is very well made. Elisabeth Shue totally delivers and this film wouldn’t have had half as much impact without her.

This one sure doesn’t spell everything out and and there are several ways it can be interpreted. I love endings like that. This is so different from films that are just too lazy to do the work – this film expertly sets up its conclusion and is able to support several different theories because it is done so well. The writer and director Isaac Webb, has not made another film yet, but based on this offering, I’d be very interested in seeing what else he is capable of. B-

Cutting Class

Bloody Reunion (2006)

AKA To Sir With Love – this title does not fit this film and makes absolutely no sense. So we’re going with Bloody Reunion, which does fit and does make sense. There is a reunion. And it is bloody.

Our movie begins in a classroom, with adolescent students making arts and crafts while a young, pregnant teacher, Mrs. Park, supervises them. Later, the children are outside playing in the water (I guess this is recess? it seems Mrs. Park conducts her classes from her home) and the teacher is sitting at the shore watching. Suddenly, blood begins pouring down her legs… I guess the baby is coming. Oh, I was right. And what a baby it is! Deformed in the tradition of the original Jason Voorhees or Phenomena‘s climactic creature, the parents find him so hideous that they keep him locked in the basement. One day it all becomes too much for the father, who if you ask me seemed like a real jerk anyway, and he hangs himself.

Now we skedaddle to many years later, which would be the present, and a detective is in that very same basement, examining a grisly tableau – a very Saw looking scene – lots of bodies, lots of the red stuff, lots of torture having been done. None of these people died peacefully in their sleep. So the detective makes his way to the hospital where the only two survivors have been taken. Mrs, Park and one of her former students, Mi-Ja, who was living with her and taking care of her. The teacher is unconscious, and Mi-Ja is by her side, traumatised it seems. The detective, understandably, wants to know what the hell happened. It is his job and all. So Mi-Ja begins to relate her tale…

And we go to flashback, which most of the movie takes place in. Mrs. Park is so ill that she requires a wheelchair, and the almost constant attentions of Mi-Ja. In an effort to lift Mrs. Park’s spirits, Mi-Ja invited several of her old classmates, and Mrs. Park’s former pupils, back to the house/school, for the weekend. Now if you have been paying attention, you’ll already know that these folks are DEAD MEAT and they’ll be lucky if they make it through the night.

As the students arrive, they are all eager to see their teacher. Mrs. Park is very happy they have come, but something seems off. It soon becomes clear that Mrs. Park is not the apple-pie-and-ice-cream nice lady that she appears.

At dinner, one of the students, who has been drinking all day, explodes into a rage, chastising everyone for not being honest and saying how they really feel about their old teacher, and how she actually treated them. He says the only reason he came back was to tell her off.

All of the students have bad memories of her, memories that stunted them, memories of her maliciousness and cruelty. One of the students was an athlete and after losing a race, the teacher forced him to do so many squats as a punishment that he blew out his leg, an injury that still troubles him, and dashed any dreams of future athletics he had. One of the female students, who was overweight in the past, has quite changed now and is almost unrecognizable to everyone – recalls that one day, as Mrs. Park weighed her, the teacher made fun of her her for being fat and joked that she almost broke the scale. This young woman is now so obsessed with perfecting herself, that the hospital refuses to do any more plastic surgery for her because they feel she is unbalanced. The young woman constantly wears sunglasses throughout the movie because of the stitches still in her eyelids. The teacher, when reminded of these things, is confused and seems unable to remember any of it. It is even implied that the teacher seduced and slept with one of the students.

A shy young man who was also once one of Mrs. Park’s students showed up at her house a year ago and has been helping out around the property. His mother was hit by a car when he was in school, and because of her accident he dropped out and no one had seen him until his recent reappearance. The shy boy has a memory of Mrs. Park’s son, in the basement, wearing a paper bunny mask he had made to hide his face.

Well, before long, it appears that anyone left alone with the teacher will recite their own story of how she shamed or abused them and a few “accidents” occur, in which the teacher almost loses her life. Mi-Ja is the only one in the group who doesn’t seem to have any woes or ill-will about Mrs. Park.

Darkness falls, some attempt to sleep, some stay up to discuss their teacher and the old days, and some find their way to the beach. And an uninvited guest makes his presence known – he’s wearing a bunny mask, and he seems to have some complaints and an agenda of his own.

Nothing in this movie is what it appears. None of these students have turned out to be very happy or successful and they all blame Mrs. Park in some way for their failures. She ruined them, is their reasoning.

I did feel bad for Mrs. Park – sure was a real witch in the past, as we get to see – but now she seems like a completely different woman, and she genuinely does seem to care about her students, and not remember anything of what she did to them then.

During the middle section of this film, when the killer first appears and is stalking away, I was really digging this film. I was almost ready to christen it one of the best slashers made in the past twenty years – and perhaps one of the best slashers ever made, period. But then as the end approached, it started to run out of steam, the seams began to show and it came apart.

Of course it must be hard to maintain this kind of exciting and exacting momentum, and while the ending for me did not completely ruin the film, I’m not sure it did it any favors. It is easy to see how the script had such a good set-up and how it would be difficult to produce a pay-off satisfying enough to please everyone and at the same time really wow us. I can’t say we’re cheated, but we do feel shortchanged all the same. This is one of those films with multiple endings and none of them are truly as rewarding as the eighty minutes that came before. The first ending is nothing short of a letdown, the second is full of pathos and does on examination ALMOST hold up – it doesn’t really answer any questions, but instead spins everything we had seen into a new perspective, leaving us a lot to wonder about. For a film that was so flawlessly executed for the majority of its run time, it is hard not to be disappointed that that level of competence was not maintained throughout.

Nevertheless, it is well made, well photographed, and it sure did make me squirm – it has some of the sickest death scenes in recent memory and it is one WET sounding film.

Think April Fool’s Day on steroids, with an Identity, The Usual Suspects and High Tension cocktail. And – finally! – we have an Asian horror film without the so familiar long dark-haired vengeful dripping wet ghost girl. B-

The Best Month Of The Year Is Here!

                                  

Happy October 1st everyone!