Thursday, October 8th, 2009
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Horrorthon Posts / Horrorthon Reviews
(2008) ****
The Strangers is on the opposite end of the horror spectrum from Hostel. It’s pure atmosphere, pure style. As I wrote below, a movie like Hostel works on multiple levels, employing complex storytelling techniques to convey political and philosophical overtones (in the great tradition of Halloween and Dawn of the Dead). The Strangers isn’t interested in any of that. It’s all about wind chimes, and neo-Ridley Scott handheld photography, and little indoor breezes that make the candles flicker. This is the kind of movie in which the characters decide to put some music on and you’re not remotely surprised that they’re playing vintage piano blues…on a phonograph.
The Strangers has exactly as much plot as it needs (i.e. barely any) and not a stroke more. The story is so sparse, it actually flirts with the kind of surrealism practiced by Polanski and Lynch and Antonioni; any less of an explanation of what you’re watching, and you’d be too baffled to follow the sequences and you’d have to classify it as an “art film.” By means of a rudimentary – but very effective – framing device (involving a pair of young quasi-Jehovah’s Witnessess on bicycles) we’re deprived early on of much hope of a happy ending; even the basic elements of surprise are essentially stripped away. But this skeletal narrative framework is filled with so much sensual texture and so many artfully evocative touches that it’s every bit as gripping and frightening as it would be if you had been provided with reams of exposition (if not more so). I mentioned the miniature Jehovah’s Witnesses on Schwinn bicycles who open the movie: Why are they Jehovah’s Witnesses, exactly? If you want a reasonable answer, you’ll have to get over it. Because it looks good, and suits the odd, off-kilter tone that the movie sustains so masterfully. (Just like the vinyl record, which is, of course, warped and scratched.)
This is, obviously, an extremely difficult game for filmmakers to play (judging by the failure rate); most of the points I’ve made above could easily be employed as criticisms rather than plaudits (and, of course, have been by the movie’s detractors), so I have to give the writer/director (Bryan Bertino, making his debut) tremendous credit for not hedging his bets; for having the courage to strip nearly everything away and be assured that he’d still have a movie. Like Night of the Living Dead, The Strangers focuses completely on a few characters in a remote house over the course of a single night, increasingly aware that a grave threat is outside, trying to get in…but Night of the Living Dead is Dr. Zhivago by comparison. This time, there are only two protagonists: estranged couple Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman (who’s from that breed of interchangeably affable, reasonably talented male actors you find in horror movies with female protagonists, like the boyfriend in The Ring), whose reasons for being alone in this lonely house on this particular evening are (again) barely provided. The threat beyond the walls – the strangers who seem able to find their way inside despite Tyler’s and Speedman’s increasingly desperate efforts to keep them out – are so elemental and yet so mundane in their fearsomeness that none of the standard movie responses seem to apply. The plot never thickens, or provides any twists, but it doesn’t matter: it never even occurs to you that you’ve seen these narrative moves before.
So why not five stars? Only because the movie ultimately plays its cards a bit too close to the vest; Bertino isn’t quite the visual/auditory genius he would need to be to pull off this parlor trick completely. (But it’s his first movie!) The Strangers was a surprise hit, and there’s talk of a sequel (which may or may not be a good idea), which indicates its effectiveness in bravely sticking to its minimalist intentions and winning over the audience, not with ideas or innovations, but with pure skill. There’s not much to be said concerning what this movie’s “about” (again, in marked contrast to Hostel), but confounding the need to answer that question is among the noblest traditions in art (Ridley Scott famously bragged that Alien had “no theme and no meaning”). Ultimately, The Strangers is about the sound of crickets, outside the window…and the whisper of unease that accompanies that sound.
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
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Horrorthon Posts / Horrorthon Reviews
(2005) ****
This is a very impressive and very interesting movie. It’s quite different from what I had anticipated; it’s cleverer and more sophisticated than its plain, flat presentation suggests. I had certain expectations because of the controversial “gorenography”/”gore porn” labels that got attached to the Hostel and Saw franchises; since I’ve seen three of the Saw movies (and that was just about enough; thank you very much) I figured that Hostel would be more of the same: a thinly-constructed, rudimentary armature for a run of sequences that push the envelope of forcing the audience to witness horrible things being done to the human body.
As with so many movies (and books, and other things) that defy expectations, it’s not that the expectations are entirely wrong; just that they miss the essential truth. Strictly speaking, Hostel is exactly what I wrote above (and what the critics of “gorenography” are so dismissive of and disgusted by): an excuse for graphic depictions of torture. But there’s a great deal more going on here, and that’s why the movie has lingered in my imagination and prompted far more enthusiasm and introspection and unsettling visualization that the Saw movies could ever hope to provoke. Sure, Saw makes a feint toward “meaning” something, in that its “traps” are supposed to have a moral dimension that gets discussed in voice-overs (through that goddamned voice-lowering filter you get so sick of) by Jigsaw, the torture “ringmaster,” but, in the end (as octopunk pointed out in his Saw reviews), that’s all just nonsense; the point is just to hurt the characters and watch them suffer.
Hostel is significantly different in several ways. First, there’s a fairly detailed story that unspools for the entire first half of the movie, with nary a drop of blood in sight. This opening sequence, which is filled with a mounting sense of dread (which the anticipation of the gore to come only sharpens), falls into the classic suspense/horror tradition of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Blair Witch Project; the characters are getting into deeper and deeper trouble without really noticing, and as they miss clue after clue (which we delight in picking up around the periphery of the action) the feeling of impending danger is enhanced by the implicit critique of their weaknesses and blindness. It’s classic Greek Tragedy Hubris; the hero enjoys a scenario that seems too good to be true, and, in failing to notice this, suffers the dire consequences of finding out that it is in fact not only “too good to be true” but actually far, far worse than he could ever have imagined.
The premise, and the plot that threads its way through that premise, belongs to a classic horror-movie tradition (exemplified by Halloween) in which the big danger isn’t a supernatural phenomenon, but is, instead, a grotesque exaggeration of human behavior that doesn’t really hold up under daylight scrutiny but is plausible enough to convince the audience through the course of the story. There really couldn’t be a “Michael Meyers” (who just is a psycho killer from the age of six, with no explanation), and, similarly, there couldn’t really be a “Hostel” (or an “Elite Hunting Corp.,” the shadowy and deadly agency that’s the real business behind the quaint Eastern European bed-and-breakfast). But while Halloween’s larger symbolic purpose is simply to address “the boogeyman” in our dreams, Hostel is working on a more sophisticated metaphorical canvas.
This is where Hostel really shines, and for the final forty-five minutes, in which the suspenseful buildup of the first half is more than paid off, the filmmaking shifts into a high gear that far surpasses anything you expect based on the deliberately-staid opening sequences. For the ignorant, arrogant American (and Icelandic) tourists who want nothing from the European continent but a pot-fueled orgy, the Slovakian town that’s their terminal destination (literally) is not just a Hell on Earth but a neo-Orwellian vision of predatory human nature that instantly separates (as they say) the quick from the dead. The sequences inside the slaughterhouse are standard horror-movie fare, to be sure, but the urgency and pathos (and genuine heroism) of those scenes are particularly vivid thanks to the story’s rich political and symbolic overtones. Hostel requires a strong stomach, not just because of the gore, but due also to the pig-like behavior of the protagonists as they’re led to the slaughter (by their libidos and their imperialistic naivite and sense of entitlement). But you can’t really call any of it “gratuitious” (although the movie’s detractors strongly disagree); the symbolic overtones are too rich and too deep, and the movie’s lingering hold on your imagination is a testament to that unusual intelligence and depth.
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
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Cartoons / Horrorthon Posts
These villains constantly pursue me!
