Monster Monday: Clive Barker’s Nightbreed – Cabal Cut

Cabal was written in what could be termed the original ‘heyday’ of Clive Barker’s horror reign. Clive Barker is best known for the tricksy Cenobites and the ruthless Candyman, but Cabal presented a brilliantly realised clutch of monsters who were actually the victims and  living as refugees from the harsh prejudices of the modern world. With their numbers depleted, the monsters took shelter underground, in the appropriately named graveyard of Midian, in an effort to avoid further destruction from frightened humans. Although you would be a fool if you weren’t a little afraid of the creatures, the point is that the world is a poorer place without their glorious strangeness. It’s a bit like angle taken later by the X-Men movies, only a lot more visceral.

Midian Group photo – thanks to Occupy Midian Facebook group

The essence of Cabal’s story was adapted into the movie Nightbreed, the new title which is actually a collective term for the monsters. A ‘troubled young man’™ named Boon is gradually drawn to their hiding spot through a series of strange dreams, and his psychiatrist (played with cool creepiness by director David Cronenberg) seems to be hiding some rather dark secrets of his own. The ancient secrets of Midian will soon be revealed to a terrified human populace, but who is truly monstrous is up for some debate.

When Nightbreed was first screened in 1990, it was heavily mutilated by the studios, and rumours proliferated of a more extensive, intelligent, and downright better cut that was a bit more faithful to the book. This ‘Cabal Cut’ was finally glimpsed at Frightfest London in 2012 and other screenings can be tracked down here.

Now, the wonderful website following the re-released cut, Occupy Midian, continues to post information about this elusive beast. Until Nightbreed’s better self gets released in its full glory on blu-ray and DVD, it’s well worth looking out for a screening of this cut at a film festival.

The Eyeball is keeping its lashes crossed that soon the Cabal Cut will pop up in the UK again – and is still annoyed about missing it at Frightfest last year. Until the Cabal Cut is made widely available, there’s still an uncut Region 1 DVD of the 1990 version out there, and the book to enjoy. But do check out the movie. Monsters are awesome. Midian is waiting.

Occupy Midian petition for reissue of the Cabal Cut on Facebook, Twitter, ipetition.

Beautiful monsters

Monster Monday: Lord of Tears (2013) AKA Owlman

First of all, thank you to Mike at the Lovecraft ezine for sending this to my inbox. Thanks for sleepless nights. Really.

The Lord of Tears is coming soon, a ‘low budget horror’ directed by Lawrie Brewster, also involving David Schofield, a veteran genre actor and craggy faced genre favourite from American Werewolf In London among many, many others.

Funded by Kickstarter, this has the potential to be extremely effective. A man in the Scottish Highlands is menaced by a childhood terror, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Slenderman, which they have, improbably, made even scarier.

Lord of Tears

This is a monster that really shouldn’t be that scary. It utililises the dread horror of the Slenderman, and yes, the Slenderman is already pretty unnerving. It’s the internet boogeyman meme that just won’t die, that’s bad enough.

But then, egad, it makes it worse. So much worse. The trailer creates a terrific sense of dread and atmosphere.

And what’s so scary about owls? Really?

OK, then imagine yourself in your own dark hallway, or in the centre of town on a Friday night out, and what do you see peering out at you, from the end of that dark hallway, or from a shop window reflecting the night back at you?

This. This monster is what you see.

Hope you’re also going to be pre-ordering the blu ray, with all the goodies, and enjoying this on its release in July 2013. If not, look out for the review on this site in the summer.

Thanks for the nightmares, you wonderful filmmakers. And for the rest of you horror fans – enjoy….if you dare.

Monster Mondays – The Thing (2011) Awesome beasts

Monster Monday

The Thing (2011)

John Carpenter’s 1982 ‘The Thing’ was an eye-popping mix of tension and gory special effects which were mind blowing at the time, and are still effectively shocking today. So when word of the remake or prequel started to come through, it seemed ridiculous, nothing could top it.

And now this remake (or, ok, officially a prequel) has been out for a couple of years, and I still haven’t watched the whole movie, let’s just make that clear now. However, I have peeked at the shiny innards of the film, having grown curious about the way they treated the iconic, shapeshifting alien which so troubled Kurt Russell and Keith David back in 1982.

And you know what? I was pleasantly blown away by the new movie’s monstrous effects. I was expecting much ropier CGI than this, and they’ve brought us a beautifully horrendous and importantly a very SOLID looking monster. Im only going by a youtube copy here, so can’t say for absolutely certain that it’s flawless. But neither is it a SyFy channel lame duck, there’s no unconvincing SharktaPus rubbish for this remake. The new Thing has some quality nasty going on. And arms…with teeth,,,and merging with your face and…and….dissolving and spearing and…owch. Wow.

I really didn’t think it would be any good, but this is pretty twisted. Yes, the Dead Space movie could get made, and if we’re lucky it’d look half as good as this.

The video below contains spoilers, but if like me you don’t want to tarnish the memory of the original film (which, yes, I am well aware was ALSO a remake of a quality black and white ‘man in a rubber suit’ extravaganza from RKO in the 1950s) then this is an excellent way to taste of the meat of the latest version. Weirdly, it’s now a lot likelier I will look at this once it pops up on Netflix, or becomes very, very cheap on blu ray. Or if I win it in a raffle…

Although it could be argued that this gives away all the good bits, if the remake is any good at all it should survive that. In the mid-1990s, Lenny Henry ruined the surprise of the SFX in the 1982 The Thing. I foolishly watched a documentary he presented about monsters in movies, shortly before ITV network (UK) was broadcasting the whole ‘Thing’ movie. Still loved it to pieces.

So if my appreciation of the 1982 movie remains unaffected by seeing all the goodies ahead of any narrative, maybe the prequel isn’t going to be so bad after all. Let’s remember that high tension and relatable characters made the Carpenter version vastly rewatchable. Perhaps this new attempt has nailed it as well. Perhaps.

Generally, though, a prequel is stuck in its own dead end of time, doomed to copycat whatever enthralled viewers of the originals, whilst charging boldly through the motions like a soulless running zombie. What happened to the Norwegian team, who the US research team tried to help, was already quite evident during the scenes when Macready checks out what remained of their camp. I keep calling the prequel a remake because John Carpenter pretty much nailed the interesting part of that story, and all its lovely Lovecraftian elements as well. Frankly, the prequel looks like more of a ‘look what we can do now’, which is fine, but not necessarily as intriguing. Of course that could be age talking, too…

What would be interesting to see is an actual sequel to the John Carpenter movie, with Macready and Childs stopping the Thing in another setting. Or at least something that moves the story along, or tries it from a fresh angle. The logical progression would be to move it to the desert. Right? A ‘Thinged’ camel would be pretty awesome….it already looks like a camel spider. Gulp.

On a final (heavhanded?) note, the Thing monster is endlessly transforming and adapting to survive its new environment, and the blockbuster industry could definitely learn a thing or two from that.

Paranormal Activity 2! Out 2010…

CONTAINS SPOILER FOR FINALE OF PARANORMAL ACTIVITY!

Very excited, and terrified, check out the rocking chair and the child only appearing in the mirror at the end.

This could still be really lame. The first one was a slow burner, but it worked. Hopefully this won’t do a Blair With 2 and chuck in a load of teenagers and some glossy photography. I think they’re keeping to the demonic spirit of the original, though.

Cold Prey (2006) Dir. Roar Uthaug

The Thing without, er, the Thing. 
There’s lots of snow and a some tense teenagers, anyway…

What two things work best in horror films? What are the tricks that these films very, very often forget? Well, let’s try making the characters just a little likeable. It’s a stretch I know, but perhaps make them less like a bunch of whiny brats, and just show us a bunch of nice kids who you’re sorry to see go. Secondly, I think the biggest scares come in the anticipation – obscure our vision, keep the characters totally oblivious, and watch the terror roll in. Cold Prey excels in the two conditions above.

But, yes, there’s a girl in her undies being terrified…it IS still a horror film

Of course, it depends what you’re watching it for in the first place. If you want T&A and naked breasts and blood, then there’s a plethora of films out there promising just that. Not all of those are keepers, though.

Making a refreshing change from the usual, then, this Norwegian horror is pretty slick. It seems to have a decent budget (although not according to wikipedia), and although it was very cheap to buy, I was pleasantly surprised at how effective Cold Prey was. It keeps us guessing for the first hour, then the unease creeps in, then the bloody horror follows. It understands the power of hiding what’s around the corner, and keeping the reveal secret until the very end. It follows a few of the ‘slasher in the wilderness’ cliches, but the thick, unrelenting snow and the unusual setting – a Norwegian Overlook - is a good choice.

 The snow-swept, incredibly isolated setting adds to the fear!

And it looks gorgeous, too.

I enjoyed it, the subtitles seemed to disappear after a while, and I think being realistically terrified translates well in any language. This is an excellent horror with a little more to it than normal, without being annoyingly pretentious or boring. And it’s really not horribly gory. There’s enough to make it terrifying without being totally gratuitous. The worst  part is really the snowboarding injury that lands them in this mess to begin with. Costing barely a snip to buy, at least two good hours of terror await you!

Struggling to survive…

SPOILERS

I would have preferred to know more about what happened between the little boy going missing and the hotel being closed for so many years, and left with all its booze and power still attached. How does he survive out there? What happened? Perhaps these questions get answered in the sequel, which came with the first one in the boxset. I’ll have to watch it very soon and find out!

Terrific Scandinavian horror with non-annoying characters and a fearsome opponent.
A nice change of pace – and nope, I’m never ever going into an old abandoned hotel…

The Killing Room (2009) Dir. Jonathan Liebesman

Blending Saw & Cube with mixed up results

The tagline above is a little misleading. This doesn’t really have the hook, the brutality or gutteral nastiness that seemed to guarantee Saw‘s success (and seven now? Really?) and it doesn’t share the totally surreal horrors of the much-overlooked Cube. Instead, this feels like a budget-friendly version of both (and trust me, they were pretty cheap) with a little less imagination and an overinflated sense of its own relevance.

I’m trying to review this without endlessly comparing it to Cube, but I can’t help feeling that it performed all this better. The premise is fairly straightforward. Four people turn up to a human testing facility inside a big, white tiled room, where they fill out a bunch of questionnaires. They’re briefly joined by the amiable Dr Phillips (Prison Break’s wonderful Peter Stormare), and everything seems perfectly straightforward until someone gets suddenly, violently shot in the face.

After this, all bets are off, and survival seems to depend on correctly guessing the answers to the world’s most inane questions. So far, so Saw, except Jigsaw didn’t work under black ops for the Government (that we know so far…) and this has far, far less gore and violence all over.

Now, I like my nearly bloodless, psychological horror at least as much as the horribly messy kind (and if torture’s done too convincingly, it sort of spoils the fun experience anyway) but The Killing Room just falls into the ‘not quite enough’ category. Not quite enough grossness, not entirely enough tension. Another movie spoiled by whispering, actually. It relies on the growing conflict between the ever-shrinking group of test subjects, and also on the moral quandry faced by Ms Reilly (Chloe Sevigny) who’s being interviewed at the testing range by the insane quack, Dr Phillips. He spends the film justifyig the experiments, as it soon becomes apparent that this is simply one of many ‘killing rooms’ inside a huge building in the middle of nowhere, where people are being manipulated in exactly the same way.

So I get deja-Cube here, only without Cube’s magnificent, nihilistic angle of ‘it was set up and left to run by itself’.

And, I admit that it’s Killing Room, not the many trapped rooms of the above. But my problem with it overall is that the people we meet are completely and utterly trapped – they have no escape possible at all, that’s obvious from the moment we learn it’s all being staged under the control of the morally-bankrupt scientists, callously observing their struggles. Even Ms Reilly’s wildcard interviewee fails to convince. Apart from her eventual decsion, there was still nobody who can possibly save them. This is one of the reasons it fails. The other is the reason for it all happening in the first place.

After soon realising all the characters we met had no chance at all, the only question left of any interest was ‘why are they doing it?‘. In Cube, there’s honestly ‘no reason at all‘ (avoid the sequels, though…) but here the process turns out to be a roundabout way of creating suicide bombers, as the Doctor aims to find people with the self sacrificial gene, those that give their lives for others (as in apotosis). As even Ms Reilly points out, there are better ways of going about this, and it probably isn’t by mentally torturing someone until they bug out and try to shoot themselves.

At the end, the survivor gets put into the second phase of the programme, which indicates that brainwashing is now involved.WTF? Did none of these people watch the Manchurian Candidate? Surely that’s where you start? It just felt very back to front.

While there’s nothing particularly wrong with the movie, it’s just not interesting enough for a ‘people stuck in one box’ concept. There are more interesting interpretations around. I intend to see Fermat’s Room at some point, which is another mash of Cube, Saw and the whole claustrophobic, often mathematically obsessed end of the horror genre.

Worth a look, but don’t expect the whispers and a sleepy performance from Peter Stormare to fully hold your attention.

Cube is awesome.

The Backwoods (2006) Dir Koldo Serra

Straw Dogs reborn

The trailer’s accurate, most of this is pretty good, 

Gary Oldman and Paddy Considine star in this UK-French-Spanish effort

The 1970s produced an odd clutch of movies. The ones that Backwoods specifically refers to hark from the arty exploitation genre. These were low key, had decent actors and usually had one or two brutal elements that the infamous ‘Grindhouse’ scene would find most  agreeable. Top of this list is Straw Dogs, the epitomy of ‘city folk vs yokels‘ movies (up there with Deliverance and Southern Comfort). Backwoods appears to be a very good try at returning to the look and feel of these classic films.

LOOK OUT, SPOILERS AHEAD

This is a European take on the concept, setting it in somewhere almost as isolated as the middle of Cornwall – some woods deep in the Spanish countryside. Two couples return to an old family house for an extended holiday and they also hope to change their fortunes whilst they’re there. Unavoidably, the locals are about as friendly as the clientéle of the Slaughtered Lamb, and alarm bells should start ringing when the local perverts start eyeing up the sexy, yet detached Lucy (Virginie Ledoyen). Things start to get really dangerous when the two men discover a young girl with a deformed hand locked up in a filthy barn, and when they bring her back to their house the locals aren’t that far behind.

On the whole, the group’s decisions seem fairly sensible at the time. They try to leave, they try to reach some authorities, they are repeatedly thwarted by the weather and technology. They are convincingly isolated – and as this is set in 1978, there’s no BS about lack of a cell phone signal – they’re lucky to find a phone at all! When it all goes to hell, the group just try to get the hell out of the village, right up until they reach the next one anyway. This is an interesting take on the themes from Straw Dogs , and the locals are actually made just a little more human than being just ‘monstrous villagers’, even if what they did with the girl is definitely, hideously wrong.

The addition of the feral, captive young girl unavoidably reminds one of recent real life cases with a similar moral void. The question here is, does taking action warrant the loss of life involved? Should we interfere? But the ending is ultimately too poorly expressed to feeling particularly satisfying; the events just come to a grinding halt, the tension peters out, and it’s a shame, because up until then I’d been engrossed.

There’s lots to recommend this – the 1970s look and costuming is dead on, and the two men use accents that feel strangely right, pulled straight from the 1970s, the kind used in sitcoms and realistic BBC dramas fo the decade. The two women’s mismatched accents (French and Spanish) occasionally come across as monotonous, which is a shame, but they also give decent performances even if their characters don’t do the sensile thing towards the end. Everyone seems to forget they’re being chased – except for Paddy Considine’s character. If they’d listened to him in the first place, they might have been able to have a nice, quiet break and made friends with the incestuous bunch of locals!

Perhaps the subtles of the English subtitles were what truly failed this movie, although it’s honestly worth a look, but see what you make of the finalé as this seems to be its biggest failing.

Awesome recreation of the 1970s era of film, but too much is sadly lost in translation.

Paranormal Activity (2009) Dir Oren Peli

Who ya gonna call? No one, it turns out…

Yes, the ‘found footage’ genre is pretty overused these days. It’s cheap, it’s ‘realistic’ and it takes about five minutes to see results. But, in the right hands it can be extremely effective. The trick seems to be not to overcomplicate things. And keep the cast small, and have a decent reason to have a video camera on all the time whilst awful things are happening – as even in Cloverfield it was pushing it.

Paranormal Activity uses all of these strengths to great advantage, and strongly hints that just filming the events has exacerbated the whole problem. It’s a slick, streamlined piece of work with a decent pair of actors, who more or less carry the whole thing. Katie (Katie Featherstone) has been aware since childhood of a menacing presence that would stand over her at night. She lives with her boyfriend of three years, Micah (Micah Sloat) in their San Diego house, and he’s keen to get the spookfest going. He buys a very expensive videocamera and sets it up to watch their bed at night. He also enjoys taunting whatever might be out there. Idiot.

Their initial footage is fairly boring, but gradually things get weirder, and the first time a VERY LOUD NOISE comes from their attic is extremely unsettling, and it just gets better and better from there. Also, you will want to knock some sense into Micah way before the end. He repeatedly calls out the increasingly threatening presence, daring it to show itself and only making things worse for Katie, and the thing’s intentions gradually become horrendously clear.

Due to some slack download time on the PS3 – in HD – we ended up watching this in the middle of the night, when most of this film is set! This definitely helped with feeling the atmosphere, and we weren’t brave enough to watch it with the lights out. After all the horror movies I’ve ever watched, it’s still amazing how effective a deep reverby-bassline and a slamming door can be when the people onscreen are freaking out too. It’s also a lot better than watching Yvette Fielding scream her head off in a shed in Norwich, too, as you start to really care about this hapless couple.

Highly recommended, as it does exactly what it’s supposed to – just have a little patience, and be braver than we were and just TRY to watch this with the lights off! Prepare to be freaked out.

Never Cry Werewolf (2008) Dir Brenton Spencer

Fright Night with Werewolves

I’ve seen Fright Night a grand total of once, but was no stranger to the concept. Think a less expensive Lost Boys with a classic British actor thrown in instead of two Frog Brothers. The plot basically runs that, local kid who watches a cheesy TV show about monster hunters realises that his neighbour is in fact one of the ghastly undead, and he must eventually get help from the washed-up TV star in order to defeat the monster next door. And of course, the authorities won’t listen to them and the whole world thinks they’re insane.

Now reimagine this in the style of Buffy. That’s pretty much Never Cry Werewolf’s angle, and the washed up actor this time is the ever-young Kevin Sorbo (Hercules) as a TV hunter who goes around shooting endangered wild animals. As you can tell, the film never takes itself very seriously, and the ceature effects are pretty good. Nina Sobrev is a gorgeous lead as Loren, easy to root for and tough enough to take on the most ferocious of maneating monsters. She also has the required goofy male best friend, who hilariously starts to turn into a wolf-bitch-thing…

The werewolf guy isn’t perhaps as dangerously sexy scary as he probably should be, but he is pretty creepy all the same. See, he thinks  Loren is the reincarnation of his long lost wife, and hopes to recreate his relationship by seducing and turning her. Gulp. So, basically at one point she ends up down to her sports bra. Luckily she also has a kickass crossbow – but I think these are less use than a really big knife in most movies!

Keeping all the charm of the 1980s classic version, but with better everything, it bumps along at a decent pace and it doesn’t look too shabby, either. Comes highly recommended if you’re after a piece of lighthearted lycanthrope action, in the spirit of all those cheesy 80s monster movies. And it is way, WAY better than the bloody Wolfman remake.

Rogue (2007) Dir. Greg MaClean

Movies at the speed of Sky

You wait all this time for a decent Australian Killer Croc flick and then two turn up at once. Admittedly, there has been a bit of a delay between them on Sky. In 2009 they showed the very respectable Black Water. It was a highly effective, although low budget piece, where a small group of people go into the outback and end up stuck up a tree, trying to avoid being a gigantic croc’s latest meal. Black Water had a tiny cast and a rarely seen beast but built its appeal on some decent characters and very respectable acting talent. The beast wasn’t bad, either.

Now we have Rogue, from the director of the superlative Wolf Creek. This is a bigger budget deal delivering enough scares and plenty of tension to make it a pulp horror classic. Doing this effectively is not as easy as it looks and there are plenty of ways to screw up, but Greg Maclean has a fine handle on the balance of likeable characters, making the most of the awesome and deadly Outback scenery, and he has the added sense to barely show the croc until the last reel. There are a lot of crap CGI reptiles out there – way too many actually – but perhaps they’ve paved the way for the success of this one, which looks gloriously gnarly and convincing even at this scale, where it’s frequently in direct view of the camera. It’s big, and mean, and clearly pissed off.

And it has an attractive cast to try and chew on, although thankfully this avoids the usual slasher movie mix of perky teens. First, the lovely Rahda Mitchell fresh from surviving Silent Hill, plays the plucky tour guide, Kate Ryan, a woman who’s never left the Outback. Michael Vartan (the other hot guy from TV’s Alias) is Pete McKall, an enthusiastic travel writer. There’s also the novelty of seeing Sam Worthington two years before he became best known for playing a 10ft blue alien (Avatar, 2009) and a robot (Terminator: Salvation, 2009). Actually I still have no idea who he is, as to me he usually looks like an action man doll without the little scar to distinguish him. In Rogue he plays an obnoxious local who starts off intimidating the crocodile tourists. The rest of the luckless voyagers include a man with a sad little secret, a snobbish photographer, an uptight couple and an English family. I also have a soft spot for the ballsy Irish lady. Oh, and there’s a cute black and white dog called Kevin. Guess how long the puppy lasts?

So, this motley crew are put together for the long cruise upriver, watching the lethal crocodiles swim past from their boat which seems to ride far too low in the water. We’re shown just how far REAL crocs, let alone massive CGI ones, can leap out of the water when properly motivated. Terrifying. Then one of the tourists spots the tail end of a distress flare upriver, and Kate elects to go and check it out. They mosey into Sacred Ground, which as we all know is a byword for ‘keep the hell out or die horribly!’ Sure enough, they piss off the croc and things get messy.

Considering this comes from the director of the pants-wettingly scary Wolf Creek, a landmark, unflinchingly nasty horror flick, Rogue actually doesn’t get nearly as messy as I’d been expecting. Don’t let that fool you – there’s plenty of tension, heightened because he’s mean enough to give us decent characters with back stories and reasons to live. Don’t worry, there’s also blood, just not a whole lot. You may be pleasantly surprised at how it all unfolds. Mind you, the woman who plays the Mary Ellen character is a dead ringer for Miranda Richardson, which had me confused for the whole movie. I was very disappointed to see it wasn’t her after all!

A few questions, though. Has no one else ever entered the ‘sacred land which the giant croc protects? I suppose they wouldn’t have lasted long enough to warn people if they had, but you’d think someone would have picked up on it even if they do a great job of showing the sheer isolation of their predicament. Also, I really feel the ending needed just a little more of a twist. Sometimes these movies need the possibility of the dragon not being quite dead, if that makes sense. That was one (of several) reason that Creep failed to satisfy, too.

Finally, although comparisons can be made, there’s really no point calling this a Jaws rip-off. EVERYTHING in the ‘evil nature’ genre is a Jaws ripoff! Most ‘evil nature’ films can only be measured whether they’re almost as good, or nowhere near as good at that particular flick, and most overdo the CGI which doesn’t deliver any tension whatsoever. Rogue really borrows from the best, and this is a solid monster flick, which along with Black Water serves the ‘giant croc’ section of horror perfectly. I’d place Rogue slightly higher than Black Water because the Outback photography is gorgeous, truly stunning, and the creature is even more impressive.

Recommended as a fun monster romp that doesn’t disappoint.