The Orphanage

The Orphanage
Starring: Belén Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Príncep
Directed by: Juan Antonio Bayona

Style: Supernatural Suspense
Blood and Guts: 1
Fright Factor: 4
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: No weaponry used
Overall rating: 5 out of 5

All Laura (Rueda) wants to do is run a home for mentally disabled children with her husband Carlos (Cayo) and son Simón (Príncep). However, her son has never really been around other children and so has imaginary friends as his play mates. Perhaps the orphanage Laura lived at as a child was not the best choice of places to live. On an outing to the beach, Simón meets another imaginary friend in a cave and invites him home. It isn't long before Simón has disappeared and Laura believes that Simón's friend from the cave is instead a ghost who has spirited away her child to be an eternal playmate.

The atmosphere of this movie is unbelievably haunting. There is little music, so all of the creaks and groans of the old house are allowed to work their magic. All of the actors are top notch, which allows the story to be seamlessly told to us. Combine that with some excellent cinematography and you have an excellent backdrop for a supernatural story. Herein lies the strength of the movie: it doesn't resort to hackneyed techniques and cheap scares to thrill the audience. All they do is tell the story and let the natural dread and ominous nature of the film seep into the audience's bones. It is perfectly natural for Laura not to see that Simón's friends may be ghosts, especially when they reveal to him a secret his parents have not told him, and yet the way in which Simón describes everything immediately sets off the spook alarm. This is a great example of how to unnerve your audience without jumping out and yelling "Boo" like so many lesser movies do.

Much like other Spanish ghost stories like The Others and The Devil's Backbone, there are very few moments of horror. Instead, things that happen cause people to shiver for the shear fact that we are afraid of what might happen. That isn't to say there aren't terrifying moments in the film. When the imaginary child first appears to Laura and a sequence involving an ambulance both sent a strong shiver down my spine. All of the pieces slowly fall into place, along with a few red herrings that become sub-plots, and so there is never a sense of expecting what will happen next. Some people may take issue with the ending, but I think it is true to both the characters and the story they are presenting.

Overall, I would say this is a film everyone should see regardless of whether they call themselves horror movie people. It is much more of a supernatural story, and while there are frightening moments, it is nothing that will terrify people for nights on end. The masterful storytelling and the beauty of the film far outweigh any negative aspects.

Diary of the Dead

Diary of the Dead
Starring: Joshua Close, Scott Wentworth, Michelle Morgan, Joe Dinicol
Directed by: George A. Romero

Style: Zombie Horror
Blood and Guts: 4
Fright Factor: 3
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Firearms, biting
Overall rating: 4 out of 5

We all know how it starts. The dead return to life and start treating the living as one big buffet table. The living, at first, think it is some kind of plague. It's still people, right. Finally, after things go beyond control, then people realize that it is in fact a zombie outbreak. This story follows a group of college students caught out in the forest filming a horror film. Upon returning to campus, they find it deserted and the walking dead roaming the streets. Not knowing where to turn, they decide to drive around in their RV hoping to find a safe place in a town that may have none left.

I was thrilled to find out that George Romero was releasing another zombie film. He always has a unique approach to the genre, and even when the films are not that good, they still offer up something that is entertaining and different. Diary of the Dead is admittedly not one of his best offerings. However, I think people have been harsher critics of the film than I think is deserved.

The entire film plays out like a grassroots horror film, with everything filmed through the view lens of two video cameras the characters carry at all times. All of the dialogue is a bit trite and bland, but I attribute it to being much more reminiscent of the YouTube generation of people who no longer need to be articulate and clever. This stems from the movie being much more of a social indictment of the cultural phenomenon of everyone wanting to record everything and post it online. One of the main characters even talks about how, in our rush to all be known, the truth is watered down, as everyone claims expertise but nobody knows who is actually right. As with the Blair Witch Project, the main character continue to film as it allows a distance from the horrific events that occur. I mean, how many times do you see people with cell phone cameras at the scene of an accident? In that regard, I think Romero is spot on.

The pacing is tight and all of the moments well filmed. There are several tense moments, and enough funny or darkly funny ones to really engage the audience. My favorite moment involves a scythe to the head, but there are also a few choice dialog moments too. The entire film is very successful in its tone and quality, though you need to accept going in that you are seeing a large scale YouTube movie with quality effects and an outstanding director.

There has been criticism about the plot and how you don't really get to know or care about the characters. While this is true, I don't think that this movie necessarily warrants that. We are supposed to see what it is like first hand to be in the beginning of a zombie outbreak. By doing so, the filmmaker is able to (sometimes a bit heavy-handedly) discuss the role of media in our lives and also where our society might turn if everything goes bad.

Overall, it is an excellent film to see, if only as the experiment that it is. Once again, Romero has proven that he doesn't make zombie films. He makes films of social commentary that happen to involve zombies.

1408

1408
Starring: John Cusack
Directed by: Mikael Håfström

Style: Supernatural Thriller
Blood and Guts: 1
Fright Factor: 2
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Psychological Warfare
Overall rating: 3 out of 5

Mike Enslin (Cusack) wishes he could see dead people. After losing his daughter, he becomes obsessed with exploring the most haunted locations he can find. After a night stay, he writes up each in his own sort of Zagat's Guide to Haunted Places. One day, he hears about room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel. The staff doesn't want him to stay, as many people have died or been driven insane by the room. Thinking it a ploy, he badgers them into letting him stay. Once there though, he realizes that it is far worse than anyone could warn him of.

based upon a Stephen King short story, 1408 is an exercise in classic horror. All of the frights are built out of variations of nightmares and phobias as the room tries to drive Enslin over the edge. Add to that a clock radio that spontaneously plays The Carpenters "We've Only Just Begun" and you have genuine creepy environment.

However, part of the weakness of this film is that it tells you from the beginning that all of the inhabitants are driven mad, and any deaths are self-inflicted. Therefore, Enslin's only real danger is himself. All the apparitions, while creepy, can never go beyond being a thrill into a deeper sense of horror as they have no physical power over Enslin based on the rules of the game that the movie sets up.

Also, none of the nightmares are ever repeated, so there is very little build-up between the scares, so the audience never really reaches a level of true fright. Something eerie happens, you hit the pay-off moment, and then all the tension is lost because something else is being built. Unlike other horror films, where the sense of danger is mostly constant even if we are not quite sure the source, 1408 plays out like a series of mini-horror films, a kind of textbook of horror films if you will. Each different scare shows a different horror technique, a sort of How To for any type of scene, but then it moves on to another one without any sort of tension carried over.

The acting is great, as I genuinely believed the character's terror and subsequent emotional stress with dealing with the death of his daughter, and I though the film was very effective with being creepy without using any on-screen violence other than occasional shots of characters hung or leaping to their death. The style is there for making this a great film, which I think part of what makes it so frustrating that it doesn't live up to the talent involved.

Ultimately, this film is interesting to watch but never gets beyond mediocre because it never connects the dots. A horror movie needs to grab the audience and drag them kicking and screaming through the movie, and this never does.

Pathology

PATHOLOGY
Starring: Milo Ventimiglia, Michael Weston, Lauren Lee Smith, and Alyssa Milano
Directed by: Marc Schoelermann

Style: Murderous Psychological Thriller
Blood and Guts: 4
Fright Factor: 3
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Medical paraphernalia
Overall rating: 4 out of 5

Ted Grey (Ventimiglia) is one of the brightest pathologists out there, and he knows it. Graduating from Harvard Medical School and now joining one of the best Pathology programs in the country, he has the world at his scalpel tips. However, he soon discovers that a few of his fellow doctors have taken to testing each others genius. Bodies start rolling in, and the after-hours club takes to trying to construct the perfect murder, one that cannot be solved by forensics. Social boundaries are crossed, limits tested, and Grey quickly discovers that there is a fine line between genius and madness.

I qualify this film as a horror film solely on the basis of the actors conviction in the roles. They portray the psychological distancing perfectly, each showing how they have lost all connection with reality. The conversations between Dr. Grey and his rival, Dr. Gallo (Weston) provide some truly unnerving face-offs. While there is a lot of blood and guts tied around dissection and a few messed up murders, all of the violence stems from the nature of the characters i.e. doctors, so it is almost never gratuitous. Hence, all of the terror comes from just how real the actors make these actions seem. We glimpse the rationalization of madness, which is what some of the very best horror films do.

Ventimiglia does a great job with moral ambiguity, where we can tell that being better than everyone else guides his actions, even when getting out of the game, as it is his way to prove to himself that he is better than the animal Gallo has become. His fiancée returning becomes his game, his ability to have done these horrible things and get away scot free. It is less that he truly cares for her, but rather she is status and a trophy to prove his superiority.

This movie hits all of the right notes and manages to be a rather gripping thriller. The plot never really deviates from the standard fare for these types of movies, so there isn't a whole lot to discuss about it afterwards. Its strength, however, lies less in surprising us and more grabbing us by the spine and pulling.

Review Archive

Below are links to all of the reviews on Never Check the Basement TT means it was a Terrible Thursday entry.

#
1408

A
Altered

B
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

C
Chopping Mall

D
Day of the Dead (2008)
Dead Silence
Diary of the Dead

E
Event Horizon

F
Fido

H
The Happening (TT)

I
I Know Who Killed Me
Intermedio (TT)

L
Lake Placid
Lake Placid 2 (TT)

M
Midnight Meat Train
Mirrors
Mother of Tears
Mulberry Street

O
Open Water 2: Adrift
The Orphanage

P
Pathology

Q
Quarantine

R
The Reaping
The Ruins

S
Session 9
The Strangers
Suspiria

T
They
Timber Falls

They

THEY
Starring: Laura Regan, Marc Blucas, Ethan Embry, Dagmara Dominczyk
Directed by: Robert Harmon

Style: Boogeyman-style horror
Blood and Guts: 1
Fright Factor: 2
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: Light, darkness
Overall rating: 2 out of 5

Julie Lund (Regan) had it rough as a kid. Nightmares of shadow creatures plagued her and her friend Billy (Jon Abrahams) growing up, but now, on the verge of achieving her Masters in Psychology, all of that appears to be behind her. That is, until Billy shows up and convinces her that their nightmares were real as kids. Even worse, those creatures marked them as children and are now coming for them once more. Together with two of Billy's friends (Embry and Dominczyk), Julie fights to find out how to escape these creatures when all darkness leads to their world.

The premise of this film is great, which makes it that much more of a shame that it was hacked to pieces by the studio. Any time ten different writers work on a movie, you know there is trouble. For me, that is my biggest complaint about the film: inconsistency. The story never seems to be able to figure out what it wants to be and thus never really makes a consistent style choice. In fact, towards the end of the film, the film even breaks its primary convention by having the creatures attack someone in a well-lit, undarkened room. For me, that is unforgivable.

There are a few good moments in the film, such as when Julie is stalked through the subway tunnels, but they never build off of one another. A movie that feeds off of the characters being placed in threatening situations needs to have each situation more intense, however slightly, than the previous event. Otherwise, you have a series of small scares with no big payoff because the audience can predict that nothing will get any scarier.

Another weak point of this film is that they waste their supporting cast. If you have a film where there are really only four characters of any interest, those characters really need to be developed and respected until their untimely end, which is part of what builds the momentum of a fright flick. However, this film acts like the supporting characters are no better than the random party guy who wanders off and is the warm-up victim for the killer. Nothing is accomplished other than you get a scene that is tense but doesn't scare us because we don't care about a character the movie doesn't care about.

Overall, this film needed those making it to care about its story and its character more. Instead, it is chopped up and dumped onto the market in the hopes for a quick buck. It's too bad, because this film really did have promise.

Day of the Dead (2008)

DAY OF THE DEAD (2008)
Starring: Mena Suvari, Ving Rhames, Nick Cannon
Directed by: Steve Miner

Style: Zombie horror
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: Biting, firearms
Overall rating: 2 out of 5

Life is never easy in secluded towns in Colorado. The isolation is a highly desired trait when scientists look to build labs for controversial research, and there is much wildlife nearby prone to mutation from said experimentation. However, this movie decided to tackle the tried and true threat to humanity: zombie outbreak.

The story follows Sarah Bowman (Mena Suvari), a tough-as-rock corporal charged with quarantining her home town. Things go bad when her sick mother needs to be taken to the hospital, as she has a flu that seems to be afflicting most everyone in town. Soon, the hospital becomes a madhouse of zombies and she must fight their way to survival. Joining her are several disposable army faces, most notably Nick Cannon, and later on, her mopey brother and his girl, and together, they must find a way to escape the town and its hungry, hungry inhabitants.

My first problem with this movie is that it has nothing to do with the George Romero original, yet they claimed adaptation so that they could use the notable title to drum up an audience. As hip as this movie tries to pretend it is, they could have done better than just ripping off a title. In fact, the entire movie feels like a project that was abandoned and rushed to DVD release. Why else would you have B-list stars, the director of Lake Placid, and the writer of the Final Destination series dump this crud directly onto DVD?

Another issue is that the zombies are of the fast variety, so that "suspenseful" chase sequences can be added, but the movie fails to employ this as an interesting technique. Instead of making the zombies run at breakneck speed and with pure rage-filled intensity, they run like guys in makeup that are struggling to make it across the street. They even go so far as to occasionally crawl across the ceiling like spider monkeys. The person who made that decision should be forced to watch the zombie classics for 3 months to learn why that is ridiculous.

Acting-wise, Mena Suvari does her best to look tough but just never gets there. Ving Rhames shows up for 5 minutes to out-act the entire movie, much like Sid Haig in Night of the Living Dead 3D. However, the "Murder him please" award goes to Nick Cannon. It's not his fault. His dialog was written by someone with a random urban banter generator. It was like a Will Smith Character but written by the Waynes Brothers.

Overall, there are one or two interesting ideas in this movie, but they are never given time to develop, and the whole movie gives up on any semblance of plot and just pumps in more zombies. It becomes just a half-hearted attempt at a zombie movie, and in my book, any film that goes with digital blood shows any lack of commitment to quality.

The Ruins

THE RUINS
Starring: Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Shawn Ashmore, and Laura Ramsey
Directed by: Carter Smith

Style: Survival creature feature
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 3
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Vines, natives
Overall rating: 4 out of 5

You would think that, by now, college students on vacation would learn to never deviate off the beaten path to go sightseeing. However, the quartet of characters, accompanying a man they meet randomly at their hotel, do just that. Upon exploring this uncharted Mayan temple, they quickly discover that the natives will not let them leave. Trapped atop the pyramid with little hope of rescue, their lives are also in danger of falling victim to the temple's inhabitant: vines with a thirst for blood.

When I first saw the marketing campaign for this film, I dismissed it as a cheap horror offering hoping to make a quick buck. However, I learned that the source material, a novel of the same name, was considered absolutely frightening, and despite the uninspiring trailer, I decided to give the movie a try. In retrospect, I am glad I did, as this film is very slickly executed from beginning to end.

Considering the characters are trapped on top of the temple, occasionally venturing into the temple through a hole in its roof, the suspense factor is limited to a few key moments, though when they come they are well utilized. Instead, much of the film is driven by their struggle to escape. Tempers flair, and character is tested. Soon, their own will is as much their enemy as the vines. It is here that the acting talent of the cast shines. The audience can actually relate to everyone trapped in the situation, humanizing them rather than treating them as meat ready for slaughter.

The violence in the film can be a bit graphic at times, but it never feels excessive. Instead, it is directly tied to the horror of the situation, which is what differentiates this from the standard gore fest that sometimes passes for a horror film. The kill when the party first arrives is a bit much, but it serves more as a sign that everything has gone to pot in a split second. Overall, all of the effects feel natural rather than being the hack CGI effort the film could have become.

Overall, I really enjoyed how this movie toys with us as the audience. It uses some cliches, but uses them in such a way that it pushes all of our buttons and pulls us into the story. There are few answers about the reasons for the killer vines, but the movie is good enough that it doesn't matter. The events that happen to the characters take center stage, and their acting and commitment to the story are what holds our interest.

Suspiria

SUSPIRIA
Starring: Jessica Harper and Joan Bennett
Directed by: Dario Argento

Style: Supernatural slasher
Blood and Guts: 5
Fright Factor: 5
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Knife, barbed wire
Overall rating: 5 out of 5

Ballet dancer Suzy (Jessica Harper) is living the dream. She has been invited to attend the prestigious Tans Academy in Germany. From the moment she arrives, however, strange events begin to haunt her. The students and faculty are reticent to speak of the dread that Suzy feels in the Academy, and soon students begin to disappear. The more Suzy investigates, the more she learns of the occult history of the Academy and its fabled Black Queen, a witch of incredible power and malice. Now, Suzy is the target, and the only way out of danger is to discover the Queen's identity and destroy her.

Suspiria may not sound like much of a film, as many modern day horror films all follow similar plot points. What makes this film such a great horror film is that the director Dario Argento is truly a master of the horrific. From the first murder sequence that practically opens the film to the ending moment that made my bones chatter, Argento displays a talent for finding those moments that make us shiver to our core. It is that talent for silence and ominous anticipation that drives the film rather than the slapdash technique of loud, sudden noises many movies use in place of legitimate scares.

Argento finds an art to his film, frequently employing dreamlike color sequences to paint the story as almost ethereal in nature. Even the blood that spills forth is a vibrant red, adding to the feeling that reality is slightly off-kilter. All of the death sequences are both brutal and stylized, a technique that does not diminish the horror of the event. As for the soundtrack, mhile most films suffer from a rock soundtrack removing the audience from the story, Argento's band Goblins feel more like something born of the world of the story than a separate entity. That too is a testament to the talent of Argento.

Now, the movie is not perfect. Some of the plot does drag a bit, and the style is borderline silly when characters are interacting. However, these can be forgiven as Suspiria is less of a movie and more of an experience, and I feel it is one that truly lives up to the hype surrounding it. People who really don't like excessive violence should probably skip this film, as well as people who don't like to be frightened, but everyone else should give this one a chance. It can be considered one of the staples of the horror film genre.