Open Water 2: Adrift

Open Water 2: Adrift
Starring: Susan May Pratt, Richard Speight, Jr., Niklaus Lange, Ali Hillis
Directed by: Hans Horn

Style: Survival Horror
Blood and Guts: 1
Fright Factor: 3
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: The ocean
Overall rating: 3 out of 5

A group of high school friends now grown up decide to spend a day out on the ocean courtesy of the yacht owned by their friend Dan. He brings a new girlfriend Michelle, while Amy brings her husband James and their new baby. Amy also conveniently brings her fear of the ocean, which she has had since her father drowned when she was a child. While out on the boat, everyone goes swimming except Amy. Dan decided to help her get over her fear of the ocean by pulling her into the water. The only problem is this leaves nobody on the yacht except a baby, and nobody thought to deploy the ladder.

The strength of the story lies in the fact that safety is always just out of reach. None of the characters can get high enough to pull themselves back on board, and a series of schemes each fall short. In fact, the movie gets quite a bit of drama out of people floating through the ocean. Each of the actors show quite a bit of range as they turn on each other. However, it feels as if the friends start panicking too early, probably in part to condense the story. They are barely in the water an hour when they act like they are on the verge of murdering each other. This is an instance of being larger than life is overdone. It's jarring in the film, and once they have reached that level of fear, there isn't much farther that the film can go. The film's best moments are when the characters aren't afraid but are taking turns emotionally breaking each other down because it is the only way to deal with the fear.

Also, for those looking for a film like the first Open Water, there is very little similarity other than it is about people trapped in the water. Whereas Open Water was about surviving against the ocean itself, Adrift is more about surviving the fear the ocean inflicts upon us. The title Open Water 2 is used more to link it in the audience's mind. It was probably a separate film before the marketing department got a hold of it.

Finally, there is the ending. I don't want to spoil anything, so I won't speak of the specifics. However, I really have a problem with films that abandon all the work it has done up until that point just to try and throw ambiguity into the mix. Clearly, the director wanted to spark debate, but it doesn't come off as a clever or smart choice. Instead, you have an ending that will have people griping about how the story remains unfinished. You can be ambiguous if the story is finished being told, but this is not the case for Adrift.

Adrift has some good moments of drama and character interaction. There are hints that this film could have been good. However, as the director's first big film, his inexperience in storytelling shows, and the film cannot hold itself together no matter how hard the actors work. This movie is probably good for a lazy Saturday afternoon, when you might be able to overlook its failings to appreciate the drama it contains.

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.

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.

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.