Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Starring: Nathan Baesel, Robert Englund, Angela Goethals, Kate Lang Johnson
Directed by: Scott Glosserman

Style: Mockumentary Slasher
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 2
Laugh Factor: 3
Weapons of choice: All sorts of pointy things
Overall rating: 5 out of 5

Everyone has a dream growing up. Some of us want to be astronauts. Some of us want to cure cancer. But for Leslie Vernon (Baesel), he wants to be remembered as the next great serial killer. He enlists the help of a college documentary crew to record the preparation for his rise as a serial killer, and even allows them to attend his night of carnage. However, lead reporter Taylor (Goethals) doesn't want to stand by while people die. Can she stop Leslie's quest for infamy, or will she be just another tally on his knife handle?

Every once in a while, a horror movie comes along that truly understands the horror movie experience. It understands that audiences usually have seen a number of the slasher films and have high expectations and standards for what constitutes a scary film. In this case, the film is about what goes into being the perfect horror villain. The first half of the movie is all about preparation and setting the stage for the night of carnage, and the film goes so far as to acknowledge its roots outright.

The selling point of this film is Nathan Baesel. He brings charisma and enough sly humor to the character that we overlook the fact that he is brutally murdering people. We sympathize with his quest for perfection, even if it is slaughter. There is one moment where Leslie is sitting in the dark waiting to begin, and he is so overjoyed that his plan is about to become reality. The humanity of that moment is heartfelt and genuine, and it is such a rarity among the horror genre.

The second half of the movie plays out the way any other slasher film would, except because we have such an attachment to both the killer and the film crew, their conflict carries us through to the end. We've already been told what will happen, and so when the crew interferes and changes the game plan, we are surprised anew. Even if those surprises still follow the clichè, they feel new to us because we have been guided the entire way.

Everything about this film shows much planning and forethought, as well as an understanding of how horror films function, and the result is one of the best horror films to come around in a few years.

The Strangers

The Strangers
Starring: Liv Tyler, Scott Speedman, Gemma Ward
Directed by: Bryan Bertino

Style: Cat-and-mouse Slasher
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 3
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Knives, firearms
Overall rating: 3 out of 5

There will always be people who take joy in other people's fears. People who like to make others squirm for no other reason than it is different. These are the people that come knocking at 4 a.m. James (Speedman) and Kristen (Tyler) have traveled from a friend's wedding to James's family vacation home. James was recently shot down proposing to Kristen, so the entire evening is already in the trash. Then three assailants in masks begin to terrorize them, first just appearing and disappearing, and each encounter grows more menacing. Surrounded and trapped, James and Kristen must find a way to escape before it is too late.

This film has all of the elements necessary to be a very solid horror film. The director clearly knows how to utilize slow-burn horror where danger is left in clear view without anything happening, leaving the audience to squirm and anticipate. If the audience doesn't know what is going to happen, they work themselves up about it. There are several long shots of the intruders walking around the home, not even chasing the protagonists, and it is chilling to watch. The violence is kept to a minimum except for a few graphic events, to the point that a bit of editing could have taken this one to a PG-13 rating. As a result, the actors are left to convey the terror the characters are feeling, and they do an excellent job at that.

The problem with this film, however, is that the suspense soon becomes a one trick pony. You can only have the intruders menace the characters for so long before it becomes repetitive. An intruder sneaks up on a character, is within striking distance, and then vanishes when the character turns around. This happens constantly through the movie, and it soon becomes clear that the intruders are more interested in toying with them than actually inflicting harm on them. It is here that the movie tips its hand too soon. The moment you realize that there is no real danger until the movie moves into its end game, the malice dissipates. It starts to become a cut-and-dry stalker film, not helped by the fact that it starts to follow all the conventions of those films. Every foiled escape ends exactly how you would expect it to the moment they announce the plan. Every "twist" is an element seen in other horror movies from the 70s and 80s.

Finally, there is the ending. Without going into too many details, it can be said that if you have seen enough of these types of films, you will probably know what is going to happen. Sure, the movie never pretends to be anything other than what it is, but at the same time, any suspenseful horror film worth its salt will give you a payoff equal to the amount you have sweated away on the edge of your seat. Anything less is cheating, and this movie cheats. After the movie, I left thinking, "Well THAT just happened..." but there was little satisfaction in the experience.

In the end, the film has a great sense of style and suspense, but that only lasts as long as the menace does, and for this film, it runs about a half hour too long. If this had run as an hour long horror movie, it would have been great. Since it doesn't, I was left feeling that this film has been done many times before, and usually with more skill. See the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre to see menace done right.

Timber Falls

Timber Falls
Starring: Josh Randall, Brianna Brown, Nick Searcy, Beth Broderick
Directed by: Tony Giglio

Style: Backwater kidnapping
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Double-bladed scythe, firearms
Overall rating: 2 out of 5

Mike (Randall) and Sheryl (Brown) are looking for a nice weekend getaway in the national park, free from all the craziness of the modern world. Instead, they find themselves victims of the crazy world of a fanatically religious couple living off the beaten path. Between the dark intentions of their captors and the deformed maniac that is the captors’ son, Mike and Sheryl can only hope to survive long enough to escape.

This film struggles throughout the story to engage the audience, and that is its biggest fault. The actors all appear to be trying their best, but there are a lot of moments that are very hollow and flat, particularly between Mike and Sheryl. As a result, there is never a strong, believable connection between them, so the rest of the plot that hinges around them drawing strength from one another to survive, is left out to dry. Other characters suffer too. At one point, it seems like the director is trying to make the point that not all country boys and actually malicious, but then it decides to portray its characters as that anyway.

The main antagonists all do well for themselves, but the story seems to be aiming for a much more deep-seated, psychological horror and ends up being too subtle with all of the events. In fact, the early scene where Mike and Sheryl are intimidated by some country boys coming back from a hunting trip has a greater sense of danger and malice than anything else that comes after it. As the movie progresses, it has to stretch more and more to even have a sense of danger conveyed, something that is not helped by the fact that Mike struts around like he knows he has a 95% chance of survival no matter what.

Not all of the movie is disappointing. The maniac son with the double-bladed sickle and some decent makeup effects feels at home to this style of film, though it is a shame that the movie instead tries to be something it isn’t by focusing on the kidnappers and not their homicidal kin. While it is noble to try other avenues of horror, one cannot get away with psychological horror without very strong characters and an excellent sense of atmosphere and timing, something this movie lacks. Nothing proves this more than the final shot of the film ripped off from a genre already suffering from cliches.

In the end, this movie suffers from being far too generic and dull. No matter how many seemingly new tricks it pulls out of its bag, it still feels like its clunking along thanks to a few wooden performances and a lack of decent story development. With a few revision drafts to refine the story down to something solid, this movie could have been decent. Instead, it feels too sloppy and falls to the wayside.

Altered

Altered
Starring: Paul McCarthy-Boyington, Brad William Henke, Adam Kaufman, Michael C. Williams
Directed by: Eduardo Sánchez

Style: Alien revenge
Blood and Guts: 4
Fright Factor: 3
Laugh Factor: 0
Weapons of choice: Firearms, teeth
Overall rating: 4 out of 5

Most people are suckers. Aliens abduct them in the dead of night, do all sorts of unspeakable things to them, drop them off again, and nobody ever does anything about it but whine and complain and try and convince others that it will happen to them. This is not the case for this group of four friends. Instead, they plan how to capture one of the creatures that abducted them years ago. Once it is captured however, none of them quite know what to do next. More importantly, none of them can foresee just how grave the repercussions of their actions will be.

Altered showcases how an independent little horror film can be better than many feature films. All of the characters are well fleshed out, allowing us to care about their fates and how the story plays out. The direction is also well done, allowing the tension and, at times, suspense of the scene to do the work rather than cheap camera tricks. The special effects are are well-used, with quite a bit of violence happening but all appropriate rather than excessive.

What makes this film work is that it isn't trying to be the greatest horror film you have ever seen. It is straight forward, simple, and sets out to tell you an interesting story. It never tries to be more than it is by utilizing outlandish or inappropriate effects, and all of the actors and crew work as if they are committed to the telling this story. The alien doesn't try to be outlandish and instead is actually very intimidating, especially when it is revealed what happens when it bites you.

If I had one criticism of the film, is that it overuses its darkness a bit too much. There are some effective shadows, but the entire film feels like it was soaked a little too long in the dark. It's the one film contrivance that feels forced, trying to impose an atmosphere rather than letting the story, the environment, and the actors do that naturally.

I would recommend seeing this film if you're looking for a different kind of horror film, one that uses story and character to chip away at your nerves before letting a vicious alien loose on all of it. It probably has better acting than you'll see in most studio pictures, and even more rarely, actually knows what it is doing.

The Reaping

The Reaping
Starring: Hilary Swank, David Morrissey, Idris Elba
Directed by: Stephen Hopkins

Style: Demon spawn
Blood and Guts: 2
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: Plagues, knives
Overall rating: 1 out of 5

Katherine Winter (Swank) has made an academic career out of disproving miracles. She and her assistant Ben (Elba) travel the world to find the deeply spiritual and make it mundane. All of this stems from Winter's daughter being sacrificed to lift a curse during a trip to to the Sudan. However, the town of Haven seems to be different. Their entire river turns to human blood, the cattle waste away with no biological explanation, and things only get worse from there. In the center of it all is a girl said to be a demonic child prophesied about in Biblical texts. Katherine must find the answers before the town decides that destroying the girl is the only way to stop the plagues.

This movie feels very rushed, like everyone started working when it was only half-developed, and as a result they have a jumbled mess that they released as a movie. For example, it is about ten minutes into the movie that you get a sense of who these characters actually are. They start off with a priest that has something weird happen to his pictures, then we meet Swank's character but have no idea what she is doing or why. It is only after that scene that she is introduced as a professor at a university studying miracles. Seriously, the beginning was like watching Outbreak.

This entire movie suffers from lazy storytelling. There is no real time for any suspense to be built as all of the plagues come almost on top of each other. They arrive and the river is blood. Next scene, the cows are having trouble. Next scene, the frogs fall from the sky. Also, there is a dream within a dream sequence that is supposed to leave us wondering if it happened but instead leaves us wondering what happened. Many scenes do not really advance a plot more as allow room for metaphors and flashbacks that try poorly to serve as suspense devices.

Meanwhile, all of the characters besides Katherine only have a cursory characterization to them. When the town is riled up and wants to murder the girl, there is never really a sense of danger because we don't really see the town as anything but crazy people who are about to fly off of the deep end. Subsequently, the ending of the film suffers because there is no connection or attachment to anyone. We don't see paranoia brought to a broil. We see people wanting to kill a kid to save their town, and that doesn't hold up for an entire movie.

Finally, there is the ending. I won't give it away, because unlike the movie, I have the ability to respect a surprise. However, the last shot is so hackneyed that I wanted the director to appear in the corner of the screen and wink at us. People need to realize that some hooks are not clever if you do not build the entire story with care.

Overall, this movie commits one of the worst offenses a horror movie can commit: it is dull. Very few scenes hold any interest, including when characters are in danger. It doesn't really offer anything new that we haven't seen in other demonic seed movies, and on top of it all, it thinks it is clever. By the end, I was the one feeling reaped.

Mulberry Street

Mulberry Street
Starring: Laurel Astri, Kim Blair, Ron Brice, Bo Corre, Nick Damici
Directed by: Jim Mickle

Style: Creature feature
Blood and Guts: 3
Fright Factor: 1
Laugh Factor: 1
Weapons of choice: Biting, fists, baseball bats
Overall rating: 2 out of 5

New York just can't catch a break. However, it does catch a plague pretty well. This oft-besieged-in-movies city this time faces an outbreak of people turning into vicious rat creatures. One bite from an infected rat or ratbeast is enough to turn you, and the city soon finds itself in quarantined lock down. On Mulberry Street, tenants of an apartment building have to buckle down for survival while others caught outside struggle to make it back home.

One of my biggest problems with this film is that it takes a very interesting idea and slowly bogs it down with bad directing, uninteresting writing, and very rough cinematography. There are quite a few moments where scenes happen in darkness, making it very hard to discern what is going on. This can work, but the way it is utilized smacks of trying to hide incomplete make-up and blood effects. It seems cheap rather than effective. If you are going to do a close-up and point the camera directly at something happening, we need to be able to see what it is. Otherwise, insinuate and put it behind a table or in a long shot.

Meanwhile, all of the characters are incomplete. They show the beginnings of characterization but never really develop past the survival instinct and a few broad generalizations. There are some moments, but they are so fleeting that nothing sticks. Thus, when the story gets to the point when a well-liked character almost escapes only to be dragged backwards to his or her doom, the movie acts like the audience should care. There are several moments like that, when the directors seems to say, "Oh ho! I bet you didn't expect I'd kill THAT character," and instead the audience doesn't really care one way or the other.

The entire film feels like it was taken from a horror movie text book. The writers and director went down the check list of everything a creature movie should include, but they don't quite know how to utilize the convention. For example, a character is killed right at the beginning to introduce the danger. However, it is a character we see for literally 2 seconds before that, and it is in the middle of character introductions. You either start the movie with a death and then start the story, or you weave the death into the story. Don't just show a body in passing. Also, you can't use the technique of trying to be quiet only to make noise more than once or twice. Every character in this film seems clumsy because they always give away their position by knocking into something.

This movie has no drive to it, which means even the good aspects like the few make-up effects we can see or the occasional good chase sequence gets lost in a film that unforgivably drags along. In capable hands, this film could have been a slick little creature feature. Instead, it should be buried.

Terrible Thursday: Intermedio

Intermedio
Starring: Edward Furlong, Steve Railsback, Cerina Vincent, Amber Benson
Directed by: Andrew Lauer

Style: Supernatural
Blood and Guts: 2
Fright Factor: 0
Laugh Factor: 4
Weapons of choice: Crappy CGI spirits, mining tools
Overall rating: Terrible

Welcome to Terrible Thursday. This is the weekly dissection of a terrible film. Something that, if you make it through, you should get a T-Shirt or some sort of medal. Our first offering is one near and dear to my heart: Intermedio.

The movie follows four friends on an ill conceived tour of a tunnel between Mexico and the US. Ill conceived because they never quite explain why this is a good idea. Also, there are random drug dealers down there. Oh, and there is also a murderous old man who controls equally murderous spirits. Well, maybe not spirits. I would say more like poorly executed flare effects with faces on them.

One of the reasons this film is so terrible is that there never seems to be any coherent story to drive it along. These kids decide to go down into the tunnel, then decide to try and rob the drug dealers, then other things happen, and then it ends. It is so bad that when I read the synopsis online to refresh my memory for this review, I thought somebody had seen an entirely different movie. I swore the kids went down there to make a drug deal, not randomly meet drug dealers.

What's worse, Edward Furlong's character appears to be constantly out of breath, as if walking at a moderate pace could result in a combination heart attack and aneurysm. Every line he delivers requires several moments of wheezing and gasping. I kid you not. Cerina Vincent's shirt is constantly shrinking throughout the film, something the movie makers did ON PURPOSE. How cheap can you be? This is how the filmmakers show how "cool" and "self-mocking" they can be. I instead wanted to break their camera hand.

Then there are the filters. It's like the director couldn't decide whether he loved filters or whether they are things you use for making coffee. The opening scene, for example, keeps changing shades of orange because the sun was in various states of setting when they were filming. They have filters to fix that. In retrospect, maybe the director just couldn't decide what color filter he wanted to use. Whichever is worse, that was probably the reason behind it. Then, filters come out of the woodwork, with every underground tunnel feeling like some high schooler's AV project. I was waiting for some scene to be double filtered, as goodness knows there was nothing else to pay attention to in this film.

Finally, the movie ends after a gloriously craptacular death by the old man controlling the spirits (if you use digital blood, you need to be slapped). If anyone can explain the last shot to me i.e. what it means and where the characters are, I congratulate you. I sure as heck couldn't, as it is so tacked on that I expected the next shot to be the director winking at the the camera, saying "Clever, huh?"

This movie is an ordeal. It is a bane to those who stumble across it on TV late at night and don't see just how terrible it can be. Throw it into a chasm. Burn every copy. Just don't watch it.