OCULUS (2013)
***1/2
A brother and sister reunite at the house where their dad and mom lost their minds inside the influential sphere of a haunted mirror ten years ago. She's got it all wired for sound with cameras set up and timers to keep them from drifting out of reality, because the mirror has a habit of making the people around it hallucinate. The brother, though, having been in an institution since the traumatic event in their childhood, explains away the supernatural tragedy of their childhoods as stress-born cover memories and his sister says "they really did a number on you in there, didn't they?" With great camerawork that services the story and slow ride suspense instead of just shock-schlock showing off, an ingenious fusion of flashbacks, mental aberration, haunting, possession, and madness--it's OCULUS, and I love it.
As the childhood events and the modern ones blend into each other as both versions of themselves begin to mover around the house at the same time, the children they were in the past even begin to notice their future selves watching them, just another set of ghosts as the mirror drives their mom towards trying to choke them to death, her face contorted with madness, and the weird vampire woman who occasionally appears to molest their psycho father is never fully explained and remains utterly creepy right up to the end, making it, all in all, the best horror film since THE CONJURING (2013). In that film, Vera Farmiga as real life demonologist psychic Lorraine Warren was a great model of courage in the face of ensuing darkness, and here we have that same courage in two first-class performances: Karen Gilan and Annalise Baso as younger / older sister Kaylie. Bayo's cute little redhead alien face and orange hair are perfectly lit and she could teach a master class at showing the process by which fear is channeled into bravery, her little war face is amongst the best I've seen since Jon Voight's at the end of MIDNIGHT COWBOY: "We're going to have to be very, very brave," she tells her young brother, and it's inspiring, moving, heartbreaking, exciting, and genuinely spooky all at once. It gave me a literal spine tingle. I always thought that was just a metonym!
SHIVERS (1975)
dir. David Cronenberg
dir. David Cronenberg
***1/2
This weird first Cronenberg film hasn't been available on DVD for awhile, but it's now showing Netflix Streaming, which seems totally out of the blue. It concerns a parasite that can devour and replace faulty kidneys developing a mind of its own and causing relentless sexual drive in order to propagate, or in other words, Night of the Rabid Orgiasts spiked with livid, funny gross outs as a squrimy red kidney thing hops from mouth to-locked-in-willing-or-unwilling mouths, creating sexual frenzies all across the residents of a swinging Montreal high rise on an island in the middle of one of the Great Lakes. The rather paltry budget and glaring lights actually work to the film's advantage; the performances are strong and there's a great sexual frenzy vibe with people running loose down halls and up and down stairs seeing couples screwing madly in all directions - reminded me of my freshman dorm in Syracuse in 1985!
Barbara Steele is great as a vampiric lesbian swinger, and Radley Metzger fans will love seeing SCORE's Lynn Lowry as the hot-to-trot nurse. Add a nice car crash, lots of sick vignettes as each apartment holds its own bizarre snapshot of Canadian nontraditional living and the result is one of those rough-hewn gems of the 1970s, a real trendsetter, with some great weird stuff that taps into the swinging lifestyle in ways your Vadims and Dereks had no clue about (see also: MESSIAH OF EVIL and LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH for great analogies of sexual liberation and mass monsterism). As Cronenberg on Cronenberg author Chris Rodley put it
"One experiences a tremulous sensation that suggests one might have reached the end of the unconscious. There it seems to be, thrown up on the screen in all its perverse and truly repulsive splendour, unmasked and unashamed." (40)
DETENTION (2011)
dir. Jospeh Kahn
***
Sharp wit and slashing rejoinders are not dead in the everything-but-the-sink post-modern high school deconstruction comedy for the 'twitter generation,' a high school horror comedy of the CLUELESS meets SCREAM 2 variety, a SCARY MOVIE for high school graduates, or a REPO MAN for Generation Y. It's a lot of stuff, in sum, zipping by in layers too fast (presuming many repeat viewings--perhaps presuming too much) but the presence of diminutive HUNGER GAMES hunk Josh Hutcherson should lure enough girl fans in to at least give it a few hits and Shanley Caswell is solid as the 'second biggest loser at Grizzly High' with whom he has a shared connection, though he's going out with the hot chick Ione (Spencer Locke), agering big dumb jock Billy (Parker Bagley) who wants to fight Hutcherson but keeps erupting into THE FLY like symptoms, the result of touching a meteorite as a child and spending most of his elementary school life with his hand in a television.
I can see Godard and Antonioni loving this movie, especially the scene where the kids watch a bootleg copy of CINDERHELLA 4 while in detention to see how to survive their situation, and a whole screen-within-screen infinite chronosynclastic infindibulum meltdown occurs. Stunt casting includes Dane Cook as a dickhead principal and.... that's about it, but there's a time-traveling bear school mascot and enough cheerleaders to make this a bizarro parallel to the other Netflix high school horror comedy, Lucky McKee's ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE, and enough bizarro world alien invasion transdimensional portal activation to make this the callow tweaker cousin to JOHN DIES AT THE END. Show it to that ADD friend of yours when all else fails. Directed and written by music video director Joseph Kahn whose previous feature was 2004's TORQUE which I also liked a lot for its gonzo over-the-top deadpan but in-on-its-own-joke dumbo comic momentum.
MIMIC 2: HARDSHELL (2001)
dir. Jean de Segonzac
***
dir. Jean de Segonzac
***
You don't often get to see awesome direct-to-video sequels of anything, but here's one badass high school etymology teacher, navigating treacherous urban streets and fending off insect suitors. Alix Koromzay, using sewing scissors as mandible talons to rend the exoskeletons of her imperfect dates, brings a lot of depth, ginger sexual oomph, and maternal tenacity as said teacher. She and the director clearly decided to treat this like A-list material and, like true artists. Bzzzzzz! No less a luminary than Kim Newman recommended this as one of the best of the direct-to-video horror sequels ever. And with no one looking, Koromzay and Segonzac wiggled past the usual patriarchal groupthink to depict a super strong woman still so sexy she has a whole coterie of devoted, smitten inner city students with whom to hole up in the high school while giant insect mimics hunt them and a cabal of governmental agents seal off the building with plastic. So what if there's a smudge of direct-to-video sequel cheapness? It's the ideal third or fourth entry of any all-night horror binge, one where your defenses are down and your pheromones at peak between-shower pungency.
THE HOWLING (1981)
Director: Joe Dante
***1/2
For my money this is the best werewolf movie since WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1934) which could be partly explained by the realization I don't care much about werewolves. They get too hung up with transformation scenes, disbelieving friends and family, rural skulking, and obligatory nervous breakdown showboating. But HOWLING is way beyond that, tapping into the same kind of 1970s sexual swinger and EST-ish energy that makes Cronenberg's works of the same period like RABID, THE BROOD, SHIVERS and SCANNERS such unique pre-AIDS time capsules. Dee Wallace is a TV reporter who can't remember the shocking moments between when the killer she was hoping to interview lures her into a rough peep show booth and when he's shot supposedly dead. Her therapist sends her to his colony, a beachfront encounter group that like to make bonfires and eat meat. Elizabeth Brooks (above) makes an impression as the supposedly dead killer's sister Marsha Quist, and she has a great fairy tale-like scene coming onto bland hunk husband Dennis Dugan as Dee's mustachioed husband who gets separated from his hunting party. You may find yourself questioning your loyalty to the non-lycanthropic human race when she cooks his shot rabbit then playfully bites him on the lip. Later he and Marsha get it on by the bonfire, the powers of desire and orgasm shifting and churning their inner wolf power while Dee Wallace nightmares it up in their cabin.***1/2
I like the idea that these wolves can just shapeshift whenever it suits them and their transformation isn't overly agonizing, but it sure takes a long balloon-inflatin'-and-then-deflatin' time so that Rob Bottin can compete with Rick Baker's snout growing skills in AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON which came out the same year. Despite the former being meant as a jet black comedy and having a far a smoother snout grow, HOWLING is a lot funnier (and less slapstick-ish) and scarier, with more intelligent characters and less tedious denial or dippy dream sequences, and--despite igniting my lifelong crush on Jenny Agutter--sexier. As the unofficial matriarch sage of the wolf clan, Brooks is super lupine sexy and dangerous without being stripper-style bimbo chintzy, proving that in the late 70s/early 80s, horror film (unprotected) monster sex could still be guilt-free and even E.T's mom could have a carnal immediacy that only enhanced rather than detracted from her reporter character's courageous intellect and (unfortunately poodle-like) nose for news. Kevin McCarthy, Slim Pickens, Dick Miller, Kenneth Tobey, Forey Ackerman, Roger Corman, and John Sayles all have bits parts for the fans.