A Moveable Fest, Week 12: Shutter, Ghostwatch, In the Mouth of Madness

Moral: don't run over people, and if you do, don't run away.

Week 12: Tim's Choice

Shutter

I don't think I've watched a Thai horror film before, but this one was certainly a good starter. When a young couple run down a woman in their car and the boyfriend is all "Yeah nah let's just keep driving" (I don't know how to translate that into Thai), it's all a bit I Know What You Did Last Summer. Then they're haunted, of course, but it's more interesting than that, and the boyfriend has a not-very-nice history with his clingy ghostie. I was really impressed with the backstory on this one: it's done its homework and has really crafted a proper story (which is a lot more than you can say for IKWYDLS). This film loves to combine sudden appearances with sudden noises and will make you jump ALL THE WAY THROUGH, so if you're a wee bit quivery with your drink at the best of times, as I am, maybe put the glass down between sips unless you want to end up wasting wine.

Ghostwatch

Right, so: Michael Parkinson is hosting a hokey show (I know, really?) where a team of "experts" investigate a so-called haunted house. Lister and the chick from Blue Peter are hosting, there's a not-very-convincing ghostie expert on set, and someone might be faking things from within the house. But, you know what? Things seem to start to happen, and then escalate, and because of the cringe-worthy, "buck up old chap" method that starts the film, what happens in the end is actually scary - even if you've seen it before. The backstory is expanded on in a really convincing fashion, and the use/dodgy use of surveillance footage works even better than in Speed. The knowledge that people were genuinely frightened and tried to call in to the jammed switchboard during the show's first (and only) first airing in Britain somehow makes this funny little piece of history more effective. It's a bit like watching a special Halloween episode of Spicks n Specks, and then the set goes grey, Adam Hills looks directly at a guest and whispers "Come to daddy". *BLACKOUT*

In the Mouth of Madness

A dear favourite from my VHS sleep-over days as a teenager, ITMOM (best acronym, thanks Tim) is a bit like what you'd imagine what would happen if you decided to write Stephen King's biography as a horror story. Anyway: there's a really famous horror writer, and he appears to be sending people mad with his books. Mad, I say! *AXE CHOP* So, when said famous horror writer Sutter Kane (hello SK initials) disappears when his new book is due, Sam Neill (sporting an accent that tries to be American and then periodically forgets) is hired to, well, go find him. He hooks up with Kane's aggressive assistant Linda, and they encounter creepy children, deserted towns, creepy children, and bad acting. Look: really, really bad acting, which is usually the last thing I notice/resent about a film. But seriously: BAD ACTING. There's at lot of fun at the start that sustains the film for maybe half its length, but it does start to drag, and the whole madness-within-madness setup only works if at least one of the madnesses is vaguely convincing.

A Moveable Fest, Week 11: The Amityville Horror, Hell House, Spirits of the Dead, [REC], Lake Mungo

Abortion Girl: the most coveted role in Hell House

Week 11: My Choice (we got a bit carried away and ended up watching 5 films again this week)

The Amityville Horror

A clueless family move into a house where a mass murder occurred, and weird stuff starts to happen. I remembered this film as actually being quite scary, but not very far in this time I was exclaiming to Tim: "This is So. Fucking. Tedious." It's not scary, it's boring, it's bad, and it's TWO HOURS LONG. The only explanation I can have for its popularity at the time is (cue italics) 70s zeitgeist. Really, don't bother. If you just look at a picture of the creepy house, that's at least as much as you'll get out of the film. As Roger Ebert said: "The horror in this movie, alas, isn't a bad guy at all. Doesn't have a shape or a face or a personality. Is a presence that causes the worst sorts of things to happen. Who upsets the dog and causes doors to bang open and make the house too cold all the time, and in short, makes things just like Chicago."

Hell House

Suitable, I thought, for Halloween-month is this documentary following the yearly creation of 'Hell House', a Texan pentecostal church's "modern" take on a house of horrors: but in this case the 'horrors' include what afterlife fate befalls you if you have an abortion/are gay/take-drugs-and-get-raped (the rape is your fault because drugs)/read Harry Potter/play Magic: The Gathering, etc. I watched this on SBS (I think) quite a few years ago, and was drawn in initially by the participants' commitment to the production, juxtaposed with the fundamentalist glee with which they approach their parts: who will be 'abortion girl' this year?  It's a full scale production, but despite the overacting, jump-scares (that genuinely frighten some of the hell house visitors), and the dreadful Satan ("YOU KILLED YOUR BABY, JAN!"), for me the scariest bit is at the end of the horror show, where the kids are chatted to in an overlit ordinary room by an imposing "friendly" bloke, and offered the chance to redeem themselves by going into a private room to pray with members of the church. Or they can choose to leave immediately, and, you know, forsake their souls. The backstage focus on one particular family centres the film: a dad single-parenting a bunch of children, several with special needs, whose wife left him under mumblemumble circumstances and took the kids for a bit mumblemumble but now he has won them back. The portrayal of this family sits uncomfortably alongside the work that they do: judgments can be easily made.

Spirits of the Dead

An old favourite of mine from my taping-things-off-the-telly-when-Warrnambool-first-got-SBS days: three Edgar Allen Poe stories re-imagined by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Frederico Fellini. The Vadim one, otherwise known as "the one with Jane Fonda in lots of racy outfits", is the one that everyone hates, but really, there's a lot of Jane Fonda on a horse and Peter Fonda AS the horse, and the costumes are brilliant, so what's not to like? Malle's take on 'William Wilson' is really promising (the threat of live human medical dissections scared the crap out of me, despite knowing there couldn't be too much gore at this rating), but the ending just makes you go: 'Oh. Well. That's a bit shit, isn't it.' Fellini's version of Poe's 'Never bet the devil your head', however, is totally brilliant: nightmarish, gibbering, oddly coloured, drunkenly beardy, and the only film of the three to totally nail the ending.

[REC]

A Spanish reporter is following a fire-crew on their calls, hoping for a little excitement but not really expecting anything. They're called to an apartment block where it seems an elderly woman has locked herself inside her house and isn't responding, so the fire crew break in. THEN HORROR AND BITING. When they escape the staggery bloodthirsty geriatric, they discover the whole apartment building has been sealed off from the outside by authorities. So that's not good. [REC] takes the found footage idea and really works it well: the POV isn't so jerky as to cause much sea-sickness, there's a lot of great use made out of different lighting and camera scenarios, and I basically CLUTCHED at Tim's arm from the first bite to the last. It's a really decent modern horror film, and those can be hard to come by.

Lake Mungo

A recommendation from our friend @ernmalleyscat, this film proved to be an excellent Australian sleeper. A family is devastated when their daughter Alice drowns in a dam on holiday with her family. Even after Alice's body is found and laid to rest, she seems to pop up in photos and footage taken by the family: until her brother is discovered faking the ghostly appearances. Or...is he? This is an underrated emotional sort-of-ghost story that presents itself again through found footage: news reports, Australian Story-style grief-porn, interviews, photographs, and bad-quality phone footage. It's both touching, frightening, and deeply sad: less a horror movie than a meditation on fear, grief, and the ways we try to capture what we can't let go of.

A couple of publications

At the moment I have poems in::

Antipodes

and

Otoliths (which is an online journal, so you can pop over and have a read if you feel like it.)

And happy halloween!

Four-Sentence MIFF Reviews #5-6: Ginger & Rosa, Alone

Ginger & Rosa (Sally Potter)

Born in adjacent beds, raised in adjacent houses, teenagers Ginger and Rosa have always done everything together.
But when Rosa falls for someone very close to Ginger, the girls' friendship is on rocky (and melodramatic) ground.
A decent first half with some excellently accurate characterisation of adolescent passion/angst/bad rhyming poetry.
Second half descends into hysteria and predictability, saved only by Ginger's lovely bumbly gay godfathers and their smart-mouthed friend Bella.


Alone (Wang Bing)

Three sisters aged 4, 6 and 10 live alone in a remote Chinese country village, with occasional food from their aunt next door and their father who visits from the city every few months.
A fascinating, if context-free, look at a lifestyle where basic day-to-day survival is hard, dirty, and relentlessly exhausting, and the brunt of it is borne by a 10 year old girl.
The documentary-makers follow the girls and their family in almost complete silence, only rarely conversing with their subjects:
"Where is your mother?"
"She left."
"Where did she go?"
"We don't know."*





*Yes, I'm counting a quoted conversation as one sentence here. No rules, man.

Boo! A Halloween Podcast for some creepy listening

The multi-talented and decidedly awesome Tim Howard (aka @timsterne) has put together a Halloween podcast with lots of different contributors: "Fifty minutes of gothic tales, ghostly anecdotes, urban legends, nursery rhymes and appropriately spooky tunes."

Should your 31st of October need some creepy listening (and honestly, whose doesn't?), I highly recommend you download or stream it here!

(Also, two of the recordings on it are by me, so you really really should download it. And not just because I end up sounding a bit like Drusilla on one of them.)

For your amusement, here I am recording, about to engage my home-made sound effect.

Contributions:
"The Funny Old Box" by Christopher Miles
"Halloween: Some Prefatory Remarks" by Tim Howard
"Meeting Mum" by Jon Buckingham
"You Can Never Leave" by Alice Cannon
"The Green" by Mat Larkin
"The Stables" by ernmalleyscat
"A Gap in the Shadow" by Anna Ryan-Punch
"Snapshots" by Tim Howard
"Zaldock the Dread" by Timothy Train
"Passing Notes" by Anna Ryan-Punch
"End of Messages" by Sean M. Elliott

Happy Halloween! Enjoy! Or die...