Random Movie #12: I Spit On Your Grave

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Random Movie #11: Battle Royale

This last unhappy trend of movies (for which Becky is solely responsible) was finally bucked by a mutual pick: the 2000 Japanese action film Battle Royale.  Having previously seen the movie, which I initially took as a poor man's Hunger Games, I figured that it would be right up Becky's alley.  Having previously read the novel on which it is based, Becky got the exact same idea.

In the face of widespread social unrest (especially from the student population) Japan passes the B.R. Act.  This new law dictates that once each year, one randomly selected class of students will participate in a Battle Royale: a free-for-all fight to the death from which only a sole survivor will walk away from.  This year's participants, class 3-B, are fitted with electronic collars that will explode if there is no victor after three days.  Now, armed with randomly distributed weapons (ranging from paper fans to machine guns), it's every boy, girl and clique for themselves.

Battle Royale is both strongly and immediately comparable to The Hunger Games.  The premises of each are identical: a dystopic government, fearful of social uprising, abducts children and forces them to fight each other to the death as a means of terroristic control.  Both competitions are controlled by a centralized "game maker" who uses a variety of strong-arm tactics to funnel participants toward one another (ranging from The Hunger Games' traps / mechanized weaponry to Battle Royale's explosive collar and "danger zones").  Both include "career tributes" that have an unfair advantages in training and experience.  Both present alarming disadvantages in terms of the equipment distributed among the participants.  Both see the creation and dissolution of alliances as a means of survival.  Hell, even both sets of protagonists are romantically involved with one another.

The differences between the films, however, are infinitely more profound.  The Hunger Games functions primarily as a political allegory.  It emphasizes the brutality of Snow's regime and the harsh inequities between The Capital and The Districts.  It focuses on The Games as a means of control and, subsequently, the intensity of the unfolding action within them.  At its core, The Hunger Games is an action movie centered around combat and survival: "blut und ehre."

Battle Royale, however, is a surreal portrait of Kafkan intensity.  Director Kinji Fukasaku does not invest the film in the politics of the Republic of Greater East Asia or its subsidiary of Japan any more than is absolutely necessary to provide context for the battle royale itself.  The closest explanation for this free-for-all comes in the form a disarmingly cheerful orientation video, which is itself cut short when "game maker" / teacher Kitano (Takeshi Kitano) impales a girl with a knife for whispering to another girl during their orientation (every teacher's fantasy).  We (along with class 3-B) are then thrust into hypnagogic pandemonium before the implications of "why"  of the situation can sink in.

Near the end of the film, Kitano resumes his role as the chief agent of surrealism when he reveals a picture that he painted over the past three days.  Rendered in the simplistic style of a child's watercolor, it shows how every student in class 3-B died during the past three days.  It depicts children pin-cushioned by arrows, run through by swords, impaled by hatchets, leaping off of cliffs and having their heads explode, all sprayed with bright, cartoonish blood.  In the center is Noriko (Aki Maeda), untouched by the carnage, smiling serenely and haloed in light: the only student that he wanted to win the competition.  After being shot (and seemingly killed), he gets up and casually answers his ringing cell phone, carries on a brief conversation and shoots his phone in frustration before slumping over dead.

While the tributes' confrontations in The Hunger Games emphasized actual combat skill, Battle Royale's deaths are rarely the result of the students' fighting prowess.  When Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) kills Glimmer (Leven Rambin) or Marvel (Jack Quaid) kills Rue (Amandla Stenberg), it is because they either outsmarted or overpowered them.  In Battle Royale, however, it is based on a factor that none of them had any control over: their randomly selected "weapons."  Yukiko (Yukari Kanasawa) and Yumiko (Misao Kato) are murdered by Kazuo (Masanobu Ando) when they attempt to use their "weapon," a megaphone, to get people to stop fighting one another.  Likewise, Hiroki (Sosuke Takaoka) is killed by Kayoko (Takayo Mimura) when he uses his weapon, a tracking device for each student's collar, to find her so that he could confess that he liked her.  Except for Kazuo replacing his paper fan for a stockpile of guns and grenades, the deaths predictably play out based the fatalistic distribution of weapons.

In perhaps the most memorable scene of the film, Shuya (Tatsuya Fujiwara) is rescued and nursed back to health by a group of girls.  One of the girls, Yuko (Hitomi Hyuga), witnessed him accidentally kill fellow classmate Oki (Gouki Nishimura) and poisons his food.  Another girl, Yuka (Satomi Hanamura), grabs the food and eats it, subsequently dying after vomiting up blood like one of Danny Boyle's Infected.  The group of girls devolve into accusations of foul play, resulting in a massacre that leaves only Yuko alive (which she corrects by committing suicide after freeing Shuya).

The entire scene plays out with the brilliant senselessness an old episode of The Twilight Zone, where social order breaks down over veritable non-issues.  Having secured a safe base of operations, this close-knit group of friends had managed to not only survive the carnage thus far, but were planning on meeting up with another group of students to escape from the island on which they were being confined.  But because Yuko blamed Shuya for Oki's death (when, in fact, Oki brained himself with his own hatchet after falling down a hill while attacking Shuya), she committed one small act of vengeance in poisoning his food.  In a bout of fatalistic irony, her attempt to preserve their social order (by saving them all from the "murderous" Shuya) snowballed into killing every last one of them after fear and suspicion turned them on one another.

With The Hunger Games as an immediate comparison, it is easy to mistake Battle Royale as an inferior film.  There is less build-up to the titular bloodbath, less character development and an unwieldily cast of characters (42, compared to 24) that we cannot possibly begin to grow attached to.  When Rue dies, it is heart wrenching; by watching her shadow Katniss, help her escape from the careers, nurse her back to health and then share intimate details of her life in District 11, we grew as attached to her as Katniss had.  By comparison, when Kazuhiko (Yasuomi Sano) and Sakura (Tomomi Shimaki) commit suicide at the outset of the battle royale, all that we know about them is that they are boy #21 and Girl #4.

Despite being most of the cast's first or only film, Battle Royale features an exceptionally good cast, perhaps assisted somewhat by the fact that so few of them had a significant amount of screen time.  Both Masanobu Ando and Yousuke Shibata fully immerse themselves into their characters, conveying the psychotic and chilling nuances of Kazuo and Mitsuri.  Takeshi Kitano provides a straight-faced juxtaposition to the unfolding chaos of the film, able to deftly switch between the romantic longing, murderous rage and droll lecturing of Kitano.

Battle Royale is the other half of The Hunger Games coin: existential and absurd.  It plunges into its subject matter with nihlistic glee and never slacking its pace to allow our sensibilities to catch up with our senses.  It is as entertaining as The Hunger Games and twice as wicked.  Becky and I both rate this film an 8, putting it on par with American Psycho, Fearless and Kwaidan.

Random Movie #10: Air Buddies

And so it came to pass that, through random happenstance and Becky's willful inclusion of it in the bucket, we have seen one of Becky's "puppy movies:" the 2006 direct-to-dvd family comedy Air Buddies.  She was so insistently hung-ho for this movie that I couldn't even bribe her to remove it (I threatened to add Olympus Has Fallen, I offered to remove Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus).  It was inevitably going to happen, especially since she added NINE of them (Air Buddies, Treasure Buddies, Super Buddies, Santa Buddies, Spooky Buddies, Snow Buddies, Space Buddies, The Search for Santa Paws, Santa Paws 2: The Santa Pups), but that doesn't make it any easier to deal with.

After retiring from Basketball, Football, Soccer, Baseball and Volleyball, the famed Golden Retriever Air Bud settles down with the dog across the street and has a litter of pups.  But when the burden of raising Rosebud Budderball, Buddha, MudBud and B-Dawg becomes too much for the Framm family to bear, they are forced to break up the litter.  Not wanting to go to puppy foster care, they decide to run away from home.  A villainous group of exotic animal dealers, however, sees this as a $500,000 payday.

So... yeah.  This happened.

If you have any love for your children, you will give them a far better childhood than this sad Air Bud spin-off franchise has to offer.  You can identify the villain by his eye-patch and mangled German accent, so there's not really much more to say about it.  I give it a 2.5, even lower than Grave Encounters 2!  This puts it squarely in line with Bio-Dome, Dude, Where's My Car? and The Stupids.  Becky, who very obviously enjoyed this far more than I did, gave it a 5.

Random Movie #9: Grave Encounters 2

Our lineup of random movies nears double digits with the addition of the 2012 horror movie Grave Encounters 2.  Given how much we both enjoyed the first installment to the fledgling series, I could hardly argue with Becky's choice of this film for the bucket.  Sadly, though, the best laid sequels gang aft agley.

Film student Alex Wright (Richard Harmon) is obsessed with the movie Grave Encounters.  The more that he researches the making of the film, the more convinced he is that it is not just a movie, that it is real footage of what really happened to the crew of the tv series.  Armed with their own set of cameras, Alex and friends Jennifer (Leanne Lapp), Jared (Howie Lai), Tessa(Stephanie Bennett) and Trevor (Dylan Playfair) track down the haunted hospital to uncover the truth behind Grave Encounters.

The preeminent flaw of Grave Encounters 2 is that it is under the impression that the first film is a cultural phenomenon like The Blair Witch Project, instead of the obscure little horror film that it actually is.  The only people that I know who have seen it only did so because it was conveniently streamable on Netflix.  The Vicious Brothers mistook "passingly entertaining" for "cultural tour de force."  Grave Encounters is not The Blair Witch Project, not even The Human Centipede.  It is merely "good enough" for a laid back Friday night scare.

In addition to the utterly pretentious, meta-cinematic premise, Grave Encounters 2 violates the cardinal sin of found footage films: thou shalt not force thy found framework on the film.  This is something that The Blair Witch Project itself flirted with and Cloverfield violated.  In an attempt to call back to the original film, director John Poliquin stretched the found footage premise to the point of disbelief, requiring diegetic cameras to be rolling far beyond when it was actually realistic to do so.  It required no less than 16 video blogs, a student film, a student documentary about that student film, a spy camera, all of the cameras from the first film (set up in the hospital in the exact same locations as in the first film), a police car-mounted camera, a tv spot and revisited footage from the first film.  Worst of all, none of this unrealistically elaborate framework did anything more than remind us of how well-done the found footage in the first film was by comparison.

Grave Encounters 2 also suffers from something that seems to be increasingly common in low-budget horror movies: an overly long opening segment.  The film opens with a series of 15 YouTube reviews of the first movie (supposedly establishing it as an edgy, divisive, widely popular film: none of which is true), listlessly meanders into a footage from an insultingly stereotypical college party (in which the protagonist passes out while in drag and is repeatedly teabagged by his roommate) and finally comes to a head with footage from the protagonists own D-level horror movie "Slash 'n Burn," chased by over twenty solid minutes of research into the film Grave Encounters before they ever leave campus.  The resulting thirty minutes of cross-dressing, drinking, drug use and sexual assault could easily have been condensed to ten minutes of setup and research, but it drags on for seemingly no other reason than padding the movie to 90 minutes.

So what does all of this build up to?  Evidently the house watches Alex's vlog, including his unimpressed review of Grave Encounters and subsequent conviction that it is real.  Encouraged by this turn of events, the house, using the username DeathAwaits666, leaves Alex a trail of bread crumbs to the supposedly non-existent hospital so that it can 1) kill his friends and 2) convince Alex to make a sequel to Grave Encounters.

That's it.  That's the payoff.  That is what they think is worth 90+ minutes of somebody's time.  It's like Cartman pooping on Mr. Garrison's desk to avoid a fight at recess and hoping that nobody figures out why.

That all being said, the film is not entirely without merit, although it does skim dangerously close to just that.  When they actually get to the hospital, they delve deeper into the workings of the building than its predecessor did.  In the first movie, it was extremely easy to miss the trail of breadcrumbs that consisted of the film's back story.  Those details are pleasingly expanded on in the sequel, adding additional context to the happenings of the first film.

The inclusion of the deranged and lobotomized Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson), the protagonist from the first movie, was Grave Encounters 2's only saving grace.  His manic, scattered performance is outright exceptional: far better than this film deserves.  Watching him dissolve into insanity, it is extremely easy to forget that outside of these two movies, his most notable role was Death Dealer #2 in Underworld: Evolution.  His seamless transitions between lunacy and almost-sanity during his self-interview is fiendishly entertaining to watch.

Grave Encounters 2 is the very definition of a unneeded sequel that fails to understand why its predecessor was so enjoyable.  The reappearance of Lance Preston is almost worth sitting through the rest of the movie for (almost).  Ultimately, I would rate it a 3, putting it in line with fellow disappointments Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, Friday the 13th Part 2 and Dead Snow.  Becky, ever the more generous between the two of us, rated it a 5.

Random Movie #8: Pulse

For our eighth randomly selected Netflix movie, Becky and I watched the 2001 Japanese horror movie Pulse.  While I had seen its absolutely atrocious remake, I had heard considerable praise for the original (according to the blog They Shoot Pictures, Don't They, it is the 246th best reviewed movie of the 21st century).  Besides, the exceedingly unsettling poster alone made the movie at least worth checking out.

When Tokyo florist Kudo Michi (Kumiko Asô) begins to worry about absent co-worker Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi), she goes to his apartment to see what is the matter.  During the course of their conversation, Taguchi casually walks into an adjoining room and hangs himself.  It becomes rapidly apparent, however, that this is only a single occurrence in a widening pattern of suicides throughout the world, caused by ghosts crossing over en masse to the world of the living.

Pulse is the Japanese progression of Dawn of the Dead, which declared that "when there is no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth."  Like its predecessor, Pulse envisions the afterlife as a dimension of finite space: overcrowded with the spirits of the dead.  The core difference between them, however, is how the dead choose to interact with the mortal.

Romero's zombies wage a crusade against the living, seeking to either consume or convert anybody that they come across.  They don't want to amicably co-exist with the living, but to conquer them one meal at a time.  Kurosawa's ghosts, however, are the displaced dead: refugees from their own phantasmal realm (which one character describes as "eternal loneliness").  They are the "tired, [the] poor, / [the] huddled masses yearning to breathe free" in a new world filled with promise and possibility.  Our world is their last, desperate hope for an afterlife.

The internet videos that are viewed throughout the film are windows into these ghosts' hellish afterlife.  What we see is a dim and isolated room where every face is obscured by darkness.  The words "HELP ME" are written repeatedly on all of the walls.  As the video progresses, we see a figure enter the room and strangle its existing occupant: presumably a territorial dispute over what little space remains in this afterlife.  And, given that ghosts are eternal beings, the implication is that they must endure these promethean tortures for all eternity.  The unforeseen consequence of their intrusion on our world, however, is that any living being that they come in contact with is stricken with suicidal depression, further exacerbating the root issue of an overcrowded afterlife.

The ghosts' invasion of the living world is modeled within the film by a computer program in which a series of white dots move listlessly through a black screen.  If the dots ever touch one another, both are destroyed.  If any move too far away from one another, though, they are propelled closer together.  This program doubles as an apt metaphor for all human interaction: we both fear isolation and crave human contact.  Because of this, we propel ourselves toward one another with wild, often reckless, abandon, resulting in our own mutual self destruction.

The medium for this destruction is modern technology.  Kurosawa presents it as a means of isolating, rather than connecting, people, which invariably results in despair.  Instead of making meaningful, personal relationships, we seclude ourselves in our rooms (which are so very like those occupied by the invading dead) and surf the web.  By the time that we venture forth beyond technology, it is far too late: we have become as desperate and self-destructive as the dead themselves.

Pulse is a movie that improves considerably upon retrospection: something which is more appreciated than enjoyed.  While its production quality and scares are only so-so, its soberly meditative take on people's relationship with modern technology is thoughtful and depressively tragic.  Becky and I both give the movie a respectful 6, the same that I have awarded to Flatliners, Insidious and The Evil Dead.

Random Movie #7: Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn

For our seventh Netflix incursion, Becky and I watched the 1987 horror-comedy Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn.  Interestingly, this particular film is one that both Becky and I chose for the bucket.  We have both seen and enjoyed the original 1981 film (her more than myself) as well as its 2013 remake (myself more than her).  And having also seen the admittedly Army of Darkness, the second installment was the only one that I had not yet seen, which I had often seen referred to as the best of the series.

After surviving the undead assault of his possessed friends the night before, Ash (Bruce Campbell) finds himself no less in danger.  Still trapped by the bridge collapse, he desperately fights a losing battle against demonic possession and his own growing madness.  Meanwhile Annie (Sarah Berry), the daughter of the cabin's rightful owner, research partner Ed (Richard Domeneier) and locals Jake (Dan Hicks) and Bobby Joe (Kassie Wesley) make their way to cabin to translate the missing pages of the Necronomicon that may prove to be the key to saving Ash's soul.

The film begins with one of the most head-scratching openers that I have ever seen: a "recap" of the first films that completely retcons everything that happened in it.  Among the most dramatic alterations that it made was that it completely wrote out third, fourth and fifth wheels Cheryl (Ellen Sanweiss),  Scotty (Richard Demanincor) and Shelly (Theresa Tilly), changing the friendly weekend hangout in the woods into a secluded romantic getaway.  In addition to retconning the first film, it also serves the purpose of expanding upon the previously non-existant lore of the Necronomicon, providing deepening layers of interest in the events of the film.

Evil Dead 2 is essential The Three Stooges meets The Exorcist in Pewee's Haunted Playhouse.  It somehow manages to avoid outright farce to deliver something which is equal parts comedy and terror, akin to F. W. Murnau directing Modern Times.   Sam Raimi infuses the film with a crazed, manic energy derived from rapid tonal shifts between slapstick antics, body horror, sight gags and psychological torture.  In the over-the-top battle with his own possessed hand, Bruce Campbell delivers a "Three Stooges" one-man show (complete with the famous eye-poking gag), which quickly changes to horrifying as he cuts off his own hand with a chainsaw.  The scene comes full circle when Ash traps his disembodied hand under a bucket weighted down with a copy of A Farewell to Arms.

Due to the psychological nature of the horrors that Ash must face, it is often not clear whether or not he is truly under assault by demons (which mean to possess him) or merely insane (and dismembered his girlfriend in a fit of madness).  The boundaries of the real are continuously blurred in the film, ranging from the mounted animal heads hysterics to Ash interacting with his own tangible reflection.  Even Annie's possessed mother ambiguously shifts between murderous "deadite" and helpless old woman, bringing into question what really happened when Ash and Linda were alone.

Visually, Evil Dead 2 is a macabre masterpiece, whose makeup mutilations comparable to those featured in The Thing: decayed, gray-toned skin; rotted teeth; blind, pupil-less eyes; sharply defined facial bones.  These deformations are further enhanced by extremely high-contrast lighting and the frequent shifts between the actors in and out of their possessed forms' makeup.  When combined with scenes of Linda's head being crushed in a vise, Ash severing his own hand and any number of characters being showered in geisers of blood, it creates a singular vision of bodily deformation and horror.

The film also features what is absolutely the most astoundingly good use of stop-motion outside of fully animated features like The Nightmare Before Christmas.  The scene in which Linda's decapitated skeleton dances in the woods like putrefied ballerina is the film's crowning achievement: a sickeningly entrancing image of ghoulish beauty.  She twirls, pirouettes and even juggles her head about her skeletal frame before disappearing like a lingering wisp of smoke, leaving us to wonder if she was ever there at all.  Even the ultimate confrontation with the manifested evil from the Necronomicon is suitably epic, sickeningly riveting despite the film's paltry budget and out-moded style of special effects.

While a shade more slapstick than a usually care for, Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn strikes the proper balance between scares and laughs for a horror comedy.  In the true tradition of Paris' Grand Guignol theater, the juxtaposition between comedy and horror makes the scares scarier and the jokes funnier.  I give the film a high 8, the same as I have given to Scream, The Hills Have Eyes and Ghostbusters.  Becky gave the movie a 6.5

Random Movie #6: The Wind that Shakes the Barley

For our sixth random Netflix movie, Becky and I saw the 2006 war drama The Wind that Shakes the Barley.  I have wanted to see this movie since it first came out in 2006.  Initially it was because it looked interesting and starred Cillian Murphey.  Later, this grew to include its Palme d'Or win from that year (best described as the equivalent of winning a Nobel Prize in film).

Damien (left) and Teddy (right)

In rural 1920s Ireland, Dr. Damien O'Donovan (Cillian Murphey) prepares to leave his hometown for a job in a London hospital.  After a farewell game of Hurling (a game similar to Field Hockey), a group of English soldiers confront them for hosting an illegal public gathering, resulting in the summary execution of friend Micheál Ó Súilleabháin (Laurence Barry).  After his initial misgivings about fighting an unwinnable war, Damien's brother Teddy (Pádraic Delaney) convinces him to join the Irish rebels in their war against English oppression.  But while Teddy is satisfied to compromise with the English, Damien will not be satisfied until Ireland achieves full independence.

The Wind that Shakes the Barley is an a-typical war drama, having far more in common with dialog-heavy dramas like 12 Angry Men than with action-laden epics like Saving Private Ryan.  Rather than focusing on the sanguine skirmishes between the Irish rebels and English troops, the film emphasizes the surrounding debate of Irish nationalism and independence.  The real battles are not fought amidst the fields of Anthenry over territorial gains, but in the court rooms and churches over the distribution of wealth and the exact nature of the new Irish government.  The war itself, which ends 45 minutes before the end of the film, merely exists to provide context for such a debate.  

The film is a deeply immersive experience that steeps the viewer in the fiercely-fractured context of 1920s Ireland.  Its title - The Wind that Shakes the Barley - is drawn from Robert Dwyer Joyce's tragic ballad of the same name, which is sung during Micheál Ó Súilleabháin's funeral.  The song, which strongly parallels O'Donovan's own story, tells of an Irishman torn between his nationalist love of Ireland and his romantic love of his sweetheart.  After his lover is murdered by an English soldier, he joins the IRA and fights in the war.  Its choral references of barley refer to the fact that the Irish rebels would carry barley in their pockets as marching provisions.  When soldiers killed in combat were buried, the barley would take root and cover their unmarked graves.

Another song prominently featured in the film is Óró, Sé Do Bheatha Abhaile, a traditional ballad that was intensely popular during the Irish War of Independence.  The song welcomes home the soldiers who have "scatter[ed] the foreigners" that have threatened the country, comparing them to national heroes like the pirate queen Grace O'Malley.  It is performed by the Irish rebels emerging from a fog-seeped road, marching toward the a stationary camera and accompanied only by their footfalls.  Though it lasts less than a minute on camera, it remains one of the most enthralling and memorable moments within the film.

At the heart of The Wind that Shakes the Barley is an intensely personal tragedy.  Much like the American Civil War, which pitted entire families against one another, brothers Damien and Teddy ultimately find themselves on opposing sides following the Ireland's eventual treaty with England, which turns Northern Ireland into a Puerto Rico-like commonwealth that remains under English control.  Damien refuses to stop fighting until Ireland is completely independent of England, accusing Teddy of "wrapp[ing himself] in the [...] Union Jack: the butcher’s apron."  Teddy, fearful of England's threat of "an immediate and terrible war" if hostilities should continue, believes that the treaty is the best possible outcome that they, a rag-tag group of rebels, could hope for.

The Wind that Shakes the Barley easily numbers among the best war movies ever made despite, paradoxically, de-emphasizing the events of the war proper.  Unlike most films, where anticipation breeds disappointment, this one was well worth the seven-year wait.  While Becky only rates this exceptional film an 8, I rate it a 9, placing it on par with the likes of Apocalypse Now, Lincoln and A Man Escaped.

Random Movie #5: Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

For our fifth Netflix installment, we returned to one of my additions to the bucket: the 2010 horror film Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.  First shown to me by an intensely enamored friend, it seemed to me that it would be something that Becky and I would enjoy watching together.

Eight-year-old Sally Farnham (Bailee Madison) has recently moved to Rhode Island to live with her estranged father Alex (Guy Pearce) and his girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes) while they restore the ancient Blackwood Manor for resale.  Even though Alex and Kim try to make her feel welcome, all she wants to do is to go back to her old home with her mother.  One morning, while exploring Blackwood's extensive grounds, Sally discovers a hidden chamber accidentally frees a tribe of pixie-like creatures.  It is only afterwards, however, that she realizes that they want to kidnap her and bring her to their warren under the manor.  Her father refuses to believe that she is telling the truth, leaving her to defend against these nocturnal invaders on her own.

Though not an altogether inaccurate label, I would hesitate to advertise Don't Be Afraid of the Dark as a horror film.  Doing so creates an inaccurate set of expectations in the viewer (similar to my opinion of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Last House on the Left).  Between its whispered threats and murine antagonists, it is intimately more creepy than terrifying.  It could be more appropriately described as a melancholic meditation of the effects of a broken home on a too-often overlooked child.

To this end, the film is structured less like a modern horror film than it is a Greek tragedy.  The imps in the house are only a threat to Sally, whose most formidable weapons are a night light and a Polaroid camera.  Though he was capable of stopping the imps' assault throughout the film, Alex is too preoccupied with his work to take even the slightest notice of the danger that his family is in.  By neglecting Sally's need for companionship when she first arrived, he opened her to the tempting offers of friendship that the imps promised her in exchange for releasing them.  By refusing to believe Sally's increasing visible fears, he placed all three of them perpetual danger.  By refusing to leave the house when even Kim was begging him to, he ensured that the creatures would tear his family apart.  Although Alex himself survives the ordeal, he is burdened with the guilt of knowing that his constant inaction directly resulted in the film's tragic climax.

By starring a girl who was only eight-years-old at the time that filming began, director Troy Nixey and writer / producer Guillermo del Toro took a considerable risk with the emotional core of the film.  The old Hollywood adage, "never work with animals and children," is a direct warning against making this exact kind of child-centric film.  The quality of child actors is notoriously unpredictable, running the gamut from Daniel Radcliffe to Jake Lloyd.  "Not terrible" is often the best that anybody can expect.

Bailee Madison, however, gave a rare and moving performance as the haunted Sally Farnham.  Her character is surprisingly complex, torn between her instinctual need for her father's protection and her aversion toward a man who is essentially a complete stranger to her.  Madison's performance captures every nuance of a girl forced into a broken family.  She conveys the sour resentment of being uprooted from a reasonably stable home, the giddy wonder of a girl discovering strange new "friends" and the desperate need to be believed.  Amidst a solid-but-forgettable cast, she succeeds at giving a truly exceptional performance.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark features all of the darkly beautiful visuals that are characteristic of Guillermo del Toro.  Blackwood Manor, rooted with secret passages and draped in heavily saturated colors, is entrancingly beautiful.  It is a pristine vision of old world opulence.  This, in turn, is contrasted against the savage imps that infest its walls, nightmarishly rendered on paper as often as they emerge from the shadows.

On the whole, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is a solidly entertaining and reasonably executed horror film.  Becky and I agree that this film is a solid 7, comparing favorably to Alien, Carrie and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.

Random Movie #4: Grave Encounters

Our fourth random movie was one of Becky's additions to our Netflix Bucket: the 2011 horror film Grave Encounters.  Becky had seen this months ago and had been trying to get me to see it ever since.  For some reason I was never really interested in it, despite being the kind of movie that I usually like.  It turns out that it takes blind luck of the draw, rather than reasoned discussion, for her to get her way.

Like Ghost Hunters, Grave Encounters is a paranormal investigation show.  The show's cast consists of host Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson), occult specialist Sasha Parker (Ashleigh Gryzko), psychic medium Houston Grey (Mackenzie Gray), cameraman T.C. Gibson (Merwin Mondesir) and technician Matt White (Juan Riedinger).  For the latest episode of their show, they visit a haunted psychiatric hospital in Canada, where they lock themselves in overnight while they conduct a paranormal investigation.  After a seemingly uneventful night, they become trapped in the hospital, terrorized by the very ghosts that they came looking for.

Grave Encounters, like the more famous Quarantine and Cloverfield, is a found footage horror film.  In an attempt to create verisimilitude, the film has been shot in such a way as to appear authentic footage from a paranormal investigation.  The only things that we see or hear as audience members are what the numerous cameras placed throughout the hospital (or carried by the protagonists) have shot.  We are forced to literally adopt the perspective of the protagonists that, experience tells us, are all doomed.  Their fear is made all the more palpable since the audience is fully immersed into the protagonists experiences.

The film is essentially a superior version of The Blair Witch Project.  The updated premise ( a ghost hunting show) comes off as far less forced than its predecessor's (a group of students filming a documentary in the woods).  The rotting fixtures, nonsensical graffiti, immersive shadows and labyrinthian hallways of the derelict psychiatric hospital were the best possible combinations of the impossible layout of The Shining's Overlook Hotel and Silent Hill's corrosive infrastructure.

While a large number of scenes in The Blair Witch Project unrealistically stretched the assumption that the characters themselves shot the footage (scenes where they bickered and argued with one another over where to hike or who was to blame for getting them lost).  Realistically, the characters would either have been too absorbed in finding a solution to their problem or too angry with one another to record the increasingly bitter arguments for posterity.  In Grave Encounters, however, the found footage premise never forces itself upon the action of the film.  Since a number of cameras had been set up prior to the start of the investigation, it makes sense that there would be footage of events that the protagonists were otherwise too preoccupied to shoot themselves.  Additionally, the basic premise of the film necessitated that they wanted to record proof of the paranormal, so it would only stand to reason that they would continue filming beyond the point that a group of college students working on an unrelated project would.

Grave Encounters also features a far more experienced and far more capable cast.  The Blair Witch Project starred three purely amature actors.  The film was the debut of actors  Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard and it was actress Heather Donahue's first non bit-part.  Their  inexperience showed throughout the film, where they merely shifted from calm to angry to unconvincing bouts of crying.  They succeeded in reading their lines and marching through the woods, but that was all.  Grave Encounters' cast is vastly more experience, each credited with non-recurring tv and film roles.  While the cast of The Blair Witch Project had difficulty conveying even simple emotions convincingly, this film's cast plays off one another with the ease of experience.  Mackenzie Gray easily shifts between his duel roles of irreverent actor and dramatic spiritualist Houston Grey while Sean Rogerson embodies the charismatic, self absorbed Lance Preston with practiced deftness.

Grave Encounter's The Vicious Brothers show a greater and subtler ease helming their film than Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick did with theirs (despite both pairs having no previous directing experience).  The frequent and seemingly random switches between color and black and white in The Blair Witch Project were needlessly jarring, preventing the fully immersive experience that the found footage genre seeks to create.  The more-occasional (though still frequent) shifts between color and night-vision maintained Grave Encounter's verisimilitudinous qualities while eliciting the same unease and sense of "wrongness" that the green-tinted lights are commonly used for in horror films; it succeeds in creating tension without succumbing with unthinking ease into convention.  Likewise, the use of fixed-position cameras at present locations offered a third-person perspective to the events of the film that The Blair Witch Project lacked.

Grave Encounters' one great fault is that the exact "whys" of the plot are not immediately evident after the first viewing.  While they are there, they are threaded through heavy exposition in the form of interviews before the protagonists' overnight lock-in at the hospital.  It is exceedingly easy to miss this information and even easier to forget it when the action of the film gets underway.

Overall, the film is an effective and entertaining addition to the found footage horror genre.  It features far superior acting, directing and writing than The Blair Witch Project and far steadier camerawork than Cloverfield.  Becky and I both give it a rating of 7, putting it on par with the aforementioned Cloverfield, Cabin Fever and both Fright Nights.