Review: Insidious (2010)

Insidious (2010)

Director: James Wan

Writer: Leigh Whannell

Stars: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Ty Simpkins

Insidious is a strange hybrid of a ghost story. Writer Leigh Whannell and director James Wan drew inspiration and homage from so many different sources that they wound up creating a patchwork creation that shouldn’t work...but sort of does. There are so many shifts in focus and story, in fact, it would be hard not to talk about the film without spoilers. So be warned, I plan to bring up a few specifics below and I really loved going into this film completely in the dark (so to speak).

The film gets off to a slow start. Josh and Renai Lambert move their young family into new house where creepy things immediately begin to happen. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. The first act of Insidious is a world filled with cliches and tropes (there’s a moment where a mother finds that her books have been moved and accuses her children of the ghostly pranks. Not only have we seen that exact scene dozens of times, but it doesn’t quite make sense with what we later learn). It’s not terrible, Rose Byrn and Patrick Wilson are capable actors and give the usual family-moves-into-haunted-house yarn some believability. Plus, I’ll give Wan full credit for sprinkling in some truly subtle (blink and you’ll miss them) and creepy scares. I mentioned in my Oculus review about the tired setups of all ghost story films these days, and Insidious follows it religiously.

Things pick up, though, when the film takes a refreshing turn, and the family actually decides to move the house. Of course, if things were that simple, there wouldn’t be much of a movie. No, it turns out it wasn’t the house that was haunted, but their comatose son! This is where the film begins shifting gears and gaining some energy. You could rightly level the criticism that Insidious become a thinly veiled Poltergeist homage at this point. However, there’s enough cosmetic differences to the same core story that I was okay with it. Besides, I’d rather it be hewing too close to one single movie than every haunted house movie ever, ala the first act.

You could also lay the criticism that the tone shifts dramatically here. Broad comic relief characters are introduced in the form of paranormal investigators, and the subtle scares are being replaced with more blatant jump scares. But again, the shift was unexpected enough to refuel the lagging story, yet still felt like it belonged in the same universe of the film. Plus, it made me realize, I had no idea what direction the rest of the film was going to go in, which I loved. So, there’s a change, sure, but it feels more like the next chapter of the story, than an entirely different film.

Things get weirder and more outrageous, yet I found myself loving every minute of it. We’ve got an old woman acting as medium utilizing some bold choices in equipment. Red faced demons crawling on ceilings. Unveiled backstories that connect dad to the current predicament.  Some of it is a bit silly, but it also feels fresh and inventive. I’ll take interesting and off-beat over safe and boring any day.

The final sequence of the film features Josh venturing into the astral world to save his son. Though I enjoyed some of the bits here, overall, I felt like the world could’ve been more imaginatively realized. Instead of something hitherto unseen and unsettling, we get smoke and the old house with a different color temperature. Still, the final chase is filled with knuckle biting tense moments and a few good scares. The final moments of the film are the obvious choice and only serve to undermine much of what just happened. But I suppose it does set us up for the sequel.

So, the first part of the movie is subtle yet common, while the second half is broader, yet interesting. Re-reading some reviews, I see I’m a minority in preferring the latter, but at least you know you’ll probably enjoy one half of the movie. Which half depends on your tastes.

3.5 out of 5

- Cameron Harrison

Review: Oculus (2013)

Oculus (2013)

Director: Mike Flanagan

Writers: Mike Flanagan (screenplay), Jeff Howard (screenplay)

Stars: Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff

Oculus (not to be confused with the recent virtual reality headset) starts out as an incredibly strong entry in the contemporary ghost story genre. However, as polished as the surface appears to be, it’s too ambitiously heavy to be supported by the lack of foundation lying beneath, eventually shattering by the uninspired ending. But let’s start with what works, shall we?

There’s an inherent flaw in most modern ghost stories. They tend to follow the same formula: weird things happen, one person starts to suspect a supernatural element, but no one believes them, things escalate, others begin to believe but it’s too late, they manage to dispatch the ghost but with some sacrifice. Not only does the formula begin to get old, but there’s a built-in passivity to the characters, at least in the first half. And passiveness is a character killer. We want to watch characters do things, be proactive, confront their problems head on. Even in the good ghost stories, I always feel like I have to put up with the first part to get to the good stuff at the end. We, the audience, know why the plants are dying and what the whispering is, but we have to watch the characters blunder around ignorantly.

Oculus deftly avoids this pitfall through the cunning use of a non-sequential narrative. In fact, the movie almost serves as its own sequel. We cut back and forth between Kaylie and Tim as children, being terrorized by their parents (or what’s possessing them) and the two in their early twenties, attempting to destroy the evil which caused them so much pain. This structure allows us to begin with the meat of the film, the characters on the same page as the audience, and all the obligatory set up told through incremental flashbacks. I can’t overstate how refreshing it was to immediately jump to the trying to outsmart the ghost aspect of the film. I really liked the aspect of the film that Kaylie has studied the possessed item and is trying to simultaneously document and prove its abilities, as well as destroy it. I always like it when characters in horror movies go on the offensive. Watching her detail the various steps she’s taken to safeguard herself is quite entertaining.

Much of that fun was thanks to Karen Gillan, who gives an exciting, feisty performance as Kaylie, a woman determined to defeat the ghost that wreaked so much havoc on her family as a child. Brenton Thwaites, who plays her brother, is a bit less engaging, but he does have the more boring part, playing the skeptic who doesn’t trust his own senses or memories. Their child counterparts are both capable actors, and look remarkably like them, helping form the link between the past and present.

In fact, the pacing of the two stories was woven together incredibly well. Writer/Director Mike Flanagan, who also did his own editing, gets full marks for deftly editing in and out of past and present. This technique in films can often go horribly awry. Spend too much time with one story and it feels jarring to jump to the other. Don’t spend enough time and you lose interest in it. I was fully engaged in both past and present of this film and never felt like one was overstaying its welcome.

So where does the film fall apart? Well, the movie deals with themes of perception, memories vs. reality, and the immutability of evil. However, it never really has anything to say about any of that. As the film progresses, we, the audience, are brought into the characters’ shoes, as we can’t really tell what is real or not. Time begins folding in on itself, past and present merging, reality and perception blurring. We’re never really sure if what we’re seeing is occurring or just part of the evil’s machinations. This is all well-presented, the dread and tension building nicely, yet nothing ever really comes of it. At times the film seems to suggest that we should rely on our memories, at other times it says that our senses can’t be trusted at all. It just feels like the movie could have gone somewhere interesting but seems content just to utilize these ideas to justify some scares and stylish sequences.

Another problem is that a horror film is only as good as its villain. Even the worst installments of the Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween series were worth watching because they had great villains, with pasts and motivations. The villain in this film is an evil mirror. Yes, not since Harry Potter was almost entranced by The Mirror of Erised has a mirror been so dangerous. It’s actually a cool, spooky looking mirror with a colorful past spelled out in a fun bit of exposition. However, what is blatantly not mentioned is why the mirror is haunted. Why it kills those around it. I don’t want it all spelled out, but some hint that there is a story there would be nice. There’s obviously a central figure which we see emerge from the mirror a couple of times but given no hint to who she is or why she does what she does.

Another storytelling cliché is that even the most fantastic stories have to have rules. Okay, I’m going to buy that we have a supernatural killer mirror, but I want to know that it operates under some set of rules. I don’t need to know what they are, but it should feel like there are things it can do and things it can’t do. This is also very muddled in the film; the powers of the mirror seem to be whatever the needs of the scene are.

So, despite a strong beginning, full of hope and promise of a new horror classic, the film finally shudders to an unsatisfying ending that somehow manages to come out of nowhere yet is also horribly predictable. What we’re left with is a stylish, spooky tale with a couple of unique elements and a bit of a shoulder shrug ending. There’s certainly been worse, and it’s worth the watch, but I fear it will soon be forgotten.

- Cameron Harrison 3 out of 5

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Classic Horror Review: The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Director: James Whale

Writers: Mary Shelley (suggested by the original story written in 1816) William Hurlbut (adapted by)

Stars: Boris Karloff, Elsa Lanchester, Colin Clive 

Horror fan confession time. There is a large gap in my viewing history, a gap in the shape of Universal’s Classic Horror Monsters. I’ve seen most of Dracula and Frankenstein over the years, piece by piece, and only recently watched The Creature from the Black Lagoon. And that’s pretty much it. But now, at long last, I’ve seen The Bride of Frankenstein (on 35mm no less!). And, well, it was okay. Not quite what I was expecting for sure. It’s kind of a patchwork of subplots and directions, with the titular Bride herself only appearing in the final reel. And at a scant 75 minutes, it feels like the film ends right when it’s getting started.

We open with Percy and Mary Shelley along with Lord Byron on a dark and stormy night. They discuss Mary Shelley’s story of Frankenstein, the proper movie setting off as she decides to tell them what happens next. Although the scene is quite fun in and of itself, featuring some exuberantly hammy acting by Gavin Gordon as Lord Byron (never have you heard so many R’s rolled in a single sentence!), it feels very awkward and out of place. Firstly, watching any film requires a great deal of suspension of disbelief to buy into the story and empathize with the fictional character, even more so when the film features reanimated corpses and dated special effects. Adding the element of flat out telling you that the movie you’re watching is just a story sort of pulls the rug out from under it. Why invest us in these characters and struggles when they’re just figments of Mary Shelley’s imagination? All the scene serves to do is spell out the theme that man shouldn’t try to play God, which is very clearly stated elsewhere in the film. And although it sets itself up to bookend the film, we don’t actually return to the authors at the end of the movie, which makes the opening stand out all the more (though I’ve read that they did film such an ending scene, which wound up on the cutting room floor).

Once we’re into the Frankenstein story we pick up right at the end of the first film. The village mob is having a gay old time around the burning windmill. We’re quickly introduced to Minnie (Una O’Connor), a busybody of a maid who adds a dash of humor throughout the rest of the film. The townsfolk are quite upset at the death of Dr. Frankenstein and cart his body away to tell his fiancée the sad news. Meanwhile The Monster is, of course, still quite alive and murders a couple of people poking around the ruins (the identities of these victims seem quite mean spirited, especially since the film wants us to start sympathizing with The Monster. But...he is a monster). What does come as a surprise, perhaps, is that the doctor is also alive too! (well, I guess that just undercuts the entire drama at the end of the first film!)

Here the story diverts into two subplots. The Monster wanders around the countryside, looking for food and companionship. He meets a kindly blind man who doesn’t realize what he is and takes him in, teaching him to speak. The Monster becomes relatively eloquent, quite quickly really. Karloff is great in all these scenes, his physical performance has since become iconic, and his deep voice conveys the desperation and sadness of The Monster.

Off in the world of Dr. Frankenstein we’re introduced to an old professor of his who has also had some luck in creating life. This scene really took me by surprise as the fantastically named Dr. Pretorius reveals tiny miniature humans he’s grown. This bit of science fiction seems to come from an entirely different world than that of Frankenstein and smells more of the studio wanting to show off their new special effects than anything. It’s almost as if a scene from some Flash Gordon-esque serial found its way into the film print. Anyway, Dr. Pretorius wants to join up with his former student and create a mate for The Monster (even though there’s no reason either of them should know he’s still alive at this point).

Ernest Thesiger, who sets the bar for mad scientists with his portrayal of Dr. Pretorius is absolutely one of the best parts of the film. He’s grandstanding, humorous, and utterly captivating. When he speaks the infamous “...gods and monsters” quote, you can’t help but get a shiver.

This is a good point to mention the other interesting aspect of watching a movie like this for the first time. I’ve seen so many moments of this film used in other works or parodied, that it’s quite bizarre to see the source material at times. You can’t watch The Monster meeting the old blind man without thinking of the scene from Young Frankenstein. And you certainly can’t hear Dr. Frankenstein exclaim that “She’s Alive” without immediately humming the opening bars of Weird Science. This isn’t a knock against the film at all. I love those little Deja vu moments when watching classic films, it really makes you feel like you’re experiencing film history.

So, the problem with the parallel stories is that they seem to be saying different things. The mad scientist story sticks with the theme that man should not play God and any of his creations will turn out to be abominations. However, The Monster’s story is actually a pretty decent parable about discrimination, showing that even a monster is just misunderstood at heart. Both stories and themes are well told and aren’t necessarily exclusive. The film could have gone very deep in examining what to do with byproducts of man overstepping his place in nature. But it doesn’t. At the end we’re given the classic playing-God-is-bad and monsters-should-be-killed morals.

Although the end does play it safe in this way, when we finally get around the creation of The Bride, it’s absolutely thrilling. Every crazy scientific experiment scene in film history owes a little to the climax of The Bride of Frankenstein. The set dressing, cinematography, acting, and music all combine to bring the audience to the edge of their seats, waiting to see the big haired Bride we’ve all come to recognize. And she’s absolutely…fantastic! Really. Elsa Lanchester, pulling double duty as Mary Shelley and The Bride, performs the creation with such frightening robotic movements and animalistic noises that I have to say she outdoes even Karloff himself! Sadly, she’s only on screen for a scant few minutes before the conclusion of the film. Which is incredibly disappointing. After sitting through the disjointed first two thirds of the movie, things were finally starting to come together and get fascinating. The relationships between all the parties, mad scientist, reluctant creator, Monster, and Bride, is full of drama. Yet it’s all squandered as the film almost seems to be racing to throw up the ending title card. It’s not a bad film by any means, it’s just a bit disappointing seeing that it could have been so much more.

- Cameron Harrison

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