Month: October 2014

Poll – Review a Day!

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It’s october again folks! My favourite time of year. That being said, I have decided to make an annual tradition of a horror movie a day. Yes I have a late start on this but I want some input this time too!

Comment below for what movie(s) you want reviewed this month. It must be themed around October, Halloween, or generally horror themed. You can take a look at all of last years reviews to get some ideas.

I promise you – one week this month will be dedicated to nothing but the original Universal Classics.

So what else do you want to see?

Winners of the Amused in the Dark launch contest

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We have over 70 likes on the facebook page, shares, followers on Twitter, (not so much on Tumblr), and Google+.

Thank you all. As promised here are the five winners picked at random. It was entirely possible for someone to win more than once based on the activities they did, but that didn’t happen on this contest. Perhaps next time as I promise there will be more.

Winners

James M.

David R.

Mark E.

Rachel T.

Andrea C.

 

Please PM me on how you would best like to claim your prize.

Darke Reviews | Alien (1979)

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Some movies have good posters. Some movies have good trailers. Then there are the taglines.

“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…”

“Who ya gonna call?”

“Houston, we have a problem.”

“They’re here”

Each of those evoke a memory of a film or a moment in time. They are all you needed to know what you were getting into. Now, imagine if you will (a place beyond sight and sound?), the concept of a horror movie in space is all but unknown. Sci Fi horror and truly gruesome alien monsters don’t exist. You walk into your local cineplex and see the image above with this tagline:

“In space, no one can hear you scream.”

At the bare minimum you might be curious, but what would you be getting if you paid money for a ticket?

The very definition of gothic horror actually.  Written by Dan O’Bannon, inspired by his earlier work Dark Star, and co written by Ronald Shusett. Both of the men would go on to have little success beyond this with Total Recall being one of the few non-Alien based movies of any notoriety.  It’s a shame since they did such a fantastic job in making relatable working class characters that you bother to care about. If that seems a trend in some of my reviews, it is. It is important to me that I care about the characters and create investment in their well being. If I don’t care if they live or die, then where is the tension? There’s no reason to care, then I am only watching for the psychotic glee of witnessing horrific deaths. That has its purpose from time to time, but to be truly great – you need to care. It’s also worth mentioning many of the tropes and cliches of modern cinema started with movies like this. Not only that, but they created a universe here. One we keep dipping our toes back into year after year – Books, Comics, Sequels, Video Games…all of it.

The story here, for those uninitiated, focuses on a group of blue collar miners on a massive space ship and refinery called the Nostromo. They are woken from cryosleep by a mysterious signal from a nearby planet LV-426.  A small recon team is sent to explore the source of the signal and uncovers an ancient ship with secrets within. A specimen is brought back to the ship which begins its return voyage home; only for things to go  wrong. Claustrophobia, fear of an unknown creature, fear of each other, and an ever increasing body count ramp the tension to a climax unlike most others.

The acting cast reads almost as a who’s who of 70’s and 80’s films. Tom Skerritt as Captain Dallas, Sigourney Weaver as Lt. Ellen Ripley (in one of her first screen appearances),  Veronica Cartwright as Lambert, Harry Dean Stanton as Brett, John Hurt as Kane, and Ian Holm as Ash. Every aspect of their characters works. They feel real. Their reactions are honest (in some cases very honest). Special recognition of course must go to Weaver. She has the unenviable task of carrying the film when it initially appears Skerritt – the veteran – would do so. She is outmatched in nearly every capacity by the creature that is stalking them except her will to survive. That is a thing of beauty to watch.

Director Ridley Scott, who has done more famous films than I can list reasonably, made this his opening to Hollywood as a director. He did it remarkably. Every aspect of this after the script came down to his raw direction. Tight claustrophobic tunnels, steam, poor lighting, uneven camera angles, and practical effects all from his hand and eye. Granted all the beautiful atmosphere that makes it the gothic classic that it is wouldn’t do well if the villain was Pennywise.

AlienPennywise

Beep Beep Ripley. Beep Beep

 

For that we went to the mad genius H.R. Giger. His brain had a thing for the blending of man, machine, and monster. This isn’t to say he made cyborgs or robots, but rather things that seemed to defy both in their surrealist organic nature. Thankfully, he won an Academy Award for this. The creature design is iconic and alone may be the reason this franchise has spawned so many sequels and stories over the decades.

TL;DR

This movie is definitive. It is the work you need to go back to if you want to do horror in space. No one, arguably, has done it better since.

It has some gore to it, but most of the horror comes from what you can’t see and what you aren’t being shown. This movie successfully combines psychological horror, science fiction, and monster movies.

It’s an absolute film.

This is Jessica Darke, with the last review of the night. Signing off.

 

 

 

 

Darke Reviews | The Devil’s Pass (2014)

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So where last year I was doing a vampire movie every other day, this year I think I shall do a classic every other day. As we started the month with a classic horror, let’s jump to something a bit more modern. It is also quite likely something you haven’t heard of or seen yet. Added bonus for me to get to introduce such films. I should mention, I am a supernatural mystery junkie. Ghost Hunters, Fact or Faked, Unsolved Mysteries, etc all were favorites of mine. I have a shelf in my library around such topics. Now a few months before even hearing of this film I came across the Dyatlov Pass incident from 1959. The story of 9 hikers who were found in an unusual state some weeks after vanishing in the Ural Mountains. There are dozens of plausible explanations for it, but I love the idea of mystery.

The Devil’s Pass takes this mystery and applies the found footage genre to it. Made famous (and nigh inescapable) in 1999 by the Blair Witch Project this style of film is designed around the conceit of someone using a camcorder, cellphone, or some other recording to capture every moment of an event or experience. These films also are particularly known for shaky cam due to the nature of the work, which is a turn off for some watchers.  Night vision is also a regular trick of the camera work but is usually far more bearable and tends to add something to the film. The found footage aspect really isn’t wasted and the film utilizes it as one of the tools of storytelling rather than a style. The film was written by an unknown, Vikram West, but directed by a very well known Renny Harlin. Harlin has a strange career and aesthetic to his work, but most people know Die Hard 2, Long Kiss Goodnight, and Cutthroat Island.  This sort of film seems deeply out of the norm for him.

Since this one is definitely newer, I am retaining normal spoiler free territory.

It focuses on a group of college students from the University of Oregon trying to uncover the mystery of what happened in 1959.   The mystery and tension continues to build amongst the group and the environment around them as it bothers to explore some of the psychology of these events.  The actors, while falling to similar stereotypes, don’t really get too annoying.  They are overall rather smart and came with all preparations in mind. The only mistake they make is the one not to leave when things get odd. The individual characters themselves are all relatively interesting and worth watching. They do figure some stuff out on their own that made me smile and showed some awareness usually lax in teen/twenty something films. I believe the interactions between them and watching their own fears become manifest in the performances. Regretfully, I do lose track of who is who a few times as we have a cast of Abercrombie models, but it’s negligible with only a total cast of twenty in the film.

From a technical standpoint the movie has solid practical effects where possible and they sell themselves well. It doesn’t rely on a lot of gimmicks in the effects and lets your imagination do the work. The CG that is used occurs sparingly but is limited by budget and I can tell. The best is the avalanche that had to occur in any mountainy/snowy terrain for a movie like this. Yes, you can blow it off as the sounds it makes coming down, but at the same time they really did a good job of bringing the raw force of nature to life.

TL;DR?

I was really surprised by this film. I found it on a lark one day when I was searching my Netflix. I was reminded of the actual incident and thought I’d give it a once over. It was absolutely worth it. It is a slow burn that builds to a satisfying climax that is worth discussing with whomever you watch it with.

If you have issues with found footage though, give it a pass because the camera work is pretty normal for the genre and could make you nauseous. There is little blood or gore in this one – which I suppose hits some spoiler territory – but also in prep for the film you need to know.

All in all Devil’s Pass is a fun little horror movie and an enjoyable ride. It’s fun to think what if sometimes…

 

Darke Reviews | A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

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It seems fitting to start this years October reviews with the film that started it all for me. I channel surfed into it when it was on network TV a couple of years after its release. It is one of the few movies to ever actually scare me. It sticks with me today for more reasons than one. While not the original slasher film, not by a long shot, with Halloween and Friday the 13th beating it by a solid 6 and 4 years respectively. Heck, Halloween had already had two of its sequels out before this was released and Friday the 13th had four. This one stood apart from the rest though. There was something new here. So let’s talk about A Nightmare on Elm Street.

It should be noted, this may not be spoiler free due to the age of the film.

Written and directed by Wes Craven, a name now synonymous with the horror genre, but was at the time relatively unknown. He had some mild success a full decade before with The Last House on the Left and the Hills Have Eyes, but he was aboard the New Line Cinema train to get a new “slasher” out. Where as Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees are “men”, he wanted to create something new. Something scarier and he went into the land of dreams. Sure we all have nightmares, but what do you do when you can’t wake up from it? When the Nightmare follows you? How do you fight something like that? This added a new level of fear to the teen slasher and it was unlike much we had seen before.

The script uses similar tropes from other slashers of its ilk, which were relatively new at the time. You have your imperiled teens, quaint suburbian life, a brief bit of recklessness from the teens, and a relentless killer after them who is seemingly unstoppable. What makes our killer here different was motive. Jason was about revenge on the “type” of teenager. The people who let him die and the stereotype that exists all the way into todays films some thirty years later. Michael was driven by something else, something broken in him but at the time was purely human. His type was similar to Jason overall though, with anyone getting in his way just as much a likely victim as well.

Then we had Freddy. Freddy went after the kids not because of anything they did, planned to do, might have done, or didn’t do; but instead he went after them for the sins of the fathers and mothers. This makes him an entirely different kind of monster. He tortures the children in order to make the parents suffer for their crimes of killing him. The original film doesn’t entirely address whether or not he actually committed the crimes he was accused of and that the mob burned him for. It hints at it with the opening credits that he was in fact guilty of something, but that ambiguousness adds to the horror that is Freddy Krueger.  It’s never explained how he does what he does either, it just is (again original only), leaving that supernatural mystery to make him even more terrifying still.

All of this wouldn’t work without the right people though. Heather Langenkamp owns this film as Nancy Thompson, as much as Robert Englund does as Freddy. Her evolution from a scared teen, to understanding what hunts her, to trying to become the hunter is a classic to watch and sold for every single moment she is on screen – which by the way is most of the running time.  Englund gives the definitive performance of what it means to chew scenery in this as he cuts his way through the cast. The supporting cast is equally as important here for their own parts, with the esteemed John Saxon as Lt. Donald Thompson, Nancy’s father, and Ronee Blakley as Marge Thompson her mother. It’s one of the earliest times, to my recollection, we dealt with a couple who had divorced in a horror film with their child literally caught in the middle of it. The reasons for the divorce, the tension between them, and even how they deal with their own guilt through the film is as telling as any lines of dialogue. When discussing the supporting cast, its impossible to not mention a certain young mans first role – Johnny Depp as Glenn, Nancy’s disbelieving but big hearted boyfriend.

From a practical and movie making standpoint, while the effects don’t always hold up. The make up varies from scene to scene if you look too close; but this is an acknowledged mistake by the filmmakers. The music follows Cravens usual style of simplistic piano/keyboard with a guitar. It doesn’t sound elegant, but man does it work. It, much like the Jokers Theme from Dark Knight, is so offputting and uncomfortable it makes you squirm a bit. The lighting and practical effects help sell the movie and make it work. CG could only damage it and the weakest sequence is the one with some CG in it. One of the best and most iconic is Freddy pushing through the wall over a sleeping Nancy. For the record though, the one that got me was Tina’s death in the beginning.

TL;DR

If you have not seen A Nightmare on Elm Street and love horror movies, you must see this. It is one of the triumvirate of slashers and arguably the best.

While it may not be scary to individuals now, this one will always hold a special place in my heart and my nightmares. It is probably one of, if not the, most influential film of my childhood.

If you want to know more about the Nightmare saga, I recommend Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy. It’s on Netflix and runs 3 hours and I enjoyed every minute of it.