I sing. I nerd. I watch BBC. I'm training to act and crash coursing in theatre tech. I can stage kiss and hand sew and beat you at Scrabble. I don't make my own gifs...except for that one time. I do create verbs out of nouns.
An American Werewolf in London is widely recognised as a cult classic in the horror genre. So saying anything bad about it will likely get me punched in the face. Thankfully I liked it. I didn’t love it, but I liked it. For me it suffered one glaring plot flaw, but was otherwise solid. And the prosthetics work was amazing, especially when you remember that it was made in 1981. I was also happy about man butts, but that’s beside the point.
If you don’t already know, An American Werewolf in London follows a pair of college students roaming the countryside of Northern England when they are attacked by a mother fucking werewolf. The real adventure begins after the attack and lets you see how the young men fare with their respective fates.
Spoilers ahead.
The first thing I loved was that the soundtrack team had a really fun time finding appropriate songs with “moon” in the title and/or chorus: Blue Moon, Bad Moon Rising, Moondance. Fun times.
The next thing I liked was the contrast between the hospitality of the truck driver and the almost hostile environment of the Slaughtered Lamb. The patrons are very obviously trying to get the young men to leave, but when they finally do there is a since of almost immediate guilt. That’s great character development for a very brief window of screen time and that’s brilliant. I love how these young Americans don’t heed the warnings of the locals (because they seem kind of nuts) when they do leave and wander off the road without realising it. That’s a very American tourist thing to do.
The initial werewolf attack was also pretty great. You had lovely puppet work on the werewolf. You had great prosthetics and make-up on Jack. And you had some nice foreshadowing with David’s running away and then coming back for his friend. It sort of lets you know that he’s going to run from being a werewolf, but eventually he’ll respond to the needs of others.
Once we get David to London, there’s a kind of fatal flaw that’s required to make the plot function: his relationship with Alex. Alex is his nurse. She is a professional woman in England and I wouldn’t imagine her very casual relationship with David would go over well with her superiors. But without that very off dynamic, we don’t have a maintained relationship between Dr Hirsch and David, which we need to round out our story. Without that relationship to Alex and Dr Hirsch, David would never realise that he really was a werewolf and really was killing people. But ok, we’ll accept that Alex has a thing for David and acts kind of inappropriately with him at her workplace. But when he’s discharged, despite some serious hallucinations and possible psychosis, she takes him home with her. Who does that? You wanna shag the guy, that’s fine, put him up in a hotel and visit. But this guy may be genuinely crazy and you invite him into your home? That’s nuts. That was my biggest problem with the entire movie.
Moving on. The prosthetics work for the transformation was en fucking pointe. So much so that An American Werewolf in London won the Oscar for Best Make-Up in 1982, which is impressive for a horror movie. I honestly expected it to be on a level of so bad it’s good, but it was genuinely good. The transformation was seamless, despite layers and layers of prosthetics going on to make it happen. And they looked good the whole time. The facial work was astounding. But the other prosthetics work that was amazing was on Jack’s rapidly decaying corpse. His first undead appearance had his entire throat exposed and it looked awesome. Then we have him in the sort of grey zombie stage, which was still pretty good. But his final appearance in the porno theatre is that lovely half skeletonised, meat falling off the face glory that we love to see in the undead. It. Was. Stunning. I don’t know if you can tell that I have a soft spot for prosthetics and make-up, but I do. Especially when it’s really good. And this was really, really good. And in 1981!
Let’s talk about Jack for a minute. I think Jack is a great character to try to guide David through accepting his own death has to happen. Jack is his friend. He loves Jack in a way. Seeing Jack decay and knowing that Jack has to suffer for potentially eternity for him to live makes things really difficult. But Jack goes about it with a sense of wit, which I really like. American Werewolf is by no means a comedy, but it certainly has its moments that make you at least snigger at it. Jack is actually really funny, in a dark, somewhat broody sort of way. But I like that. I like that a lot. It gives a sense of realism to things. We often say we have to laugh to keep from crying and I think Jack definitely connects with that sentiment.
And even though I think Alex makes a huge mistake taking David home with her, I think she really does care for him. I think she really does fall in love with him. And that makes it really sad to see her, at the bitter end, trying to reach out to what’s left of David’s humanity in the werewolf. But I also think it brings back the idea he presents to her that maybe only someone who loves a werewolf can kill them. While she doesn’t fire the shots, she puts herself out there for him to charge at. In a way, she gave him an out to let himself be killed, which was, at least for him, a show of love.
Now overall, I liked this movie. I certainly wouldn’t categorise it with a lot of other horror movies. I think the horror is psychological. David thinks he’s going crazy and then has to face that he isn’t, that he really is turning into a murderous monster. While yes, there is blood and mayhem, like many a horror movie, it’s not quite the same. You, as the viewer, don’t feel fear for the characters. I think maybe because you know where it’s going. But you do recognise the fear that the characters must feel. So I would categorise this one as more of a psychological horror than a traditional horror movie.
Finally! One that doesn’t mislead me! I was super pumped about this one because I had heard good things but paid absolutely no attention. Then I brought it home and was like “hey mom, wanna watch this creepy doll movie”. And my mother was like “oh, Annabelle. Shudder.” So I asked if she was familiar with the movie. She said “no, I’m familiar with the case. That thing is locked in a glass case in a museum so no one can ever touch it.” So that was exciting.
But review time!
I liked this movie. It wasn’t 80s slasher movie scary. It was 70s haunting movie creepy. For some reference, the only movie that ever kept me up at night after watching it was the original Amittyville Horror. That shit was terrifying, dated effects be damned. Anyhoodles, Annabelle. I remember hearing someone say “why would you get that doll, it’s creepy as fuck”. But she didn’t start out that way. She was actually really pretty before she got possessed. But side note: the real Annabelle is not an easily made creepy porcelain doll. She’s a Raggedy Ann doll. I’m sure that didn’t go over well in the concept meetings because how can you be scared of Raggedy Ann? Well, this Raggedy Ann is apparently terrifying enough that two expert occultists keep her under lock and key and have her blessed by a priest twice a month, but what do they know. That’s apparently all the artistic license needed to make this story creepier as fuck. I should note that Annabelle’s “origin story” is completely fabricated. The only part that is true is the interview in the beginning with the young nurses and the moment in the end where a woman buys the doll in a secondhand shop. This movie was designed as a potential explanation for how this otherwise normal doll became evil.
There were a few very minor details that I found irritating from a technical aspect. There were a few times the pregnant belly prop was obviously a prop. That was probably the worst offense of this movie. The plot was solid. The characters were solid. The deus ex was even solid. I did find the foreshadowing a little heavy in some parts though, i.e. the sewing machine. I spent like a third of the movie waiting for poor Mia to mangle herself with the sewing machine only to have it be a red herring. I also expected more of Annabelle being creepy. The way it was handled on screen, though, put you more in the mindset of actually being there and not knowing how the doll got from the shelf to the chair. I wanted a head turn. Just one. She really only had two good moments of inducing terror herself, which I felt was a little disappointing considering how famous this doll is for being scary as fuck.
Some reviews argue that the characters are weak, but I beg to differ. I think they all make very realistic decisions based on their experiences. I read one that said they acted “stupid”, but they don’t act any different from other families in haunting films that take place in the same time period. Look back at The Amittyville Horror, The Omen and the Exorcist for reference if you don’t believe me. They act like fairly normal, but suddenly terrified, mid-century modern families. They try to explain away their feelings like any normal person would: I don’t want to keep the doll because the crazy lady who broke into my house and killed herself was holding it when she slit her own throat; you’re just experiencing postpartum anxiety; things like that. I don’t think those are weak character traits. They make sense in the context of the characters.
I will say the ending was a little disappointing and fails to explain Annabelle’s continued evil existence. Spoilers ahead. In order to make the demon return her baby, Mia offers to pitch herself from her sixth (possibly fifth) floor window to sate said demon’s desire for a delicious human soul. Her husband races in just in time to pull her back from the leap and Mia’s friend Evelyn offers to jump in her place because she apparently has nothing left to live for so it all works out. What bugs me is the voiceover of Father Perez’s next sermon as we peer down on Evelyn’s dead body. He talks about God recognising our sacrifices. If at any point your god only takes note because your friend threw herself from your window to sate a fucking demon, your god is an asshole and does nto deserve your respect. These were devoutly Catholic people who were praying about this shit and seeking aid from the Church and God couldn’t help a sister out until somebody jumped out a fucking window? What. A. Douche. But then we remember this is a prequel. If we gave the demon the soul, and supposedly the demon would leave once it got its soul, why are there two more movies?
I can only describe Marble Hornets as a bizarre game of Geocache, wherein your reward is 36 hits of acid from a guy with Marfan's Syndrome.
So I watched and kind of reviewed Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story. I figured that meant I had to watch Marble Hornets. Marble Hornets got way better feedback than Always Watching did, which surprises me a little. Maybe I just don’t have the attention span for the webseries, but it didn’t hold my attention the way Always Watching did.
I think a big reason for this was the use of people in the series. Always Watching saved the reveal of the Operator controlling people with the end game of making them kill each other. Marble Hornets shows people attacking each other, but doesn’t really give up that the Operator is behind it until almost the bitter end. That being the case, I’m less scared of the Operator and more scared of these mother fuckers in the masks.
My personal opinion is that Marble Hornets would be an amazing video game. I think the creepy factor would work way better in that format that in did in the webseries format. Maybe I just have more patience with a video game story line than I do watching something on YouTube, but who knows.
One thing I did like better in Marble Hornets was the way the Operator moved. It wasn’t a fast movement, but it was a creepy movement. It was something I would love to have seen in Always Watching, but didn’t get. Another thing I liked better was that the Operator’s method of getting people to kill each other was much more psychological. He really did drive them mad and in their madness they attacked each other. There wasn’t the weird possession seen in Always Watching. That does, however, lead me to consider Marble Hornets to be more of a psychological thriller than a horror series. Even though the big bad really is a supernatural entity of some sort--he has to be right?--it’s the people that you have to be afraid of. It’s people trying to protect themselves and each other that become killers. All the Operator does is put them in the position to have to make that decision.
Now even though I liked the psychological murder spree better than the possessing dead bodies method, I didn’t like the way they showed it. The fact that from fairly early on it was people who were doing the breaking in and the knocking out and the attacking, for me at least, detracted from the story being about the Operator.
There were some entries that I didn’t like because it seemed kind of nonsensical that they would have been uploaded. Then of course in the end Tim’s weird hallucination journey through whatever was going on there seems really out of place. One of the things that made it so interesting was that everything sort of made sense. But how does a tape show him being transported from Benedict Hall back to Rosswood Park then to the middle of a street? It just didn’t work for me. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the way they did it; I just didn’t think it fit with the rest of Marble Hornets.
I also have to say that I loved what they did with totheark. Those videos were really great artistic pieces. I looked forward to those probably more than I did the main series.
And then you let me down. Unlike IMDb, I give this one a solid 6. It’s not terrible, but it’s not great. It’s a solid OK. There are a number of reasons for this, including but not limited to having something great and not using it to its fullest potential.
Always Watching is an adaptation of Internet creepmeister Slenderman. That has potential right? Except it’s an adaptation of Marble Hornets, which is an adaptation of Slenderman. This can be like playing a screenwriting version of Chinese Telephone.
Something that got garbled between scripts was the creep factor of Slendy himself, called the Operator in the Marble Hornets universe. Being that Slendy came to be in a photoplasty, his initial iteration doesn’t move--or at least his initial iteration doesn’t give us insight into how he moves. Sometimes not knowing is 12000 times more terrifying than knowing. Well, Always Watching imagines him as a sort of blip; that things that moves way faster than it should and when you’re not watching. Like a weeping angel. This is definitely creepy, but my qualm with it is that you bothered to put Doug Jones under that suit and failed to his potential range of motion. Jones has the ability to contort in ways many actors can’t and this can make watching him move absolutely terrifying. The Operator that we get, though, could’ve had anyone under that suit because he doesn’t really do much moving that we get to see. It’s not that their choice was a bad one. Like I said, it’s still a creepy method of locomoting. It was just disappointing knowing Doug Jones was under there and we didn’t get to really see him do his thing. I spent the whole moving waiting for Doug Jones to scare the crap out of me and it never really happened. He also goes from being freakishly tall and thin to only being Doug Jones tall and thin. Now don’t get me wrong, if you have to pick an actual human height to be eerie, Doug Jones is your guy, but the bizarre proportions of the original Slenderman could’ve been achieved. It’s not like he hasn’t done stilt work before. And it would’ve certainly added to the creepy factor.
So synopsis time! A cameraman meets a reporter at a New Years’ party. They hook up. I’m not sure why we needed this information. Somehow months later they end up working together at a news station. A new guy shows up and tells them they’re going to work on an otherwise lame story about home foreclosures when they discover a box of family videos tucked inside a crawl space in an eerily quickly abandoned home. New guy decides they’re going to use this to put a face on the housing crisis and show the lives of people affected by the constant string of foreclosures. Instead the cameraman finds fucking creepy shit on the tapes. The Operator--who never gets a name but has one in the credits--appears to have been stalking this family. In their fear they fled their home, leaving most of their possessions and also this box of creepy tapes behind. Once invested in these tapes, The Operator starts to fuck with the cameraman IRL and integrates himself into the lives of Reporter Girl and New Guy while he’s at it.
Like Marble Hornets, they opted to present Always Watching as a found footage piece, which can easily go horribly wrong. I don’t normally like found footage, but this one worked for me. Of course, they had to give Cameraman a creepy fixation with Reporter Girl to explain why he’s filming literally all the time even before finding a creepy mother fucker in his camera viewer. This creates some added character relationship issues during our adventure but more about that later. Unlike Marble Hornets, The Operator in Always Watching can only be seen in a camera viewer. In my opinion, this makes him creepier because whoever sees him in the camera can’t point him out to anyone without handing over the camera and losing sight of him. Also it makes them look crazy when they try to convince somewhere there’s a 6 foot guy in a suit with no face in their yard.
One thing I really appreciated about this movie was that there was a sense of the characters being genuinely scared. Something I miss in a lot of horror movies is what fear does to people in the dark. If something fucking creepy is going on, pretty much everything starts to scare you. If you’re afraid of the dark, every shadow is creepy, every unaccounted for sound scares the shit out of you. That happened in this movie. Cameraman is wandering around a dark garage and something falls, he freaks out. His power goes out, he starts talking himself through finding the breaker while reminding himself that he’s not going to die. I was really happy to see that.
[SPOILERS]
So now that Cameraman is fully terrified, he goes to Reporter Girl, who has now hooked up with New Guy, to inform them that the previous homeowner was not in fact crazy and that there really was a creepy mother fucker in his yard that has now started to live in Cameraman’s yard. Of course New Guy thinks this is a way to get back into Reporter Girl’s pants so he breaks into Cameraman’s house and discovers his stash of stalker videos. So this creates a whole new problem that’s only resolved when The Operator makes an appearance, as if to say “Hi guys, remember me! Oh, sorry, you wet yourself.” So they all crash at a hotel together, recording every moment so they can go back and look at it eventually I guess. The Operator brands them all without anyone noticing it until after the fact and New Guy gets some help from a friend at the FBI to track down the runaway homeowners. Then they road trip to Colorado with Cameraman’s dog to track down the owners and see how they escaped the clutches of creepy guy.
On the way, Reporter Girl wonders what would happen if they just turned all the cameras off. The answer is someone kills the dog. Slendy makes the statement that he will be watched creepily through video cameras. Dammit. More tension builds in the group, but they continue on their trek. They reach their destination and find a smouldering pile of nothing. And also a bunker. The bunker reveals video footage of Runaway Dad murdering his child and trying to kill his wife, who bashes him in the head and sets the house on fire. They track down Murder Mom at a local psych ward where she flips her shit because “fucking shit, you brought him back”. They then crash in a cabin, set up their cameras and try to decide what to do.
Clearly their only option is death or death. The Operator’s end game is to make everyone kill each other. The downside to this reveal is that it comes too late. The build up to this discovery doesn’t have the sense of impending doom you want to see in this kind of story. Up until we see Runaway Dad do the deed, The Operator could just get off freaking people out. We don’t find out that he’s more sinister than that until about 15 minutes from the end of the movie. If his end game had remained to drive his victims mad, I might’ve been more satisfied with it. Anyway, the Operator appears and Cameraman decides to take one for the team. Since Runaway Dad’s death seemed to end the Operator’s hold on the family, maybe offing himself will save his friends. He hangs himself amidst protest from Reporter Girl, but not from New Guy.
Apparently the Operator is able to take over dead bodies, so he takes over dead Camerman and beats New Guy to death. Then he beats Reporter Girl to death. Then he just sort of re-dies. Then we find out that the footage will probably re-release the Operator when someone new watches it. Yay! A Revolving door of death.
So aside from my disappointment with their use of Doug Jones, the acting was pretty ok. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t “sold my soul to SyFy years ago” either. It was solidly ok acting, especially for the genre. Unfortunately, lower budget horror movies have a tendancy to get stuck with shitty actors. This didn’t suffer from that. The camerawork worked for the found footage idea, but there were times I really hated the angles. Found footage also gets no score, which had its ups and downs. You didn’t know from the score when the Operator would make an appearance, but you did know based on the “distortion” his appearance caused in the camera. The upside to that was that you didn’t have a startle reflex based on the score, you had it because he fucking showed up. They didn’t trick you into being startled when he wasn’t actually making an appearance.
The tagline is actually for an episode of Supernatural and completely unrelated to the movie this poster is advertising.
So the box synopsis of this movie sounds really interesting: a group of college kids decide to measure whether or not thoughtforms can manifest in realty and everything goes horriby wrong, indicating their thoughtform does manifest and they must destroy it, right? Except that’s possibly not what this movie is about at all. I will denote [SPOILERS] before they happen, should you wish to avoid them. Apparently my descriptions of what actually happens in this movie are funny or something.
I was disappointed in this movie for several reasons: the plot was based on someone being an idiot; the apparition doesn’t ever make a full appearance; it provides neither closure nor sequel fodder; and the apparition spends most of the movie just being a dick.
The acting was good, if somewhat overdramatic on the part of Girlfriend #2. The neighbour kid, however, is brilliant. Score reasonably thriller-y. Effects quote good. The first 15 minutes of the movie might as well have been from a different movie though. That first 15 minutes had me. I was ready to be terrified, like blanket to the chin terrified of this movie. And then its momentum sort of died. The apparition stopped being a malevolent murder-ghost and become just an irritating asshole who kills the neighbour’s dog because it seemed fun at the time. The whole sense of dangerous murder-ghost, forgive me, gives up the ghost at that point. Even if we do bring back Murder McMurdermist, I’m just not set for scared anymore. They completely overextended the suspense in this one, having played their fear card at the onset, and it kind of killed it for me.
And below the jump: a re-enactment by Captain Jack.
The first 90-150 seconds is a grainy 70s home movie of the basis for the college kids’ endeavours called “The Charlie Experiment”, wherein a bunch of paranormal investigators try to contact their recently deceased pal Charlie. If these kids are dealing with thoughtforms, why do we care about a group of 70s investigators trying to contact an actually recently deceased person?
Wait, what the fuck is a thoughtform? Remember the episode of Supernatural Hell House? That. That’s a thoughtform: have enough energy invested in believing in a thing and it manifests as reality. At least that’s the somewhat logical conclusion of the idea of thoughtforms. They are in fact based on a Tibetan idea called Tulpa, mentioned in the episode, but Tulpa is more realistically about the power of enlightened persons to manifest things for positive reasons not scaring the shit out of people.
And we’re back. So these college kids decide based on The Charlie Experiment to will a ghost into existence? Yeah, I don’t really follow that logic either. If you do, please explain. But anyhow, they do it. Led by intrepid investigator Tom Felton--who has clearly made at least one poor life choice since the Harry Potter franchise came to an end--a group of students with nothing better to do decide to will Charlie, the aforementioned actual dead guy, into existence in what appears to be a university crawlspace they’re probably not actually authorised to be in.
So based on the box synopsis we know they succeed and something terrible happens. They apparently will Murder McMurdermist into existence and its first act is to kill its mother: it grabs Girlfriend #1 and literally hides her body in the walls. Ok. This could be good, right? That’s fucking terrifying. Well, then we randomly pan to a chick in a vet’s office to meet Girlfriend #2. Girlfriend #2 is the second shown girlfriend of Not Tom Felton. GF2 and Not Tom Felton are moving into a property owned by her parents to keep it company until it finds real tenants. Then spooky shit starts happening. Plants inexplicably wither and die, doors open without triggering the alarm they went out of their way to show you was engaged, weird mold shows up, an invisible rabid raccoon plays cat’s cradle with GF2′s scarves. This all takes way too long. They run away. They come back. GF2 discovers GF1′s untimely drywall related death. GF2 breaks up with Not Tom Felton, gets back with Not Tom Felton.
[SPOILERS] And when the apparition finally makes a sort of appearance as a red blob on a heat sensor, intrepid investigator Tom Felton returned to save the day! But not before telling them that he fucked up. Bigly. It boils down to him explaining that they didn’t so much will an entity into existence as open an interdimensional doorway just enough for it to be a murder-douche the one time. Then Tom Felton had a brilliant idea that he could catch it if he did it right, only he didn’t do it right and he freed the murder-douche. He escaped its clutches by hiding in an anti-thoughtform Faraday cage, so it gave up and went after Not Tom Felton because it could scent track him or some shit, I don’t know. Oh! The IMDb page says something about it feeding on fear. They probably should’ve mentioned that in the movie. Well, Tom Felton talks them into letting him try his experiment one more time because he’s sure it’ll work this time and he’ll send Murder McMurdermist back from whence it came. They agree. Even though he has a horrible track record of this not working at all. I guess they were desperate or something. Ok, so he did try to suffocate GF2 in the hotel room with her own sheet, but otherwise he’s just been an asshole. Haha. I moved your dresser. Whoops. I killed the cactus. Sorry! I opened all the doors. Check that A/C bill! You know, the kind of shit bored teenagers do to their babysitter.
So anyhow, Tom Felton saves the day and GF2 and Not Tom Felton can go back to their normal lives in their giant house in the middle of nowhere. [SPOILERS] Not! Murder McMurdermist survives! And the first thing he does is eat Tom Felton with the closet. So Not Tom Felton and GF2 flee to Tom Felton’s Farraday Cage of safety! Well, the apparition has left Tom Felton’s journals on auto replay for them to hear. Turns out he neglected to let them know that all of the Charlie Experiment participants died horribly before inviting them to do the experiment that’s not really the same thing at all, but still. Disclosure is important. You don’t invite someone to bed and wait until morning to tell them you have herpes. Dick move. Turns out the Faraday Cage either doesn’t work or is broken. Not Tom Felton dies horrible and GF2 makes a break for it. She runs and runs and runs. Straight into the camping section of their local Lowe’s? She zips herself into a tent and a bunch of grimy hands pet her softly and tell her it will be ok. Apparently that’s how they kill her or something.
But yeah, there’s no resolution here. We haven’t sated the apparition’s desire for revenge or something. No one else knows it exists because it ate or murdered everyone else. Is it just loose on a new plain of existence to slaughter everything in its path? Is it benevolent now that enough fear has allowed it to fully manifest? Does it walk down the street in a suit asking you to call it George? What?
Some people aren’t bothered by lack of resolution, but I see it as poor writing. Yes we have an end. Everyone dies, I get it. But we haven’t solved anything. We haven’t learned anything. You may think “it’s a horror movie what the fuck are you supposed to learn”. And that’s fine. But even Zombieland had a fucking point. Maybe the point is “you reap what you sow” or something similar, but that doesn’t account for GF2. She had nothing to do with anything other than dating the wrong guy at the wrong time. But then maybe that’s part of the point. Being peripherally related to people who fuck shit up will probably get you into some shit. So don’t be friends with heroin addicts. Ok, fine. But I was still unsatisfied at the end and a large part of it was that the basis of the movie didn’t make sense to me. The Charlie Experiment wasn’t a thoughtform experiment; it was a can we contact the dead experiment. How that turns into a thoughtform experiment still doesn’t make sense to me. If it was a thoughtform, it shouldn’t have had any affect on GF2 unless Not Tom Felton brought it up, which he was determined not to do. If it wasn’t a thoughtform, why was it so obsessed with these people? And the biggest unresolved question of all: what happened to the lizard?
So Anguish. The tagline is a lie. I was expecting night terrors and got minor hallucinations. To be fair, I really enjoyed it; but it failed as a horror movie. As a supernatural drama it performed well. Kind of like Naina, the Indian movie The Eye was based on. It was a good movie, it just wasn’t a horror flick. Not even in a psychological horror kind of way.
Now let’s dig into the “inspired by true events” bit. I can’t actually find anything that indicates what events Anguish is supposedly based on. There are some viewer theories that it might be the Watseka Wonder, a nineteenth century case of purported spirit possession. In an interview with writer/director Sonny Mallhi, he mentions Spirit Releasement Therapy, which is an attempt at making spirit possession sound more professional, I guess? But Spirit Releasement Therapy isn’t an event. It’s an idea. So I’m at a loss on the true events that inspired this movie. There was, however, a photograph of a teenage girl shown at the beginning of the end credits who was not an actress in the movie, so I’m guessing she was the origin story. That being said, it doesn’t reveal anything about her.
Now then, let’s talk about the actual movie. I honestly did like it, but I found myself waiting for the scary part until literally the end of the movie. Some reviews on IMDb call the acting poor, but I disagree. I think for the idea that’s actually being portrayed in the movie, the acting was great. You have a group of really believable actresses playing really believable moms and daughters. I do think Sarah’s reaction to this strange girl showing up on her doorstep and hugging her is a bit fast. I mean yes, we get “oh yes this spiritual thing I witnessed in my childhood halfway across the world is clearly what’s going on here”, but someone shows up claiming to be your dead daughter and you don’t immediately freak the fuck out? That seemed odd to me. But that falls squarely on the director, not the actor. And this was Mallhi’s directorial debut. He even calls himself out in interviews for having been in way over his head. But his goal was to tell the story the way he envisioned it, not the way someone else did--which is how all his previous pieces had happened. Now Mallhi also has an interesting viewpoint on horror as a genre, which might explain why this didn’t really feel like a horror movie: his take is that horror is subjective. What one person finds terrifying doesn’t necessarily apply to the next person. Ok, cool, but the Internet is a pretty wide net and no one’s bitten that one yet.
Now, the best part of this movie for me was the score. It was highly minimalist for a movie score, but it was all simple four part harmony. As a music nerd, that made me really happy. And it worked really well in the context of the movie itself. Going back to basics. Four part harmony is how most “classical” music was composed and remains the basis for most music composition today. This movie wasn't about being a bloody, ghostly horror movie. It was about looking at what scares someone in their actual life. For the character you’re following, what scares her? What’s in her head. Her very existence every day is frightening to her. That doesn’t really cross the fourth wall though. We aren’t afraid in the way she is, pulling us out of the horror genre and into a more psychological drama.
Meet a disaster movie trying to be a depths of human depravity movie.
Because I have no sense of direction, I started with the As. If you’ve never heard of Aftershock, there’s probably a reason for it. While it supposedly did well enough at the Toronto International Film Festival to get picked up by Dimension Films, its online reviews from average moviegoers were mixed at best. I didn’t know this when I picked it up because that would ruin the fun.
Eli Roth being involved in a movie can assure you of two things: gratuitous gore and good FX make-up. That’s probably why I have a love-hate relationship with Roth’s movies. I love the make-up and prosthetic work but it often comes at the price of gratuitous and nonsensical violence. The number of needlessly squished heads in Aftershock was irksome. While I can give Roth the body count, considering the movie was based on an actual horrific earthquake that actually happened in Chile with input from people who actually experienced it, I’m not sure he needed to squish a metrosexual under a stage amp, hit a cleaning lady in the face with a car bumper and toss a priest headfirst into a hole, making sure to linger on their lack of discernible faces and/or torsos. But that’s kind of Eli Roth’s thing. Way too much build-up “getting to know” our characters so we can maybe feel bad about it when terrible things happen to them, followed by terrible things happening to them.
The way too much build up part of the movie did what it was supposed to do: it introduced our six protagonists and their personalities and gave you time to decide which ones you wouldn’t feel bad about having bumped off when the earthquake finally happened. It also gave you time to think of numerous ways you would kill Pollo (played by discount Chilean Zach Galifinakis) given the chance. Between Pollo’s attempt to bed everything with a pair of breasts and Eli Roth’s recently divorced dad pining for sweet sweet poontang character, there are lots of objectifying Daisy Duke clad ass shots of the three female protagonists. There was also a totally random dump of personal controversial life choices information on the overprotective big sister character that didn’t really play any role in the future plot except to give you a reason to feel sorry for or hate her. Oh, and to have gratuitous dead babies in the final stretch of the movie. Also that.
When it came time for the earthquake to happen, you had passed Show Me the Fucking Monkey way too long ago. You have a fight between the sisters and then you finally get the fucking monkey and it’s like nothing happened between them and it never comes up again. The entire relationship between them that the build-up spent creating completely disappears once the disaster happens. You would at least expect one line about how if you had just listened to me in the first place we wouldn’t be in the situation. Just one. But no, they go from seeming to kind of hate each other to you’re-my-best-friend-in-the-whole-wide-world-I’ll-never-leave-you. Which makes no sense. I get that in disaster situations, priorities change; but how much you hate your spoilt brat sister acting like a spoilt brat usually gets an I told you so. I digress. Earthquake. Cue body parts strewn about everywhere and lots of screaming. This is where the physics starts to fall apart for the sake of the gore factor. Limbs don’t get cleaning hacked off because something heavy falls on them. But that’s what sends our heroes on their daring escape toward the hospital: in an attempt to save the beautiful bar tender from the fallen shelf crushing her against the bar, Ariel loses his hand when the shelf becomes too heavy and comes down on his arm, slicing his hand off beautifully in a spurt of blood. And here we see our first glimpse of humans are their own worst enemies when the beautiful bar tender runs off, leaving her hero to bleed all over himself. Of course, our heroes escape one crumbling edifice only to be robbed, seen by escaped prisoners, chased, squished, lit on fire, raped, nearly hit by a fire engine, raped some more, shot, shot some more and chased into a church. I fully expected someone to shout sanctuary. My expectations were not fulfilled. The disaster part of the movie was kind of classic gratuitous Roth, but the switch over to a depths of human depravity movie didn't’ really work for me. I’m halfway through an Eli Roth movie and I stop getting body parts and blood spatter? What is this? I’ll tell you what it’s not! A horror movie. It’s a bad drama at best. There’s nothing scary about it. Don’t get me wrong. I love terrible horror movies, but this fell in the space between a terrible horror movie that’s fun to watch and an actual horror movie that’s fun to watch. It took itself seriously, but failed. Now for some people, that’s a fun movie. I did enjoy it from a watching a bad movie standpoint. But that’s not how everyone watches “horror” movies.
Probably the worst part about Aftershock for me was that the actors were actually pretty good. The actress playing overprotective sister is someone I would love to watch if she did more English language films; not that I wouldn’t watch her in foreign language films, but I don’t necessarily have access to them. And bratty sister (played by discount Chilean Lauren Cohen) was highly watchable Not just because she was cute to look at either; she was genuinely good at being in this movie, despite it’s short comings. She’s the kind of actress that will do well in B horror movies. I think she’d do well in good horror movies too, but her IMDb page indicates she may have sold her soul to Eli Roth and thus will never go anywhere else. Like Stephen Baldwin and the SyFy network.
Of course, the make-up and FX prosthetics were en point. That’s the one thing you can always guarantee from Eli Roth, even if his budget is only two million dollars. Dismembers limbs, squished heads, immolated bodies, all those things were executed well by the FX team. And I will give the cinematography team props for making the whole movie on a DSLR. Their goal was to make it look like a 35mm film, but it didn’t quite happen that way. I honestly couldn’t tell they were going for that, but then I wasn’t looking for it and am not a cinematography guy.
Anyhoo, on a scale of one to pants-shitting I give it a squeaky fart. If you like terrible disaster movies and gore, it might be for you. Just remember there is a rape scene and dead babies. If that’s a deal-breaker, skip this one. If not, enjoy knowing that you’ve made better life choices than everyone involved in this movie. Also ask yourself: why the fuck does a library have this piece of shit?
I’ve been MIA for a while, because life got in the way of itself as it so often does. I quit school, moved out of my parents’ house, got a job (sort of) and got a boyfriend. Craziness ensued. Anyhoodles, I work at a library now, meaning I have access to a bunch of randomly assembled books and movies. In an attempt to keep myself from playing Pokemon and watching the new all day, I’m going through the horror movies at the library. I’d like to share them with you.
This is my second audiobook and my first fiction narration. It has 31 character voices--so like the first 2 chapters of Game of Thrones? It's a satire about the early Christian church told from the perspective of Mary Magdalene's granddaughter's cat. Because if any creature could look at religion and go "what the actual @$#% are you thinking", it would be cats. It's a fun read...well listen. But still. It's a fun little story, it's about 3 hours long and about 30 hours of my life I have given away for the promise of royalties. So if you like that kind of stuff or just want to check it out, buy my book. Or share my book. If you don't have an Audible Membership, you can get it for free! Jan and I would be so very happy if you would help us spread the word.
"I finally know where I am going with this and IT IS TERRIBLE IT IS THE BEST THING oh man you’re gonna be SO MAD AT MEEEEEEEEEEE." VERY VERY STERN FROWN
I swear, it’s almost like you don’t appreciate my efforts to make you happy.
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