The Bone Collector (1999)

If there has never been a porn parody, I'm on it.

Before a household movie night at the weekend, I hadn't watched The Bone Collector in perhaps ten years. Though I know it well, as it was one of the first movies I caught on TV that my mum actually allowed me to buy on VHS, even though I was several years younger than the rating demanded.  A thirteen-year-old me thought it was a pretty cool movie with a good crime mystery to it. A withered and haggard twenty-eight-year-old me thought it was a silly, nonsensical and hilariously '90s movie that was moth-eaten in so many places, I couldn't believe I never noticed its threadbare appearance before.

I didn't become an NYC cop to monitor
glory holes.

The movie opens (after the flashy and entirely too-long credit sequence) to an able-bodied Lincoln Rhyme (Denzel Washington) on assignment to retrieve the corpse of a fellow police officer who has died on the job. Some big heavy object comes hurtling at Washington out of nowhere and we cut to him waking up, in his luxurious apartment, being stared at by a falcon on the windowsill. If it sounds like this falcon, who appears numerous times, will have any relevance, you are already giving this movie far too much credit. Rhyme, it transpires, is a top forensic mind who continues on full pay as a detective from the confines of his home hospital bed, which is linked up to all the best and bulkiest gadgets that the '90s could muster. His friend/nurse is Thelma, played endearingly by Queen Latifah, and she is there to CPR him out of seizures and tell meddling police officers to fuck off.

We then meet Amelia Donaghy (Angelina Jolie), who a nicely succinct scene tells us suffers insomnia and cannot bring herself to commit to a relationship. It seems the only thing that drives her in life is her job as an NYPD cop. Now lemme just stop it right there and say, "Kid -- does this seem familiar to you?" If it's not already ringing bells, the rest of the movie will beat you over the head with how much it wants to be Silence of the Lambs. This may be too early to outline the entire thing, but bear with me. The Bone Collector, in a nutshell, involves a young female law enforcer with trauma in her past, who somehow hooks up with a restrained genius that will help her catch a serial killer, and perhaps alleviate her past horrors by saving the lives of innocent strangers. There is also a sexual undertone to the relationship between the cop and the genius. When rewatching this movie, I took the director for some naive newcomer whose ambitiousness was commendable, but was let down by material not even fit to polish Silence's good bag and cheap shoes. It was only upon researching that I realised Phillip Noyce was at the helm: by 1999 he was a veteran filmmaker, and had turned out some decent thrillers, including Dead Calm, which I really enjoyed. Perhaps Noyce was feeling lazy, or just taking easy jobs.

Amelia takes a call on the job one day, to be met at the shabby railway tracks by a young street kid, who alerts her to the half-buried body of a man. She spots what appears to be neatly laid-out clues from the perp, and has the balls to run at an oncoming train with her flashlight in an attempt to preserve the evidence. Now don't ask me how the hell it happens, but this incident somehow results in her showing up with colleagues at Rhyme's apartment in no time, and suddenly she is on the case. Rhyme apparently takes a liking to Amelia's tenacity and constantly teary eyes, and begins to read her for filth in the fashion of the 'magical negro' stereotype; note that this is also how he solves crimes. Throughout the movie, he spouts out random words and numbers in a way that clearly make sense to him, but the visuals present it as utterly random, and there is no way the audience can follow Rhyme with his logic like they should, and like other, better productions would allow them to. We are never sure where his instincts or logic come from, and by the time all the loose ends have been supposedly tied up, the way Rhyme arrives at what turn out to be correct conclusions never makes any goddamn sense. 

Their initial reaction to the script.

And that's not through lack of trying to help the audience make sense of it all. It's just that the writer and director clearly thought that their audience would be entirely braindead and unable to understand the basics, let alone the more integral plot points. A sequence towards the end demonstrates this, in which Jolie comes across the final clue and adopts the methods of thinking that Rhyme has impressed upon her throughout the story. She stares fixedly at the number of an abandoned train carriage, while muttering, "Help me Rhyme, help me!" and the visuals do some silly sepia montage of different places she might have seen the number. Now these visuals (let's just forget the stupid dialogue ever happened) could have worked in a far less cheesy way had the director established this visual theme earlier on. As I mentioned, the camera often just sits, looking at Rhyme along with his colleagues, waiting for him to spout his random wisdom, and when he does, everyone springs into action. The earlier scenes of his thinking and deducing could have also had these sepia montages, and then the whole thread of Rhyme teaching Donaghy to be a good detective could have felt fluent and deserved. Instead, it just jumps out of nowhere and seems laughable. It is topped when she finally figures the clue out, and exclaims, "He's going to kill Rhyme!", as if the visuals hadn't just given us that information on a silver platter. 

So the plot... well, the man buried by the train tracks turns out to be a man who we earlier saw hailing a cab with his wife from an airport, but being accosted by the driver. His wife is still missing. Later one or two totally unimportant and unestablished characters are pounced upon by some dude in a balaclava, and each time, he leaves ridiculous clues for the police to find. I guess the conspicuousness of the clues doesn't matter though, as the clues themselves make no fucking sense anyhow, and if it weren't for Rhyme's magical omniscience, they would never be solved by anyone.

Long story short, some dickhead is recreating murders from some old crime novel, which Amelia finds, and thankfully doesn't have to read, as all the important points are illustrated -- how convenient. Given the standard of dialogue, I'm almost surprised she doesn't blurt out, "The killer is copying this book!" in the style of "It's goblin spelled backwards!" The movie tries weakly to imply that one of Rhyme's many professional associates is the culprit, focusing mainly on the flamboyant Latino who makes the odd joke.

I'm your number one fan!

Since we're here, we may as well talk about the conclusion of this stupid movie. No, the killer isn't Manny or whatever his stereotypical Mexican name was; it's Richard, the geek who hovers in the background, tuning up Rhyme's heart monitors or some shit. Richard gives the silliest fucking 'culprit spills the tea' scene I have ever seen. It would seem that two or three brief flashes in this movie are meant to imply that at some point, a few cops were put away for some sort of corrupt act, although it is never elaborated upon. Turns out - and you can thank the clunky dialogue for me knowing this - that Richard was one of the cops incriminated by some paper or other that Rhyme wrote, and so after being donut-punched in federal for six years, he spent another two learning how to tweak crappy late-'90s PC monitors in order to get to kill Lincoln Rhyme. Yeah, that doesn't sound like a monumental waste of time and energy.

And if you thought that was crazy, you ought to hear the rest. Rhyme's nearest and dearest know that he fears a seizure that would vegetate him, and so has suicide plans in place. Knowing that what he dreads most is becoming a "vegetable", Richard sets upon him, asking him what sort of vegetable he wants to be. A carrot or a zucchini. Christ, way to take the seriousness out of a scene! Well thankfully, Rhyme's state of the art hospital bed just happens to have an emergency collapse mode -- cos why wouldn't that be useful in a medical situation? -- and he traps Richard's fingers in the frame, before biting his neck and dragging him along like a limp-limbed hyena. It is truly funny, and takes all the wind out of the drama's sails. 

Nothing makes sense in this picture. The killer's motives are stupid, the clues are ludicrous, and the implications of unfinished plot threads are worse. What of Amelia's boyfriend? Does she learn through her struggles to commit to a relationship? I dunno, but she certainly became more comfortable with molesting comatose cripples. Does Lincoln learn to value life more? Apparently, but it's only so that the movie can end on the cheesiest, stupidest Christmas ending I ever fucking saw. Amelia's depression and old traumas are only ever alluded to, yet her whole character seems to hang on them. Is she now at peace with her father's suicide, and can she go forward in life? God knows, but she looks hot in a slinky black dress while putting presents under Rhyme's tree. 

So glad we got over our individual traumas,
thanks to the magic of crime-solving
 and Christmas.

And if all of this didn't seem vapid and tone-deaf enough, guess what song they chose for the closing credits? Don't Give Up by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush! The musical tone and the themes of the song only fit this movie in the loosest sense, and it reminds me of those god-awful slow, belting versions of songs that Celine Dion or whoever would sing at the end of '90s Disney movies. There is an old TV movie from about the same time called Perfect Body, starring former Power Ranger Amy Jo Johnson, about a gymnast training to Olympic standard, who develops an eating disorder. After all the trouble and trauma this causes her, the final scene is of the girl in a dimly-lit gym, once again mounting the horse, while Don't Give Up plays softly in the background. That movie uses the song perfectly, but The Bone Collector left me baffled with this choice.

Roger Ebert once said that the cast of The Bone Collector was too good for the material, and now I absolutely get what he was saying. I watched this with five or six people, all of whom recognised some of the character actors. This movie strikes me as a strictly Paycheck Picture. I'm sure it was largely forgotten six months after its release, and if not for the odd TV rerun, it would be a footnote on many successful actors' resumes.

Urban Explorer (2011)

Andy Fetscher's Urban Explorer was one of my several cheap DVD store punts that turned out to be, as Roger Ebert once called Last House, "about four times as good as you'd expect". I am a keen urban explorer in real life, and am always totally compelled by movies that use it as a subject. Truth is, amazing suspense can be conjured on the screen simply by having characters be in places they shouldn't, such as in Area 51. The likes of As Above So Below and Chernobyl Diaries keep me coming back again and again, and while Urban Explorer has a lot in common with them, it delivers on the visceral horror aspects that the other titles may be lacking. I discovered this movie by chance about a year ago, and have since snagged a wonderful boyfriend who lived in Germany for many years and is fluent in the language, so I was eager to watch this movie again for his input, if nothing else, for his unique insight into the language and translations. He didn't disappoint.

Still I think he's raather tastyyyy!

A very cosmopolitan movie, Urban Explorer follows the journey of Denis and Marie are a couple ready to snoop around the undercarriage of Berlin for their anniversary, along with other couple Lucia and Juna, under the guidance of local Kris. Naturally, all seems well at first, before things go disastrously wrong, and they are stranded miles beneath the surface where nobody knows they have ventured. However, one of the cool perspectives that this movie offers is the lack of supernatural interference. There are no radiation zombies like in Chernobyl Diaries, no Dante's Inferno like in As Above, and no time-travelling Soviets like in Devil's Pass. All we have to fear this time around is a truly maniacal German fellow with huge teeth, huge eyes and a beard that even I don't find sexy, and isn't a real person always that much more frightening than a monster?

The group are fairly unremarkable, but can all be defined by one trait. Lucia is the dumbass who causes the whole disaster in one absent-minded moment; Juna is the Asian chick who may be into other chicks and wears a dangly earring that will later explain her fate when found on the floor of the Maniacal German's lair. Marie is a Venezuelan nurse and the girlfriend of Denis, who it later transpires once studied in Berlin, and is actually quite a competent German speaker, despite insisting that he only speaks it "a bit". Kris is the shifty German guide who we decide early on must be the antagonist because he's just so damn shifty and German, but we later find out he's the very least of our issues.

I was told I was in a Bob Clarke movie!

Midway through the movie, weird hermit Armin (Klaus Stiglmeier) literally drops into the story, offering suspiciously convenient help to the injured party and his desperate comrades. It all takes a turn that we don't tend to see in these movies, and paces the story in a more patient way, not to its detriment. This is a longer movie than many of its kind, but it works well. There are sequences in which silence and space are drawn out to excruciating lengths, crafting a proper sense of suspense. Urban Explorer is a great and slick-looking picture, and it throws some new ideas into the ring. It also wisely avoids the temptation to format itself as a found footage picture, and by doing so allows itself maximum cinematic freedom. It is not constrained by what the characters would be filming themselves, and has fun with the space and angles this allows. It really is about four times better than you'd expect.

"It's the gayest show in the fucking world!"

Sure, the characters are nothing special and this is no piece of high intellectualism, but it offers a fucking good viewing experience of its type, and goes above and beyond to deliver an engaging show that isn't just a dime a dozen. It also has that typically European ballsy attitude to conclusions that mainstream American audiences don't appreciate: the horrors are man-made, and even when it looks like the nightmare is over, this significantly powerful and relentless human being wipes away all hope in the way that true criminals do in the real world. There is a boldly hopeless tone to the film, and I truly admire a movie that dares to lean into this sort of theme, with no happy ending and no unrealistic escapes. It's a tense and unnerving experience that never lets up, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

(Incidentally, my boytoy advised me that the hermit speaks very colloquial German and that Denis' conversation is suitably amateur for his character, so it is even a carefully written movie.)

The Haunting of Sharon Tate (2019)

Making films, music and literature based - either loosely or otherwise - on real events, and more specifically, on true crime, is far from a modern trend, and yet it is still a divisive topic on moral grounds. The better known serial killers, such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, continue to inspire recreations of their lives and crimes, and the human condition of morbid curiosity keeps ensuring return on profit is seen. The question of whether it is ethical to rehash such crimes for 'entertainment purposes', and how such recreations can impact the survivors and their loved ones, continues to be asked, yet it seems to have little effect on the industry's production of such movies, or on audiences' viewing of them. Monster and The Girl Next Door are serious and well-made productions based to varying degrees on true crime, but for every Monster, there are easily a hundred The Haunting of Sharon Tate.

Critics have been slamming this movie for many reasons, and Lionsgate have been pulling out all of the damage control stops to ensure people still give their movie the benefit of the doubt. Not only is this not a well-made film, but it is a very inconsiderate one. It doesn't seek simply to recreate the crimes of the Manson family in 1969, but to put a supernatural twist on things, and perpetuate dismal rumours first circulated by the media mere hours after the news broke fifty years ago: talk of infidelities, open relationships and devil worship somehow being the cause of those events is tasteless and speculative at best. What, I ask you, could possibly be gained, or added to this story, by the suggestions of Roman Polanski (who is not portrayed onscreen in this movie) 'cheating' on his wife, or Gibby Folger and Wojciech Frykowski manipulating Sharon into a position of vulnerability? It drags this whole sorry tale to the depths of tabloid fodder in the least tactful way possible.

The media spin that continues to embody the Tate-LaBianca murders could be an interesting way to tell this story, but this is clearly not what the makers had in mind. If nothing else, its only real goals are to paint Sharon and her friends as people they were not, with an aim to add a sense of suspicion and tension that never existed. And this is not to say that this movie manages to achieve even the slightest feeling of suspense. It consists primarily of repetitive sequences of Sharon creeping wide-eyed around her dark house, convinced that she is in danger but for some reason doing nothing about it.

For some reason, Hilary Duff 'stars' as Sharon Tate, and we are suddenly and rudely reminded of why her repertoire never really expanded beyond Lizzie McGuire and being Steve Martin's stroppy teen daughter in Cheaper by the Dozen. She looks and sounds nothing like Sharon Tate, despite her fleeting attempts at some sort of regional accent. Duff is very strangely directed throughout this picture, in every way from accent to emotion and mindset. There are odd moments at which she seems to react to things in ways that just don't match the action, and her character's thought processes are sloppy. This heavily pregnant woman, whose several friends are literally in the next bedroom, keeps creeping around this dark house when she suspects intruders. No guns, no phone calls, she doesn't even turn on the lights or scream for someone. She just keeps skulking around in the dark.

The main narrative bookending this piece is what pissed me off the most. The movie opens in black and white, and purports to show us Sharon giving an interview in 1968. The interviewer asks her if she has ever had any experiences she considered psychic. Now this in itself is not crazy, as there was quite a trend for metaphysics, spirituality and psychedelia in the '60s and '70s, and this could have been an interesting approach in more competent hands. But Sharon responds that she had a nightmare in which she and her friends are murdered, which "I guess you could consider a psychic experience". We are given no other indication at this point in the story's timeline that could give weight to this idea that a simple bad dream is some form of premonition, and the narrative only seems to show Sharon come to recognise this much later on. This terribly contrived plot device is the frayed string from which the entire narrative precariously hangs.

Now when I did some basic research into this film (which I did when I got to this very point in writing my review), I made a striking discovery about the resume of writer/director Daniel Farrands. Not only is his filmography comprised almost entirely of horror sequels and true crime movies, but he actually wrote the aforementioned The Girl Next Door, which was a very good and considerately handled movie. Interestingly, that was more or less the first thing he wrote in twenty years, preceded by Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers in 1995. This in itself makes me wonder why and how Farrands' ability to craft believable dialogue that propels a difficult narrative seems to have evaporated. On top of this, his more recent credits include another dreadful Amityville movie, and production on an upcoming piece titled The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson. There is a definite pattern there, which I might not take such a distaste to if not for Farrands' sharply declining standards. In 2007, he proved himself capable of taking a horrific true crime, dramatising it in a way that gives context to the behaviours of its characters, and approaching what is essentially an exploitation picture with utmost dignity, respect and care. Somehow, he is now a shadow of his former professional self.

Farrands' habit of running with the scrag ends of existing narratives smacks of commercial and artistic cynicism. He demonstrates little ability to create original material, and he has absolutely forgotten - or neglected - the way real people speak, which is so crucial to his line of work. Often when we hear of true crime stories, particularly those in which people are somehow convinced or manipulated into committing crime by others, the mind really boggles at how things get from A to B. What does a person have to say, and how do they have to say it, in order to get another person to commit such cruelty on innocents? With The Girl Next Door, Farrands showed us just how an evil adult could have manipulated neighbourhood children into torturing and killing a young girl, and it was his way with dialogue that made these unimaginable events believable. Now, he can't even convince us that a woman is trying to tell her friends she thinks she is being stalked. I mean damn, that's not a lot to ask of a writer who has previously shown his mettle with conveying difficult ideas on screen.

Although The Haunting of Sharon Tate is nowhere near as technically inept as I had expected it to be, it is just a sad, sorry and puzzling excuse of a film. A film doesn't have to be a masterpiece to be redeemable, but this is just the laziest form of 'retelling', and is not entertaining, scary, intriguing or compelling. As unethical as it can seem, it is undeniable that our nature as humans is to find curiosity in the extraordinary, in the things we don't see every day or have never seen before. Whether this is a motorway pileup or a murdered film star, we can't help but be fascinated. But there are so many elements of the Manson crimes that actually warrant elaboration and exploration, that don't disrespect the memories of the victims, and better filmmakers have explored these. Cult mentality, the transition to a life of crime, the death of a social movement; these are all insights that can be gained from these awful events that people can learn from. We gain nothing from 60 minutes of Hilary Duff creeping around in the dark and 25 minutes of crass crime scene recreation. This movie is utterly worthless.

Hatchet III (2013)

I have written several times before of my love Adam Green's throwback slasher series Hatchet, and by this point, I would argue that it is also one of the most consistent series of its kind. Although I have been a fan of the first Hatchet movie for a lot longer than the others, and I've seen it a lot more than the others, I contend that every Hatchet installment is on par with its predecessor.

Hatchet is renowned for its FX, and in this third installment, it is not some elaborate death that is my

This sight is like freakin' Disneyland for Crowley

favourite, but in fact, a very subtle rebirth. By this point in the series, we know that Victor Crowley is a 'repeater', in that every time he is killed, he regenerates in the same form as the night he died. So when the police and coroners have come along to scoop the gloop of the previous night's shenanigans, and have the various pieces of Victor Crowley lumped in one huge body bag, the now lone coroner makes the mistake of turning his back to said bag with headphones in. The cramped body bag slowly deflates like a beach ball until entirely flat, and we just know who's on his way into town!

Having made mincemeat of Crowley, Marybeth rocks up in the local copshop armed and looking like Carrie on prom night. She is immediately detained and held in suspicion of leaving Honey Island Swamp smeared in human debris, much to the amused disbelief of several local hicks. Just like Giselle in Jeepers Creepers, this particular backwoods copshop has a police radio stalker in the form of Amanda (horror veteran Caroline Williams) who is the sheriff's ex-wife and a journalist who has spent years obsessing over the legend of Crowley and is desperate to prove his existence, which the latest massacre seems to evidence, in her opinion. She blags and bribes her way into grilling Marybeth about what happened, and eventually into breaking the suspect out of jail to supposedly put a stop to the latest slashfest.

Among the various police crew at the vast scene of the crime who are about to serve as Crowley's daily buffet of limbs, is coroner Andrew (once again the brilliant Parry Shen), whose character is not related to the recently-deceased tourguide Shaun or Reverand Zombie's employee Justin, but is played by the same actor. His colleague comments that two of the bodies he has recovered look just like Andrew, which the scene gets a good laugh at with the whole 'all Asians look the same' cliche. Andrew ends up one of the finale performers, but not before he gets pinned in the centre of major carnage.

Fuck yo' sista!

Amanda is one of those annoying horror characters who comes up with elaborate and unprecedented theories about how to defeat paranormal entities that basically always turn out to be wrong - and the theorists tend to find out the hard way! Naturally, Amanda drags several others into her ridiculous plight - one that maintains distance and hence survives is Sid Haig in a great cameo scene - leading to the logical but assumed death of both Marybeth and Crowley. Although we can't be sure that either are really dead by the end of the movie, it is hard to believe - even in Adam Green's world - that Marybeth will survive abdominal impalement on a tree branch. But as ever, there is no final overkill in terms of material, and by ending abruptly while the narrative is still midway back down the story arch. This makes for a good thrilling ending.

Oh no! Ma theory was wroowwng!

The third installment is not directed by Green this time around, but by BJ McDonnell, cameraman from the first two Hatchet movies. Having been elected by Green to direct the picture, McDonnell does a strong job of directing a very Greenesque movie that still feels individually crafted. It makes for a very natural extension of a strong franchise, sort of how Jeannot Szwarc did with Jaws II. It's exactly as fun, tense and utterly watchable as the first two Hatchets, so bravo BJ McDonnell.

Hatchet II (2010)

When it comes to post-millennial independent horror series, I don't think Adam Green's Hatchet can be beat. It's not just their technical and artistic proficiency, but the spirit behind them. Green, a kid of the slasher reign of the '80s, is one of those rare artists whose creativity is absorbed in childish imagine, bringing equal measure of excellence and adolescent thrill that no good horror fan has ever really grown out of.

In a Friedkin-style sound jump, Hatchet II jumps straight back in where the first left off, with Marybeth (now scream queen Danielle Harris) neck-deep in grimy swamp water at the hands of the still-not-fucking-dead Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder). A good old-fashioned thumb to the eyesocket sends him toppling overboard the boat and into the water with her, where she is inexplicably saved by old piss-drinker himself Jack Cracker.

He takes her back to his cabin and serves her a refreshing warm cup of piss (and this is before he realises he hates her!) When Marybeth reveals her recently-deceased pappy was Samson Dunston, old Jack cocks his shotgun and tells her to get the hell off his property, and that if she got any questions as to his sudden reversal of attitude toward her, to take it up with Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd).

She makes it back to town somehow, and drops in on Zombie, who reveals to her that her own beloved pappy was one of the three young hoodlums that threw firecrackers at the Crowley house that fateful Halloween night, and is basically directly responsible for the brick-shithouse of a mutant terrorising Honey Island Swamp. He summons his colleague Justin (the wonderful Parry Shen), who it turns out is the brother of Shaun, the hilarious fool whose illegal and "ONLY haunted swamp tour" *smacks with top hat* was the vehicle of the previous night's massacre - and whaddaya know, the guy is the spitting image of his recently-deceased tourguide brother.

Zombie sends him into town with a list of personnel to call to the shop, claiming if he is going to head out into the swamp, there are certain people he'd rather have there for backup. He also tells Marybeth that if she doesn't bring a relative (knowing full well that both her pappy and brother are dead), he will not agree to take her. So she enlists the reluctant help of Uncle Bob, and we are still not sure just what diabolical scheme is behind Zombie's insistence that her family member comes along for an imminent bloodbath.

Having had a fabulous but underexposed cameo in the first Hatchet, adding a few good points to its ensemble of horror icons, it is great to see Tony Todd take Zombie into a feature-length and central character in this sequel. He brings an interesting secondary villain role to the mix, and plays it sinister and yet oddly charismatic, to the point that we are never certain exactly what he's plotting. And naturally, after all of his scheming, he has wiggled his way to the front of the 'creatively horrible death' queue.

So an hour or so later a big old motley crew descend on the Zombie abode, ranging from beefy grey-bearded bikers with confederate flag patches on their denim waistcoats, to slutty girls, to unattractive redneck sex pests. They are all offered $500 a head to supposedly retrieve Zombie's boat, but he promises $5000 for the head of Crowley. Those who are not instantly scared off by the mention of Crowley swagger off into the swamp with guns a-blazin', certain that they needn't fear a 'children's story'. Famous last words.

The real joy of the Hatchet movies is their youthful vigour, with Adam Green at the helm. Dedicated to old-school effects and a zero-tolerance policy towards CGI, Green's series is characterised by its wickedly creative death scenes and its tongue-in-cheek freshman comedic style. For any good horror fan, it is the ultimately enjoyable combination, that makes for fully-loaded entertainment that allows us to laugh hysterically while marvelling in all the really gruesome FX.

Ils (2006)

Back in the summer of 2008 (great summer, by the way), my sister and I went to the movies with our boyfriends to see The Strangers. The cinema environment naturally enhances the fear factor of decent horror movies (provided you don't have any sarcastic assholes in the house), and the movie scared the shit out of us. It prompted a lifelong fear of uncurtained windows after dark. And being alone in a house at night. But fuck it, every horror movie had done that.


It was claimed that The Strangers was based on Ils, which I am somewhat ashamed to have taken ten years to watch. The copy that I picked up had an English cover and was titled Them, but my DVD turned out to be an original without subtitles. Fortunately, I am a moderate French speaker and am in the habit of watching French movies to improve my language skills, so it posed me a nice challenge. Particularly as the movie actually takes place in Bucharest and features some Romanian dialogue too. If anybody out there is a particularly cunning linguist like myself (*wink*), Romanian is an interesting language, which a native friend of the family tells me is mostly Latin-based, with very minimal Slavic roots as one might expect. Due to several Turkish occupations, there are even Arabic influences. So yeah, check out a bit of Romanian.

Clementine (Olivia Bonamy) is a French teacher at a school, and she and her fiance Lucas (Michael Cohen) have bought a dilapidated chateau in the countryside which they are in the process of fixing up. It's beautiful and it's huge, and there's no one for miles around. No wonder people emmigrate to France for the space and low housing prices! Anyway, one night Clementine is disturbed first by a weird phone call, then by noises outside. A mysterious gang of attackers descend upon the chateau for reasons unknown and wreak havoc for the young couple.

Even for the surprisingly brief portion of the movie that actually takes place in the house, Ils provides little reference point for The Strangers, other than the basic premise of a young couple in an isolated house being terrorised by assailants unknown. And the only slight oddity of this premise is the small group being attacked. And that's only because the genre usually likes as many pick-offs as possible. But the movie, like its antagonists, is in it for the hunt - the kill is a mere afterthought. And writers/directors Xavier Palud and David Moreau's script and direction make thorough use of the terrifyingly vast spaces where attackers could be lurking.

This movie relies far less on jump scares like The Strangers did, and despite the latter's phony use of the old 'violent crime in America' statistics and implication that it is an act of charity which could help avoid similar things happening, Ils really addresses the situation with realism. Being on this turf, you should already know that this is a ***SPOILER ALERT*** zone, but I'll just put it out there, as the point of this movie requires me to give away twisty details. These antagonists turn out to be children, a small gang of varying ages, who carry out a carefully orchestrated attack against innocent people for no apparent reason. But in court, the children justify their cruelty by saying, "they wouldn't play with us." It is this point that leads one to believe this is far more than your average stalker/slasher. Like Eden Lake, it seems to be making a social statement.

Not only is this a creepy movie whose point is driven further home by the entire possibility of it, but it is vocal, and says to me that the entitled attitudes of the younger generation can have tragically detrimental effects on their social development. In other words, if kids are allowed to command adults and get their own way, what is to stop them going on such criminal rampages as a tantrum?

Girl House (2014)

Hey guys, fancy being pleasantly surprised by how good a movie is, even when you're sure it's going to be a typical exploitative gorefest with as many naked girls crammed in as a compact disc will hold? Well then, check out this slick Canadian slasher entitled Girl House. In a sentence: psycho killer in house full of webcam porn girls. Right? It sounds cheesy and stupid and gratuitous. That's what my Pop thought when he pointed it out to me in a shop, and that's what I thought when I went to watch it today. So I was somewhat taken aback when I realised I was in fact in for a creative and intriguing horror-thriller. And the surprise addition of the Thriller is one of its potent ingredients.

Kylie (Ali Cobrin) is a college student whose father has recently passed away, leaving her mother penniless and living abroad somewhere. She has been approached by some guy in a suit who says she'd be perfect for his company. And there's no funny business. He's not some greasy-haired cigar chomper hollering 'Hey honey, you wanna be a big time movie staahh? Wanna come sit on my casting couch?' She is fully aware that the job is doing webcam shows. But this does seem like a surprisingly decent company.

Girl House is different from the rest: it's like a cyber Playboy Mansion. All the girls live in a gorgeous secluded house which is rigged up with cameras as if installed by E! themselves, and their USP is that clients get to watch them in any room, at any time, whether they're sleeping, showering, playing pool or stripping. The idea is that the people watching get to feel like they 'know' the girls, and therefore are more loyal and better paying customers. The house has security guards and high walls, the operating system is protected by a whole team of computer specialists. The location is untraceable, and the system unhackable. But then, the Titanic was unsinkable.

All starts well. Kylie settles into the mansion, everybody is nice, and her first show (although very mild) goes pretty successfully, especially when she attracts the attention of Loverboy, an eager user who plans to come back for more. It looks like she'll be able to earn her good money, send it to her mom, and all will be well. And even when a guy from her high school recognises her, and confesses his eternal love for her to the pal he's watching with, he manages to start a relationship with Girl House's favourite New Girl. The introduction of these two guys, Ben (Adam DiMarco) and his buddy Alex (Wesley MacInnes), adds real dimension to the plot, and is written well enough to fork the road without losing the quality. It is their involvement that adds the Thrill to the equation.

When the Webcam Porn Rampage starts, everything is, of course, being broadcast live on the website, much to the horror of its clients (and particularly amusingly, a young boy), and Ben and Alex bear witness. They become the unofficial Day Savers by making many frantic phone calls, driving a 70 mile distance at top speed, and hacking the website. This level of commitment to rectifying the bad situation in a third party is most unusual in horror. But they are great characters: distinct, well acted and level headed.

There's really nothing not to love in Girl House. The script by Nick Gordon is excellent - well paced, imaginative and thoughtful enough to distinguish the dialogue of each character - and Matthews' direction is strong; all the actors are in the Good to Great range, and production design is wonderful. And if none of these more artistically admirable qualities are enough to draw you... there's also lots of hot girls in various stages of undress and a whole bunch of creatively staged murders.

All Hallows Eve (2013)

Season's greetings to all! Having just returned from my mum's house for the winter festivities, with a collection of horror movies bestowed to me by my sister, I have much new to write about, and today's is for a movie my sister declared one of the scariest things she's ever seen, and as I have documented here, she is a hardcore fan like me, and does not crack easily. It is All Hallows Eve by one Damien Leone, who research informs me has been developing something of a YouTube following with his short horrors. Two such pictures he incorporates into this anthology feature, his directorial debut.

The movie opens on Halloween night, at a house where Sarah (Katie Maguire) is babysitting two adolescents Tia and Tommy, and they have just returned from trick or treating. Turning out their candy bags, a VHS tape falls out, and the kids manage to wrangle Sarah into letting them watch it. Most definitely ill-advised, but where would a horror movie be without a clueless babysitter who is surely old enough to know better? In a cross between The Ring and Creepshow, the video (as this is one of those few households like mine which actually has a working VHS player hooked up to a TV) ties together the short films of Leone into a feature plotline.

That being said, the plotline is somewhat evasive, and the significance of the tape is dropped on us in the closing minutes. The finale of this movie is thrilling. As is the third of the three shorts on the tape which leads into the finale. The first short involves women kidnapped from a train station by Leone's signature character Art the Clown, played menacingly by Mike Giannelli, and taken to a satanic cult for rape and/or sacrifice. I'm pretty sure I spotted Eden Sher from The Middle as one of the girls, though I have not been able to find anything to back this suspicion up. This short is decent enough - fairly college project-y - and an obvious mark of a decent filmmaker in the making.

The second is somewhat silly, but again, research enlightens me. Poor Leone had some pretty severe monetary and time restraints whilst trying to pull this feature project together, and needed to produce both the middle short film and the core storyline in a frantic rush. And, having been involved in several indie productions, to various capacities, I could totally understand his plight. He said the middle short just didn't come together like he'd imagined. My first year film class project, which I did entirely by myself, was great and got an A, and I was really proud of it. My second year project was interrupted by various difficulties, and despite getting a B, I knew it was a piece of shit. Sometimes creative projects (particularly those with a deadline) just don't work out on paper the way they did in your head, and at least Leone was accepting enough of that to admit it.

Now don't get me wrong - the second short is not bad. It's just... flaccid. It starts well, consequences are dire, things are getting kind of creepy. A woman is moving from the city to an isolated house in the country with her (presently away) husband, when all electronics suddenly shut down and something crashes in the backyard. I think the real error comes with the on-screen acknowledgement of the creature. It's an alien. And a really, really typical looking alien. And it's a guy in a suit. And not only do we see him, but he becomes a very visible second character, which is majorly off-putting. The unknown is often scariest. Art the Clown appears again, quite inexplicably, in the last shot, as the painting the unseen husband has been obsessing over. At this point, I was groping for a link between the character, these two scenarios, and the 'real life' in which a babysitter and two kids are watching.

The third and final short on the tape is the first of several Oh Shit moments in the homestretch of All Hallows Eve. The first two films are really very tame in terms of horror or gore. They could probably both pass for a 12 certificate (or PG-13). The third goes all out, and involves a woman stopping for gas in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. As she pulls up, the attendant is kicking Art out of his joint for smearing shit on the bathroom walls. The attendant gets a pretty raw deal. The girl, however, after thinking she's escaped time after time, suffers one of those fates that you come across every now and then that sears its way onto your brain for life. Although this site carries a hefty Spoiler Alert throughout, this is one element I shall not give away. Because it is probably the shock of it that makes it such an effective bridge to the finale of the Babysitter thread.

And as for the actual ending... what will become of the babysitter and the kids? Again, I shall restrain myself and leave it vague, but I must comment upon what a clever piece of filmmaking it is. In the years that I have looked at film journalistically, I have learned to separate myself from the fiction created by consenting adults working a sometimes challenging job for varying sums. But this ending is one that really got inside my head and played with me, and actually left me struggling to sleep. I very nearly gave in to the trick and turned the movie off prematurely. I tell you, I felt twelve again, struggling to sleep because of a movie! It was almost nostalgic.

Although it's not particularly consistent, All Hallows Eve has a stellar payoff, which justifies its slow build up. It's a really good scare, and that is something I find harder and harder to come by.

Black Christmas (1974)

Today I decided to revisit a retro early-era slasher from 1974. Much can be learnt about the genre from watching the earliest examples. Where Last House on the Left gave us among the first "bad guy jumps out just as victim is escaping", Black Christmas presents POV killer shots, predating Sleepaway Camp, and even Halloween. As Halloween would go on to do, the opening sequence is from the perspective of our antagonist, here the deliciously ambiguous Billy, who is used to absolutely perfect extent.

Despite the writer's claims that his script was inspired by a Canadian mass murder, it seems far more likely that it originates in the form of the urban legend, The Babysitter and The Caller. We all know it: an innocent young woman is all alone in a big house, looking after the neighbour's child, when she is hassled with threatening phone calls, which are eventually traced from inside the house. On top of the 2006 remake, this concept has been used in several other horrors, including the original and remake of When A Stranger Calls. Now that remake was a really tense, terrifying ordeal... right up until they showed us the killer's face, and then he was suddenly in plain sight for the remainder of the film. It killed the effect like the words 'not tonight' kill a boner. It left my sister and I movie-blueballed, and we were not impressed.

So the first time we saw this fantastically '70s original movie, we were overjoyed. Not a single glimpse of our stalker's face did we get... all we ever saw was a silhouette, and one eye... once. This keeps things terrifying. Consider in Silence Of The Lambs, when Clarice has finally cornered Jaime Gumb in the house, she is confident and proud, and ready to take him down. However, when the place is plunged into darkness, she is scared, because she knows she is being watched, but can't watch back. This is exactly the primal fear that Black Christmas taps into, and it is immensely effective.

This honestly is one of the superior early '70s horror movies. It is simple, understated, surprisingly unexaggerated, and yet overwhelming in its atmosphere. Lesser movies (and certainly the majority of modern ones) like to use that typical shrill string music to create eery, still scenes in which threats may be lurking; Black Christmas embraces the silence, and recognises its merits in scaring people. But where appropriate, sound is used creatively....

The movie is set in a sorority house a few days before Christmas. All the girls are partying and readying to go home for the holidays, the resident gang including Jess, played by the beautiful Olivia Hussey of Romeo & Juliet, and Barb, wonderfully portrayed by Margot Kidder. And all the festivities cause the appropriate ruckus to mask a surprising number of murders within the house, performed by the creep Billy, who lives in the attic. The girls receive illegible phone calls from a guy they've dubbed 'The Moaner', and take it all fairly well. The drama that stops this from being a totally straight-up slasher pic manifests between Jess and her troubled musician boyfriend Peter. He is under immense stress about an upcoming exam at the academy where he's spent the past eight years, and she is unintentionally pregnant, and plans to abort.

This is another pattern you'll notice in early genre examples: these were not just gratuitous gore shows, but often had some political or ideological theme about them. To me, Black Christmas was something of a statement about the women's liberation movement that was gathering such momentum at the time, and the opposition it faced from those not so hot on the idea of equality. Each of the women at the house are independent in nature, and working hard towards a self-sufficient future. They are massacred for their troubles by a confused, reclusive, faceless man. In the foreground, we have the dispute over abortion between Jess and Peter: he insists that she keep the baby, even forbids her to abort it, and Jess refuses, insisting that she will not be forced to give up her future and ambitions. Very noble and sensible sentiments. But Peter is "an artist - he's highly strung", and so when one mad phone call is attributed to him and his anger, the finger is pointed at him. After all...have we ever seen Peter and 'Billy' in the same room at the same time?

Now the ending of the movie concludes its message and stance. It is easy for movies depicting female suffering to be dubbed 'misogynist' and the like. Actually, it is easy for people, out to get offended on others' behalf, to dig out something to complain about in almost any movie. But you know what I mean. Some may say, having watched a house full of independent, middle-class young women being slaughtered by some limp gimp of a man, that the movie itself is misogynist. Firstly, it seems to me that misogyny is rather like going into labour: you notice a million little things that could be a symptom of labour, but when it's actually happening, there's not a doubt in your mind about what's taking place, and how could you, in hindsight, have thought that those tiny things were the real thing?

If an entirely male crew wrote, directed, produced a movie which expressed severe hatred for women; if the casting agents said to each actress hired, "Thing is, we hate bitches, and we plan to degrade, marginalise and otherwise offend you by making this picture"; if the entirely male crew had showed up to press releases and premieres vocalising their hatred of the female population, and highlighting the movie's intention to express hatred and discrimination... then perhaps, we could say a movie is 'misogynist'. But otherwise, movies of quality tend to carry some message or moral at their core, not necessarily shared by its creators, but something worth expressing. It is a medium. Don't shoot the messenger, right?

If this movie, broken down into a basic motive, was something close to Independent Woman = Threat to Masculinity, therefore Independent Woman + Threatened Man = Dominant Male, therefore Problem = Solved, then perhaps there would be some undercurrent of masculine insecurity, as raved about by Siskel and Ebert back in the day. But if the formula were as simple as this, with women being punished for their independence and self-assurance, then surely Jess would pay the ultimate price for daring to abort Peter's baby. Perhaps we'd even be subjected to some MacDuff-style forced c-section for a particularly melodramatic effect.

But, if ambiguously, Jess survives the ordeal, and Peter is killed. If basic survival vs. death is totted up, does the movie's sympathy swing in Jess' favour? But what of the ambiguity of the ending? Billy is obviously still lurking, so it obviously wasn't Peter. He may yet kill Jess, but so far as we witness, he does not. The way I read it, Black Christmas is addressing the opposition to the women's liberation movement. Billy, the opposition, has claimed many victims, who remain unnoticed and unmissed. Jess, the liberated woman who will have an abortion, has come through male oppression, and will live on to do as she wills. However, Billy is still stalking, observing her with the potential for being another victim. Bottom line: Female liberation has gained its momentum, but it is still under threat, and must be conquered by assertion.

NOTE: I felt the ending I just concocted was sufficiently emphatic that I should leave it there, but I must somewhere add that this movie contains some of the most psychedelically '70s outfits a vintage hippie like myself could ask for. Guys in fur coats, anyone?!

Don't Go In The House (1979)

I decided to start from the beginning with the Don't... movies. They are a famous figure in the exploitation genre, and if the first installment is anything to go by, the titles offer rather irrelevant advice to potential victims. And for once, we find ourselves concurring with the taglines...'don't say we didn't warn you...' I mean, for God's sake, people: the title told you not to, and yet on you waltz into the house! Don't you know you're in the middle of a slasher movie?! Imaginative viewers have paid far more attention to the assertion of the movie's title than its characters do, and have suggested alternatives. A few of my own might include Don't Hitch Rides With Weirdos, Don't Snoop Around Weirdos' Houses and Don't Piss Off Child Abuse Victims. Any one of these could have served more suitably as the 'warning' of the story. 'Don't Go In The House!'? But all my stuff is in there!

Donny Kohler (Dan Grimaldi) is a quiet, weird guy who looks like a less-striking David Hess and works at an incinerator plant. He is obsessed with fire, thanks to his abusive mother's fanatical religiously-based abuse of him during which she'd 'burn the evil out' of him. So, you may say, 'Good on ya, Donny -- ya landed ya dream job!' But with fire being top of his Christmas list, he is less than responsive in fire-related health and safety situations. The opening scene sees one of Donny's colleagues fishing around an incinerator for an aerosol can. Now, I'm no Incineratory Technician, but I know that where there's a furnace and there's a metallic container of compressed gas, I'm not gonna be around to see out the consequences. So, the can goes boom and all the other guys scramble to put out their professional friend who doesn't seem to know the words Stop, Drop and Roll, while Donny stares on hazily.

The guys get mad at little ol' Donny for being fucking useless in a crisis situation, and he runs off home. The first second you get a glimpse of the Kohler place, you practically see 'Bates' written all over it. The obvious inspiration for this crooked mansion atop a hill sets the ball rolling for several other allusions to predecessors of the horror genre. Now if you thought Donny was having a bad day, you should see the look on his face when he finds his mother at home dead. How awful! But, oh wait, Donny's mother was a maniacal child-abuser. After an initial burst of rage at the cold and pale (yet still visibly breathing) mother, he recognises his newfound freedom, and so decides to live the good life: he turns up his records and swings back on the chair. He even smokes a cigarette!

But now for the real fun... to pretend his mother is still alive, not show up for work for a week, and lure gorgeous ladies back to his house for a little hot stuff. First up is a snotty florist (Johanna Brushay), whom Donny offers a ride home. Then he pulls that classic "I just gotta swing by my place for a minute -- it's right on the way" thing. Donny is no slobbering hick with an eyepatch; in fact he looks deceptively friendly, so when he is the only person around to give a lift, politeness indicates that there is little room for hesitation on this request. But then when they get there, Donny insists she come in and meet Mother Kohler. The girl seems to be with us in imagining that any guy who brings a random stranger in to meet his mother probably has some kind of issue, but it would just be plain rude to refuse, right?

The exteriors of the house are completely Hitchcockean, and the interiors have a real Carrie feel to them, with the long cavernous stairwells and gloomy woodwork. It is, as a drunken victim later comments, in dire need of a paint job. One room in particular is quite the spectacle. Once the girl is knocked out (as was imminent -- these buggers are never man enough to just drag a conscious person off against their will, are they?), she wakes up naked, chained to the floor by her feet and her hands to the ceiling of a steel-lined room, and Donny comes storming in menacingly in his full work uniform. Sure hope he noted the extra hours he put in at home down on his time sheet.

The death of Donny's first victim is apparently what most of the fuss was about, and what landed the movie in hot water with the Daily Mail's dumbass scaremongering campaign. The poor girl is doused in petrol and set ablaze with a flamethrower. My initial thought whilst watching this sequence was that its state-of-the-art CGI (Highlander style) were far more than I ever expected from a picture like Don't Go In The House. And I suppose it is quite horrific. But then, I'd recall the death of Delecroix in The Green Mile as far more painful to watch in comparison. I would say the more disturbing aspect of the scene is the mechanical, laborious manner in which Donny carries it out. Albeit a little batty, so far he has come across as a relatively meek fellow, but the way he torches the girl like he does every day at work...it feels as meaningless as a porn actor having sex with his wife at night.

Donny starts hearing voices. Encouraging him to burn the evil out of others. Seems like the Old Lady is getting bored and jealous out there on th'other side. He collects a couple more victims, and chars his mother's body, and arranges them in a macabre Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style family. Now a colleague, Bobby (Robert Osth), calls to see what has kept Donny from work for a week. He invites him out with suggested hooker arrangements made. Hesitant at first, Donny agrees, and hits the clothing store to purchase some disco-worthy gladrags. There he is served by a hilarious camp salesman, who kits him up in a surprisingly plain suit, so when he rolls up to the disco he feels kind of uncomfortable.

Well, it's uncertain whether the promise of whores is really fulfilled. It seems more like Bobby has met two young women who agreed to go out for the night, and he... filled in the gaps, so to speak. They seem nice. Not really whore material. Everyone is eager to dance except our valiant hero, and the poor girl who gets foisted upon him makes the mistake of being a bit too insistent with a secret psycho. Hey -- easy thing to do. As he is sat at a candlelit table, the girl grabs his hands and tries to pull him towards the dancefloor, rather carelessly holding his bare arms over the flame. *Momma Flashback* Cue the publicly alarming episodes which finally draw outside attention to Donny's shenanigans. He freaks out and throws the flame in the girl's face, setting her hair alight and promptly legging it.

During his workless week, Donny anxiously consulted with Father Gerrity (Ralph D. Bowman), telling him of the abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother, and of his murderous tendencies as a result. Gerrity advises that Donny forget it all and move on, that what's in the past can't hurt him. So Donny tried this, but as the little incident in the nightclub demonstrates, it's not had the greatest success rate. So along with the alarmed Bobby, who is left to deal with two girls whose night has been little of what was promised, Donny also has Gerrity looking for him.

He has meanwhile picked up a couple of drunk chicks looking for a ride to the nearest available booze-jockey. Having developed something of a flair for bringing chicks home, he offers them a much better night at his house. They're drunk, and dumb (deadly combo) so gladly accept and start obnoxiously snooping around once they get to the Kohler place, as dumbass victims often do. To be honest, if I invited a new 'friend' to my house, went to get drinks, and came back to find them snooping through my bedroom, I'd be pretty pissed too.

The Priest-Whoremonger duo descend upon Donny's house, freeing the drunk girls from their topless captivity, and taking on the Fire Demon. Donny suits up, and tries to barbecue Gerrity, who is rescued by Bobby, prompting the psycho to barricade himself in his creepy Family Den. Now here's the cool ending I didn't see coming... the Mother-shaped jerky and her poor companions start to creak to life and edge menacingly towards him. I wonder if perhaps the ending sequence of Tony Scott's wicked The Hunger was inspired by this far less stylish example. But dontcha love it when the Insanity card is played throughout, only for the Supernatural card to be suddenly whipped out like a Thai bride's cock at last minute?! What a riot!

I mean, that's assuming that this isn't just another manifestation of Donny's increasingly menacing psyche. If nothing else, Don't Go In The House lends an ear to the lonely, abused souls who suffer pain and degradation. Donny's seeking of redemption in the form of Gerrity demonstrates his ultimately good nature, and he is clearly a tortured man. But what could be learnt from the movie? I suppose, the only lesson the duration of this pretty decent horror teaches can be best summed up by its title, or better by some of my own suggestions. The aim of Don't Go In The House is to warn audiences Don't Piss Off Child Abuse Victims. 

Chaos (2005)

One of my all-time favourite horror movies is Wes Craven's film-making debut, Last House on the Left (1972); a film which captured, at just the right time in the political and social development of the US, a shocking and controversial story as a response to many misconceptions and cover-ups. Craven and producer Sean Cunningham were among many young hippies of their generation to feel outraged and lied to when footage of the Vietnam war came home, and the men decided that the sickly violence inflicted overseas was just as relevant in US society. It was clearly within the human capacity to commit torturous acts on our own kind, and it was there. The Man just didn't want you to think it was.

But alongside their own peace-fuelled angst came the basic morals and structure of an old Swedish folk tale, originally adapted to film by Ingmar Bergman in the Academy Award winning The Virgin Spring (1960). This went on to become story of Mari Collingwood (Sandra Cassell) and her friend Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham), two teenage girls of 'the love generation,' who are off to a Bloodlust concert in the City. In the remote Connecticut woodland live Doctor and Mrs Collingwood, who are busy preparing Mari's 17th birthday at home while the girls are out.
Through the brilliantly-used medium of a local radio station, we are introduced to the movie's antagonists. Krug Stillo (David Hess) and Weasel Pedowski (Fred Lincoln) - two escaped convicted murderers and rapists - and their companions Sadie (Jeramie Rain) and Krug's son Junior (Marc Sheffler). The girls run into the gang whilst trying to buy some grass and are kidnapped, taken to the woods, raped and murdered. By pure coincidence, the woods they are in - their car having broken down on the road - are the back garden of the Collingwood place, and the gang spend the night after their day of havoc, before the parents discover who they are and what they've done. Then the parents kill them all in miserable revenge.
In 2005, David DeFalco wrote Chaos, originally with Krug himself David Hess attached for the title role. Alas, the potential saviour of this sickening flick was let go, for fear of type casting. However, Marc Sheffler (Junior) signed on as co-producer for good measure. What this picture turns out to be is an almost scene-for-scene remake of Last House, but with the violence skyrocketed, the craft neglected, and the ending absolutely brutalised.

The two girls we have this time are Angelica (Maya Barovich) and Emily (Chantal Degroat) who is mixed-race. The only reason I mention this otherwise irrelevant point is because it is pressed so frequently throughout this outrageous film. In the opening minutes, Angelica (who, we gather has been Emily's friend long enough for her mother to worry about her party animal tendencies) says that Emily's mother should be more liberal, because she's in a mixed-race marriage. Why the hell would a long-term friend bring up their friend's race without any point or purpose? That's just stupid. To be continued...

Anyway, the girls are off to a rave in the woods, and the family at home in the wilderness are Mr Ross (Jewish doctor of some kind, we assume) and Mrs Ross (typical worried African-American sitcom housewife). Yeah, it already sounds terrible, doesn't it? So the girls head off into the woods, where people are still setting up. Angelica, in her irritating 'broken record' manner shouts loudly and obnoxiously about 'scoring some E' and soon her obviously dwindling common sense gets them friendly with our new Junior, Swan (Sage Stallone). He takes them back to a secluded and dilapidated cabin where his pop Chaos (Kevin Gage), sidekick Frankie (Stephen Wozniak) who looks like he may be Jared Leto under a false name, and their eye-candy Daisy (Kelley Quann) are hiding out. Wow, Daisy--Sadie...see what they did there?!

This gang has none of the swagger or chemistry that Weasel, Sadie and Krug had. Chaos, who's a towering skinhead always shot from below to appear terrifyingly large, is soon revealed to be an absolutely (for want of a less-horror-cliché term) twisted fuck. Daisy, whose hair was styled just like Jeramie Rain's, but whose appearance is lacking in the original felinity, is a questionable character. Throughout she expresses remorse, fear and disgust, yet when the gang inevitably torture the girls, she screams, hollers and molests with considerable conviction. She's well acted, but under-developed. Frankie, the aforementioned Leto in disguise, is similarly questionable. He constantly disagrees with Chaos, and although he claims 'We do it because we like it!' is later equally disgusted by Chaos' rampage. It's like his mantra is 'Rape and torture is fun and harmless, but there's a line, man, don't cross it.' 

So, the gang have taken the girls to the woods, for some reason. 'Nobody'll bother us way out here.' Yeah, dude, but nobody would've bothered you in that perfectly good hovel in the middle of nowhere either. Why the woods? Anyhow, it is suggested it would've been a good, old-fashioned rape and murder spree until Chaos came in and added his ridiculously vile torture that is obviously designed purely to sicken us. Do we really need one girl force-fed her own nipple before being stabbed and her dying body raped by two different men? Do we really need the other girl's two orifices being carved into one? No we fucking don't. 

Craven's movie was distinctly lacking in any really 'original' killing methods. Phyllis was stabbed, Mari was shot and both were raped. The content of the violence was not the point of the movie, the context was. But Chaos is not so subtle. The only real object here is to make the audience vomit til their stomach linings hang from their mouths. This is truly gross shit. 

Anyhow, the girls done away with, we are given Last House-style cuts back to the parents at home. The original used this as a mild form of comic relief, with jaunty music and lack of worry. It was used as a contrast. But the constant cuts back to the parents here are increasingly annoying and pointless, just going round in circles, conversation-wise. The mother character is irritatingly pitiful, but the dad is strongly played, particularly towards the end. But again, the original story's pivotal third act is barstardised, made totally pointless and fruitless. 

The gang finally arrive at the parents house, for whatever reason, a mere ten minutes from the end, and there is no development between them, or trickery. As soon as they set foot in the house, the dad realises what's happened because Daisy's wearing her victim's belt. He manages to get a call out to the cops-- wait, wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. I must mention the cops. Earlier the worried parents called the local sheriff, who is again ridiculously and pointlessly racist. Taking Emily's picture with him he comments, 'Would you believe one of her parents is white?!' I reiterate-- WHAT?! The mom goes into typical housewife outrage, while in the car the sheriff rambles on to his deputy about 'All that perfectly good white pussy out there and he goes and marries a nignog.' What a crazy fucking asshole. There is no point to any of this shambolic conversation, except if it is to emphasise the fascist attitudes of all the male characters, bar Pop. 

The original 1972 cops were a wicked delight, again used as comic relief. They see the gang's car broken down outside the Collingwood place, but choose not to pursue it. Soon after they realise the car belonged to their wanted felons, their sudden chase is stalled as their car runs out of gas. They spend the remainder of the movie walking and trying to hitch various hilarious rides back to the Collingwoods'. These here cops are not only backwards pricks, they are also mindless idiots, as the show's jaw-droppingly ridiculous, and point-defeating anti-climax proves.

Five mins to run: The cops have arrived, and are busy wrestling with the hysterical Mrs Ross, while Doc Ross has Chaos, Daisy and Frankie at gunpoint (oh by the way, the son is dead. I forgot about that. He dies). Anyhow, after wasting his first chance to blow them away by chatting shit, Dad's gun is snatched away by Chaos, who shoots and kills Daisy. While this happens, Doc runs off and grabs a chainsaw (wink to the original) and guts Frankie like a leather-clad fish. He wastes the remaining fuel, and his second attempt to blow them away, by sawing through various wooden objects. A struggle between Doc and Chaos sees the latter with a screwdriver to the leg, and Doc reloads the gun, aiming it at his aggressor's head. Here it goes, third chance, that was lucky, better not screw it up... In runs the sheriff, who immediately SHOOTS DOC ROSS IN THE HEAD in his own fucking living room!!!! Mrs Ross runs in and sees her dead husband, and grabs the sheriff's gun and shoots him dead with it. By now Chaos has grabbed the gun again and shoots the deputy, and then the mom. Everyone's dead except Chaos, and his cruel laughter runs over a black screen. End of movie.

What the fuck did I just see? In the words of Ron Burgundy, "Well, that escalated quickly." One of Craven and Cunningham's key points of their movie was showing how ordinary, good people can become killers, the same as those scum we don't believe live in our neighbourhoods. What did it take for that to happen? And would it give any satisfaction, or did it just have to be done? Well it wasn't done in Chaos, that's the problem. So now not only the ending, but the entire story is obsolete. The parents were meant to be central characters, victims who become aggressors. But they weren't; they were victims like everyone else, turning this movie into one long, mindless killfest by a single sick bastard, and in the end, he is better off. What does this mean? 

In 1972, every member of the gang was dead, and the parents left in confused misery at what has happened. But the gang was dead, so revenge had been dealt. Evil had been punished. That is, one way or another, a satisfactory conclusion. But here evil is not punished, it is fed and it prevails. The beginning of the movie features a particularly long-winded 'true events' bullshit title card, which claims the movie should 'serve as a warning to parents and potential victims...and perhaps save lives.' So what is this movie's warning? That sick, evil people will always win? Or that evil is everywhere so parents should lock their daughters in the attic for life? What was DeFalco doing? There is no clear message or moral to this movie. It's just a torture album.

All of this turf was already covered by the mighty Ebert, but it's true and obvious. Not only lacking constant attitude or perspective, it's craft is minimal. Last House featured some good, while certainly amateur, cinematography, and an amazing score by none other than David Hess. The music, Hess' main passion, was meaningful, lyrical and beautiful, and made a few scenes eerily sensual. Music in Chaos is negligible, and when it's present, it's just bullshit rap-dance beats anyhow. It's pointless, an empty medium which could convey so much.

Chaos is a sick and senseless film with absolute lack of direction, meaning or creativity (except when it comes to methods of killing innocent people), and the unwanted bastard child of Last House which should have been nipped in the bud before it got worse.