Hard Candy (2005)

 

What if...? is the central question to any writer. First you write what you know, then you ask 'what if...?'. I never thought a seriously thrilling psychological movie would - at least in my mind - spawn from an episode of To Catch A Predator. It is difficult to make a movie with a moral or societal message that doesn't come off as biased or preachy, and given today's climate, it is probably suitable that a movie like Hard Candy was made in the mid-'00s, just on the precipice of artistic expansion, mere years before the populace apparently became too precious to take a joke, or to acknowledge genuine social commentary when it presents itself. I cannot imagine a movie like Hard Candy being made either today, or even five years ago. It is sometimes terrifying how quickly the societal landscape evolves, and often not for the better, especially when it comes to freedom of artistic expression.

Hard Candy is an amazingly intelligent, sensitive and thrilling movie that is effectively a 90-minute  two-hander of intense conversation, like Educating Rita or Venus in Fur. Elliot Page plays Hayley, a fourteen-year-old girl who meets middle-aged photographer Geoff (Patrick Wilson) on a chatroom, and gets together with him at a local coffee house. They hit it off and she talks him into taking her back to his place, where things take an unusual and *SPOILERY* turn. Hayley roofies Geoff and he wakes up in a slightly less horrifying scenario than the fellas in Hostel: tied to a chair, threatened with bodily harm... and accused of child abuse. Hayley has targeted Geoff as a predator, but once he is subdued, the identity of the predator is suddenly up for question.

I thawt yew wawnted to be shayved... down thayr

It is rare, as the writer and director of this picture both remarked, for a movie to be so succinctly summarised, but as is often the case with character-driven pieces, plot is not necessarily pertinent. Almost Famous and Me Without You are two examples that spring to mind of one-line-plot movies that find their momentum in their immensely detailed characters, who feel like real people. Although Hard Candy is much harder-hitting material than either of these movies, it is essentially a character profile with genuine dramatic tension. Hayley is a vigilante and Geoff is a sinner of the worst kind who tries to spare his reputation the truth right until the end. It could work well as a stage play in its excellence with dialogue and characterisation, and purposeful use of literal frames to reflect the photographic lens through which Geoff allegedly sees the world. 

Hard Candy hangs heavily on its two leading actors, and they carry it with simultaneous ease and torment. Page, given the duality of Hayley, is required to craft a base character, and an alter ego masquerading as a naive teenager, and it is eerily effective. She shows little glimmers of flirtation and precociousness, while maintaining an adolescent naivete; later she suggests entirely through facial expression that her character was molested as a child, and sees this whole ordeal as retribution for not only herself, but for every other young person who was ever victimised. Wilson, meanwhile, runs the gamut of emotion, and is essentially the characterisation of the audience itself, reacting to the each new twist of the ordeal he finds himself in. Importantly, he never once shows true evil to anybody. He goes through flirtatious manipulation, lust, confusion, anger, mortal fear, rage, guilt, submission, but he never lets us see the side of him that caused Hayley to target him in the first place. He is a real, complex person with many layers, and Wilson's performance is nothing short of athletic.

For tonight is the night that my beautiful
creature is destined to be born!

Not only is this movie an intense emotional ride, but it is like wandering through a chic, minimalist art gallery to look at. Everything has a sleek Scandinavian flavour to it, with expressive pops of colour hinting at some thematic undertone. Indeed, the opening credits are a simple shifting of a single red shape among a variety of white backgrounds, suggesting a small but lingering figure stalking just beyond the periphery. And not for the first time, we are forced to consider who this figure really is. Perhaps their identity depends on what sort of a person is looking. Those with devious skeletons in their closet may see that figure as the reason they still look over their shoulder every day. Those of a more innocent nature might consider it the unremarkable perpetrator of terrible cruelty. 

Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)

Any basic kid of my generation remembers the craze of Japanese ghost women haunting their dreams in the early 2000s. I distinctly remember getting rather pissed one time off at two friends who slept over, and kept wailing into the night about Samara coming to get them. Ju-On: The Grudge and Ringu were two Japanese horror movies that soon got American remakes and exploded onto the Western mainstream, and both spawned an obscene number of sequels et al. I enjoyed all such movies back in the day, and after more than ten years, I decided to revisit Ju-On: The Grudge.

The throaty croaking, the creaking woman with long black hair and cat screeches are so widely known of The Grudge, but what only fans will recognise it for is the episodic framing, eerie use of sweeping camera and minimal musical score, and overall excellence in creating suspense. For all the Scary Movie-style parody and social recognition that the franchise has attracted, Ju-On: The Grudge remains a quietly scary film that horror rookies will be scared by, and horror experts will be impressed by.

"Bubblegum!"

The story of Ju-On: The Grudge is centred on a particular house in suburban Japan. A typical Japanese family home with paper doors and minimal decoration, its boxy interiors capture the majority of the movie's action and fear. A catatonic old woman lives in the house, and very quickly, the family and acquaintances who set foot in the place are hunted down by a ghostly woman and disappear. What is essentially a basic setup is made more mysterious in its non-linear presentation, jumping around on the story's timeline to ultimately give us a complete jigsaw puzzle.

Get those nuts away from my face!

I've experienced a moderate body of Asian horror movies over the years, and would never claim to be an expert, or even an enthusiast, despite how highly I would recommend the movies I have seen and the genre they represent. I find Ju-On: The Grudge to be an easily watchable movie. I know of many people who really will not give their time to foreign movies, and I swear to God, if I had a nickel for every time I had heard, "If I wanted to read, I'd go to a library!" But I think that this movie is a fairly easy transition for a world cinema novice. Speech, of course, plays an important part, but a surprising amount of the movie is visual, and I believe transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries. Honestly, this could be a silent movie of the '20s with just a musical score and still work terrifically.

All this pussy and nobody's getting laid

As I said, I am no expert in Asian movies, and speak about three words of Japanese, but as an enthusiastic linguist of the English language, I can say that at times, the standard of acting is hard to judge due to the cadences of spoken Japanese. When compared to their corresponding subtitles, some regular spoken sequences can come across as over-acted to an English-speaking audience, but I understand that this could be due to the natural sound of the Japanese language. However, as I have observed with many a horror movie over the years, the actors are largely very convincing and engaging when acting frightened.


Director/writer Takashi Shimizu has fun within the visual and narrative boundaries he set for himself and his crew, and manages to communicate fear up-close and in long shots. Those iconic extreme close-ups of the faces of the ghosts' imminent victims are so well crafted and acted, and truly stand out as the highlights of the movie. The repeated sweeping tracking shots of victims as they succumb to the haunting are wonderfully simplistic while establishing key visual themes; by the third or fourth chapter of this chilling tale, we understand what is to come both visually and narratively, but that doesn't stop it from being absolutely terrifying when it arrives.

Helloooo? Avon calling!

As it happens, I did not find Ju-On: The Grudge as immediately terrifying as I either remembered or anticipated. I did not jump, and no scene gave me the chills or gave me trouble sleeping (as tall an order as that is for me these days), but as a film enthusiast, I really appreciate this picture. It clearly inspired enough tension and excitement in people to spew a whole gooey egg-nest from its cinematic loins, but the humility and understated charm of Shimizu's Ju-On: The Grudge is an entirely enjoyable and magnetic cinematic experience.

A Serbian Film (2010)

How bad can a movie themed on
mid-century communist propaganda possibly be?!

A Serbian Film is one of those controversial movies you get once in a blue moon that the creators insist there is deeper meaning to, much to the disagreement of audiences and critics. Mark Kermode disputed there being any legitimate allegory being made by the movie, and it has gone down in recent history as one of the most horrifying films ever made. Having finally subjected myself to its uncut version, I am baffled as to how anybody can not recognise the statements being made. I know virtually nothing about Serbia, except for it having a history of severe unrest in many senses, but I could very explicitly identify what the movie was trying to convey. Despite what one might expect having heard the grisly keywords associated with it, A Serbian Film is a devastatingly effective movie with plenty of angst.

Miloš is a retired porn actor who has settled down with a wife and child, but given up a good income and lavish lifestyle in the process. Struggling to get by and realising a quiet part of him misses the guy he once was, he is informed by a former colleague of a filmmaker who is producing a new high art form of pornography, and wants Miloš as his star. Coddled beneath several layers of armed security guards is Vukmir, a sinister and eccentric multimillionaire with a chip on his shoulder about the state of modern Serbian society. He is well practised in his prophetic rhetoric, ranting at length about what real art is, and what it is to feel and live. He wants to sign Miloš for big bucks, but is unwilling to tell his actor exactly what he will be performing, as part of some pornographic method acting school of thought or something.

No autographs, please.

Miloš is dubious about the unspecified nature of the work, but his wife Marija is heavily swayed by the money he will receive in return, so he decides to go for it. First day on set, Miloš is directed by Vukmir via an earpiece while flanked by several armed heavies holding cameras. Some odd domestic is going on between a mother and her adolescent daughter, both of whom go on to be central co-stars in this weird improv. By the second day, Miloš' convictions are being tested too hard by Vukmir's depraved setups, and he decides the next day to throw in the towel.

Suddenly Miloš awakens, hungover and bloodied, and it is three days later. Haunted and unable to find anybody he knows, he racks his brain for scraps of memory and tries to piece together what the hell happened to him. Through flashback and footage on a stolen camera, the movie takes us through Miloš' dreadful search for the truth, and we know things will somehow never been the same for him again.

Fans of Last House on the Left may recall that the original draft of its script was a more pornographically-oriented take on things, and as A Serbian Film was wrapping up, I couldn't help but compare it to Last House. It ultimately tells the same story, of an innocent and loving family torn apart by cruel outsiders, and how the family members react and are irreparably damaged by the ordeal. It is hard to classify either movie as horror, because they are really more like hard dramatic tragedies; they show us relatable and likeable characters whose terrible experiences stir emotional reactions in us as viewers. If I felt anything at the end of A Serbian Film, I felt sadness.

This is the greatest show!

Another element that these two movies have in common is that they narrate from the perspective of the family while framing them visually from the voyeuristic view of the aggressors. A Serbian Film is a very slickly produced picture, with sharp and very precise camerawork and sound. As we follow Miloš through this dark chapter, the camera always follows him like a stalker: we see him from over the shoulders of the people he converses with, or the corners of rooms. The feeling of being watched is intrinsically woven into the style of the movie, while sound forces the foreboding atmosphere upon us like a millstone, with inventive use of string plucking, static-like electronics and even what sounds like tearing paper. An incredible tension is created, starting with small tugs and stirs, and finally climaxing (eh-hem) in the film's closing minutes as an unbearable outburst.

This film is nothing short of ballsy. Srđan Todorović gets to show off an incredible range in the role of Miloš, and wouldn't work so well were it not for his courage to do exactly what the character requires of him. Were his performance to lack a certain emotion and vulnerability, we would not be able to feel for him anywhere near as much as we do by the time his nightmarish ordeal finally ends. I cannot imagine any of the roles in this movie being easy to fill for a director or for an actor, and every single person gives it their all, and absolute sincerity. Sergej Trifunović as Vukmir grasps just the right note of villainy and cunning. He is eccentric without being cartoonish, and measured enough for us to never quite peg him as a straight-up bad guy; he genuinely believes in what he does, and there is more to his motives than simply enjoying causing pain.

If this scene doesn't turn you on, you
clearly don't understand high art.

There is a great scene early on in the movie in which Miloš and Marija are in bed together watching one of his old skinflicks. They have the old "difference between love and fucking" discussion and Marija tells him that she quite fancies just being fucked once in a while. So he tries on the rough, underwear-tearing persona that he hung up years ago, and while she seems somewhat turned on by it, he clearly is not. The action cuts back and forth between the couple fucking, and Miloš' onscreen performance, before he recedes, turns his wife back over, starts to kiss her, and goes on to actually make love to her. This tells us so much about Miloš, and about his relationship with Marija. Although he clearly has the capacity (and from what we all hear, quite the knack) for your classic porn-style fucking, it is a compartmentalised section of his personality that he realises he doesn't like to open out into other sections, and just maybe, he has grown to dislike that side of himself.

Many an exploitation flick is accused of doing exactly what it says on the tin: exploiting suffering. More specifically, they are accused of 'glorifying' violence. A Serbian Film has definitely met its fair share of this vein of criticism, but it never once looks at violence through a rose tinted filter. Every second of pain is depicted as cruel and senseless, and despite its inherently sexualised framing, is never presented for titillation or kicks. It wants us to look at its content in the harsh, brutal way that it truly exists in the world, and ultimately, it wants our understanding of Miloš to grow as a result. The impact of the movie hinges on how we feel for the characters being wronged, not how gross and sensationalist it can be.

Uh... no homo.

The casual moviegoer is unlikely to accidentally stumble into this picture without any prior understanding of what they are getting themselves into, but let it be known: this is a gruesome and hard-hitting picture which in its uncut version uses some very disturbing imagery. It is stuff you won't shake off easily, but if you feel you can handle it, it is very worth seeing. I got so much more from watching this movie than I had anticipated, and am still somewhat surprised to be declaring it a moving and very effective piece.

I wonder what Roger Ebert would have made of this movie. Although he was still alive and critiquing when it came out, he never reviewed it. I feel like his 70s self - the same one that commended Last House - would have seen redeeming qualities in it, and perhaps even recommended it, much to the horror of the average moviegoer. In his mid-80s, Siskel-centric era, he may have decried it for its sexually-oriented violence. I know that by his twilight years, he had grown pretty damn tired of the hardcore exploitation flicks. That was his taste. I love me a hardcore exploitation flick, and A Serbian Film is as extreme as it gets in terms of content and context.

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.

Last House on the Left (2009)

Last House on the Left, by Wes Craven, is my favourite horror movie of all time, and any reader of my stuff knows that well. We are still in the midst of a decade-long trend of remaking classic horror movies, and in the grand scheme of things, I am sort of surprised right now that Last House got one before Carrie, Poltergeist or even The Exorcist (these were all terrible and should not have been attempted), due to its underground nature and mixed reception in modern day. But the centuries-old Virgin Spring story that Last House, among several other movies, is based upon still holds water, perhaps now more than ever. When I considered it in contrast to Denis Iliadis' 2009 remake, the original Last House was not what one would imagine when thinking of a horror movie: plenty of comic relief and dark humour, almost no on-screen gore and ungratuitous narrative. The new one takes on a far more classical 'horror' feel from the start, with dark misty visuals, more menacing characters and an obviously ominous set up.

The original Last House went like this: Mari, the daughter of a doctor, lives in the woods of Connecticut, and is celebrating her 17th birthday by heading into the city with her streetwise friend Phyllis, who Mari's mother dislikes and distrusts. On their way to a concert, they cross paths with a gang of escaped convicts while in pursuit of ganja, and get kidnapped, sexually abused and ultimately murdered in the woods near Mari's home. When the gang's car won't start, they seek shelter at the nearest house - and its occupants soon discover what has happened to their daughter, and seek to right some wrongs. This action was punctuated with upbeat folk music and a duo of dumb cops trying to stop the bad guys.

The remake opens with a play on the original loveable cops with two detestable assholes, who are escorting dangerous convict Krug to his new prison. His accessories Francis (Aaron Paul), girlfriend Sadie and son Justin run the cop car off the road and spring Krug. Then we meet the Collingwoods: teenage daughter Mari (Sara Paxton) is a determined competitive swimmer, under much encouragement from her mother, while Doc Collingwood (Tony Goldwyn) is a hands-on ER doctor/surgeon. They lost their son a year previously - Mari treasures a gold pendant that he had engraved for her, and Momma Collingwood frets over her one remaining child with appropriate neurosis.

They come to stay at their summer house in the woods, and Mari looks up old friend Paige, and hooks up with her at her job in a convenience store. The girls chat behind the counter and Mari's newfound aversion to marijuana is made evident. A shady young hoodlum overhears their conversation, and he invites them back to his motel room to buy some green. The girls get friendly with the boy, Justin, and end up partying awhile in the room, when Krug, Sadie and Francis come home, and decide that the girls' inate involvement in their crime spree means that they cannot leave.

This time around, Mari is the smart one, and in the course of her kidnapping, pulls off several intuitive tricks in escape attempts. Her ultimate survival just happens to hinge on her immense swimming ability - but let's face it, they wouldn't have bothered giving us this insight into her personal life if it weren't going to pay off later. This time around, Doc Collingwood's profession serves more purpose than to justify the family's large house. When his near-dead daughter ends up on the doorstep, he uses all his top ER tricks to save her life, all while touchingly talking to her like a loving father.

The gang are very modern, in that the girlfriend gets her tits out a lot, the sidekick is a small white thug, and the leader is absolutely unoriginal. In both looks and character, this Krug is unremarkable and although his team dynamic is largely unexplored, he is a psychological manipulator and a physical abuser. His control of his son is not reliant on heroin, but on emotion, and in amongst his physical assault of the girls, he rubs salt into the wounds with his psychological abuse. His written character is pretty good, but on screen it is not too memorable. David Hess as Krug is one of the most charismatic movie characters ever, and it's a tough act to follow.

The abuse that the girls suffer in the woods is far more in-your-face than in it was in the original, to a certain effect. The rape of Mari certainly turned my stomach, but I maintain that in a good narrative, such cruelties are necessary for us as an audience to feel the way the author intends us to about certain characters - consider Joffrey Baratheon in Game of Thrones to get my point. But a comparison can be drawn here: the 1972 version made my heart ache with its depiction of sexual assault, where the 2009 version made me feel sick. This evidences the primary difference between the two Last Houses: 1972 was a sorrowfully poetic movie, and the 2009 movie was a horror exploitation.

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?

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?!