Oh! the Horror! – Little Dead Rotting Hood (2016) and The Inhabitants (2015)

25 Friday Mar 2016

Tags

Bianca A. Santos, Den mother, Elise Couture Stone, Eric Balfour, Horror, Jared Cohn, Little Dead Rotting Hood, Michael Rasmussen, Michael Reed, Missing children, Review, Shawn Rasmussen, Stillwater, The Carriage House, The Inhabitants, Werewolves, Witchcraft

Little Dead Rotting Hood (2016) / D: Jared Cohn / 88m

Cast: Eric Balfour, Bianca A. Santos, Romeo Miller, Patrick Muldoon, Heather Tom, Brendan Wayne, Marina Sirtis, Amy Argyle, Tony Ketcham

In the small town of Stillwater in the state of Backwoods USA, there’s a bit of a problem with wolves. It seems the hairy devils are attacking and killing the townsfolk, which according to State Officer Victoria (Tom) shouldn’t be happening… unless of course these wolves are some kind of genetic mutation (which would explain why they don’t hunt in a pack). But the problem is a much more serious one: these aren’t just any old wolves, even genetically mutated ones. No, they’re werewolves, and they have a den mother who wants to kill all the townspeople on the night of the autumn equinox (basically, in a few days’ time). Can town Sheriff Adam (Balfour), Deputy Henry (Muldoon) and the usual handful of eager locals/dialogue-free extras, including town weirdo Benson (Ketcham), bring these supernatural entities to heel and save the day?

Not by themselves, no. As it turns out they need help from the Keeper of the Forest. And who’s that you ask. That’s Samantha (Santos), the granddaughter of the town’s other weirdo, Mrs Winfield (Sirtis) aka the Wolf Lady. You see, Samantha has inherited her grandmother’s supernatural abilities, albeit in very unfortunate circumstances: following a werewolf attack, Samantha died, but her grandmother used her powers to resurrect her. Now Samantha is able to kick werewolf butt and aid the Sheriff in his attempts to hunt down the werewolves that are running amok, and also track down their den mother.

Viewers expecting a fun time with Little Dead Rotting Hood would be advised to lower their expectations – and they probably will when they see “The Asylum Presents” show up during the movie’s opening credits. Small town werewolf movies have become reasonably popular in recent years, what with the likes of Late Phases (2014) and WolfCop (2014), but Little Dead Rotting Hood isn’t likely to join them in the public’s affection anytime soon. It’s clear that the title came first and screenwriter Gabriel Campisi was left to come up with a story to match it to, but as he hasn’t written a script since Alien Agenda: Endangered Species (1998), it soon becomes obvious the task was beyond him. When he can’t even decide if the werewolves can be killed by ordinary gunfire or not you know the movie’s in trouble (before we learn that they’re werewolves they can, afterwards they can’t).

Things aren’t helped by the hiring of Jared Cohn in the director’s chair. Cohn gave us the incredibly stupid Buddy Hutchins (2015), and he’s on equal form here, stifling what little tension Campisi has managed to create by virtue of poor staging, failing to address the absurdities of the script (difficult as there are so many), and failing to encourage even one halfway decent performance from anyone. Balfour looks as if his agent said yes without consulting him in the first place, Santos looks baffled in the way that someone does when they’re not sure if they’re in the right place, and Sirtis gets off lightly by only appearing in a cameo role. Even the special effects reflect the bargain basement budget and lack of creativity, with Santos’ Little Dead Rotting Hood look reminiscent of the kind of “scary” make up worn by kids at Halloween.

Rating: 3/10 – one to avoid, Little Dead Rotting Hood pays lip service to the zombie aspect of its title, and squanders any attempt at being hokey fun by running away from the possibility whenever it seems likely to happen; basically a random selection of scenes that barely relate to each other, the movie is neither entertaining or rewarding, and seems only to have been made on some kind of dare.

The Inhabitants (2015) / D: The Rasmussen Brothers / 90m

Cast: Elise Couture Stone, Michael Reed, Judith Chaffee, Rebecca Whitehurst, India Pearl

Jessica (Stone) and Dan (Reed) decide to buy a New England bed and breakfast, the isolated, three hundred and fifty year old Carriage House. Previously run by an elderly couple, the wife has become too infirm to run things by herself since the death of her husband, and her family are looking for a quick sale that includes all the fixtures and fittings. Jessica and Dan have plans to continue running the place as a bed and breakfast, and once they’ve moved in they set about fixing what needs fixing and upgrading what needs upgrading. But it isn’t long before they each begin to hear things – strange noises – and Ben discovers that one of the fuses relates to somewhere in the main house that he can’t track down.

An encounter with some of the locals leads to Jessica finding out that the Carriage House was built in the 1600’s and was home to a midwife, Lydia Marsh (Pearl), who was charged with witchcraft when several children she nursed grew sick. After her death, a number of children went missing and were never seen again. Dan leaves on a business trip, and while he’s away Jessica has a supernatural encounter that leaves her distant and uncommunicative. Her newly-odd behaviour leads to Dan discovering which part of the house the mystery fuse relates to: an attic space that contains a bank of video screens and recorders. But his discovery that the previous owner was spying on his guests also reveals a greater secret, one that the house has been hiding for over three centuries.

When a movie poster boasts that the movie it’s supporting is “From the writers of John Carpenter’s The Ward” it’s likely to provoke one of two responses: first, “John Carpenter made a movie called The Ward?”, and second, “Is that really the best recommendation anyone could come up with? Have they seen The Ward?” Either response would be appropriate for this slow-moving, less than atmospheric chiller that ticks off the clichés as it navigates its way from its inauspicious beginning to its predictable resolution. With nothing new to keep the viewer interested, The Inhabitants is a dreary, tension-free affair that signposts its few scares and offers one of the most tired horror set ups there is: the house with a bad history (cue disappointment and yawning).

In the hands of the Rasmussen Brothers, Michael and Shawn, the movie doesn’t even attempt to get us to like its central characters. Jessica and Dan lack a back story, and thanks to the vagaries of the script in its first third, we never get to know them as a couple. Once the house begins to exert its influence on Jessica, any potential development is abandoned in favour of Dan’s discovery of the surveillance system, and having her wander around the house in a trance. The movie also favours the type of dark, hollow-eyed make up (that we’ve now seen done to death) to make its spectres look chilling, a creative decision that doesn’t work thanks to that particular look being so prevalent in horror movies right now. By the end you won’t care what happens to either Jessica or Dan; instead you’ll be glad you can leave the Carriage House behind and never have to go back.

Rating: 4/10 – lacking in many departments, but let down most of all by its derivative nature, The Inhabitants is a so-so horror movie that barely feels as if it’s “alive”; and when a movie has to include the deaths of some minor characters in order to bring some energy to proceedings then you know it’s in trouble.

The Witch (2015)

15 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Anya Taylor-Joy, Black Phillip, Drama, Folk tales, Harvey Scrimshaw, Horror, Kate Dickie, New England, Ralph Ineson, Review, Robert Eggers, The Devil, Witchcraft

D: Robert Eggers / 92m

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson, Bathsheba Garnett, Sarah Stephens

New England, 1630. Expelled from their newly settled community for religious differences, Puritans William (Ineson) and Katherine (Dickie) take themselves and their family – eldest daughter Thomasin (Taylor-Joy), eldest son Caleb (Scrimshaw), twins Mercy (Grainger) and Jonas (Dawson), and their newborn son Samuel – off into the wilderness where they make their new home. They build a dwelling, establish crops for food, and have goats for milk. All seems to be going well until one day when, in Thomasin’s care, Samuel disappears.

Katherine is devastated, and prays continuously. William and Caleb go into the surrounding forest to hunt for game, but have a strange encounter involving a rabbit that has an effect on Caleb. When they return, they find Katherine angry at their having gone, and Thomasin unable to control the unruly twins. Later, Mercy’s antagonistic nature annoys Thomasin so much that she threatens her younger sister by saying she – Thomasin – is a witch and will do terrible things to Mercy if she doesn’t do what she’s told; Mercy believes her completely.

Soon after, Caleb and Thomasin are in the forest when they become separated. Caleb meets a young woman (Stephens), while Thomasin searches in vain for him. She is found by William, but it isn’t until later that night that Caleb returns, naked and feverish. Katherine blames Thomasin for this, and Mercy reveals what Thomasin said to her about being a witch. Both Katherine and William believe Mercy at first, and confront Thomasin over it, but she manages to convince her father that she isn’t a witch, and that it is Mercy and Jonas who are in thrall to the Devil, and that they speak to him through one of their goats, Black Phillip.

Matters become worse when Katherine becomes afflicted by madness, and Thomasin and the twins are locked in the goat pen while William struggles to make sense of what’s happening. But the supernatural events that surround them begin to increase, and circumstances lead to Thomasin being the only person who can find of keeping herself at least from further harm.

The Witch is one of those movies that comes along every once in a while, gains some media attention and gets some critical mass behind it, so that by the time it reaches a wider audience it’s seen as something to be admired and sought out at the earliest opportunity. And so it is proving here, with Robert Eggers’ debut feature having picked up a lot of traction from film festivals around the globe throughout 2015 (including Romania’s Dracula Film Festival). Usually, the hype that attaches itself to such a movie proves to be undeserved – or is at least just that: hype – but for once, here is a movie that lives up to its promise.

Based on folk tales, fairy tales and legends from the New England area, all of which Eggers grew up with, The Witch is a fabulous collision between faith and evil, loneliness and paranoia, that is being marketed as a horror movie, but which is a whole lot more. While there are very definite supernatural elements, and we see the witch of the title very early on, this isn’t just a horror movie, this is a powerful drama that sees one family fall apart under conditions of deprivation – the crops fail, the goats give blood instead of milk – loss, paranoia, mistrust, lies, pride, and arrogance. The true horror is seeing this otherwise contented family undone by the loss of a child and the subsequent emotions that develop, and which each member is unable to deal with. By placing them in the middle of a forest, with no close neighbours to help, and leaving them to deal with the isolation that all that brings, Eggers exposes the fragility of faith and the inherent strains brought about by personal sacrifice.

The supernatural elements are well handled, and for once there’s no attempt at allegory or making it seem as if it’s all coincidence, or that there’s a more rational explanation for everything. Here, there is a witch, and we see her clearly, and there’s no room for doubt that she is responsible for setting in motion the events that lead to the family’s downfall. Without any possible ambiguity to muddy things, the straightforward horror of the situation is allowed to take hold, and as mutual suspicion leads to paranoia and then to madness and death, the movie is pitiless in its observational nature, leaving the viewer to watch a series of scenes in the movie’s last twenty minutes that signpost an outcome that is inevitable, even if the way in which it all happens isn’t.

Eggers’ confidence in the material, which is often very dark and uncomfortable – the scene where Caleb revels in a kind of sexual ecstacy is a good case in point – is aided by a trio of superb performances from Taylor-Joy, Ineson, and Dickie. The casting of Ineson and Dickie is particularly important: their accents and English speech would have been the norm at that time, and they both have a clear grasp of the religious and moral underpinning that their characters rely so heavily on. But as all that certainty begins to crumble, both actors retain an honesty in their performances that make their eventual fates all the more affecting. Taylor-Joy is similarly impressive in a role that, if the movie had been set somehow in modern times, would have reduced her to little more than the screaming virgin who gets chased through the woods. But Thomasin proves to be more than that, and there’s a scene where she confronts William over his behaviour that is compelling for the way in which the hypocrisy of William’s religious stance is exposed as a cruel sham (and which gives both actors the chance to highlight the true cause of the family’s problems).

The soundtrack is a big part of the movie’s effectiveness, with dissonant noises and choral sounds reaching their own kind of fever pitch, and serving to illustrate the weird nature of the events taking place, as well as being eerie in their own right. The score by Mark Korven is also highly evocative, and has an unsettling nature to it that is occasionally unnerving when allied to the visuals. Those visuals are expertly composed by Jarin Blaschke, and the dour, oppressive feel of the Canadian location where the movie was made, is evident in almost every exterior shot. And Louise Ford’s careful, measured editing style adds further lustre to a movie that, otherwise, could have lapsed into wilful obscurity in terms of the narrative and its intensions.

Rating: 8/10 – an unnerving examination of one family’s disintegration due to a lack of true faith in themselves, The Witch is a horror movie that works on several levels and has an embarrassment of riches, not least in its casting; Eggers’ confidence in the material and the way it holds together is compelling, and the whole thing is drenched in the kind of suffocating atmosphere that lingers long after the movie has ended.

Sleepy Hollow (1999)

30 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Christina Ricci, Christopher Walken, Hammer homage, Headless horseman, Ichabod Crane, Johnny Depp, Literary adaptation, Michael Gambon, Review, Tim Burton, Washington Irving, Witchcraft

D: Tim Burton / 105m

Cast: Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Miranda Richardson, Michael Gambon, Casper Van Dien, Jeffrey Jones, Richard Griffiths, Ian McDiarmid, Michael Gough, Christopher Walken, Marc Pickering, Lisa Marie, Steven Waddington, Claire Skinner, Christopher Lee, Martin Landau

New York State, 1799. Young policeman Ichabod Crane (Depp), viewed as an embarrassment by his superiors due to his interest in unorthodox investigation techniques such as fingerprinting and forensic testing, is dispatched upstate to the small hamlet of Sleepy Hollow to investigate a spate of murders where the victims have been found headless. When he arrives he finds the town’s elders, led by Baltus Van Tassel (Gambon), have no doubt as to the murderer’s identity: a vengeful spirit known as the Headless Horseman (Walken).

A disbelieving Crane begins his investigation. He learns that one of the victims was pregnant at the time of her death and that there is a link between them all to a will made by the first victim, Peter Van Garrett (Landau). Further slayings take place, though Crane continues to believe the killer is made of flesh and blood. It’s not until he witnesses the death of Magistrate Phillipse (Griffiths) that he realises that the Headless Horseman is real.

During all this Crane becomes infatuated with Van Tassel’s daughter, Katrina (Ricci). Along with the son of one of the victims, Young Masbath (Pickering), she helps him find the Horseman’s grave; the skull is missing, convincing Crane that someone is using it to control the Horseman. Crane deduces that “someone” is Van Tassel as before Van Garrett changed his will, he stood to inherit Van Garrett’s fortune. Katrina, however, burns the evidence and renounces her feelings for Crane. Though, when Crane is wounded by the Horseman in a fight, she tends him until he is better.

Things escalate when the town’s notary, Hardenbrook (Gough) takes his own life. A town meeting is held in the church, during which both Dr Lancaster (McDiarmid) and the Reverend Steenwyck (Jones) are killed, before Van Tassel is claimed by the Horseman. With Crane’s chief suspect murdered, he begins finally to piece together the identity of the person who is really controlling the Horseman, and the reasons why they have employed him in such a fashion.

Justly celebrated at the time of its release for its remarkably effective on screen beheadings, Sleepy Hollow was something of a return to form for Burton, who hadn’t directed a movie since the less-than-well received Mars Attacks! (1996). Although he wasn’t originally scheduled to direct the movie – that was meant to be creature effects designer Kevin Yagher, who also constructed the story with screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker – this is recognisably a Tim Burton movie right from the start, and his tribute to Hammer movies. With its muted colour palette, and grim rural setting, Sleepy Hollow is not perhaps the most attractive looking movie you’ll ever see, but it definitely suits the action, its steely blues and ghostly greys adding greatly to the often stifling atmosphere. There’s a real sense of foreboding about the hamlet and its surroundings, and the movie uses Rick Heinrichs’ excellent production design to impressive effect. And then there’s the Tree of the Dead, a superbly realised gateway to Hell that is almost a character all by itself.

If the screenplay ultimately is a pretty convoluted concoction, with the motivations of the Horseman’s controller proving to be unnecessarily tangled, there’s still tremendous fun to be had from a movie that invokes the spirit of 60’s Hammer movies with such obvious affection, and includes roles for horror icons Christopher Lee and Michael Gough (who was persuaded to come out of retirement for the movie). The movie’s mix of horror, humour, action and romance is intoxicating, and is helped by a clutch of performances that embrace the proceedings with gusto. Depp anchors the movie with a slightly prissy interpretation of Ichabod Crane that gives rise to much of the humour, while Ricci is more quietly proficient as Katrina, her role more in keeping with the independent heroine who still requires saving in the final reel. Gambon does nervous and guilty with aplomb, while Griffiths is a (brief) standout as the petrified Magistrate. And Walken, with his piercing blue eyes and sharply pointed teeth, impresses as the Hessian horseman, all snarling rage and bloodthirsty intensity. In smaller roles, Richardson, Jones, McDiarmid and Van Dien all have their moments, but it’s a measure of their collective abilities that they aren’t all lost in the mix.

There’s a lot packed into Sleepy Hollow, from the various well-mounted and staged killings (Van Tassel’s is a striking example), to the back story involving Crane’s mother (Lisa Marie), to the elements of witchcraft that underpin the Horseman’s return, to a thrilling three-way battle between Crane, Bram Von Brunt (Van Dien) and the Horseman (Ray Park, fresh from filming his role as Darth Maul in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) and as equally menacing here), but under Burton’s expert guidance, all these disparate components come together to make a richly rewarding whole. The movie takes the more fantastical aspects of the story and grounds them effectively, and if there’s a few too many occasions where things are glossed over or rushed through in order to get to the Horseman’s next appearance, then overall it doesn’t hurt the movie’s drive. With its fiery windmill confrontation and stagecoach chase climax, the movie ends on a thrilling note, and provides a suitably horrible fate for both the Horseman and his controller.

Rating: 8/10 – a stylish exercise in period horror, Sleepy Hollow has yet to be equalled or bettered, and features one of the most memorable villains in recent movie history; with its excellent production design and convincing special effects, Burton’s homage to the horror movies of his youth is both memorable and exciting.