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grrgoylAs a horror movie fan who has despaired of ever returning to that state of innocence that enables one to feel actual fear while watching movies, the much-advertised "Horrorfest: 8 Films To Die For" fills me with a tiny ray of hope. These are supposed to be movies "too graphic and disturbing for general audiences." Fortunately I've never considered myself to be a member of a general audience.
I'm not completely hard-core, mind you. I love the Saw franchise but refuse to ever watch Hostel. et.al. I think the distinction can be summed up in two words: Quentin Tarantino. Ever since the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs, I've had an aversion to his too graphic, too ultra-realistic horror. Yes, I know this makes me a bit of a hypocrite. Let me 'splain: I don't really enjoy seeing people tortured for long periods of time, and in Saw typically the physical torments are brief (but the psychological......). Does that make sense?
I thought it was mighty strange, then, to see a commercial on SciFi announcing their airing of last year's Horrorfest. If these movies are "too disturbing for general audiences," is it really a good idea to show them on cable at 4 in the afternoon? I suspected massive editing must be involved.
Since I never get to surf, I was unaware of them being shown and only caught three on SciFi. The rest I'm leaving up to Netflix. Here they are in no particular order:
The Hamiltons: The Hamiltons are four orphan brothers and one sister who we see through the eyes of the second youngest, Francis, an angsty teen making a video documentary of his family for school. There's David, the eldest and father figure, the incestuous twins Wendell and Darlene, Francis, and Lenny, who's locked in the basement and never seen. He's heard though, mostly by his intended victims as they're tied a short distance away for days before finally being served to him Fay Wray style.
The Hamiltons appear normal and wholesome (except for the lascivious twins, of course), but the few guests who come to visit can sense something is off: David's laughter is a bit too high-pitched and inappropriate, and Wendell and Darlene don't even attempt to hide the fact that they're evil. Oh, and the muffled screams for help heard occasionally in the cellar.
The main thrust of Francis' school video is how different from his family he feels, how isolated and alone. As it turns out, this means only that Francis feels the most normal of the bunch -- the Marilyn Munster, if you will. He takes pity on one of the victims, slips her food, but brushes off her pleas for help (with difficulty). Meanwhile Lenny grows more and more restless, rattling the door of his prison ominously, illustrating Alfred Hitchcock's belief that the most terrifying thing in the world is a closed door (at least, I'm almost positive it was Hitchcock. Google is proving stubbornly uncooperative in corroborating this).
The ending has a bit of a twist, but not enough: It turns out the Hamiltons are just your run-of-the-mill vampires (that can walk in daylight). It was a tiny bit cool that Lenny, who by the end you imagine must be this slavering, ravenous man-beast, is actually a perfectly normal-looking 6-year-old. The family is forced to move to another town when their murders can no longer be hidden, and thus continues the circle of life. Ho-hum.
If this was the industry's idea of "too graphic for general audiences," it didn't bode particularly well for the rest of Horrorfest. Or maybe I AM more hard-core than I realized. 1 out of 5
Next up was Penny Dreadful... which is a really stupid name for a movie if it's only because your main character is named Penny.
Ever since watching her parents meet their fiery deaths in a horrible car accident, Penny has been understandably a little auto-phobic. Her well-intentioned therapist decides a little road trip into the mountains to the scene of the event is just the thing.
In predictable horror movie fashion, a moment's distraction results in them side-swiping a hitchhiker, thus obligating them to give him/her a lift (the gender is vague because s/he is hooded and you only see the lower half of their face throughout. Creepy). The ride is unsettling to say the least, with the hitcher refusing to make small talk but offering a shish-kebob full of some kind of raw meat to nosh on.
It's with great relief that they drop him/her at an abandoned summer camp, except of course it's the end of the road for them as well: They discover the shish-kebob stuck in their tire, the therapist disappears soon thereafter while searching for a cell phone signal, and Penny is left sitting alone in the very cause of her crippling fear.
While she dozes, someone (we have to assume the hitcher) wedges the car between two trees, trapping Penny, and then spends the rest of the movie dancing around, teasing her and driving her to the brink of madness. Every escape attempt is foiled, every would-be rescuer murdered gruesomely before her eyes. I kept thinking, "Boy, if she was afraid of cars before, all of this is certainly not going to help."
I also kept thinking, "Come on. If someone was THAT terrified, they'd be able to muster the strength to break a window and climb out of the car." But she never does, preferring to stick to her tried-and-true tactic of weeping and screaming ineffectually. I HATE when girls become boneless, sobbing, useless victims in movies. No patience for that at all. And no patience for it here, where literally the bulk of the movie is watching her sit in a car and do, well, nothing.
I thought of a handful of twists for the end that would have been amusing and refreshing: What if all this was staged by her therapist as sort of shock therapy? You know, "Yes, car accidents are awful, but there are so many far worse things that could happen to you"? That was the best one. I had more, but I forget them now. It's moot, since the filmmakers opted for the utterly predictable ending that I saw from a mile away but hoped that maybe, this once, I'd be wrong. 1.5 out of 5
Hmmmm. So far 0 for 2. Fortunately, next was Unrest: Alison is just starting med school. Her financial aid hasn't gone through yet, so for the time being she's sleeping in a hospital room in the vast, largely unused teaching hospital (classes haven't officially started yet, is the reason given. Does it matter? She's staying alone in an empty hospital. Creep factor is off the charts).
Also unexplained is why the one class we see in session, Gross Anatomy, is allowed to begin before the start of semester. Again, don't get bogged down with details.
Alison and her three frat boy lab partners start working on their cadaver, but she's convinced something is wrong with it -- she's getting some kind of bad mojo vibe off it (details). Sure enough, anyone who has anything unkind to say about the dead woman in her presence comes to a grisly end soon thereafter.
Alison is dogged enough to dig up the history of the corpse. We learn that so many cadavers are shipped across state lines (to avoid medical students dissecting someone they recognize) that almost every commercial flight has a dead body in the cargo hold. As for the woman, a disturbed Aztec burial ground is mentioned, as well as footage of the woman descending from normal archaeologist to prostitute and then to self-mutilator and suicide victim. Oh yes, and there's a large cadaver tank full of murky formaldehyde and floating body parts which figures quite prominently. Creep factor has achieved orbit.
Unlike those other two, this one was genuinely scary (to me) so I don't want to give away anything else. Scary enough that I might like to see the unedited version someday (again, assuming SciFi had to cut something to preserve the sensibilities of the fragile, childlike general public). 4 out of 5, for getting me to cover my mouth in terror and restoring a tiny bit of faith in the horror genre.
I'm not completely hard-core, mind you. I love the Saw franchise but refuse to ever watch Hostel. et.al. I think the distinction can be summed up in two words: Quentin Tarantino. Ever since the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs, I've had an aversion to his too graphic, too ultra-realistic horror. Yes, I know this makes me a bit of a hypocrite. Let me 'splain: I don't really enjoy seeing people tortured for long periods of time, and in Saw typically the physical torments are brief (but the psychological......). Does that make sense?
I thought it was mighty strange, then, to see a commercial on SciFi announcing their airing of last year's Horrorfest. If these movies are "too disturbing for general audiences," is it really a good idea to show them on cable at 4 in the afternoon? I suspected massive editing must be involved.
Since I never get to surf, I was unaware of them being shown and only caught three on SciFi. The rest I'm leaving up to Netflix. Here they are in no particular order:
The Hamiltons: The Hamiltons are four orphan brothers and one sister who we see through the eyes of the second youngest, Francis, an angsty teen making a video documentary of his family for school. There's David, the eldest and father figure, the incestuous twins Wendell and Darlene, Francis, and Lenny, who's locked in the basement and never seen. He's heard though, mostly by his intended victims as they're tied a short distance away for days before finally being served to him Fay Wray style.
The Hamiltons appear normal and wholesome (except for the lascivious twins, of course), but the few guests who come to visit can sense something is off: David's laughter is a bit too high-pitched and inappropriate, and Wendell and Darlene don't even attempt to hide the fact that they're evil. Oh, and the muffled screams for help heard occasionally in the cellar.
The main thrust of Francis' school video is how different from his family he feels, how isolated and alone. As it turns out, this means only that Francis feels the most normal of the bunch -- the Marilyn Munster, if you will. He takes pity on one of the victims, slips her food, but brushes off her pleas for help (with difficulty). Meanwhile Lenny grows more and more restless, rattling the door of his prison ominously, illustrating Alfred Hitchcock's belief that the most terrifying thing in the world is a closed door (at least, I'm almost positive it was Hitchcock. Google is proving stubbornly uncooperative in corroborating this).
The ending has a bit of a twist, but not enough: It turns out the Hamiltons are just your run-of-the-mill vampires (that can walk in daylight). It was a tiny bit cool that Lenny, who by the end you imagine must be this slavering, ravenous man-beast, is actually a perfectly normal-looking 6-year-old. The family is forced to move to another town when their murders can no longer be hidden, and thus continues the circle of life. Ho-hum.
If this was the industry's idea of "too graphic for general audiences," it didn't bode particularly well for the rest of Horrorfest. Or maybe I AM more hard-core than I realized. 1 out of 5
Next up was Penny Dreadful... which is a really stupid name for a movie if it's only because your main character is named Penny.
Ever since watching her parents meet their fiery deaths in a horrible car accident, Penny has been understandably a little auto-phobic. Her well-intentioned therapist decides a little road trip into the mountains to the scene of the event is just the thing.
In predictable horror movie fashion, a moment's distraction results in them side-swiping a hitchhiker, thus obligating them to give him/her a lift (the gender is vague because s/he is hooded and you only see the lower half of their face throughout. Creepy). The ride is unsettling to say the least, with the hitcher refusing to make small talk but offering a shish-kebob full of some kind of raw meat to nosh on.
It's with great relief that they drop him/her at an abandoned summer camp, except of course it's the end of the road for them as well: They discover the shish-kebob stuck in their tire, the therapist disappears soon thereafter while searching for a cell phone signal, and Penny is left sitting alone in the very cause of her crippling fear.
While she dozes, someone (we have to assume the hitcher) wedges the car between two trees, trapping Penny, and then spends the rest of the movie dancing around, teasing her and driving her to the brink of madness. Every escape attempt is foiled, every would-be rescuer murdered gruesomely before her eyes. I kept thinking, "Boy, if she was afraid of cars before, all of this is certainly not going to help."
I also kept thinking, "Come on. If someone was THAT terrified, they'd be able to muster the strength to break a window and climb out of the car." But she never does, preferring to stick to her tried-and-true tactic of weeping and screaming ineffectually. I HATE when girls become boneless, sobbing, useless victims in movies. No patience for that at all. And no patience for it here, where literally the bulk of the movie is watching her sit in a car and do, well, nothing.
I thought of a handful of twists for the end that would have been amusing and refreshing: What if all this was staged by her therapist as sort of shock therapy? You know, "Yes, car accidents are awful, but there are so many far worse things that could happen to you"? That was the best one. I had more, but I forget them now. It's moot, since the filmmakers opted for the utterly predictable ending that I saw from a mile away but hoped that maybe, this once, I'd be wrong. 1.5 out of 5
Hmmmm. So far 0 for 2. Fortunately, next was Unrest: Alison is just starting med school. Her financial aid hasn't gone through yet, so for the time being she's sleeping in a hospital room in the vast, largely unused teaching hospital (classes haven't officially started yet, is the reason given. Does it matter? She's staying alone in an empty hospital. Creep factor is off the charts).
Also unexplained is why the one class we see in session, Gross Anatomy, is allowed to begin before the start of semester. Again, don't get bogged down with details.
Alison and her three frat boy lab partners start working on their cadaver, but she's convinced something is wrong with it -- she's getting some kind of bad mojo vibe off it (details). Sure enough, anyone who has anything unkind to say about the dead woman in her presence comes to a grisly end soon thereafter.
Alison is dogged enough to dig up the history of the corpse. We learn that so many cadavers are shipped across state lines (to avoid medical students dissecting someone they recognize) that almost every commercial flight has a dead body in the cargo hold. As for the woman, a disturbed Aztec burial ground is mentioned, as well as footage of the woman descending from normal archaeologist to prostitute and then to self-mutilator and suicide victim. Oh yes, and there's a large cadaver tank full of murky formaldehyde and floating body parts which figures quite prominently. Creep factor has achieved orbit.
Unlike those other two, this one was genuinely scary (to me) so I don't want to give away anything else. Scary enough that I might like to see the unedited version someday (again, assuming SciFi had to cut something to preserve the sensibilities of the fragile, childlike general public). 4 out of 5, for getting me to cover my mouth in terror and restoring a tiny bit of faith in the horror genre.
