Play Misty For Me

The Mist (2007)

This is a bit unusual in that it's a movie that's not among my favorites, for a number of reasons, but still interesting on a purely conceptual level and, in some ways, in terms of execution. Kind of like Event Horizon. I like the idea, basically, and sometimes the movie does it well enough that I can sit through the annoying parts.

Based on a novella by Stephen King and directed by The Shawshank Redemption's Frank Darabont, The Mist opens with, as might be expected, a dense mist descending on the small town of Bridgton, Maine -- a nonfictional town, though Castle Rock, one of King's favorite fictional locations, is mentioned. Artist David Drayton (Thomas Jane), his son Billy (some kid) and his unfriendly neighbor Brent Norton (Homicide's Andre Braugher) take a trip to the local supermarket to pick up some supplies and find themselves trapped inside as the mist creeps far enough inland to envelope the entire store, with out-of-towner Dan Miller (Jeffrey DeMunn, who's probably remembered these days as Dale from The Walking Dead) running ahead of it screaming about something dangerous in the fog. Maybe something alive.

Tensions start to rise as the shoppers debate whether to venture out into the mist and see what's up with it. Then the shit hits the fan when David, Norm the bag boy and a few local assholes go to check the generator in the loading dock and Norm gets eaten alive by a bunch of spiny tentacles that reach in from outside and rip off his skin. It's pretty unpleasant. Nobody in the store believes them, so Brent, in an idiotic attempt to prove David wrong, heads outside with a rope tied around his waist and ends up getting bitten in half by something. That pretty much sets the powder keg off and pits everyone in the store against each other as they prepare for nightfall and the new horrors that come with it. There are a few other people of note -- a trio of soldiers from the nearby Arrowhead Base, who seem to be keeping a secret, and the awful Mrs. Carmody, a religious zealot deeply devoted to an extremely bloodthirsty Old Testament God, whose preaching goes from annoying to dangerous as the people trapped in the supermarket grow more frightened and more susceptible to her influence.

It's a good story and it's been influencing other writers for a long time. The first computer game based on the novella was released in 1985, and Silent Hill has a number of similarities (the all-encompassing mist being the most obvious). The groundbreaking video game Half-Life was directly influenced by the novella. There's even an episode of Ultraman based on it. Both the novella and the film are deeply cynical, and none of these people are likable. The only people you don't want to see mauled by tentacles are Ollie the assistant manager (Toby Jones, who at the time was in every movie released for about five years) and Irene Reppler, the badass old lady who beans Mrs. Carmody in the head with a can of peas. The irrational tensions, the eventual willingness to participate in human sacrifice to appease the monsters in the mist, all this is basically the point of the story: that people are dumb and panicky and dangerous, and if you put more than two of them in a room for a few days, they'll start thinking of ways to kill each other. It wouldn't be quite as frustrating if it weren't true. At least in this movie it's intentional. Most movies want you to like their shitty people, or at least to sympathize with them. They constantly ignore the obvious. Seriously, half the deaths in the movie could have been averted if they'd just duct-taped Mrs. Carmody's mouth shut, tied her up and tossed her in the storage room at the start.

I do like the monsters here, and how they're handled. There are all sorts of creatures, from giant crabs to skinless pterodactyls to dog-sized spiders that shoot acidic webs. Eventually you're sort of looking forward to seeing what horrifying death the next monster will inflict on these hapless jerks. What's interesting is that as easy as it would be to portray a tentacled horror hundreds of feet tall, large enough to leave road-width footprints in its wake, as some kind of Lovecraftian thing from beyond space, the creatures here are all just animals. Animals from a different place, and by all evidence a much less pleasant place, but they're still part of a natural order. Sure, the pink four-winged pterodactyl thing takes out a few shoppers during its rampage, but it's just going after the giant poisonous bugs attracted by the store's floodlights. It's how I imagine things would go if one drastically different ecosystem began to impose itself upon another one.

One last thing that makes The Mist noteworthy is the ending. It differs quite a bit from King's original, which I liked better, but I have to admire the sheer, unexpected cruelty of the movie's ending. It might be the least happy ending I've ever seen. Most horror movies can't resist having the slasher survive, or having the characters doomed after all, even when it makes no sense whatsoever...but The Mist sticks the knife in and just twists it, and I have to give it a few points for that. There's also a director's cut in black and white, which is probably the best way to watch this.

Available On: Amazon Prime.

Low-Budget Double Feature

The current resurgence of independent, low-budget horror, as we discussed in our review of A Dark Souvenir, has opened the door for some skilled new filmmakers in the horror genre -- a genre that's typically a bit trickier to get a foot in the door than most, as you have to take into account special effects and makeup. These were just recently added to the Netflix horror roster and are worth taking a look if you want some suspenseful, minimalist horror.

From the Dark (2014)

From the Dark is a very straightforward vampire movie from Ireland. It breaks absolutely no new ground in concept, but it's very competent and suspenseful in execution. Our main characters are Mark and Sarah, a couple traveling through the Irish countryside when their car breaks down. With evening coming on, Mark decides to hike to the nearest farmhouse, only to find its sole occupant badly wounded and incoherent. When he brings Sarah back to the house to try to help the old man (who made a terrible discovery at the beginning of the film and was attacked by the thing he unearthed), they find themselves under attack from a creature that seems to fear nothing but light.

This movie's simplicity works in its favor. It doesn't try to mix up the vampire myth at all. There's a vampire (the bald, ugly Nosferatu type), the people it bites turn into vampires eventually, and there are two people in a farmhouse. Sarah is the real protagonist here, as she's left to fend for herself before long. Niamh Algar is a fantastic physical actress and really sells how far she's being pushed as she tries to figure out a way to escape the farmhouse even as her sources of light dwindle -- she's got a flashlight, then a lamp, then a burning newspaper...a candle...a pack of matches. After a certain point there's really no dialogue at all, and the movie stands steady as a tense physical confrontation between woman and monster.

Available On: Netflix.

Creep (2014)

Creep is another two-person horror movie written and directed by, and starring, Patrick Brice as Aaron, a freelance videographer, and Mark Duplass as Josef, the lonely recluse who hires him for a day's work. Josef, diagnosed with cancer, has two months to live and an unborn son on the way, and he wants Aaron to film a typical day in his life to leave behind for his son. There's just something off about him. He's too eager to be Aaron's friend, too free with personal details about his life, and his attempts at social interaction grow increasingly unsettling, until Aaron begins to suspect that being around Josef might be dangerous.

Unlike From the Dark, Creep is a dialogue-heavy movie, and it's all delivered naturally by Brice and Duplass. Everyone's met someone like Josef before, and has probably been at least a little unsettled. A lot of the tension here comes from the fact that we're never entirely sure -- and neither is Aaron -- that there's actually anything to worry about. It's possible that Josef is dangerously crazy, but it's also possible that he's just a lonely weirdo looking for a friend. The ending took me entirely by surprise. This is a found footage film, and found footage is something I'm never entirely on board with. Creep has a few of the hallmarks of the subgenre (particularly a few scenes where you have to ask why the person's still filming), but at least in this case the pretext is there, and the cleverness of the dialogue, the relationship between the only two characters in the movie, and a dark sense of humor throughout raise Creep well above the level of the rash of found-footage horror movies that have popped up in the wake of Paranormal Activity (and above Paranormal Activity itself, which I thought was frankly crap).

Available On: Netflix.

Trollolololol...2

Troll 2 (1990)

Troll was a B-movie that came out in 1986. These days it's mostly known for having a main character named Harry Potter who fights a troll and for featuring a number of actors who were pretty well-known at the time or would go on to be well-known (Law and Order's Michael Moriarty and The Neverending Story's Noah Hathaway, among others, but the most surprising would have to be Sonny Bono of all people). The film's non-sequel, Troll 2, is something of a cult classic among horror fans despite having considerably lower production values and exactly no one of note in its cast. It's often called the worst movie ever made, and was in fact the subject of a documentary called Best Worst Movie, which reunited as much of its original cast as possible to discuss the troubled production and the movie's subsequent cult status. I wouldn't quite call it the worst movie ever -- Robot Monster, The Beast of Yucca Flats and Horrors of Spider Island are my top (bottom?) three -- but it's a bad one, and it's certainly entertaining.

Joshua Waites has a crippling fear of goblins, because the ghost of his Grandpa Seth shows up at night to tell him stories about them. So he's not too happy when his family plans a vacation to the country town of Nilbog, where the townspeople, who are goblins in disguise but really make no effort whatsoever to act like normal people, capture tourists and other outsiders and feed them magic plant mush to turn them into half-plant, half-human hybrids, which are apparently their favorite food. Yeah, I have no idea what's going on here either.

 "You can't piss on hospitality! I won't allow it!"

Anyway, Holly, Joshua's teenage sister, has a weird thing going on with her boyfriend Elliot. The first time we even see them together she punches him in the crotch and Elliot asks if she's "trying to turn him into a homo." Elliot and his dumbass friends follow the Waitses in their trailer and provide most of the movie's body count thanks to a run-in with Sheriff Gene Freak (really) and the town's resident witch, Creedence, who seems to be the only person in the movie who knows how awful it is and makes the most of it. She turns one guy into a tree, and later asks for more magic power from the Stonehenge rock that serves as the source of the goblins' power. This turns her into a hot witch and she wastes it all on a baffling scene where she has super-weird popcorn sex with another of Elliot's friends.

"They're eating her. And then they're going to eat me.

Oh my GOOOOOOOOOOOOD."

(Notice the fly that landed on his forehead.)

There's so much going on in this movie you'll never sort it out. There's a priest who looks sort of like Mankind, some really awful goblin masks, strangely upbeat (and genuinely catchy) music during chase scenes, and some of the worst dialogue ever. (This is because director Claudio Fragasso and his wife Rossella Drudi wrote the script in English, which Fragasso wasn't great at and Drudi didn't speak at all, and refused to let the actors ad-lib any of their dialogue.) The crazy drug store owner was played by an actor who was snatched up by Fragasso when he actually was on a day pass from the mental institution he was staying in, and really wasn't acting. Most of the characters are played by people who thought they were answering a casting call for extras and ended up in important roles despite their lack of experience. It was written partly as a diatribe against vegetarianism, as Drudi was annoyed that so many of her friends were turning vegetarian. It was shot in three weeks, and at one point had a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It's no Apocalypse Now, but really, the whole production's an awful mess.

Grandpa Seth is obviously the best part of the movie. His ghost powers know no bounds. Well, maybe they do, but they're so nebulously defined as to be limitless. He can appear in mirrors as a floating head. Sometimes he can physically manifest. He can stop time (but only for 30 seconds). He can bring back stuff from the afterlife, like a lumberjack's axe, a molotov cocktail, a fire extinguisher and eventually a balogna sandwich, which defeats the goblins in the end when Joshua aggressively eats it. He can shoot lightning bolts. The movie would probably be over in about five minutes if his powers were consistent.

"Stonehenge magic stone. The goblins' magic power!"

This is the sort of movie by which you measure a person's ability to perceive that odd phenomenon we call "so bad it's good." The entire reason for Mystery Science Theater 3000's existence. I've had people ask me to explain this concept, and it's honestly impossible to do so. You get it or you don't. Anyone who knows me can tell you I'm not much of a comedy person. I prefer unintentional comedy, but I couldn't tell you why. Sitcoms bore me to death, but something like CSI: Cyber, with its naked technophobia and complete lack of research about any part of its subject matter, makes me laugh from start to finish. Standup comedy rarely makes me laugh, and most of the standup comics I actually do like are dead by now, but I'll sit through the new Fast & the Furious movie and it'll have me in tears. I don't know why this is. Maybe it's that it pisses me off when someone tells me to laugh, or to feel sad, or to be scared, and comedy, of all genres, is the least likely to dress up its intentions in any kind of artifice, while Troll 2 and CSI: Cyber are hilarious because they aren't trying to be. It's a concept I've tried to rationalize and explain dozens of times, and it's one of those things that can't be put into words, at least not to an extent sufficient to make sense of it to someone who doesn't already understand. Anyway, if someone doesn't find Troll 2 funny, they probably won't find any other b-movies funny.

No, there are no trolls in Troll 2.

Available On: Netflix, Amazon Prime.

Kung Fury

As a lifelong horror fan, it would be remiss of me to say nothing about the passing of Christopher Lee this week -- he was Fu Manchu in the 60s, Dracula in the 70s, he was Saruman at the turn of the millennium and even, like another pop-culture icon we recently lost, lent his voice to the Kingdom Hearts video game series. In addition to making Benedict Cumberbatch sound like a tenor in comparison, Lee was a badass in so many ways it seems improbable. He was related to czars, kings and Ian Fleming. He caught dysentery six times in one year, prevented a mutiny and was an agent for British Special Ops before the SAS even existed, making him a proto-secret agent. He made two heavy metal Christmas albums and whatever this wonderful thing is. And he could out-"Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" Kevin Bacon himself, as he was reportedly the most connected actor in all of cinema.

Rest in peace, Sir Christopher -- you will be missed. Unfortunately, Netflix and Amazon Prime have a very sparse selection of Hammer horror films, and the ones they do have aren't the best. Instead, let's take a look at a recent release you probably knew I would have to review sooner or later if you know anything about me.

Kung Fury (2015)

So I grew up in the 1980s. You can say any decade has its silly aspects, but the 80s were uniquely ridiculous, and vastly entertaining as a result -- not just in retrospect. More on this later, but Kung Fury is more or less a half-hour joke about how absurd the 80s were. Kung Fury (that's his name) is a cowboy cop who became the world's greatest kung fu master after his partner/father figure Dragon was killed by a ninja and Kung Fury was bitten by a cobra. He's also the Chosen One in a kung fu prophecy. Naturally, he clashes with his superiors because he won't play by the rules and refuses to work with his new partner Triceracop, and turns in his badge just before someone makes a call to the police station and guns everyone down. (As in, fires into the other phone, and the bullets come out of the receiver and hit everybody.) It turns out Adolf Hitler made the call, as he was the reigning kung fu champion of the world during WWII and wants to kill Kung Fury so he can take his position in the prophecy.

Kung Fury joins forces with Hackerman, the greatest hacker of all time, who puts together a computer algorithm that allows him to travel back in time to kill Hitler before he vanished from the pages of history. An error results in Kung Fury being transported back to the Viking age, where he meets some dinosaur-riding barbarian ladies and Thor, son of Odin. Traveling forward to the 1940s, he goes up against Hitler and his Nazi army in a fight to the finish.

That's basically all there is to it. Kung Fury started out as a trailer produced for around $5,000, and a successful Kickstarter campaign resulted in a $600,000, half-hour-long movie. There are some things that work, and some that don't. What it gets right, it gets perfectly. The Laser Unicorns logo at the beginning and the cell phone commercial are uncannily accurate, and there's a bit later on with a spot-on pastiche of M.A.S.K., one of the more obscure cartoons of my childhood. I remember those shitty VHS distortion lines like it was yesterday -- and of course they show up during the cool parts, because you always rewound the tape about a million times until your VCR chewed it up. And the song (sung by David Hasselhoff, of all people) that plays during the end credits is absolutely flawless. Listen to any number of 80s power ballads and you start to detect a pattern: there's always something about the wire, the edge, the game (and the importance of winning it, because like Cheap Trick says, there's no points for second best), a heart (possibly burning), survival, the spirit, or the night. And at some point, someone will yell "HEYYY!" between verses. I just watched Kickboxer again for the first time in about 20 years yesterday, and the song from the tournament montage in that has about 90% of those things in its first two lines.

That's kind of why Kung Fury doesn't entirely work, though. I propose a theory to anyone thinking of making something like Far Cry: Blood Dragon or Kung Fury: No joke about the 80s, however accurate, will be as funny as the 80s actually were.

Kung Fury gets a lot of things right, but the special effects are way better than anything we had back then, which can actually be distracting, and it's also sometimes too clever by half. There are too many nudges and winks. The Power Glove, David Hasselhoff -- all that stuff was funny, but joking about something that was already funny seems unnecessary, unless you're going to do build it all up to something new and meaningful, as Ernest Cline does in Ready Player One. If you want to make fun of the 80s while simultaneously kind of admiring how endearingly cheesy they were, all you need to do is post a film clip or a music video from the 80s.

See, that is hilarious -- and it isn't even a joke, that's actually the way things were 30 years ago. Maybe it's just my tendency to find unintentional comedy much more entertaining than a show or a movie that expects me to laugh when it wants me to. And there are certainly moments in Kung Fury where you'll laugh. It's an entertaining movie, and what the hell else are you going to do for 31 minutes? At the same time, I mean -- just watch this. This is like shooting the 80s directly into your veins, and it's not even supposed to be funny. Vintage 1987 kung fu garbage.

Kung Fury also has a few too many jokes that have been done to death in modern pop culture. There's a triceratops cop, and a bunch of jokes about Hitler and how he had jet packs and robot eagles and so on. It's more like an Axe Cop short film than a 1980s action movie, and having grown up in the 80s -- I was born in 1979, so those were my prime childhood years -- I can honestly say that, while Kung Fury is enjoyable, it's funnier when you let the 80s speak for themselves. Or at the very least, play it straight. Tom Savini's Planet Terror, for example, is a near-perfect 80s zombie spoof. That said, Kung Fury is funniest in its subtler moments -- granted, something I doubt you'll hear many people say -- like when Kung Fury has two police badges on him in one scene even though he slammed his badge down on the chief's desk earlier in the movie, or the slightly off-center framing when the camera goes in for a closeup.

Ultimately, this may be an imperfect movie and an imperfect parody, but it's got its heart in the right place and succeeds often enough that I can overlook its more ham-handed jokes and enjoy the bits where it does hit what it's aiming for.

Available On: YouTube, Steam.

The trailer:

The movie:

Yessir, The Check Is In The Mail

Sorry for the delay on this latest article, but I wanted to see if a rumor that had been floating around this weekend would be confirmed, and it seems it has been. It seems we're getting a remake of John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China, with The Rock taking over Kurt Russell's role. I have feelings about this, most of them not good, but first let's get into what makes the original so great.

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Carpenter hasn't done much directing in the last ten years, and what he did direct hasn't been great. For about a decade, though, from roughly 1979 to 1989, Carpenter was solid gold. Practically everything he directed was fantastic. Some of my favorite movies ever came from Carpenter's heyday -- 1978's Halloween, 1980's The Fog, 1982's The Thing (a much more faithful adaptation of its source material, John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?", than the 1951 version), 1987's Prince of Darkness (a Lovecraftian horror story masquerading as religious horror), 1988's media satire They Live! -- just to name a few.

Big Trouble in Little China is probably his most insane movie. It's...well, let's call it an action-horror-fantasy-comedy. Trucker Jack Burton (Russell) shows up in L.A.'s Chinatown and gets in over his head when his friend Wang's girlfriend Mao Yin is kidnapped by the Lords of Death, a local gang. There's an underground turf war going on between multiple Chinatown gangs, but all that pales to the real threat -- David Lo Pan, an ancient Chinese sorcerer played by the incomparable James Hong, who pretty much steals the show. Whatever Lo Pan is, he's no longer human. He's an evil dream, or a magician who made a deal with a demon, or was cursed by a demon, or "a ghost playing at being a man," but he is, in his own words, "beyond your understanding." He's also intent on possessing Mao Yin, as a prophecy has said that if he marries a girl with green eyes, he can become mortal again, his soul no longer scattered across eternity.

Wang and Jack team up with lawyer Gracie Law, Wang's friend Eddie and bus driver Egg Shen (the late, great Victor Wong), who also happens to be Lo Pan's rival in sorcery. The crew descends into Chinatown's hidden subterranean depths, a labyrinth full of monsters, traps, magic and centuries-old evil. There's a gorilla monster, a Beholder from Dungeons & Dragons, a giant neon skull, Lo Pan's three henchmen Thunder (Hong Kong movie star Carter Wong, who I'd watched in a dozen Saturday-afternoon kung fu movies on WGTW-48 during my early teens), Lightning and Rain, and all sorts of other craziness that has to be seen to be believed.

"Oh my God, no, what is that, don't tell me!"

There are some mostly apocryphal stories that Big Trouble in Little China was originally meant to be a sequel to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, and if I didn't know better I could believe it, because this movie is just as ridiculous and the dialogue is just as weird. It's a movie steeped in Eastern mysticism and Western bravado, and it could only have been made right smack in the middle of the '80s. Movies back then had their directors' fingerprints all over them. You could recognize a John Carpenter movie about two minutes in.

Which is partly why I'm wary, to say the least, of any attempt to remake it. It's relevant as a snapshot of '80s culture, and I have vivid memories of Chinatown actually being a lot like it is here when I was a kid (minus the cave-dwelling monsters), but a modern remake just seems like it would be sort of meaningless. Both cultures, American and Chinese, have moved on, independently and relative to one another. Potential racial insensitivity aside, what's the point of making this movie again?

"I'll have you both rolled off to the Hell Where People Are Skinned Alive,

it's that simple, understand?!"

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against remakes on principle. Sometimes they offer a new perspective on the original, sometimes they let the director refine his or her own vision, as with Takashi Shimizu's American remake of Ju-On: The Grudge. Lately, however, it seems to me as if a lot of remakes are just missing the point. RoboCop did away with the original's sharp satire and over-the-top gore. Total Recall didn't even take place on Mars. If they ever remake Starship Troopers -- well, I hope they don't, enough people misunderstood that one the first time around. I haven't seen the new Poltergeist, but everyone seems to be saying the same thing: as with the rest, it's blandly inoffensive and essentially pointless. Like chewing cardboard for an hour and a half. It's as if producers know people liked these movies, but they never even think to imagine why people liked them.

The whole point of Big Trouble in Little China is fairly subversive for its time. A lot of movies had the all-American hero and the Asian sidekick, who tended to be played by a non-Asian actor, such as Joel Grey as Chiun in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (I love Joel Grey, but he is not the best casting choice for a wise Chinese mentor). Jack Burton thinks he's the hero of the story, and the audience is invited to believe this as well -- he's Kurt Russell, after all -- but Wang is the real protagonist, and it's Jack who's the bumbling comedy sidekick. When the final battle starts, he fires his machine gun in the air and ends up knocking himself out with a piece of the ceiling, and then he ends up spending most of it pinned down under a pile of guys who keep getting killed on top of him. I just can't see The Rock doing that.

"Oh sure, and sorcery!"

On the other hand, I like The Rock. I like him as an action star. I like him as a serious actor. I like him as a comedy actor. He seems like a cool guy in real life, and onscreen he has charisma to spare. He also says the original is one of his favorite movies. But I'm not sure anyone involved gets the whole thing about Jack being the sidekick who thinks he's awesome, but seems perpetually out of his depth with each new turn in the maze. Maybe they'll do the same thing here, and set him up as the star only to turn audience expectations on their heads.

I guess we'll see how it turns out, but in the meantime, check out the fantastic 1986 original, which will, I'm about 99.99% certain, be better than even a remake that does it justice.

Available On: Netflix, Amazon Prime.

The Sad Story of a Man and His Butt

The Sixth Sense (1999)

Once upon a time, there was a talented young director from the Philly suburbs named Manoj Nellyattu Shyamalan -- but he called himself M. Night Shyamalan, because Night is a badass middle name. Back in the late 90s, nobody had ever really heard of him. Then he made his first movie, The Sixth Sense, and then everybody was talking about him. For good reason, too, because The Sixth Sense is an awesome movie. I'd say it's sometimes brilliant, in fact. It popularized a particular twist to the point where you expect it at the end of any movie that features a ghost in any way, and I won't give it away here in case you're one of the two or three humans in America for whom it has not already been spoiled, either by references in other movies, in magazines, or by that guy who tells you the end of every movie ever. It also popularized twists in general, for better or worse.

The Sixth Sense was the movie that convinced me that Bruce Willis could act. I'd seen him in Die Hard, of course, and Hudson Hawk, and some other action movies I forget, but this was the first time I'd ever seen him in such an understated role. Willis plays Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist who, after recovering from a near-fatal gunshot wound at the hands of a former patient (Donnie Whalberg, a one-scene wonder here), finds himself estranged from his wife and hanging his future on the shoulders of Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), a troubled boy who has his share of secrets. Crowe asks Cole what he wants from their time together -- and Cole tells him it's not what he wants, but what he doesn't want.

Cole's working-class mother (an excellent Toni Collette) loves him with fierce determination, but she's struggling with Cole's secrecy and his troubles at school. He's bullied constantly, he's getting in trouble for drawing disturbing and violent images during art class and even his teachers are scared of him. Mysterious lesions show up on Cole's arms, leading child services to suspect his mother of abuse, and he won't tell her who's hurting him. It's a very adult sort of fear, and Collette portrays it exceptionally well.

Crowe nearly abandons Cole when the boy tells him what's really happening. Cole is plagued by ghosts. He sees them at his high school, which used to be a courthouse where people were executed. He sees them in his house, where they scare him in the middle of the night. The dead don't realize they're dead -- and it's this which leads Crowe to help Cole come to terms with his power, rather than search for some way to get rid of it.

It's a great movie. Parts of it are just terrifying. It's one of those movies that probably seems less great if you didn't see it around the turn of the millennium, because after that, dozens of movies aped its style, parodied its most well-known line ad nauseum and borrowed its final twist over and over until it's a surprise when you see a ghost movie where it doesn't happen. It's also, as far as I know, the only horror movie that -- well, let's be honest, a horror movie will never sweep the Oscars because the Academy doesn't really care how good a movie is, but it got several nominations, which is pretty much unheard of. Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress for Toni Collette, Best Supporting Actor for Cole (who's really the protagonist of the film, and Osment does a fantastic job)...obviously, it didn't win anything, and I doubt anyone expected it to, but it was a breakout for our friend Manoj.

He followed that up with another good one, 2000's Unbreakable, which also stars Bruce Willis and is also on Netflix. It was a surprising take on a genre -- comics and superheroes -- that was, at the time, obscure; remember, this was well before Iron Man busted open the doors in 2008, paved the way for the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and made reading comics and watching movies based on them acceptable for adults and those outside of the rather isolationist bastion of nerd culture. Then an odd thing happened, and poor Manoj began his fall from grace.

Signs, his third movie, was suspenseful and mostly pretty damn good -- but then that ending happened. Cut the last five minutes out of Signs, end it where the daughter goes upstairs, and you have a great ending that leaves the situation ambiguous. But Manoj didn't do that. It went the same way with his next movie, The Village, which I also really like, and which is also on Netflix. This one needs a scalpel taken to about ten minutes of its footage, and it's interspersed throughout, so it's kind of hard to carve this one up into something as compelling as Manoj's earlier movies. It might be the only movie where I actually stood up and yelled "FUCK YOU!" at the screen at one point. Sometime I'll have to make a viewers' guide to The Village that tells you where to fast-forward.

My sister and I decided something unfortunate had happened to Manoj, who we kind of thought of as a director who was one of us, someone to aspire to, as someone who started out making short horror movies and hit it big -- and it was cool seeing movies set in nearby Philadelphia and Bucks County. Manoj was still a talented guy, of course, but sometime between Unbreakable and Signs, his butt started talking to him. It started suggesting stuff that might work in his movies, and when he made Signs, his butt said "Hey! Manoj, let me direct the last five minutes of this thing, it'll be killer!" I wish he'd said no, but he didn't, and his butt went on to direct several scenes in The Village.

By the time Lady in the Water came out, and it was clear that Manoj's butt was doing most of the heavy lifting by that point. Like Hitchcock, he always had a little cameo in his movies. He was a doctor in The Sixth Sense, a drug dealer in Unbreakable, and so on. In Lady in the Water, he played a writer who was going to bring about a new age of world peace, and was the focus of the last quarter of the movie or so, as he's the one everyone's supposed to be protecting. Then he made The Happening (or, as it's known among my family and circle of friends, Mark Wahlberg Is The Haps), and I don't know what the happening is, exactly, but I assume it's this thing, which certainly did happen in this movie:

Then he made the live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of the best cartoons ever made and almost certainly one of the worst movies. For the last few years, studios have done this weird thing where they let him produce but not direct, or they let him direct but go out of their way to avoid putting his name on the movie, as if they can't decide if they want to coast on the reputation of his early films or if his later work is such an embarrassment that it's best to just keep his name out of it. Anyway, it's clear that Manoj's butt was given such editorial power over its owner that it grew large enough to eat him somehow, and it's currently all that's left of Manoj. Just a walking butt behind a camera. I don't know how it manages to write anything with just cheeks instead of hands, but "not very well" would certainly be one answer.

What is the moral of this sad tale? I don't know. "Don't listen to your butt when it wants to help you write a screenplay," maybe. I'd say it's more likely as simple as "Don't buy into your own hype." Writers hate their own work, and maybe there's a reason for that.

Maybe that's the moral, the bedtime story screenwriters tell their kids:

When someone tells you you're the next Hitchcock, don't fucking listen to them. You might end up like M. Night Shyamalan.

Available On: Netflix.

Ladies' Night

There's this persistent thing in American society that I almost thought was basically gone for good when I overheard some people talking at work, and then later at Barnes & Noble, the same thing, and I wondered if this is really what people in general believe. You know, the old preconception that girls and women, with their overemotional ladybrains and their cooties and whatnot, are genuinely scared of horror movies and don't like them. That they are "a guy thing," along with video games, sports, comics and a bunch of other things that are not actually "guy things," whatever that even means. Well, I thought, that's obviously a load of horseshit. Who actually thinks this anymore? Do they wear letterman jackets and drive red convertibles on their way to the malt shop or something? Gee whiz, I dunno.

Anyway, my sister and I have been watching horror movies since we were bipedal. And two of the three most interesting horror movies I've seen in the last five years or so were written and directed by women. Luckily, both of them are available on Netflix, so I figured I'd do a double feature in the vain hope that one or two people who continue to beat that particular dead horse might reconsider their position and discover some of the best independent horror films around while they're at it.

(If you're wondering what the third one is, it's David Robert Mitchell's low-budget retro horror movie It Follows, which is completely terrifying and is well worth watching. It's still in theaters.)

The Babadook (2014)

The Babadook will scare the crap out of you. Maybe not as much as you think it would while you're actually watching it, but it will stick with you for a long time afterward, making you jump at shadows and cross the street to avoid that gnarled tree that looks just a bit like a man in a long coat with his arms outstretched....

Written and directed by Jennifer Kent, The Babadook is an Australian horror film that was produced for well under $3 million (for perspective, Think Like a Man Too cost about $25 million) and backed in large part by Kickstarter. It's about a single mother named Amelia (Essie Davis, who you might recognize as Phryne Fisher from the mystery series Miss Phryne's Murder Mysteries) who lives with her young son Sam in a dark, creaking, gloomy suburban house. Sam is getting in trouble at school as a result of his habit of crafting surprisingly effective weapons from stuff he finds around the house. He's terrified of monsters in his closet and under his bed, and Amelia is fraying at the edges as a result of Sam's behavior.

I did the same thing for a while after I watched this.

One night, Sam finds a new book on his shelf, a pop-up book called "Mister Babadook." Mister Babadook is a friendly monster who wears a funny disguise. He knocks on your door at night and once you let him in, you'll never sleep again. Sounds fun! Sam becomes obsessed with the idea that Mister Babadook is hiding under his bed, and Amelia begins to suspect something sinister is going on when she tears the book apart -- and it shows up on her doorstep again the next day with new pages added. She finds glass in her soup. A visit from social services coincides with a sudden roach infestation. Finally the storybook monster itself manifests in a terrifying fashion, and the dynamic between mother and son is suddenly reversed.

There are a couple of ways the ending has been interpreted. Here's my two cents. (Spoilers follow.)

Nope nope nope.

The snobby critic interpretation is that Amelia is the monster. An abusive parent, nothing more. The Babadook isn't real. The other one is that the Babadook is real, and what you see in the movie is pretty much what you get. Naturally, being a horror fan, I prefer the second one, and I'll probably always take issue with the idea that monsters and ghosts and things that go bump in the night are less...worthy of your attention as a moviegoer, I suppose, if they are real.

In the case of the Babadook, I think the ending is the key to figuring out what's going on, and I have my own theories. The movie ends, more or less, happily for Amelia and Sam -- but in the creepiest way possible. You really can't get rid of the Babadook, and even if you drive it off, it will just live in your basement. The thing that really stands out for me is Sam's magic trick. He's doing this amateur magician stuff throughout the movie, and at the end, he makes a dove appear quite literally out of nowhere. The way it's shot, Amelia's reaction, there's clearly something going on here that's meant to be sinister.

My take on it is that Sam is basically a less malevolent version of that little kid from that old Twilight Zone episode who wishes people away into the cornfield when they displease him. He causes the dove to manifest, and in the same way, he also caused the book to appear and the Babadook to emerge into our reality. The specifics are beyond him, because he's five years old, but he wanted a monster his mother could believe in, one they could protect each other from -- and that is basically what he gets. The Babadook preys on, and represents, Amelia's grief over the loss of her husband, who died while driving her to the hospital to give birth to Sam. They defend each other from the monster, and in the end, they are closer to one another as a result. The Babadook is a metaphor for Amelia's sadness and frustration and rage, but it is also a real supernatural force that will always be with them because that's what the book said.

And that scares me a lot more than "Oh, she was just crazy the whole time."

Available On: Netflix.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

This is an odd one. It's not exactly meant to be frightening, though it's a vampire film. Written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour and produced by Elijah Wood, of all people, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night takes place in Bad City, an Iranian ghost town whose only industry seems to be oil, and whose only residents are a sparse population of junkies, pimps, hobos and prostitutes. Arash (played by Arash Marandi) is a nice, handsome young man who finds himself bullied by a local pimp demanding money and increasingly frustrated with his heroin-addict father. On his way back from a party one night, he happens upon the city's most unusual resident, a lonely vampire (Sheila Vand) who spends her nights wandering Bad City, on foot or by skateboard, preying on the corrupt and cruel as well as those who simply won't be missed.

Arash and the girl form an odd relationship that isn't quite mutually romantic, as both of them are ashamed of their lives and their pasts, and neither of them really believes they can simply leave Bad City together for parts unknown. Shot in black and white, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a moody, melancholy film that reminds me quite a bit of Tim Burton -- I mean 80s and 90s Tim Burton, back before he sucked -- though there are also more than a few threads of Jarmusch and Tarantino holding it together. A few shots go on, and on, but every frame has something to say. The ending had me on the edge of my seat. It's also got a pretty amazing soundtrack.

The Oscar for Best Cat goes to....

I also have to give this movie props for not only featuring a very memorable performance by a cat, but resisting the urge to kill him. I was worried this would happen a couple of times, and I always get upset when animals, particularly cats, are killed in movies. Maybe it's that they're innocent. Maybe it's that I'm generally fond of cats and other animals, but not, as a rule, all that fond of humans. Anyway, I was glad they kept Masuka the Cat alive here and gave him billing in the credits with the human cast members, because he's as much a character as Ashad and the girl -- when you trace his path through the movie, he's really the one who brings them together, and his position in the car at the end is highly symbolic if you think about it.

For a movie with so little dialogue and so many lingering shots of scenery, people walking, people standing, there's a lot going on here. It's a pulpy noir western, a movie about an endearing, awkward friendship and dangerous love, and maybe the only tolerable vampire romance you'll ever see.

Available On: Netflix.

Trivia: Ladies are also scared of thunderstorms. Just ask Kay Jewelers!