It’s plan and simple folks, @theartabove and @zombielectroniq love October, horror films, and art in general so we decided to have some accountability and restart Younger In October and split up watching movies.  We will conduct movie reviews along with general horror related gems.

So for my first review (@theartabove)…..

Film #1: Let the Right One In

Without going too far into spoilers, Let the Right One In is a story of love, hate, and murder.  The subject is a young boy named Oskar who is bullied at school and is befriended by the vampire-next-door. Originally a book, the film focuses less on the internal workings of Oskar and gives you a voyeuristic view of trials and tribulations of his life.

When it comes to remakes, this movie, I wished remained untouched. When I heard they were reproducing it as “Let Me In” in the States, I cringed. The hallmark of this movie is the cinematography and without it in another movie, I believe would leave much to be desired.  

However, back to the film, while I do not know how hard it is to film in the winter, the filmmaker certainly captures the mood, sounds, and isolation of snow and the cold with perfection. Each shot is a carefully crafted work of art and while may not be the best cinematography of all time, the film is consistent from opening till ending.

The film moves at a pace that seems reserved for older horror movies such as Rosemary’s Baby and builds with intensity till gore and scares are appropriately placed throughout the film.

While this film is fun to watch it does bring up the timely subject of bullying and the impact it has on young children and when re-watching it today, creates another layer to the film.

That’s the first review Internets.  Enjoy it!

This week has been too long, my friends.  But, fear not!  A review of CHUD will be forthcoming this weekend, as will several other new reviews!

Man, what to say about this?  I won’t say much, because this is new and (officially) doesn’t come out until Tuesday (note: I didn’t actually steal this: I got it from an awesome video rental place that got copies in early, so at least for MY part, this was done through legal channels).  This is actually probably as close as I’ve ever been to being a REAL pop culture critic, having an advance copy and all, so I feel pretty cool.

Anyways, my private gratifications aside, I can’t say enough good things about Trick r Treat.  Like many horror movie aficionados, I tend to take a dim view of horror in the last ten years, trending as it has (at least on the major release level) towards a seemingly interminable succession of J-Horror retreads, torture porn (which I don’t entirely hate), and, most recently, American 80’s slasher series “reboots” (which, although all pretty decent, aren’t really an original voice in horror filmmaking).

So, when a film like Trick r Treat comes along, I feel like I have no choice but to embrace it as a sort of prodigal son of horror cinema: a reminder that genre filmmaking doesn’t have to narrow itself further and further into genre tradition.  Sometimes, horror is at its best when it trends towards the general.  Well-trod tropes can find new life in the hands of creative directors, and the films can find broader appeal than just niche fanbases (E.G. slasher nuts or zombie geeks).  Trick r Treat is a horror anthology in the Creepshow/Tales From The Crypt tradition, but it ties its four storylines together with a style and ease more reminiscent of early Tarantino/Avary screenwriting than anything I’ve seen in recent horror traditions.  The vignettes are heartwarming, cute, and funny: this movie doesn’t take itself too seriously, but doesn’t go over-the-top for laughs, either, preferring to evoke sentiment more subtlely in its audiences.

This subtlety transcends merely the humorous elements of the screenplay and extends into the cinematography and the special effects as well.  With the exception of one gratuitously computer-animated scene, most of the effects are done in-camera and look fantastic.  This movie isn’t without gore, but certainly isn’t structured to exist solely upon it: most of the gory parts either occur off-screen, or are revealed to the audience in grandiose, EC Comics-esque moments, which both heighten the effect of the gore and make it a tad more palatable for the squeamish.

Furthermore, Trick r Treat isn’t just a horror movie: it’s really a HALLOWEEN movie, freighted with the traditions and the ambiance of fall in the American Midwest (something I love dearly), and the goofy, gimmicky superstitions of Halloween.  This is the kind of horror movie you can take a a date to: scary, but not TOO scary, warm, funny, and structured around the familiar childhood traditions of a holiday that most people cherish (at least nerds like me).  Trick r Treat should be at the top of your “must-watch” list this Halloween season: with any luck, in time, Trick r Treat will be as inextricably linked with Halloween as “It’s A Wonderful Life” is with Christmas, or (at least for me) “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” is with Thanksgiving.  Please, please, PLEASE: do yourself a favor and pick this one up.  You won’t regret it.

Whew.  Thank God.  After Child’s Play, I was so disappointed in what I had watched, and so stupefied as to what I should write about something so bad, that I almost shelved this project entirely.  Fortunately, I convinced myself to watch something else to get rid of the terrible funk that Child’s Play left over my home, and boy, did I pick a doozy.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II picks up right where the original Hellraiser left off.  In a move seemingly influenced by John Carpenter’s similarly almost-as-good-as-the-original-if-not-better-sequel, Halloween II, we find Kirsty Cotton, our erstwhile heroine, inside the Channard Psychiatric Hospital, just as we find Laurie Strode inside Haddonfield Memorial Hospital at the beginning of Carpenter’s film.  But, unlike Carpenter’s constant assault upon Laurie, and, consequently, her audience, Hellraiser II takes some time to set up Clive Barker’s bizarre, fantastic, nightmarish vision of Hell.  There’s gore aplenty here: not the kind of silly gimmick kills of the latter Friday the 13th films, but the kind of creepy, S&M influenced, torture-gore that one only ever really sees in the Hellraiser films, or Takashi Miike’s work.  It’s not about a body count here: Barker is more interested in keeping the viewer truly unsettled.

And, of course, there are Cenobites.  Oh, but there are Cenobites.  The iconic Pinhead and his band of decidedly un-merry men/demons are back in force, gleefully reveling in the excruciating pain that they deliver to their victims.  Barker’s ideas of power and powerlessness, pain and pleasure, are in full force here: the exploration of BDSM culture taken to a logical extreme, Barker has imagined a hell that only the most driven (or powerless) hedonists could ever want to experience: pain so intense that it opens the door to entirely new realms of pleasure, and, subsequently, perception.  There’s no shortage of Aldous Huxley influence here, but it’s filtered through a Marquis de Sade-esque perspective that posits a grim new take on Huxley’s ideas.  Other influences manifest more visually: there’s clearly an H.R. Giger influence in the design of the creatures, and the labyrinthine corridors and staircases of Barker’s hell look almost exactly like the artworks of M.C. Escher.

Hellbound is, in my opinion, a film better conceived and executed than the film that precedes it.  While the original Hellraiser introduces the terrifying Cenobites, the cryptic LeMarchand Box (a puzzle box which, when solved, summons the Cenobites), and many of the characters of the second film, it’s marred by some poor visual effects, shoddy acting, and a second act that drags interminably.  Hellbound’s script is much tighter, its characters much more believably acted, and its visual effects vastly improved (within the context of the time: the lightning is still pretty shoddy, no matter how you slice it).  The addition of a creepy little girl who loves to solve puzzles creates a new layer of intrigue: will this ingenue be subject to the same treatment as all the others who open the box?  Are the Cenobites capable of decision, or are they slaved to their “You summoned us, we came” credo from the first Hellraiser?

I won’t bother to spoil the answer to this: suffice it to say that if you’re a horror fan, this is well worth your time, and, in fact, is probably a better use of your time than the first Hellraiser is.  I’m not even sure if one needs to see the first Hellraiser: most of it is summarized in the first 30 seconds or so of Hellbound.  Hellbound has a little something for every type of horror fan: the gorehounds, the psych-horror nuts, the supernatural horror fiends, the exploitation geeks, and the horror neophyte/fan of genre film in general.  Highly recommended.

It’s unbelievable that I am 24 years old, a horror movie freak, and a child of the 80’s, and I had still not seen Child’s Play until tonight.  That being said, Child’s Play was pretty much the antithesis of what I think a good horror movie should be.  Now, don’t get me wrong: I love horror-comedy as much as the next weirdo.  The fact that Child’s Play doesn’t take itself too seriously isn’t the problem.  The problem is that it doesn’t put any effort into the things it purports to achieve.  It’s a horror-comedy movie, but in name only, as it is no more able to scare than it is to incite laughter.

Let’s address the comedy portion first: this is more easily addressed than the horror portion.  Failed comedy is easy to diagnose: if the jokes aren’t funny, the piece fails (unless it’s some sort of awesome meta-comedy, in which case all bets are off).  While Brad Dourif has some excellent moments, the writing is simply atrocious.  It’s not funny, and, frankly, ridiculous-looking killer doll movies SHOULD be funny, if nothing else.

More importantly, though, the horror portion fails in two major categories.  One, it’s not scary.  Now, this can be excused, in my mind, by a number of qualites.  Plenty of great horror films aren’t scary, and, although “scary” is a sliding metric by anyone’s estimation, there are plenty of horror movies that, while not TRULY terrifying, still manage to scare SOMEONE.  Even the lowest form of scares, the “gimmick” scare (the jumping cat in the window, etc.) still startle even the most stalwart horror viewer sometimes.  Child’s Play is devoid of even these scares.

Now, were Child’s Play well-scripted, well-acted, or self-parodic, this would be acceptable.  It’s none of these.  This is not to say that these three criteria are even essential for me to love a horror movie: in fact, most of the Italian exploitation horror that I love is TERRIBLE when measured by those criteria.  But those movies have something else to them: often, there’s an intrinsic, DIY, “we’re making a MOVIE!” charm to these films, but, universally, they’re gory.

REALLY gory.  Like, RIDICULOUSLY gory.  And this is where Child’s Play fails to find redemption.  I can accept horror movies without gore, but they have to do something else.  Even if they’re just gore for gore’s sake, that’s okay with me (sometimes: more on this later this month).  But Child’s Play is the worst kind of big-budget horror schlock: scenery-chewing, catchphrase-spouting, iconic killers, forgettable characters, and a total failure to scare.  Child’s Play doesn’t even have the cheap titillation, the massive body count, and the absurd causes of death that populate franchises like Friday The 13th or Nightmare On Elm Street: even the interminable Leprechaun franchise seems to have Child’s Play beaten in this regard.

My only guess is that Child’s Play was a big-budget studio effort to sanitize late-80’s supernatural slashers for a wider audience more averse to gore and more easily scared.  However, in the proces, they removed anything that would have made the movie edgy, hip, or even entertaining in the exploitative sense.  While Chucky has become an enduring horror icon in the tradition of Freddy or Jason, the novice horror viewer is far better served by ANY of the iterations of those franchises (okay, maybe not Jason X, but you get the point) than by Child’s Play, and the veteran horror viewer will get nothing out of it except two hours that could have been spent watching one of the many superior late-80s American horror-comedies that flew under the radar while crap like this got marketed relentlessly.