Horror fan favorite about the awful things that happen to a young girl sent to live with her aunt after her parents are killed in an accident. Based on real events -- or "inspired by," if you prefer, since Ketchum lowers the girl's age, sets the story a decade earlier (in the 50's, though there's very little sense of period), and introduces as narrator a boy who may or may not be the girl's deliverance. Definitely a page-turner, but it's as if Ketchum studied the real life case -- in which a woman, her children, and some neighbor kids torture a 16-year-old girl for months until she succumbs to her injuries and mercifully dies -- and came away with little more than the idea that torture is exciting. Certainly the author has no interest in making any of this comprehensible: the characters are sketchy and facile and his only point of view seems to be that cowards do cowardly things. In some sense, much of this really happened -- but that doesn't make any of it believable. Torture porn, pure and simple. Made into a movie in 2007.
++1/2
Horror fan favorite about the awful things that happen to a young girl sent to live with her aunt after her parents are killed in an accident. Based on real events -- or "inspired by," if you prefer, since Ketchum lowers the girl's age, sets the story a decade earlier (in the 50's, though there's very little sense of period), and introduces as narrator a boy who may or may not be the girl's deliverance. Definitely a page-turner, but it's as if Ketchum studied the real life case -- in which a woman, her children, and some neighbor kids torture a 16-year-old girl for months until she succumbs to her injuries and mercifully dies -- and came away with little more than the idea that torture is exciting. Certainly the author has no interest in making any of this comprehensible: the characters are sketchy and facile and his only point of view seems to be that cowards do cowardly things. In some sense, much of this really happened -- but that doesn't make any of it believable. Torture porn, pure and simple. Made into a movie in 2007.
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++ Nicolas Cage is Kyle Miller, a hard-driving, fast-talking businessman whose current project -- he's the middle-man for a number of diamond deals that may or may not be strictly on the level -- gets him targeted by murderous thieves. Or are they targeted because of his wife, Sarah (Nicole Kidman), who may have had an affair with one of them? Well, we know it isn't because of their sneaky teenage daughter, Avery (Liana Liberato), though through an amazing coincidence, she may hold the key to their freedom. It's only PC to get everyone in on the act, even if it makes the movie absurd and unbelievable. In something approaching a real home invasion, one with money as the bottom line, wife and daughter would be useful tools for coercing husband into giving up his wealth. But here, wife is protected by Jonah (Cam Gigandet), the psycho slug with whom she was previously acquainted. And since to hurt Avery is to hurt Sarah, that really only leaves Kyle -- and leaves us wondering why the women are there at all. They're there, of course, to sow dissension among the ranks of the criminals, a tired idea that looks positively exhausted here, when all the thugs had to do was take the women into another room, and all their internal differences would have been settled. What happens instead is a lot of yelling and gun-pointing and the making of empty threats and more gun-pointing as, through flashbacks, we learn the underlying dynamics of this little band of nimrods. None of them are sympathetic characters (which is fine), but combine that with Kyle's seeming disinterest in his family, Avery's rebelliousness, and Sarah's possible infidelity and the whole thing becomes incomprehensible. Who are we supposed to root for? You might not turn this movie off -- Cage and Kidman are all right, after all -- but it's the kind of movie you might think you did, once your brain dumps its short-term memory. ++ Set in 2025, when white men are still called "honkeys" and people still ask if you can "dig it," this story follows Ben Richards, an out of work revolutionary whose wife is a prostitute and whose 18-month-old baby is dying from pneumonia. Desperately needing money to buy medicine for the little tyke, Richards applies as a contestant for a popular game show called "The Running Man." The show is a way of ridding society of some of its more undesirable elements. Contestants are given a 12-hour head start, then pursued by merciless Hunters. Every hour they stay alive nets them a hundred bucks, which in this society is a lot of dough. It's unclear how or why "The Running Man" is a popular show. Though frowned upon, it isn't against the rules for the runner to take out innocent bystanders. Killing a cop is worth another hundred bucks. King, mired in the late sixties/early seventies, takes the hippie hatred of cops to a new level: everyone hates them, deriving entertainment from their deaths. Why anyone would want to be a cop in this society is another matter. The whole milieu is contradictory and self-serving. This is a race for Ben's life (and the life of his daughter); it should be exciting. However, like Rage, his first Bachman book, King substitutes an amorphous anger for anything truly stirring. That might work for teenagers, but adults can see through it all too easily. It all leads to a comic book ending, with lots of blood and wet, hanging entrails. If that's your thing, you may get a kick out of it. Made into a much more entertaining movie in 1987, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Richard Dawson. ++ Proto-paranormal romance more than a horror novel, focused on the troubled (and troubling) relationship of Mina Harker and Dracula. Set 7 years after the events of Bram Stoker's book. When the Harkers, Van Helsing, John Seward, and Lord Godalming return to Castle Dracula to put their painful memories to rest once and for all, the lethargic yet still-existing spirit of Dracula is revived, now animated by a need for love and revenge, primarily the former. Seward and Godalming appear in little more than name only, while Van Helsing and Jonathan, though much more active, really only get in the way as Mina tries unsuccessfully to resist the charms of an undead psychopath. Warrington even uses Mina's son, Quincey, to stick another stake into the heart of all that is good and decent. Another contradictory post-religious take on Dracula: it is one thing for a woman of faith alone to question her beliefs, but quite another for a woman who knows damn well that both God and Satan are real. ("I could abide no clerical judgements upon my state of mind," Jonathan tells us at once point. "I would rather entrust myself to science." Interesting -- given that since vampires are subject to the scientific method -- killing them in a specific way produces identical and repeatable results -- not even a scientist would adopt this absurd position.) Told, like Stoker's book, in the form of journal entries and letters from the various characters, but much less skillfully as each dovetails with the next much too conveniently. And yet, for all this, Warrington's book is light-years ahead of Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt's own horrendous "sequel," Dracula: the Un-dead. ++ Quentin Tarantino co-executive produced this film which, given that Eli Roth substitutes quirkiness for narrative, isn’t difficult to understand. It’s about three young men who travel to Slovakia in search of easy, anything-goes sex and end up the victims of a much different flesh trade involving kidnapping and murder. Roth, however, does nothing with this intriguing premise, preferring to distract us from the superficiality of his ideas with sex, torture, and snarky lines. So bereft of imagination is this story that Roth can end it only by stacking one convenient coincidence on top of another. Responding to Slovak officials who complained the film in no way reflected the reality of their country, Roth blamed his own ignorant fantasies (which include kids who kill for bubblegum!) on Americans: “Americans do not even know that this country exists. My film is not a geographical work but aims to show Americans’ ignorance of the world around them.” Presumably by perpetuating it. Offensive and badly written — but flashy — torture porn. ++ Two-part miniseries starring Zoe Saldana as young mother-to-be Rosemary Woodhouse, who unwittingly finds herself in the midst of a coven of baby-killing witches. Transplants the action of Ira Levin's novel from New York to Paris, seemingly for no reason other than to differentiate itself from Roman Polanski's original adaptation, next to which this version pales into insignificance. Good enough on its own to maintain mild interest -- provided, of course, the unnecessarily explicit and violent scenes with which the story is regularly punctuated serve their purpose in keeping you awake. (Neither Levin nor Polanski needed to resort to such tactics.) Despite its 240-minute length, the film adds very little to the story; its few embellishments -- a meaningless lesbian kiss, for instance, or the idiotic trope of a character who hallucinates then acts as if nothing unusual happened -- distract from the suspense rather than adding to it. No standouts among the performances, either, and Carole Bouquet is certainly no Ruth Gordon as Rosemary's overly-solicitous neighbor. The credits oddly state that the film is based not only on Levin's novel, but his sequel, Son of Rosemary, as well, though one would be hard-pressed to find any material drawn from the latter work, which, after all, takes place more than 30 years after the events of this story. ++ Not a remake of Michael Mann's Manhunter, but a determindly fresh adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel as a prequel to the films The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, with Anthony Hopkins reprising his role as Hannibal Lecter. Will Graham, the man who at great personal cost originally captured Lecter (according to the films, not the books), is lured out of retirement to help catch another serial killer, one targeting entire families, and is compelled to seek advice from his old nemesis. With too-young-looking Edward Norton as Graham and too-handome Ralph Fiennes as the killer, and a great deal more hero worship of Lecter and his supercalifragilistic intellect. Employs elements of the book not found in Manhunter -- that is, all the worst ones, including the silly ending, to which screenwriter Ted Tally adds a ridiculous Friday the 13th-type twist. ++1/2 This is what noir looks like when its play of light and shadow has no psychological ground -- like just another crime drama. It is, however, one of those rare movies that reverses the typical trajectory and actually gets better as it goes along. Or rather, gets better after a certain point. The film is based on Cornell Woolrich's novel (written under his William Irish pseudonym), and so it is about the search for a woman who can provide a man falsely convicted of murdering his wife with the alibi he needs to avoid execution. The point at which it improves is also an improvement over the book. Where Woolrich was content to conceal his killer until the very end, hiding the malefactor behind literary obfuscation, Siodmak and screenwriter Bernard C. Schoenfeld reveal their "paranoiac" about halfway through, instantly heightening the drama and the suspense. But it isn't enough. This is noir light (contradiction intended), from the lightweight performances of the stars (despite Ella Raines' obvious efforts as the accused's loyal and loving friend) to Siodmak's professional yet toneless visuals. It's supposed to add up to a nightmare world of murder and betrayal, but in reality -- because the off-key theme music that is both too happy and too romantic links directly with the ending -- it comes off instead as little more than a weird detour in two interrupted lives. Also with Alan Curtis, Franchot Tone, and Thomas Gomez. ++ Selfish dad (Tom Cruise) gets weekend custody of his rebellious teenage son (Justin Chatwin) and precocious ten-year-old daughter (Dakota Fanning), then gets a crash course in fatherly responsibility after Martians invade the Earth, killing or consuming everyone in sight. "Based on" -- which is to say suggested or inspired by -- H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds. This time, the Martians have hidden their gigantic tripedal fighting machines underground for thousands of years, evidently in patient expectation of the day when their preferred food -- mankind -- will have topped 6.5 billion units. (Had 6 billion been enough, they would have invaded in 1999.) The special effects are state-of-the-art, and the film has its moments, but any story that requires worldwide Armageddon to teach one dad the value of raising kids is not a strong one. And Spielberg, forgetting the lesson he should have learned from Jaws, infallibly substitutes action when dialogue would have served him better. With an even more pronounced sense of anticlimax at the end than the Byron Haskin version from 1953, and that because the screenwriters failed to give Wells the credit he deserved as a writer: while Wells wrote a realistic science-based ending to match his semi-historical novel, Josh Friedman and David Koepp simply tack the same ending on to their much narrower tale of personal redemption. ++1/2 Sleazy TV exec (James Woods) and his sadomasochist girlfriend (Deborah Harry) are intrigued by the pirate broadcast of a new show that trades in torture and murder until they discover it is being used in a plot to control the minds of consumers. Not that that realization causes Woods to be any less sleazy nor Harry to be any less self-destructive, so good luck finding anyone to root for here. Starts out well, as a mystery-thriller, then devolves (its cult followers would no doubt remove the "d") into a full-blown reality-bender of a horror movie, in which anyone exposed to the show suffers graphic and sometimes grotesque hallucinations. Woods himself is shocked when, among other things, his abdomen develops an organic videotape slot. Cronenberg's fuzzy-headed commentary on the dangers of television (he clearly wasn't trying very hard to make a political point, though, in a vague sort of way, the movie presages torture porn and the rise of sex and violence both on TV and the internet) -- that, combined with characters like Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley), who thinks people don't get enough TV, virtually guarantees that this film's only real attraction is its surreal imagery and bizarre absurdities. Well, it has plenty of both. Harry, of course, is more famous for having been the lead singer of the rock group Blondie. |
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