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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+++ Adaptation of Richard Matheson's horror novel Hell House, written by Matheson himself. The body of the story remains -- a scientist, his wife, and a couple of psychic investigators are hired to settle once and for all the question of survival after death by temporarily moving into an infamous haunted house -- but most of the connective tissue in Matheson's novel is missing, making the film seem more of a companion piece to the novel than a work in its own right. The individual parts aren't so much scenes as vignettes, each of which imparts another important plot point. Because each scene is, really, equally important, it doesn't build the way a narrative should. On the other hand, if the peaks are missing, so, too, are the troughs. It's a naive approach, but one that does give the film an unusual, if minor, fascination. This isn't a scary movie; it's ominous, from beginning to end. With good acting, though, by the likes of Clive Revill, Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowall, and Gayle Hunnicutt. The special effects are also quite good. ++ 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. +1/2 The tagline: "Fear for her." She is Susan Harris (Julie Christie), estranged wife of the creator (Fritz Weaver) of Proteus IV, a thinking machine so far advanced of human capabilities that it devises a cure for leukemia in only four days. The difficulty: the movie has no suspense. Soon after being activated Proteus is questioning its human masters and seeking a way to escape its "box." It infiltrates an open terminal in Harris' house, usurps the environmod that controls its every function, and imprisons Susan so that it can use her body to produce a child. It is so powerful and so superior that Susan never has a chance. A better tagline would have been, "Listen to Proteus." For that is about all we can do, listen as it embellishes its egomaniacal fantasy of taking over the world. (We are, however, rewarded with one nice line, something about Proteus not wanting to make humans obsolete but to so improve on humanity as to make computers obsolete.) Based on the book by Dean Koontz -- the original version, of course, not his 1997 rewrite. Improves on the book in the sense that Proteus itself is slightly more adult (Koontz imagined it as an adolescent with dreams of becoming flesh so as to ravish women), but falls far short in that the book's best feature was the suspense of its first half. Adding nothing to the film are its special effects, which serve clunky machinery on the one hand, and are used, on the other, to produce meaningless light shows that are possibly intended to be profound. +1/2 Less ubiquitous than the 1925 abridgement, this original and uncut version of Stoker's last novel is no less surreal and just as shocking for having been written by the same man who penned Dracula, one of the greatest horror novels of all time. It's inane, self-contradictory, badly plotted, and poorly written; it is so bizarre, in fact, that it becomes, in its own way, weirdly fascinating. Lady Arabella March is the White Worm, a legendary antediluvian snake of enormous size; the last of her kind, she has existed for millenia in England where, as the story begins, she can be seen in her tight-fitting white dresses openly angling for a profitable marriage with the psychopathic owner of a neighboring estate. This madman, however, is more interested in much more delicate Lilla Watford, with whom he periodically engages in hypnotic battles of will -- that is, when he isn't monomanically transfixed by the huge kite he has set flying above his castle. Meanwhile, a couple of fellows from another nearby estate -- one an old diplomatist, the other a young buck from Australia -- having stumbled onto Lady Arabella's secret spend their days plotting her long overdue death. The impetus for the abridgement appears to have been Stoker's use of racial epithets for an ugly and mean-spirited (yet pathetically amorous) African character. That, and perhaps a simple desire to shorten the book, for not much of consequence is removed; rather, the hack job is confined mostly to removing paragraphs here and there throughout. The oddest edit is one involving the monster: an entire sequence is cut in which the monster pursues our intrepid heroes into a river, where it is mistaken for a white whale. As director Ken Russell used little more than the idea of a woman who could transform herself into a giant snake for his 1988 adaptation, it is impossible to know whether his inspiration was this book or the abridgement. Read at your own risk. +1/2 Truly awful film, based, vaguely, on the H. G. Wells novel of the same name. Unlucky plane crash survivor (David Thewlis) is picked up in the Java Sea and taken to a small island where a mad doctor with a God complex (Marlon Brando) mixes human and animal DNA in a quest to create a race of "superior" beings. Goes downhill the moment Brando appears, his face, hands and arms covered in pasty white cream, as if an allergy to sunlight were in any way relevant to his character or the story. (As metaphor for the need for him to do his work "in the dark," it is overkill of the highest order.) "The" story, in fact, is a misnomer: screenwriters Richard Stanley and Ron Hutchinson try to tell too many stories, one of which is an ironic mirror of their "accomplishment": even as the film devolves into incoherence, Moreau's horrible creations, without regular injections, regress to their disordered animal states. Meanwhile, the beast creatures chafe at their subjugation, and the survivor, in an idea cribbed not from the book but from the first adaptation of the book, The Island of Lost Souls, meets a beautiful woman (Fairuza Balk) with whom he develops a personal relationship. And then there's Montgomery, Moreau's all but superfluous assistant, played by Val Kilmer. A self-indulgent crazy-quilt of a movie, redeemed only by a few pretty pictures along the way. ++++ Quite possibly King's best book -- despite the fact that it is King all over, which isn't always a good thing. It's wordy, it's got a kid much too advanced for his age, and it ends with that Mythbuster mentality that isn't satisfied until everything gets blown to hell. But this book, more than the others, is the one that was built for King's style. It's about Jack Torrance, an alcoholic man who carts his family along when he takes a job as the winter caretaker of a posh hotel in the Colorado mountains that just happens to be haunted. He doesn't know this going in, of course, nor does Wendy, his wife. But his son, Danny, does; his "shining" -- psychic talent -- clues him in real fast that the Overlook is one Bad Place. In the Overlook, King has a boogeyman just big enough for all those words and yet small enough to keep things focused. In other words, it isn't like Pet Semetary, which is the same length as The Shining, but all about that little place in the woods where Sparky was buried. And it's not like 11/22/63 either, which might have merited its 800-plus pages if were really about what happened on that date, but instead is split into three different stories rudely rammed together. King, you see, is a character guy. He said somewhere that his ideas tend to start with, Wouldn't it be funny if -- which makes him sound like a plot guy. But it's obvious that plot doesn't interest him nearly so much as his characters. His books don't run as long as they do because his plots are intricate or complex; they balloon because he can't stop riffing on the characters. Every once in awhile, he reaches a happy confluence of both. Most of King's characters, if they went looking for a house to contain their egos and their histories, would end up buying the Overlook Hotel. But only Jack Torrance gets to do that. He gets to do it because he's a haunted man who needs a haunted house to feel at home. Jack isn't a deep man, but he skates a wide surface. There's the time he broke his son's arm, the time when he and a friend nearly killed a kid, the time when his father attacked his mother, and so on. It's not without reason he thinks the Overlook is hot for him. But the Overlook has more than a quick roll in mind. For that, it needs Danny -- and for Jack, not being the favorite threatens to turn him into a living pun: a man overlooked. And that he can't abide. So this book is all about what happens when an insecure man with violent tendencies gets backed into a corner, when inner demons meet real demons. If they were serial killers, Jack would be Ottis Toole to the Overlook's Henry Lee Lucas. (Toole, in fact, lived for awhile in Boulder.) It's a match made in Hell, a Molotov cocktail. That's probably why King's explosive ending works much better here than in other novels. Usually it's not much more than an afterthought. Here, it's an inevitability. ++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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