Two Minute Movie Review: The Conjuring

Overall, The Conjuring was an entertaining film with some genuine scares and a good cast.  It had some significant weaknesses, however, that took the film from very good to just good.

The title suggested witchcraft, but the problem was that the undead witch didn't actually, you know, conjure anything.  So the title was somewhat misleading.

Ed Warren had a calm assurance at the beginning that suggested competence and experience in supernatural occurrences, and the actor did a great job of turning that into genuine alarm when things got dangerous.  I don't know why Lorraine Warren had to dress like a Victorian schoolmarm transplanted into 1971.  Lili Taylor was inoffensive, even when possessed (that's a problem).  Ron Livingston was wasted, though he did as much as he could with a mostly thankless role.

There's such a thing as being based too much on a true story, and that's where the film fell down.  We really didn't need all five daughters as characters.  They tended to blur together except for the really little one and the really big one.  The subplot with the evil doll was an utter waste of time that detracted from the movie's focus.  It's great that the Warrens have their own family and all, but we didn't need to see their daughter in danger.  It muddled things.

So the antagonist was a witch, right?  Or was it a demon?  Or a demon possessing the now-dead witch?  Or a demon/witch amalgam?  If it was just an undead witch, then why would an exorcism with a Catholic priest kick her out?  I thought exorcism only worked on demons.  What happened to the other ghosts: Rory and the maid?  Did they get exorcised, too?

The daughter sliding around the living room floor elicited laughs more than terror.

It was mentioned that crucifixes annoy the demon, but apparently don't stop it.  And Ed Warren was able to exorcise the demon himself instead of needing a priest from the Vatican to do it.  Does that mean anyone can perform an exorcism?  I thought priests had an extra line to God because of their study, their faith, their sacrifices and training.  In this film they don't.  Why have priests at all, then?  The treatment of religion in the film was muddled, though it was an interesting departure to have the Warrens be, at least partially, people of faith.

I liked the movie, but not that much.  3 out of 5 stars.

Analysis: Event Horizon

On the heels of my analysis of Omen III: The Final Conflict, I have decided to write a little bit about another Sam Neill film: Event Horizon.

Despite it being 18 years old, the movie holds up well.  It uses gore, shocks, and a genuinely disturbing idea to produce a combination of good science fiction and great horror.  The defining theme of the film is perception, specifically sight, and uses a gothic palette to paint a gloomy, almost steampunk aesthetic.

What Philip Eisner the screenwriter didn't count on was the direction modern culture took between 1997 and 2015, focusing inward rather than outward.  After the credits, the first words we see on the screen are: "2015 - First permanent colony established on Moon."  We are nowhere near that now, and not likely to be there within the next several decades.  The drive toward risk and exploration is gone, unfortunately, and can only be found among a few wealthy entrepreneurs.  While this takes us out of the film a bit, it's a temporary departure: we're immediately thrown into Dr. Weir's nightmare of the Event Horizon afterward.  Grim, derelict, with a floating, eyeless corpse.  The camera takes us through the corpse's screaming mouth and into Weir's eye.  In fact, it's the first we see of Weir: an extreme close-up of his eye.

The Event Horizon itself has become possessed by Hell, literally, and everything we see of it shows how it's been poisoned.  The viscera splattered about the interior from the bizarre orgy captured in bits and pieces by the ship's log is disturbing, more so because nobody from the Lewis and Clark  bothers to clean it up or even mentions it.  From the ship's cruciform shape to its head-shaped bridge, we're meant to know that the Event Horizon's possession represents the fall of both God and Man.

Spiked, opening and closing like a massive, fearsome eye, the heart of the Event Horizon is the gravity drive, a device that folds space.  It's only accessible through a long hallway rigged with explosives and a shorter corridor that spins in a disorienting fashion.  Hell, literal Hell is in that gravity drive, waiting to be released.  From the spikes inside the chamber to the bizarre engraving on the drive itself, there's no mistaking that this thing is evil incarnate, which is one of the film's weaknesses: didn't anyone take a look at this thing during the architecture phase of the FTL project and go, "Yeah, that's messed up."?  Are the humans of the future that blase?  The crew of the Lewis and Clark was appropriately disquieted, at least.

Most effectively, the film's theme, sight, puts the viewer in the role of an honorary crewmember of the Lewis and Clark.  After all, what do you do with a movie except watch it?  The villains all had their eyes ripped out, from the doomed captain of the Event Horizon to Weir, who blinded himself.   Weir's wife Claire, when we see her outside of flashbacks, is also missing her eyes.  Justin, who had been briefly swallowed up by the Hell beyond the gate, made an unsuccessful suicide attempt by jettisoning out into space without a suit and lost his eyes as a result (the blood squirting from his face in zero-gravity).  Peters falls to her death as a result of following a ghost that only she could see; her own vision killed her.  When Miller asks Weir, "What happened to your eyes, doctor?" Weir responds, "Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see."  And at the end, when the possessed Weir has Miller at his mercy, he shows Miller horrible visions of grotesque brutality, all the while asking him, "Do you see?  Do you see?"  Perception, in Event Horizon, is reality.  The possessed ship can make you see what it wants you to, and when it's finished with you, it takes away your eyes so that you'll see nothing else except the appalling torment it has in store.

Obviously, the film isn't perfect.  The Lewis and Clark suffers from the unimaginatively grungy look that many seem to think future spacecraft will invariably possess, and the characters play to type without developing in any way, shape, or form.  Nevertheless, it's a great way to spend 96 minutes, and it's currently available on Netflix.  Watch it (again).

Movie Review: The Possession

The Possession is an excellent horror film that puts the lie to the notion that good horror can't be rated PG-13.  The nature of the supernatural antagonist was different enough to be interesting and woven deeply enough into the film to be more than a gimmick.  Don't be fooled by the silly "Based on a true story" thing.  A spoiler-free review follows:

• John Winchester: Jeffrey Dean Morgan showed great range in this role, and was believable as both a college basketball coach and a terrified father trying to save his youngest daughter.  His frustration and confusion were palpable throughout.  Even though he'll always be Sam and Dean's dad to me, and I was hoping he'd just kick the monster's ass the way he would in Supernatural, he showed that he could believably go beyond his beloved television role.
• Poor Kid: Natasha Calis as Em, the dybbuk's victim, did a great job.  Usually, let's face it, kids in movies tend to get shrill and annoying when dealing with perilous situations, but Calis didn't go there.  What was happening to her wasn't fair, and you wanted that filthy, horrible thing out of her.
• The Others: Kyra Sedgwick was her usual, irritating self in this film, which was probably deliberate on the casting director's part.  She's unlikable in every role she's in, so it worked here as the ex-wife.  Matisyahu as Tzadok stole the show: he was funny without it spoiling the film's intensity, and authoritative as a Hasidic exorcist, of sorts.  The filmmakers used him just enough.  
• Dybbuks: The notion of a dybbuk box was very neat, and it was quite interesting to see Jewish exorcists using the power of Adonai to fight a demon, rather than the standard Catholic priest vs. Lucifer contest.  There's a great deal of wealth to be mined in Jewish mysticism and folklore.
• Nastiness: the rolling eye effects were particularly disturbing, as were the moths and other nasty, horrible things the dybbuk inflicted.  The MRI scene was bizarre, but worked.  Seeing the dybbuk out of the box...gross.  This was a filthy, disgusting monster that did appalling things, and it showed.
• Caring Is Sharing: Unlike far too many horror movies made these days, effort was made to get you to care about what happened to the characters.  This wasn't a film about bad things happening to bad people: it was about awful things happening to decent people, so the outcome mattered.  

Go see The Possession on Netflix when you have a spare 90 minutes.  4 out of 5 stars.

Movie Review: The Damned

The Damned is a mildly entertaining movie that started with an interesting idea and fell promptly into familiar horror film tropes until at the end you didn't care a lot about what happened to anyone. I'm going to spoil the film, so if you're really burning to see it and be surprised by its charms, read no further.  I'M WARNING YOU.

• Family Matters: The screenwriter overcomplicated the family relationships between the characters in a failed attempt to add depth to the story.  Rather than give us something we can hold onto and appreciate, like a father, mother, and child, we have a widower, his fiancee, his adult teenage daughter, his former sister-in-law (the dead wife's sister), and the former sister-in-law's colleague who happens to be the adult teenage daughter's wannabe boyfriend.  There was some strained byplay between these characters, but it never went anywhere.  If you're going to have tension between characters, you have to give us a side to root for, and this film didn't.  The characters just weren't terribly likable.  
• The Evil That Men Do: The possessing force (the soul of a bruja/witch) can see into your spirit and know what sorts of evils you've committed.  From there, she guilts you into feeling worse about them so she can kill you (or force you to kill her so she can possess you.  The rule here is that the witch can only possess the person who's killed the body she's in, almost-but-not-quite like like Azazel in Fallen).  It turns out that the people who wind up freeing her just happen to include someone who pulled the plug on his dying wife early (Peter Facinelli) and a guy who uses teenage girls as drug mules, at least one of whom died during the process (Sebastian Martinez).  It seemed too pat, too overt.  I've known several pieces of human trash who haven't killed anyone: they're just bad people.  I'm sure most of us know some (or are some).  If you want subtlety and complexity, start with human stories we can relate to, not wife murderers and drug dealers.
• Character Issues: Peter Facinelli was too young-looking for the role.  He did a good job with the material, but he wasn't convincing as the father of a 19-year-old girl.  The old man was okay, but not menacing enough in the beginning and not tragic enough in his death.  The cop was very good throughout, and his later appearance boosted the film significantly.  I hated to see him go.  The female characters weren't given enough to do, including the little girl, to make them more than disposable cut-outs.
• Control Yourself: We learn that the possessing force is a witch, but her only power seems to be to possess people.  She can't control the weather or do anything else we typically associate with witches (it might have been interesting for her to have implied that she'd somehow created the downpour that sent the hapless characters to her hotel prison).  Fair enough, but the problem was that she just couldn't keep it together long enough to get to civilization.  She self-sabotaged by having the little girl she'd possessed start acting creepy and dangerous straight off the bat.  If her intent was to get out into the wide world, shouldn't she have just kept up the little kid act until they took her to the city?  Then she could have found a new person to possess so she could return to get her revenge on the families that were responsible for her imprisonment.
• Location, Location, Location: There was no reason for this to have been set in Colombia.  They used very little in the way of Colombian culture or language, which was a shame.  With Colombia's rich myth cycle and folklore to draw from, this could have been a unique story.  It was a missed opportunity.  

Overall, I rate this movie 3 out of 5 stars.  I recommend it, but not strongly.