The Title Says It All

Caregiving for an aging parent is a fertile subject for horror. The wonderfully rich Relic did an incredible job of exploring that kind of responsibility in a deep, loving, and also terrifying way. Today's feature doesn't fair so well.

Quick Plot: Louise and Michael return to their childhood farm home to help see their ill father through his last days. Their mother, who has spent the last several years tending to his bedside, is less than thrilled with their visit. After just one day together, she slices off her own fingers as easily as chopping carrots before hanging herself from the barn ceiling. 

The siblings are upset, and also confused. How could their mother do such a thing, both emotionally and physically. Her diary reveals some obsession with demons, while the coroner discovers a handful of crosses in her pockets. Both Michael and Louise's troubles grow worse as they begin to hallucinate horrific visions surrounding their dying father and already dead mother.

What follows is the It school of false scares. Mind you, director Bryan Bertino actually crafts these sequences quite well, but it becomes very clear after the first CGI spider that we're in for a good 30 minutes of characters witnessing something terrifying, screaming, then opening their eyes to normalcy just as another character enters the frame. 

It gets a bit old, especially when there's not much else to hold our attention. Much like Bertino's The Strangers, The Dark and the Wicked is a very glum film. The lighting is dark, the characters are sad, and our never explained demon lacks a shred of a sense of humor. 

I have no problem with a horror film taking itself seriously. I'd much rather a director commit to the genre than undercut their storytelling with tonal shifts. But there's just nothing to really hold onto with The Dark and the Wicked. I found myself thinking a lot about Antlers, a completely unrelated, equally dour film of recent years. Both are decently executed movies about terrible things happening to unhappy people in a miserable place (though the baby goats are very cute). That's fine if the actual scares add up to something effective. For me, they just, well, added up.

High Points

I can't say this enough: The Dark and the Wicked is a good film (even if I didn't like it), and a good chunk of that comes from Marin Ireland's performance as Louise. I wish I knew WHO SHE ACTUALLY WAS as a character by the script, but the actress does a whole lot of work to make up for that

Low Points

I guess this goes into spoiler territory, although there's no actual reveals so is that even possible? Anyway, the more I think about the demon's process of tearing this family apart, the dumber The Dark and the Wicked ultimately feels. This is a demon that makes prank calls to strangers to make Louise feel bad, then uses a simulation of Louise to drive an acquaintance to suicide. It creates an elaborate tableau for Michael so he has no choice but to slit his own throat, and then flicks it away with a job well done. Then it just brutally kills goats on its own (well, in fairness, maybe Bertino just cut a scene where Louise's apparition appeared to a the herd and encouraged them to slaughter themselves). There are no rules, there is no logic, and I'm left feeling if the writer/director doesn't care, why should I?

Lessons Learned

Listen to your mother

Few things are cuter than baby goats

If your week has been filled with hallucinations that are quickly proved to be just that, maybe wait two minutes before making a rash decision based off a visual display that seems incredibly shocking and unbelievable

Rent/Bury/Buy

The Dark and the Wicked is a well-made film. I just happened to hate it. It's cruel in a way I found simply unpleasant, though I could easily understand why this would work very well for many a horror fan. Make up on your own mind via Shudder. 

Never Mumble To Strangers

As film debuts and studio produced horror goes, Bryan Bertino's The Strangers is a fairly impressive little foray into the much overused home invasion genre. When compared to foreign cinema with similar setups, it's decent.


Quick Plot: A painfully unnecessary and dumbly ambiguous prologue recycled from TCM and The Blair Witch Project opens the film to inform us that a lot of brutal crimes happen in America. In case you can't handle not knowing what kind of film you're about to see, the kindly narrator lets us know that something really bad happened to two people we’re about to meet.

Get it? It's a horror movie. Clear? Let's move on:


Cut to a hauntingly bloody kitchen rotting in the morning sun before heading back to the events of the previous evening. A young couple returns to a lonely country house carrying more melancholy weight than Sarah McLaclahn at a mass puppy funeral. He proposed. She said no. That would spoil most people's nights, but it gets a whole lot worse when a trio of masked psychos decides to break in and spend the next few hours hunting the pretty leads with sharp knives, heavy axes, and a whole lot of stealth.

If all this sounds a bit familiar, then yes, you've seen it before in films like Vacancy, Straw Dogs, Funny Games, Inside, and almost directly, Ils. The Strangers never pretends to tread new territory, which is both its biggest strength and weakness. There are some excellent moments of creepy imagery, slightly unsettling actions, and perfectly timed jump scares early in the film before the masked maniacs are totally unleashed. Where I found that Ils (aka Them) took a little too much time establishing its tense atmosphere before finding its stride, The Strangers succeeds best at creating and building a haunting setup. Unfortunately, once the chase takes center stage, Bertino’s uniquely built tension slips more than Liv Tyler in an overgrown forrest of horror cliches. It's suspenseful enough, but eventually, Bertino runs out of ideas in staging stalking.


High Points
Excellent music choices played on a scratchy LP create an early mood of old-fashioned weirdness

Burlap sacks as masks are naturally scary. Any person willing to subject his or her cheeks to such itchiness must be a true badass


What probably separated The Strangers from a lot of direct-to-DVD horror was Liv Tyler's name, and while she's no Meryl Streep, her and Scott Speedman do make a sympathetic and realistically imperfect couple. The natural awkwardness of their failing romance gives The Strangers an extra layer of character that makes, at least the early scenes before the reveal of what's actually happening, a little more tense

Low Points
I guess James Earl Jones and John Laroquette were too expensive. Hence, the filmmaker grabbed someone with a clear speaking voice, handed him Macauly Culkin's Talkboy purchased on ebay from the set of Home Alone 2, then slowed the speed to create an unimpressively deep and artificial bass to voice the opening

While Tyler and Speedman do a fine job, I can’t imagine whose idea it was to cast two actors known primarily for their quiet and rather inaudible enunciating vocal performances


SPOILER
Like High Tension, I found the opening teaser scene to be unnecessary and unfair. I imagine the filmmaker wanted to compensate for the lack of early bloodshed by hinting at what’s to come, but it takes a lot away from a suspenseful 90 minute 2 character hunt to reveal the final result in the first two minutes


Lessons Learned
Cigarettes will indeed kill you


Wearing masks does little to lower the range of one’s peripheral vision

When proposing, always have a backup plan in the event your intended declines your ring. Otherwise, you not only risk spending a very awkward night drinking champagne for the wrong reasons; you may very well become the prey of mask-wearing quiet people


Rent/Bury/Buy
This is definitely worth one viewing with the lights off, but I don't see it gaining any sort of classic status. There's a lot to admire in Bertino's tense staging and depressingly dark atmosphere, but the effect starts to wear off as the chase scenes physically intensify. A quietly moved cell phone and unseen shadowy figure lurking behind our oblivious heroine is far scarier than the gory sendoff of a minor character. There's not a lot to say about The Strangers, but that's not necessarily a terrible thing. Sometimes, a tight, somewhat predictable but cleanly made little horror is all you really need to keep your DVD player warm and filmic appetite sated.