Three Films Make A Post: Want to hear a scary story?

Bring it On: Cheer or Die (2022): Turning this perennial cheerleading movie franchise slasher-wards is a goofy idea that’s also all kinds of brilliant. Alas, the execution of this idea, as directed by Karen Lam with a screenplay credited to Alyson Fouse, Rebekah McKendry and Dana Schwartz, is about as limp, uninspired and un-fun as this could have turned out. The PG-13 rating surely doesn’t help the film, for where other horror sub-genres can survive without getting to gruesome, a slasher without creative kills lacks an important ingredient to work as it should. That the film only does much of anything with its cheerleading core in its final act when it turns out that cheerleading is a type of martial arts is another disappointment. Also not helpful are jokes that don’t hit (this is apparently supposed to be a horror comedy, though it’s difficult to notice), a cast that couldn’t handle funny lines anyway, and direction I’ll politely call uninspired.

Devil’s Workshop (2022): A struggling actor (Timothy Granaderos) in the running for a role as a demonologist spends a weekend at a real demonologist’s (Radha Mitchell) who pulls him into a bit of a supernatural psychodrama. At least half of the time, Chris von Hoffmann’s film actually is the twisty, blackly humorous, psychologically thrilling two-hander it so clearly wants to be, with some clever moments where a character’s inner life is supernaturally brought to the outside. Alas, it is a bit too distractible to quite reach its full potential, wasting too much time on the travails of our protagonist’s arch enemy (Emile Hirsch at his weaselliest); setting up a punchline really shouldn’t take up twenty minutes or so of screen time.

Mitchell does one hell of a job being ambiguous, weird and intense; Granaderos, while no slouch in the scenery chewing business sometimes can’t quite keep up with her.

Scare Me (2020): Speaking of actor’s workshops, this movie about two horror writers – one successful (Aya Cash), one would-be (writer/director of the film Josh Ruben) – acting out horror stories in a cabin during a power failure sometimes has a certain whiff of that sort affair. However, it’s a workshop where both main parties act and imagine their asses off in the best possible way, and whose director may be a bit showy, but also brilliantly effective in his showiness, building tension and mood out of thin air and sheer inventiveness. Unlike in our first entry, the sardonic humour hits nearly every time, and the script is much deeper and more clever than it at first appears; unlike in our second one, both leads are on the same level and wavelength throughout.

I suspect this is going to be a bit of a marmite film: its very specific type of cleverness and its go-for-broke intensity and personal weirdness will rub some people the wrong way. I found myself, unexpectedly, loving this approach to talking about scary stories, success and jealousy, and the kind of human interactions that can only end in tears and/or blood quite a bit.

In short: Man on Fire (2004)

Creasy (Denzel Washington), an alcoholic ex-CIA killer with the mandatory traumatic past (therefore the alcohol) is hired to protect Lupita (Dakota Fanning), the child of US company exec Samuel (Marc Anthony) and his wife Lisa (Radha Mitchell). Despite there having been a rash of kidnappings of the children of executives of US companies in Mexico like Samuel, he really hires Creasy because he comes cheaply, and because Creasy’s old murder buddy Paul Rayburn (Christopher Walken) pushes the guy recommending people to Samuel a bit in Creasy’s direction.

After a bit of the expected “PTSD suffering guy can’t let anyone into his heart anymore” shenanigans, Creasy falls in replacement father love with Lupita (who, as played by Fanning, really is a particularly nice kid), so when she is kidnapped and apparently killed, he does of course go on a murderous rampage, killing his way up the long, long totem pole to the people responsible for her death.

At first, Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, written by Brian Helgeland, is a surprisingly effective retelling of the ole tale of a shut-off man of violence reminded of his humanity by a child, and then falling back into his old ways again to protect/save her. After some minutes of the kind of noisy visual bullshit typical of late period Scott, even the director seems to calm down a little about the whole thing, giving his excellent performers enough space to breathe life into the very clichéd set-up and even – gasp – using his love for all kinds of annoying technical tricks to enhance instead of destroy what the actors are trying to do. Why, for once in a Tony Scott movie, I even felt emotions coming on.

Alas, once the film gets going with Creasy murdering his way through the supporting cast, all of this stops. Scott loses himself, Washington’s performance and my attention through the use of all the phony visual nonsense he so dearly loved in this part of his career. So there’s an incessant barrage of whoosh-cutting, pointless superimposition of Washington’s face over Washington’s face (honestly, I have no idea why), a camera that randomly jitters and jerks, jumpy editing, micro-zooms, stutter and all imaginable kinds of pointless visual graft, all, I assume in service of keeping the audience awake through way too many scenes of Creasy torturing and murdering characters in various ways. As my imaginary readers know, I’m not exactly bothered by tasteless violence, but rather by the directorial assumption that this sort of thing used as much as in this film will somehow shock a viewer.


In fact, having a murder machine murder their way through personality-less goons can only keep one’s interest up when it is either very well staged (which is impossible with all actual action buried under all of Scott’s tacky direction ticks), carries some interesting resonance, or actually does something else needed for the film. In Man on Fire’s case, all the killing ever does is make the film way too long, until what should be a tight little 90 minute thriller becomes tedious two and a half hours of nothing but Scott editing into your face, which isn’t just an unpleasant time, but also time of your life you won’t ever get back.

The Darkness (2016)

On a visit to the Grand Canyon autistic-to-keep-the- plot-“mysterious”-for-longer youngest of the Taylor family Michael (David Mazouz) picks up some nice little stones which unfortunately free some animal-themed evil spirits once incarcerated by the Anasazi. This sort of thing is really bound for giving a family trouble. So, soon after they come home, the Taylors – also including mother Bronny (Radha Mitchell), father Peter (Kevin Bacon) and sister Stephanie (Lucy Fry) – have to fight off random paranormal phenomena as well as suffer through equally random attacks of Lifetime movie-style melodrama done very badly.

Praise be to The Darkness’s director Greg McLean for making a mainstream horror movie not fixated on jump scares. Alas, that’s the only thing the film has going for it, for everything else here put together forms a practically archetypal concoction of all that is wrong with contemporary mainstream horror - and nothing of what’s right with it.

Worst offender is the terribly sloppy writing. The script keeps things so vague I honestly couldn’t even tell you if the dysfunction presented in the Taylors (of course the usual foursome, because we don’t want to get creative by having a family of three or five) is supposed to be caused by the evil spirits hitchhiking their way from the Grand Canyon (Anasazi spirit prisoner security is kind of lacking, I have to say), if it is made worse by it, or if the writers just put some random family melodrama in here to pad out the running time. The film does throw in a few half sentences suggesting it’s all the spirits’ fault in one of its moments of exposition but there’s nothing in what’s actually shown on screen which would bolster that idea. It probably doesn’t matter anyhow, for the perfunctory checklist style way the film treats plot lines like the daughter’s bulimia makes these parts of the plot pointless in any case. And no, of course The Darkness does put zero effort into establishing any kind of baseline of dysfunction for anyone involved so the audience can't put what’s happening during the course of the film into the context of how the family members usually act, leading to a film whose characters have emotions that just come and go randomly for no particular reason apart from their convenience for the plot (such as it is).

Which, come to think of it, is the same feeling I get from the supernatural scenes as well: random crap that lacks any coherence and weight – what’s a “theme”? – and is only in the movie because the three screenwriters didn’t have anything as avantgardistic as a plan what the film is supposed to be and do apart from providing a best of (but worse) of every damn cliché about haunted families you’ve seen in a horror movie in the last ten years. The whole mess of the script also includes sure signs of total disinterest by everyone involved like repeating exposition about its random core haunting two and a half times (to help out those in the audience with a damaged short term memory, one supposes), and a finale that is about as much a culmination of everything the characters experienced and learned before as I am an alien invader from Yuggoth.

The whole of The Darkness feels terribly underdeveloped, not like a proper finished movie made by seasoned professionals, but like the first draft of something that might have become a decent if unspectacular horror movie if anyone had cared enough about it (or its suffering audience) to put the work in.

Sacrifice (2016)

Warning: spoilers are as inevitable as the cold indifference of the universe

After a series of miscarriages, medical doctor Tora Hamilton (Radha Mitchell) and her husband Duncan Guthrie (Rupert Graves) decide to adopt a child. Because these people are rich shits only a baby will do, so they move to Duncan’s native Shetland where his family is involved in a clinic and adoption centre. They’ll just have to live and work in Scotland for twelve months and a new-born will be theirs. Who knew this baby adoption stuff is that easy?

While digging a hole to bury a horse in the peat around the house Duncan’s father (David Robb) found for them, Tora discovers a peat body. It’s a dead woman whose heart has been cut out, with runes branded on her back. She also must have delivered a baby only about a week or so before her death. The local police under DI McKie (Ian McElhinney) isn’t particularly perturbed about the dead body. Only thanks to Tora’s agreeable nosiness (we’re probably meant to think it’s caused by the magical word “baby” rather than her being very civic-minded, but let’s not go there) and her ability to look up weather news in old newspapers can they even be convinced the body is only a few years old, but there’s clearly nothing being done at all to even identify the corpse.

Not surprisingly, Tora assumes this amount of incompetence can’t be real, and somebody is trying to conceal some kind of secret. Soon, she finds herself involved in various – often rather illegal – avenues of research that suggest a kind of crazy fertility cult connection to proceedings. Finally, Tora does manage to convince McKie’s subordinate DS Dana Tulloch (Joanne Crawford) – who’s initially from Dundee – that something very mysterious is going on, but will the two women beat the patriarchy?

Sacrifice is a rather frustrating film. It features a highly competent cast, excellent photography, and decent if sometimes somewhat clumsy direction – just try and manage to watch the scene of Tora in front of the burning car and not start to giggle at the clichéd way it is staged – by Peter A. Dowling but manages not to use any of this quite to its own advantage.

The film’s main problem is how willing its is to fall back on very tired and standard gothic romance/romantic thriller and conspiracy thriller tropes without actually showing the ability to make effective use of them. Consequently, the conspiracy here does everything an evil conspiracy does in a movie, without thought or care taken if what it does actually makes sense for it. So of course the conspiracy leaves an absurd body trail for something that must have been a secret for several hundred years, and makes an hilariously bad job of making up excuses and picking scapegoats, while blocking every of Tora’s early investigations in exactly the way that is most bound to make her more suspicious. The conspiracy is also based on beliefs that just don’t work for the people that are supposed to have them.

It is particularly annoying because Sacrifice has a perfectly decent basic fear at its core, seeing as it concerns itself with a patriarchal secret society that can only see women as breeders and – literally – sacrifices and a modern woman fighting against it, with all the potential for social critique and paranoia towards the men who are closest to a woman that offers. However, the film’s treatment of this is so flabby, bland, and old-fashioned it actually manages to take this set-up and not feel feminist at all; one might praise it for at least not being misogynist, but having no position at all relating to a rather important part of one’s plot does nobody any good. Certainly not a viewer who expects a film to do more than just go through the motions of a thriller when its obvious possibilities for angry, or terrifying, or effectively depressing filmmaking are basically screaming in your face.

As it is, this is a perfectly watchable film that’ll probably anger nobody, which would be fantastic if not evoking emotions or thoughts were what films are for.

In short: Rogue (2007)

A tourist river tour in the Australian Outback lead by Kate Ryan (Radha Mitchell) goes pear-shaped when the boatload of tourists (among them non-adventurous travel writer Michael Vartan) follows a distress flair right into the territory of a Big Damn Crocodile.

Said crocodile is quite happy about having so many tasty looking snacks in jaw-reach and goes to work, leaving the soon boatless group stranded on a river bank and struggling for survival.

Rogue was directed by Greg Mclean whose previous film Wolf Creek was one in the seemingly endless chain of spam in a cabin films, although a nearly good one of that sub-genre if not for a certain disregard for the basics of logic and a tendency to lovingly hang onto a little too much of the "generic" part of the word "genre".

In a sense, Rogue shares this problem. The film is hitting every expected beat in the sort of survival story its telling, from the asshat locals to the woman willing to die if only her daughter can be saved etc etc. Much to my surprise I wasn't as annoyed about this as I was when watching Wolf Creek, mostly thanks to Mcleans very fine sense of timing and pacing combined with a real determination to not let the movie be slogged down by too much soap operatics.

The grand finale is especially tense, gifting the viewer with the best fight between Man and Damn Big Crocodile I've ever seen. It's just too bad the "Man" here has to be male. I see no good reason for making Michael Vartan's travel writer (you know, a guy without any survival experience) the final hero of the peace when Radha Mitchell's tour guide is supposed to have actual Outback experience - except for a nearly neurotic need to fulfill the "generic" part again.

Still, this is a very entertaining movie and I am now officially waiting for Mclean's future features (possibly even with some of this "subverting expectations" stuff one hears so much about nowadays?).

 

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