Picture the scene: it’s a Saturday afternoon, the morning of
which has been spent at a 4-year-old’s birthday party. The rain, constant and grim, has killed any
desire to leave the house for the foreseeable and our sloth is compounded by
comfortable sofas, huge bags of crisps, and the choice of 3 separate streaming
services. Making a hasty decision before
option paralysis robs us of too much time, we decide to embark on a day of
horror films.
Being a lily-livered coward, I am not a massive fan of horror
films. My wife, being much harder than
me, doesn’t mind the gore so much. We
start with recent Scandinavian-set Brit-flick The Ritual on the strength of solid reviews and Rafe Spall, who is
ace. It opens with a group of friends
bullshitting in the pub, before one of
them dies in an off-license robbery while another cowers in hiding instead of
helping. We then have an interesting
twist on the ‘lost on the woods’ horror staple; add the volatile elements of
post-traumatic stress, guilt, and suspicion to a group of backpackers lost in
Swedish woods and you have a great premise.
Occult markings, Predator-like
corpses in trees, and an ill-advised stay in a creepy abandoned cabin lend the
film a heavy dose of atmosphere.
As one might expect, the group argues, splits, all very
organically, and is picked off one by one before the Wicker Man-inspired titular ritual becomes clear. As with most horror films, it’s always better
when you don’t see the creature, and
I can’t help but feel some disappointment when all is revealed. The Scandinavian occult angle is fresh and
different, but the film can’t escape from its own trappings.
I think it’s at this point where we start drinking and
search through a seemingly endless list of films I’ve never heard of for one
that isn’t absolutely dire. We settle on
a found footage joint called Hell House
LLC, which has a (relatively) decent IMDB rating of
6.4. Another good premise (documentary
team investigates the mystery behind the deaths of 15 people at a haunted
house), and presented in the style of a documentary rather than just a series
of scenes bookended by lines like “This footage was recovered from blah blah
blah…”, Hell House LLC is surprisingly good.
We find out early on about a mysterious disaster at the
house, see some footage of the event, discover that nobody wants to talk about
it, and then see the events leading up to the fateful night. There are horror clichés aplenty, including
the house being cursed by previous deaths on the premises, and tropes which are
played for maximum scares: dummies dressed as clowns, which move when nobody is
looking, a piano playing itself, things moving in strobe lighting, a creepy
girl who gets closer whenever you look away, and an increasing sense of dread
through the characters. It’s nothing
you’ve not seen before, but it’s presented in an interesting way, and primed
for maximum scares. Actually not bad at
all. We keep the drinks flowing and dive
back in for something else.
Mother’s Day
(2010) is our choice. Despite sharing a
name with a 2016 Jennifer Aniston/Kate Hudson “comedy/drama”, this is actually
a quite unpleasant home invasion movie.
Thoroughly implausible and about half an hour too long, it boasts a good
B-movie cast (Rebecca DeMornay is brutally cold as the eponymous mother, Frank
Grillo, Shawn Ashmore, and Deborah Ann Woll are all dependable Marvel
veterans).
A family of fugitives (one of whom has been shot), arrive at
their former home to find a nice middle class family entertaining their
guests. A hostage situation ensues,
during which the residents (one of whom is, helpfully, a doctor) are beaten, tormented,
killed, and threatened with sexual assault.
The plot is absolutely preposterous, presenting increasingly flimsy
reasons for keeping everyone in the house, before bumping people off left and
right. It’s impressively brutal, quite
distasteful, and not something |I’d rush to watch again. But in our increasingly drunken states, now supplemented
by Chinese takeaway, we were thoroughly entertained.
Speaking of brutal and distasteful, the conversation turned
to Eli Roth’s charming Hostel films
and we decided that neither of us had seen either of the sequels. Much like the equally family friendly Saw films, it’s hard to remember which
you’ve seen since they all blur into one.
So, Hostel: Part 2 gets an
airing. A further development of the premise
of the first: wealthy businessmen pay shady company Elite Hunting to torture
kidnapped tourists in a grotty Eastern European warehouse, and Part 2 treats us
to the lovely auction and victim selection processes, and focuses on a group of
female travellers this time.
While the first film built steadily up to a gory climax,
this gives us some hideous scythe-related action midway through. As well as the
power tool-fodder tourists, we also see the two American businessmen, who have
bid on their lives. The arrogant and
brash Todd, and the timid and reluctant Stuart are subtext personified: American
wealth and its nonchalance towards the rest of the world; alpha male
entitlement taken to its extreme; the elite at play when golf gets boring. It’s obvious and as subtle as a drill to the
forehead, but not really a stretch to imagine Trump and his cronies using a
service like this.
Anyway, Roth turns the premise on its head when Todd has an
implausible crisis of conscience mid-scalping and decides he doesn’t want to
kill his prey, and Stuart decides that he can use Beth to act out his
misogynist fantasies of killing his wife.
It ends badly for both when it transpires that Beth is richer-than-thou
and outsmarts then outbids him, before leaving his genitals for the guard dogs.
Roth pulls off some inventive kills, some nice shots, and
otherwise hits you in the face with a rusty hammer made from subtext, but it’s
not something you’ll want to see more than once. As inventive as Roth’s kills are, they are
nothing compared to what comes next. It’s
getting late and we’re pushing the drunk envelope somewhat, but I make the
executive decision to keep it going with The
ABCs of Death 2. Possibly the
strangest choice for a sequel since The
Last Exorcism’s title turned out to be a lie, the first film was 26
vignettes, each representing a letter of the alphabet and an aspect of
death. It was, to put it mildly, strange
as fuck (F is for Fart, and L is for Libido are two you will not want to
revisit). This anthology is more of the
same, from 26 different directors. It opens
well, with Amateur, Badger and Capital Punishment being both messed up and hilarious. D is for Deloused is a Robert Morgan claymation
piece and one of strangest things I’ve ever seen.
Special mention goes to Grandad,
Invincible, Jesus, Nexus and Questionnaire, for being brilliant and
terrible in their own special, inventive way.
It runs out of steam somewhat and a few are forgettable where they
really should be seared onto your
psyche. It often feels like watching 26 short
episodes of Inside No. 9 without the
quality control, however a film featuring a scene as outright wrong as X is for Xylophone can’t be all bad.
We call it a night with our heads spinning from a
combination of gore, Chinese food and rum, but satisfied with a day well spent
doing absolutely nothing.
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