SHOCK WAVES (Ken Wiederhorn, 1977, USA)

 

A group of vacationers is shipwrecked on an isolated atoll with an exiled Nazi and his undead legion. Director Ken Wiederhorn resurrects the Third Reich to complete its thousand-year rule, the master race once almost human rising from the dark waters to advance their insidious holocaust.

Ken Wiederhorn imbibes every horror cliché, bookending the film as a survivalist tale of insanity, relying on the generic to create the narrative spark. His characters are lifeless zombies…and I’m not talking about the creatures. Each represents a specific trope; the good-looking guy, the complaining egoist, the tough guy, the fat dude, and the women who are fuel for frisson. But the film doesn’t wallow in the shallows, it moves a bit deeper and begins to tread water. Wiederhorn doesn’t lower the film with slasher techniques, instead focused upon the mystery and pursuit, choking the audience with palpable tension. He doesn’t shy away from the gore but realizes the suspense is in discovering how the nubile protagonist survives and doesn’t descend into a feeding frenzy of murderous delights. It’s actually a breath of fresh air to discover a horror film that sustains its namesake, if only briefly. Peter Cushing’s obligatory role expounds exposition but not much else, lending a credibility for genre aficionados. Though Wiederhorn fails to cover any new ground the film remains eminently watchable and shockingly enjoyable. 

Final Grade: (B)

THE SHINING (Stanley Kubrick, 1980, USA)

 

Jack Torrance is a torrent of misogyny, denial, and self-loathing: devoured by compulsion, he writes his failure in blood. Director Stanley Kubrick has crafted one of the great horror films: though it deviates from the source novel it stands on its own as a brutal metaphor of secretive domestic violence, the self-destructive impulses of alcoholism, and child abuse that is a preternatural curse, a pre-existing condition that allows Jack to become a violent boy of all work and no play…and his axe isn’t very dull either. 

Kubrick creates the dynamic tension from the very beginning as Wendy Carlos’ eerie score haunts Jacks’ tiny VW as it climbs towards the Overlook Hotel, the omniscient viewpoint like some ethereal ghost following his tragic journey. The paternal family is already fractured as Wendy and Danny are left alone while Jack is being interviewed, and the car ride to the Hotel is indicative of their relationship: cold, sparse, and emotionally isolated. Kubrick frames the three of them with Danny in the middle, but the dialogue is icy and static, dreary and rehearsed, a symptom of a family already disintegrating. Filmed mostly with a Steadicam, the cinematography seems to float and stalk the family, the Overlook like a hulking demon from Danny’s viewpoint. Soon Jack’s mental breakdown comes as no surprise, possessed by some dark power that to him has become a harsh reality. Danny’s gift is only a picture book of ghastly images and dire warnings, while Wendy discovers that a battered woman can indeed find inner strength against her abuser. 

Beautifully filmed and masterfully paced, THE SHINING veers towards burlesque with Nicholson’s performance, but it plays perfectly against Shelly Duval’s hysterics, her reactions emotionally claustrophobic and restrained until the final act: she is a woman on the verge of a mental breakdown but, unlike her husband, is able to commit a selfless act to save her son and find salvation. THE SHINING is a Grand Guignol ghost story filled with genre conventions but strip away the supernatural and the narrative still works on a visceral level: it becomes a believable story of a marriage turned murderous. And herein lies the true horror like the Telltale Heart, a savage rhythm obsessively audible under thin ice. 

Final Grade: (A+)

THE BOX (Richard Kelly, 2009, USA)

A tale of altruism and aliens that leads humanity towards a penultimate fate contained in a small wooden box. Writer/director Richard Kelly’s third film is another concoction of the preternatural and prosaic, loosely based upon Richard Matheson’s story BUTTON, BUTTON and embedded with a healthy dose of Satre and Philip; K. Dick. Unfortunately, this marriage of the X-FILES and THAT 70’s SHOW leads to an intellectual divorce.

Arthur and Norma Lewis are typical suburbanites living the late 70’s American Dream of crushing debt and silent frustrations, slaves to the green god of capitalism. One day, a mysterious man appears with an innocuous box and a promise of one million dollars. But first they must press the button with the knowledge that another human being unknown to them will surely die. Can they live with the guilt?

Richard Kelly takes Matheson’s miniscule tale of marital strife and transforms it into a magical mystery tour de farce, losing sight of interesting characters and compounding the fiction with needless prattle. Unlike the masterful DONNIE DARKO, here Kelly feels the need to explain every detail, to crosscut from a strange circumstance to blatant exposition, thus draining the narrative of all ambiguity. James Mardsen is woefully pathetic in his role as the dejected patriarch, projecting the emotional depth of a Romero zombie. Cameron Diaz isn’t much better, seeming to channel the overwrought spirit of Tammy Faye Baker with pouting lips and swollen eyes. Kelly conjures forth the Bicentennial with exceptional attention to period detail, even down to the metal lunchboxes. The cinematography utilizes a subtle palette and soft image, his beautiful compositions imbue the film with a flair of nostalgia.

Kelly’s intent is to create a humanistic test of altruism in order to judge the human race worthy of survival. Of course, the original sin of pushing the button (a double entendre concerning nuclear war) comes through the woman. But I believe the test itself is flawed since its effects are too distanced: the result should be in witnessing the death of someone, or the knowledge of the identity of the person they killed. In other words, there must be an immediate consequence. The story is interesting but soon becomes mired in explanation and exposition, smothering audience imagination. The ending is a monotonous melodrama that aborts reason.

One thing is now apparent: Hell is indeed another Kelly film. 

Final Grade: (D)

DEAD SNOW (Tommy Wirkola, 2009, Norway)

 

A group of medical students is dissected by an army of darkness, a platoon of undead Schutzstaffel eternally in search of plundered gold. Director Tommy Wirkola targets nearly every horror trope and blasts away with the subtly of a MG 34, creating a cacophony of phony laughs and CGI bloodletting.

The rigid cast of characters are ill defined, their aborted personalities neither representative nor allegorical: they’re just food for the dead. The plot is dimensionless, just an obligatory excuse to isolate the caricatures upon a lonely mountain, buried in an avalanche of gore. The set-up screams homage to classic horror but fails to deliver anything but gruesome humor with head-banging aplomb. Wirkola eschews flashback and uses exposition from a mysterious stranger to convey back-story, while utilizing simplistic foreshadowing to create a sense of imminent danger. The film finds its humorous equilibrium in unbalancing the four humors; from the lower depths of gut-wrenching and intestine-looping laughter to self-mutilation, DEAD SNOW is a flurry of dead-on parody.

The special effects are rather mundane never reaching the heights of Tom Savini’s vintage work and the CGI fountains of blood look aren’t very convincing, cheapening the overall thrill of this spectral spectacle. To achieve a more visceral atmosphere, Wirkola should have relied in physical props instead of computer-generated illusion. A nihilistic nexus of Nazi nemeses, DEAD SNOW is a conjunction of shock and haw that unfortunately leaves its best parts unthawed, frozen in the wastes. 

Final Grade: (C)

THREADS (Mick Jackson, 1984, UK)

 

O, what a tangled web conceived, in an atomic age of no reprieve. A prescient tale of humanity diminished by the looming mushroom cloud, an exclamation point to the brief lives segregated by nuclear holocaust, this final winter of awful discontent. THREADS is a brutally honest representation of a nuclear war and its immediate effects and fallout, gruesome in its portrayal of the millions dead, frightening in its scope of murderous intent.

The story begins innocently enough as two young lovers embrace and talk about future plans, parked on a hill overlooking their town, momentarily lost in the dreams and imagination of youth. The radio’s voice poisons the atmosphere with its noxious newscast, declaring the elevated tensions between world powers. The ubiquitous newscaster haunts the film, a droning soliloquy easily ignored until reality begins to intrude upon their lives. Soon, violent protests and boldfaced headlines lead to heightened awareness, the possibility of war impossible to ignore.

The narrative follows the couple and their families, representing disparate social classes impregnated with fear, showing that all lives are tied together by the thread of human existence. The cinematography utilizes many close-ups and establishing shots in full frame compositions, but when the carnage begins each frame screams with an abundance of suffering, every inch filled with the corpses of the atomic age.

The modern world descends back to medieval times under a blanket of irradiated snow, children of this new age toiling to survive, knowledge replaced by animal instincts. The young mother has survived the holocaust and ten years later ends her suffering in a dilapidated barn, her death an ironic contrast to the birth of an impotent savior two thousand years before. Her daughter struggles ever onward never knowing hope or charity, and the film ends, like Munch’s existential masterpiece, with a silent scream. 

Final Grade: (A)

HANGOVER SQUARE (John Brahm, 1945, USA)

 

Musician George Harvey Bone lingers amid the 19th century London streets like a bad hangover, suffering a ghost of violent memories that haunt his conscience. The film opens with an excellent shot as the camera races from street level to a second story building and, in Hitchcock-like fashion, through the window glass to the scene of a grisly murder. The protagonist is clearly revealed as he escapes the conflagration in a fugue, seemingly in a drunken state as he stumbles through the midnight streets. We quickly learn that George Bones is the murderer, but he suffers from blackouts, an undiagnosed schizophrenic disorder. He even turns himself in to the police with what he believes to be the murder weapon, but he is soon released for lack of evidence. 

Director John Brahm breaks with traditional formula and doesn't create a whodunit’…he paints a lonely portrait of an artist who has unknowingly committed these heinous acts, a pianist whose tenuous connection to the world is through music: even his beautiful concerto cannot calm the savage beast within his own broken mind. Laird Cregar as George Bones is politely genuine in his performance and domination by Netta, a raven-haired femme fatale, whose love he shall feel nevermore. He spurns the love of his life for the momentary tempest of this affair and sacrifices his talent and reputation for inane “pop songs” to assuage Netta’s ravenous hunger for fortune. His fugues are provoked by harsh discordant sounds, like the clatter of metal pipes crashing into the street, and he acts upon some primal impulse that becomes a dull ache in the base of his skull. 

The marvelous Bernard Herrmann music flits from pop standard to dark brooding piano score; the diegetic music creates visual frisson with the events as they unfold on-screen. George finally kills Netta and disposes of her body atop a bonfire, and its destructive touch eventually becomes a Pyrrhic victory as his final concerto is swallowed by a Hellish inferno. 

Final Grade: (B)

PEEPING TOM (Michael Powell, 1960, UK)

Mark is subsumed by his monochrome pathology as his bright eyes becomes grim lenses, the convolutions of his confused brain tangled celluloid that captures the dying of the light as focus is pulled towards infinite darkness. He is a damaged child in a man’s body, victim of his father’s cruel psychological experiments to understand fear by causing it, to extract this noxious ether from Mark which traps the boy forever in this flammable element. 

Suffering from Scopophilia, Mark is a photographer by hobby and 1st Assistant Camera by profession: he sees the world only through an objective lens and experiences relationships through the purring revolutions of a projector. He is distanced from reality by a morally reduced aperture, and murders women while filming them, which yields his zealous sadistic pleasure…but the light always fades too quickly. Director Michael Powell has ingeniously crafted a vicious thriller whose elements precede both Hitchcock’s PSYCHO and Antonioni’s BLOWUP. 

Masterfully written by subverting cultural mores, the narrative concerns the very act of filmmaking…and film viewing: a subtle condemnation of the audience as participant in voyeuristic pleasure. Powell’s expert editing and mise-en-scene reveals Mark’s interior dialogue without the need for exposition: his ghostly shadow cast surreally upon his blank screen, his eyes seen through the spokes of a film reel, or the mimicry of his 24/fps reality all convey his deepening madness in a more terrifying way than the grisly murders. 

Carl Boehm’s portrayal of Mark Lewis is too shy and backwards, a man whose humanity is isolated beyond a fully compassionate relationship with the audience: he is no cruel monster but lost in his own Idios Cosmos. Though a victim of childhood trauma like Norman Bates, there is nothing very likable about Mark Lewis and it’s difficult to believe in his minor romantic interest. Marks’ nightmares haunt him in black and white and this becomes his existence, while the world of color becomes a violent fantasy. 

Final Grade: (B) 

NIGHT OF THE EAGLE (Sidney Hayers, 1962, UK)

 

Norman Taylor must face his disbeliefs and intellectual limitations, his home a volatile house of tarot cards, summoning his charm to conjure wife. Director Sidney Hayers casts a cinematic spell of witchcraft and trickery by utilizing tight framing and solid compositions often dominated by looming statues, creating a sense of impending doom in a rational world. Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont adapt the classic Fritz Leiber novel into a believable domestic melodrama amid the politics of an English College. 

Norman is a young and successful professor, well-liked by his students and colleagues. He teaches the psychology of superstition, that it's the believer who powers the supernatural with post hoc fallacies and wishful thinking, not the ability to control reality with secret ceremonies and trinkets. But his wife Tansy believes that her charms guard Norman against the sinister urges of the faculty wives. Like the protagonist of Matheson's HELL HOUSE, Norman cannot accept the possibility of magic superseding science and it could drive him to madness. What makes the story so intriguing is that each encounter has a potential rational explanation, either hypnosis or self-fulfilling prophecy. When Norman destroys his wife's protective charms and bad things begin to happen, he must race against time to save her from the evil clutches of a crippled witch...or from her own crippled beliefs. 

The dénouement brings poetic justice to the vengeful and plotting antagonist: the eagle finally makes its landing. 

Final Grade: (B+)