STDVD: The New Daughter

Well, it stars Kevin Costner … but you’ve never heard of it. Must’ve missed it in the theatres, eh? No. It didn’t make it that far. This is one of the hallmark rules of Straight To DVD: if it stars a famous actor but never had a cinematic release. Welcome to The New Daughter.

Take equal parts Burnt Offerings, Orphan, The Blair Witch Project and The Ring, stir them up with some classic Costneristic acting and you have this modest horror offering, which I expected to find derivative, and did. But it also gave me a couple of solid spooks, kept me guessing and, in the end, made me forget that I had seen it all before.

Well, not all of it. This is a film about a recently divorced writer whose wife has run off with another man, leaving him with two kids. His son, Sam, worships him. His daughter, Louisa, hates him and blames him. So off they go, moving to a small town, into a big old country house with an burial mound in the back.

That’s the part that I liked: the mound. As the movie progresses, the mound takes on an interesting and chilling significance.

Costner is pretty good in this. He seems to have resigned himself to the fact that his glory days are over, and is making a movie he wants to make. And for good reason: the film is based on a short story by the amazing and eerie Irish mystery writer John Connolly, author of the Charlie Parker paranormal detective series. (Note: Read those books.)

Of course, there are endless shots of Costner’s ass, beginning with the opening; you don’t see his face for the first couple of minutes, just his faded Levis walking around. I had to wonder if he told the director to aim down. This is Spanish director Luis Bardejo’s first work, so he might have been swayed a bit, but if this film is any indication, Bardejo won’t be taking guff from aging Hollywood stars much longer.

But the real star here is Ivana Baquero, the little girl from Pan’s Labyrinth, who just shines, in a bleak, grim, grubby way, as the teenaged daughter, the “new daughter” of the title. She’s the scariest pipsqueak on the planet, if you ask me.

It isn’t very often that a horror movie can be this unoriginal and yet still work so well. And that makes it worth seeing.

Cutting The Human Centipede In Half

I watched this movie.

It took me a couple of days to work up the nerve, and let me remind you: I am a horror junkie. I read, watch and listen to scary things for fun on almost a daily basis. Yes, I am a professional science fiction talker-abouter. But horror is my main interest as far as the fictive arts go.

The Human Centipede: First Sequence crawled into the public eye a few months back when its trailer started making the rounds. So I don’t think I’m spoiling much if I describe the basic plot, which is laid out for you in full vivid detail in that preview clip. Three tourists are kidnapped, drugged and held captive by a crazed German surgeon who wants to create a human centipede. This guy spent his career separating conjoined twins; now he wants to go the other way.

In other words, this is the first movie ever made about people being kneecapped, then sewn together butt-to-lips so they can crawl around while sharing a gastric system.

Here’s my dilemma: I love horror. I love to be scared. And that never happens anymore. Modern horror is pretty tame; I’ve seen it all before, right? The most recent attempt to transform the genre, remakes of 70s and 80s classics, has fallen flat, and the attempt before that, torture porn, was not my cup of tea at all.

Maybe that’s why I was so hesitant about Human Centipede. I have a built-in fear of operations (having had many, many surgeries, plastic and otherwise). Medical horror scares me because it could actually happen. “You say you like horror,” I said to myself. “So watch something that actually scares you.”

After staring at the DVD case as it sat on my desk  for two days, I took the plunge and put the disc in.

This movie does not look cheap. It was, but it doesn’t look it. Director/writer Tom Six does an excellent job working within the confined space of an actual house, and scores with his casting choices. Dieter Laser is Dr. Heiter, and I can tell you there hasn’t been a better villain since Gary Cole in Office Space. Laser, who has the best name on the planet, is the surgeon, the creepy, evil, deranged genius, who has been trying to replicate his beloved three-dog but has been having trouble finding subjects … until two stupid American girls knock on his door after suffering a flat tire in the same Bavarian forest where the opening of Suspiria happened.

The first half of the film works really well, because Laser just rocks it. He welcomes the girls in and says “I don’t like … people.” Later, as shown in the trailer, he explains the operation in chilling detail. I was loving it. I loved the attempted escape scene, the dread of the three captives, the knowledge that they could not stop this over-the-top madman from creating his vision of a sewn-together chain of people crawling around his back yard.

Horror fans, you should probably watch this. It isn’t as much of a gross-out as you might have assumed, but there are some moments that will make you squirm. It is a surprisingly effective frightfest, and genuinely horrifying, because you really don’t know what to expect. I loved the first hour. The second? Problems.

Here’s where the movie went south for me.

• This will spoil a bit, so if you plan to see this and don’t want to know, go up there, click up top there on the previous article, and keep going until you hit the Black October series from last year. Those are horror reviews without spoilers.

Anyway, I decided around the halfway mark that this movie was working really well, because the actual surgery, the actual Human Centipede, was being held out as a threat, a final destination, a horrible possibility. Having seen the trailer, we know it’s going to happen, but I thought it would be the last few minutes. But it isn’t. It’s the second half of the movie.

It’s too much. It goes too far. Six removes the idea of suggestion and instead bombards us with images of torture, degradation and terror. It veers out of suspense territory and right into torture porn, with Dr. Heiter’s “I vant to be a surgical pioneer” justification for what he does suddenly reduced to “Vatch me drool while you poo.”

There are some good moments in the second half. The bond that builds between the three tourists as they’re forced to scuttle around, kneeless, stitched lips-to-sphincter, is handled surprisingly well. Laser’s slow mental and sexual deterioration, which is interrupted by the arrival of two cops (played by a couple of former Scorpions roadies)  looking for the owner of the car with the flat tire, is a fantastic performance. The cops, though, should have heightened the tension, but serve instead to draw things out unnecessarily, mostly because of bad mulletry.

The ending is excellent, and lives up to the tagline “100 percent medically accurate.” It’s just that middle sequence that went on too long, too stupidly. It’s better to let us imagine than to graphically tell us, and show us, what’s happening as the characters realize what “sharing a gastric system” really means.

• Note: This was the low-budget test run for Six’s planned masterpiece, which will apparently involve a much larger chain of people. Can’t wait.

Jack Ketchum’s Offspring

Offspring, the book, is Ketchum’s sequel to his brutal 1982 debut, Off Season. Like that first book, it’s the roaring, visceral tale of an inbred tribe of modern cannibals who have been living and hunting in the remote Maine woods since the mid-1850s, and how their hunger leads them to an isolated house filled with people who have no idea what’s out there.

Over the past few years, ModernCine has been bringing Ketchum’s bleak, bloody visions to life.

Until now, I’ve been able to see only one Ketchum film: 1997′s The Girl Next Door. Remember, I live in the last igloo on Icefloe Avenue, and there’s a storm on. My local Blockbuster doesn’t usually stock this stuff, and I owe $100 in late fees at the art-house rental place from the time I lost the DVD of Twitch of the Death Nerve. I think it fell out of my briefcase at a parent-teacher interview.

I was happy to find Offspring (2009) for rent at Blockbuster the other night. I’ve just watched it for the second time, this time with the commentary. Overall, I’m pleased with it. Ketchum wrote the screenplay, and stayed so close to his book that I saw scenes unfold the way I pictured them while first reading Offspring. The casting is right — and effective, considering the limited experience of most of the actors — and the presentation of the cannibals makes them frightening without falling into caricature. These are grunting cave-dwellers, all of whom were stolen as children and raised in the wild, and when you watch, you buy it. Even the very young children, who could have been played for giggles but are as terrifying as the dominant adults (The Woman, First Stolen and Second Stolen).

• Warning: There are some very disturbing scenes in this film, some very graphic violence and some terrifying ideas.

Offspring stars Art Hindle as George, the sheriff who first discovered the cannibals years before — and eradicated them (in Off Season, the events of which are quickly described in this film). Also in the mix are Pollyanna McIntosh as The Woman and Holter Graham as the current sheriff; he was the kid in Maximum Overdrive. McIntosh, in particular, is a rampaging icon of horror. Speaking of which, I have an autographed photo of Art Hindle from when he was on ENG.

As I’ve told you before, Jack Ketchum is a particular favourite of mine, which continues to surprise me. I don’t like gore, or splatter, or torture porn, but his books (and now films) are filled with such scenes. Not all of them, of course, but enough. What works for me is Ketchum’s ability to sum up a character in a few lines, to set a scene without telling you exactly what you’re seeing. That translates to this film, largely due to Ketchum’s involvement — he’s in the film, too, as a paramedic — but also because director Andrew van den Houten stuck close to the creator’s vision.

Great film? No. Great horror? Yeah. It’s short and tight and will surprise you, because there isn’t a cliche to be found. Everything is fresh and new and dark and disturbing, just like Ketchum’s books.

And I haven’t even mentioned The Cow.

• Note: I wondered why Offspring was made before Off Season, but it turns out someone else owns the rights to that first book. There are other films — learn more here — and other books, which you can read about here.

Black October 31: Halloween

Well, sure, it’s Halloween. It was always going to be Halloween. The whole point of this month of horror DVD reviews was building up to this moment. I plan things out, people.

Maybe you take John Carpenter’s 1978 classic film for granted, because you’ve seen it so many times. Maybe you’re pretty young, and you saw it on DVD for the first time last year, and you said “This is just like every other slasher movie.” You’d be wrong.

When Halloween was released, it was part of a fairly new genre of films. It isn’t the first slasher movie, despite what a lot of people think. Black Christmas, the seminal Canadian film, has more of a claim to that title than Halloween. What Halloween did do, though, was define the next 30 years of horror movies, and define it well. Every horror movie made since owes a debt to John Carpenter.

Plot: Laurie has to babysit on Halloween night. Meanwhile, a killer named Michael Myers is stalking her. And that’s it. That’s all. It’s perfect in its minimalism. The later sequels would try to attach more reason, more explanation, to the story, but it wasn’t necessary. Halloween works because it is brutal and honest and frightening as hell.

I came to this movie in a weird way: I read the book first. Not that this is based on any real novel; someone smuggled me the knockoff paperback adaptation when I was about 11, and because it had murders and a couple of sex scenes, I thought I’d struck bloody gold. I didn’t see the movie for a few more years, when Betamax came out, and boy, was I hooked. There’s a clarity to Halloween that sets it above and beyond all the other slasher films that followed it, and that’s what makes it work.

The sequels are crap. I’ll just come out and say that. Ted, Tony and Doug at the Horror Etc. podcast just spent three episodes dissecting the Halloween series beautifully; I recommend you listen to those shows. I agree with them completely: some things should be left alone, and later attempts to graft the supernatural onto the Halloween series were a mistake.

Rob Zombie remade the original film a couple of years ago, and made a terrible, terrible sequel called H2 this year. I didn’t mind Zombie’s first movie, but it didn’t come close to the original film. If you haven’t seen them, go ahead and skip them all. Just watch the original.

I’ve spent the last month watching and reviewing movies from my DVD’s horror shelf. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and I hope you’ve found at least one movie you didn’t know about. But if you aren’t a horror movie fan, you should at least watch Halloween. Especially tonight.

Update: Simply Syndicated’s Movies You Should See podcast takes a look at Halloween in its latest episode. Great minds think alike, and so do ours. Here it is.

Black October 30: Ghost Ship

I thought I’d seen this movie, but as I watched it just now, I realize I hadn’t. I think I was mixing it up with Virus, that movie with Jamie Lee Curtis, which I know I saw, but can’t remember. So Ghost Ship has been on my shelf all this time. I suppose this makes my random-access horror movie reviewing system worthwhile, but honestly, there are a couple of dozen other films I’d rather talk to you about, like Don’t Go In The Basement. But here we are with Ghost Ship.

It opens very strangely, with 60s Desilu-type titles and a swoony, dreamy tune. We realize we’re at sea, and it’s 1960 or so, and this is a luxury liner. What follows is one of the most gruesome scenes I’ve seen in a mainstream horror film, and it’s very, very well orchestrated.

The rest of the film? Not so much. This is a Hollywood attempt at blockbuster horror, so it has B-level actors, lots of action and stunt work, gloomy cinematography and, true to its time, incessant nu-metal music stings to make sure you know this is supposed to be scary.

The plot: A salvage crew learns of a luxury liner adrift in the Bering Sea, and heads north to find her and claim her. Once aboard, strange things begin to happen, visions appear, and it becomes clear that there is something on this boat that doesn’t want them to leave.

Gabriel Byrne heads the cast, and that gave me hope. Karl Urban’s in it, too. But so are Julianna Margulies and Ron Eldard, a couple, who were also on ER together and here play exactly the same characters: the tough woman and her mouthy subservient wanna-be boyfriend. And they don’t do it well. Margulies, who I have never thought of as a strong actress, mumbles her stupid dialogue while staring straight ahead at whoever’s in the scene with her. It’s bad, bad acting. And Eldard, who looks like a surfer here, falls back on his “Yo hey, I’m a dude” routine, which worked well on the short-lived American version of Men Behaving Badly, but is tiresome everywhere else.

A lot of money was spent on Ghost Ship, and it’s a slick-looking flick. Unfortunately, that isn’t enough to make it anything more than a quick popcorner. It barely even qualifies as a horror movie, in my book.

Black October 29: The Grudge

I liked The Grudge when I first saw it, in 2004. Coming off The Ring, I was in the mood for another good adaptation of a Japanese horror film — in this case, Ju-On. I loved Ju-On. I liked The Grudge.

Seeing it again now, years later, I wonder why.

Aside from a few spooky moments (mostly involving whiteface makeup and quick edits), this isn’t a very frightening film. An attempt is made to focus on the American characters’ fish-out-of-water situation in Tokyo, but it fails; there are so, so many Americans in this movie that it seems like it was filmed in a neighbourhood next to Chinatown in San Francisco.

It’s a good story. I’d even say it’s an excellent story. And this movie is very, very well constructed. It just doesn’t hold my attention. It tries hard, but you can actually see the moments when director Takashi Shimizu — imported from the Ju-On series to helm the American remake — decided to throw in a gross-out scene to amp up the action. These scenes don’t further the story and serve only to highlight the inadequacies of Sarah Michelle Gellar and the actor who plays her boyfriend, who was in Roswell and whose name escapes me.

The Grudge comes close, but fails, to scare, relying on scenes of mutilation rather than building suspense through mood. I don’t think I’ll be watching it again anytime soon.

If memory serves, I liked The Grudge 2 better, but I haven’t seen it in ages. Maybe I’ll do that soon. But to be honest, I’m glad this month of horror DVD reviews is wrapping up. I might watch The Sound of Music for a while to cleanse the palate.

Wait, it’s Jason Behr. I just remembered. Also, Ted Raimi is in this, which is always good. So there’s that.