Five Across The Eyes

I believe in cutting indie filmmakers a bit of slack. When Michael Bay runs into a problem on Bad Boys 9, he has $200 million to throw at it. An independent guy has whatever credit is left on the card his brother loaned him. Five Across The Eyes is definitely trying to make a horror movie on a shoestring, and, for the most part, it succeeds.

Five young women going home after a football game take an ill-advised shortcut in east Tennessee (this is a similar setup to Bryan Smith’s great novel House of Blood, so a new Universal Rule: When driving through east Tennessee, stay on the goddamned interstate). The shortcut becomes a nightmare when they get lost, and are chased and tormented by an obviously deranged woman. That’s about it for plot outline, although it isn’t really inadequate for its purposes.

The movie was filmed on digital video near Morristown, Tennessee (also where The Evil Dead was filmed), and seems to have used mostly local talent, as the accents match the location. The girls are supposed to be 15 or 16 years old, and the actresses are too old for the parts, but that is par for the course. Although cast members have few if any professional credits, for the most part they do a competent job. (I did think the actress playing Isabelle was prone to bizarre facial expressions, but maybe she was supposed to have Tourette’s). All of the characters with the exception of Melanie are unremittingly dumb, but that may have been necessary to the story.

There are two central self-imposed rules by the people making the film. The first is the film occurs in real time, a tradition that goes back at least as far as Robert Wise’s classic The Set-Up. This works well, as the action should be compressed for this story. The second is that filming occurs from within the van in which the girls are riding. I understand that this was at least partly to build a sense of claustrophobia and feeling trapped in the van, but it doesn’t always work. There is no reason for it other than just being the director’s choice, since the camera POV moves around within the van, and there are a few sequences where the action moves outside the van and it is difficult to tell what the hell is going on. I wish they had been a little more lax about that rule.

This is another movie that I feel doesn’t have enough story to reach its 90 minute length, and to make it last, the characters commit one of the common horror movie errors that just drive me crazy. Their antagonist is one crazy woman with a shotgun, and on several occasions when she is briefly incapacitated, they refuse the opportunity to finish her off. I understand the girls may be a little delicate, but when you’ve been tortured by a psycho, it’s okay to give her an extra whack with a crowbar to make sure she stays down. They finally get past this at the end of the movie. There are also occasions when the psycho woman is attacking one of their friends, and the girls could take her out by ganging up on her, but instead wait their turn.

Despite all this, this is a pretty good little film. It effectively transmits the panic of the girls, and doesn’t make the mistake of trying to explain why the psycho is freaking out. The not knowing why you’re being targeted adds to the terror. Unless you’re bothered with watching a movie filmed with a sometimes shaky handheld camera, it is probably worth a rental.

As a trivial note, this is one of the rare films to have no male speaking parts (the only men in the cast play corpses). Also as trivia, the title Five Across The Eyes is slang for a slap (five fingers across the eyes, get it?), but the filmmakers try to needlessly justify the great title by having the girls call the section of Tennessee they are traveling through "The Eyes". Five girls traveling across The Eyes. It would have been easier to have the psycho scream "I'll give you five across the eyes!" at a crucial point and leave it at that.


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Ancient Images

Ramsey Campbell is one of the few writers who can be deservedly called Grand Masters of the genre. Stephen King, Richard Matheson, probably Peter Straub…it’s a short list. Despite, my admiration for him, there are several of his novels that I missed the first time around, either because it slipped by unnoticed (even at the height of the horror boom, Campbell seemed under publicized here) or they came out while I was taking a break from horror. Thus, I often have the pleasure of reading a “new old” Campbell novel. The latest of these is Ancient Images.

The premise of Ancient Images is one that grabbed me in particular. A film researcher discovers a lost horror film from the 30s, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi called Tower of Fear. (I really found myself wanting to see this imaginary movie, since Karloff and Lugosi are favorites of mine) A young film editor friend watches the researcher die in a strange manner before the film, which disappears, can be shown, and begins a quest to find it. The more she searches, the more strange events occur, until she finally reaches the village of Redfield, where she learns the movie was a little too close to the truth to be allowed to exist. In Redfield, she finds human sacrifice, and a supernatural attachment to the land. There is quite a bit of history of English film censorship along the way. The ending does seem slightly forced, but the book flows well. I’ve always thought Campbell’s work fell on the boundary between “quiet horror” and “splatterpunk” and there are elements of both here.

This book is one of Campbell’s best. I found it very reminiscent of Arthur Machen, which is a high compliment. There are also elements that recall the movie The Wicker Man (English version). Fortunately, nothing that brings to mind the remake of Wicker Man, so you don't have Nicholas Cage running around in a bear suit. It won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel in 1989, but is sadly out of print. Used copies are easy to come by, and I would suggest anyone who wants to read horror done well to check it out.


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There's A Reason It Starts with 'Twit'

Apparently, the Twitter widget in the sidebar has started asking for a username & password from anyone who visits this site. My apologies, that is as annoying as all hell. Just click "cancel" and it should be fine. if this problem doesn't clear up in a couple of days, I'll remove the widget. Apparently, the entire Twitter network is having trouble.

Skinned Alive

Jeffrey Shapiro is a sad lonely man. Living by himself in his mother’s house after her death, he yearns for female companionship. Despite being reasonably nice looking, with his own home and a good job (insurance), no woman will give him the time of day. He is reduced to hiring a succession of hookers for sex, but he still dreams of finding a girl and getting married. He doesn’t realize he’s getting more action from the hookers, and cheaper, to boot.

Pandora is a hooker. But not just any hooker. She’s also a cannibal, who has to eat (literally) someone once a day. This has to be bad for business, as it would be hell on repeat business, but she perseveres. Amazingly, none of her victims really seem to fight back. I think if someone started to tear my flesh off with their teeth, I would at least try to slap weakly at them, but maybe I’m just a manly man.

Anonymous stalker guy is a dude who used to hire hookers for his younger, mentally handicapped brother, until he hired Pandora, who chowed down on little brother. Now he’s after Pandora, to kill her, and engaging in a little torture and murder to find her.

Pandora and Jeffrey intersect when he hires her services. Surprisingly, she doesn’t eat him (that way), and they fall in love. He’s a little put off when he finds out she’s a cannibal, but hell, no woman’s perfect. He’s so sweet he even starts grabbing victims for her. It looks like they’re going to live happily ever after, until Anonymous Stalker Guy finally catches up with Pandora.

It’s not a bad film. Like a lot of modern movies, it has the feel of a 45 to 60 minute story padded to 90 minutes, and there are parts that are wretchedly slow. Scenes to establish that Jeffrey is a hopeless loser continue long after we’re convinced of the fact. Still, the central story is interesting, and the final plot twist is not the one everyone would expect (and the movie is smart enough to discuss the possibility of the obvious twist). If you’re in to cannibal movies, this would probably do it for you.

It does contain one exchange I thought was hilarious, right after Pandora demonstrates graphically her cannibalistic nature to Jeffrey:

Jeffrey: I wasn’t sure how to tell my family you’re not Jewish. I don’t know how I’ll explain this. You’re not Jewish, are you?

Pandora: I’m an abomination to God.

Jeffrey: You’re a Mormon?!

Well, it made me laugh.

Hostel Part II

I don’t know whether there is really a point to doing much of a review for Hostel II. If you are interested at all in seeing it, you probably watched the first one, and if you did, you know what is going to happen, since it is basically the same movie.

Hostel II starts right after the events of Hostel. We learn what happened to Jay Hernandez’ character from the first film in a somewhat unnecessary prologue, then begin to follow three American girls on holiday in Europe. That’s the major plot twist: first movie, three guys, second movie, three girls. I did find the movie worked well on one level. You know from the beginning the fate to which the girls are heading, so there is a palpable sense of dread that builds as the film progresses. Although the movie has gotten a lot of attention for the quantity of gore and torture, the creepiest scene to me was when the motel clerk sent the girls passport photos over the internet for an auction to see who would “buy” which girl. The coldness of this seemed closer to true horror than the actual torture scenes.

I like a lot about the controversial director of these films, Eli Roth. I think he works the camera well, handles dialogue with ease, and gets good performances out of his mostly unknown actors. One day, I hope to see him direct something with a little more plot.

The upshot is, if you liked Hostel, you’ll probably like Hostel II.

Horror Is (Un)Dead

A lot of the news, rumor and gossip on the internet in the last few weeks have concerned the death of horror fiction. The economy has tanked, big retailers like Borders and Barnes & Noble are rumored to be in trouble, small press publishers are struggling, and it is harder for authors to find paying markets. I don’t doubt that all of this is true, but I don’t think it is time to panic just yet. There are negative portents, but no need to jump out of the window.

The first problem I have with the Horror Is Dead (HID) proposition is that the horror genre exists in some sort of a binary universe, in which it is either deceased or alive and well. To my untrained eye, it seems to be more of a sine curve, rising and falling in cycles. The horror fiction field is certainly worse off than it was five years ago, but it is certainly better off than it was fifteen years ago. Five years ago it was a lot worse than twenty years ago, and so on. Here’s the universal rule: Things are never as bad as they seem at their worst, and they are never as good as they are at their best.

There is always a market for horror stories. Spooky tales have been around since pre-written language storytellers, and they will be around when all our reading is done through a chip implanted in our brain. It’s hard to imagine someone won’t figure out how to use the desire to read horror to make a buck.

One of the biggest concerns is the health of the small press that has become the backbone of the horror publishing market. Imprints are closing their doors, going dormant, or trying to re-tool, which is undeniable. But at least part of this can be laid at the feet of the contraction of the “collector” market.

Like beanie babies, baseball cards and comic books before it, there was a surge (a much smaller surge) of sales tied to people buying horror with an eye toward using it as an investment. Purchase a limited edition, signed, re-marked, numbered or lettered book for a slightly inflated price, and watch it earn money as it sits sealed in mylar in your closet. I can’t count the number of times someone has said/written “my book collection is my 401(k)”. Not that real 401(k)s are doing that great, but I hope the people who invested this way don’t end up living under a bridge. The rush to purchaser books for their theoretical re-sale value was a fad, and all fad bubbles burst.

What you see today is a secondary market where the works of a few popular authors (Brian Keene and few others) still command high prices, but for most authors, you can purchase them on ebay or through Amazon at significantly lower than cover prices. I purchased a year’s subscription from the leading small press, Cemetery Dance. I love them to death (their ability to meet deadlines notwithstanding), but it amuses me that they refer to me and other subscribers as “collectors” in messages. This despite one of the selections from the club selling on ebay at under $10, with a $30 cover price. It would be nice if they would think of me as someone who loves well-written books published in a quality edition instead. Another rule: Books are for reading, not for sealing in a vault.

It’s hard for writers trying to make it today, but it’s always been hard. I doubt there has been a time since the end of the 80s boom when there has been ten horror authors who were making a good living off nothing but horror fiction. I hate that this is true, but it is the way the world is. If you are an author whose ambition is to be published in a bound-in-human-skin-limited-to-five-copies-$1250 edition, you’re probably out of luck. Unfortunately, if your ambition is to get rich writing books about werewolves, the odds are against you, too. But if your desire is to have your work read by an audience that appreciates it, I still believe you can make it, with talent and determination.

The preceding is, of course, just my opinion, and given my track record, no one will be able to remember what a vampire is in five years.

The Mad

The Mad is one of a wave of recent “zomb-edies” (Shaun of the Dead, Dead and Breakfast, Undead), zombie movies that are comedies. Judging by this movie, the shallow wave may have petered out.

Billy Zane (who is actually quite good in his role) plays a widowed doctor who is on vacation with his new girlfriend, his teenage daughter, and her boyfriend. The daughter is one of those walking advertisements for abortion, whining and complaining about everything. The group stops for the night in a rural community in upstate New York, where everyone talks in a deep Southern accent, something I didn’t know about New York State. Unbeknownst to them, the local cattle farmer has been using additives in his cow feed that turn all that eat the beef into zombies (it also brings the beef itself to life, resulting in a number of cow patty attacks on the luckless humans). Together with the cook at the diner and his stepdaughter, they go through the usual routine of trying to stay alive and put an end to the zombie epidemic.

The movie tries a little too hard to be funny. Instead of emphasizing the inherently humorous aspects of the zombie genre, a la Shaun of the Dead, the jokes here are forced. The movie becomes increasingly slapstick as it goes along. And (Spoiler Alert!) I was very disappointed the whiney daughter doesn’t get eaten. As I said, I thought the now-bald Billy Zane did a good job, he’s just lost in the shuffle.

The one thing I did find amusingly, which won’t mean much to most viewers, is when the four survivors have a debate as to whether the enemies they are facing are really zombies, and what constitutes a true zombie, whether the creature in question must be dead or alive, whether it has to be dead first, etc., etc. What makes this funny to me is having seen the exact same debate on horror message boards.

Webnerd note: When this review was originally posted elsewhere, it briefly became one of the top referred sites for anyone googling the phrase "teenage abortion". Re-read the second paragraph to figure out why. This is funny to me.