As Above, So Below (2014)

Well this fits nicely next to Verónica, because writer/director John Erick Dowdle also directed Quarantine, the American remake of [Rec]. It all ties in!

Maybe because it was actually filmed in the Paris catacombs, or that there are some genuine moments of "oh fuuuck", or that I was reminded that it follows Dante's Inferno... and maybe all three, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this the second time around.

This found footage flick follows a group as they break into the intensely claustrophobic catacombs that lie beneath Paris. They're searching, we're shown in annoying scenes of exposition/set-up, for a mysterious ancient stone and possibly treasure, too. Lead character Scarlett (Perdita Weeks) is a tomb-raider style daredevil daughter of some old bloke who discovered the secrets of alchemy. Or something. I dunno, it's not really that important.

On their underground adventures, Scarlett and her accumulated crew (including Ben Feldman, "Ginsberg" from Mad Men) find both the desired stone and loot, but in the process, they also encounter cults, violent apparitions of their past, and maybe even Satan himself.

Honestly, the plot is kind of secondary to what Dowdle is trying to achieve (down) here. 

Rather than do the decent thing of just losing their minds with fright after the first cave-in, the group continues on as they become repeatedly trapped and blocked in their passage through the catacombs; journeying deeper, further, squeezing through tiny tunnels and dropping down bottomless-looking pits.

For an atheist, I do still find religious/blasphemous-tinged horror pretty unnerving when done correctly (just ask Baskin) and so as the weary travellers realised they may be descending into Hell, I definitely found it an unnerving experience. The imposing darkness and impossibly labyrinthine routes they take don't help to un-jangle the nerves, either.

❝According to mythology, that's the inscription over the gates of hell.❞

 − Scarlett.

As the group thins, we learn more about what this system of caves really represent, and how the remaining individuals might escape. The aspect of the narrative with the mystical stone is absurd, but at least it allows for some more scares.

Two impressive set pieces have always stuck in my mind from this film, even when I initially wasn't convinced of its merits. The burning car deep underground, and the manhole cover scene at the film's end. For all the irritation I felt at Scarlett & Co. at times, the inventiveness and audacity to conceive of and execute both of these ideas is something I must tip my hat to. 

As Above, So Below is an effective, imaginatively claustrophobic nightmare punctuated by solid scares. It must have played brilliantly in a cinema environment.

Ignore the earnest jabbering at the beginning and stick with it, it's streaming on Netflix now.

Dead End (2003)

If you'd have told me this was an episode from the 1995-2002 run of The Outer Limits series I would have totally believed you. 

That's not meant in any way to disrespect Dead End - for one, I loved The Outer Limits! - but it's just that in its 1hr25min runtime it's so simple in premise and so restrained, almost coy in its gruesomeness, reminiscent of such TV-friendly horror back in the day. And it feels delightfully nineties, too, mainly due to daughter Marion's style (those highlights and that lilac palette!) and a passing mention of Marilyn Manson.

Alexandra Holden, Ray Wise as daughter and dad, Marion and Frank.

However, Dead End is indeed its own movie. Written and directed by French natives Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa, it's technically a French movie, even though it was filmed in the US, and all dialogue spoken is in English by a majority American cast.

The plot: It's Christmas Eve, and the Harringtons are driving to visit family when dad Frank (Ray Wise, always a delight to watch) decides to take a shortcut. What they encounter as a result is actually the opposite of a "dead end" in the literal sense, as for the rest of the movie they find themselves on a seemingly neverending road through a forest.

In frightening succession, horrible, urban legend-worthy things start to happen: they pick up a woman in white, standing dazed at the roadside clutching her baby; Marion's boyfriend Brad is seen being driven off in a hearse (hammering at the rear window, clearly still very much alive and terrified); son/brother/horny brat Richard meets a sticky end, and they pass a sign for a town that seems perpetually unreachable. The road never turns - cue some really lovely shots of endless trees and their little station wagon trucking along - and yet they keep coming back to landmarks from earlier on.

When the family begins to get picked off, some of the remaining members have a hard time holding it together, and it's these scenes above anything else that I found unsettling. Genre pillar Lin Shaye as the mother makes your skin crawl as she grapples with what's going on, reverting to a childlike insanity that is at once so horrible and very darkly funny (see: eating an entire pie, saying she's fine and then a quick cut to her puking in the background of shot).

The moments of the Harringtons just struggling, arguing and trying to remain calm are written brilliantly. Coming from a family not without its own dysfunction, I really enjoyed the dynamic of underlying love with a sheen of passive aggressive and irritated attitude. Just because you are all facing certain death together doesn't mean you're all suddenly going to get along!

I want to call this one "quirky" but I mean that in the best way. It's so odd at times but it all works together to make a solid, dark, entertaining film, right through to its "shock" ending - which also feels quite television script-y. Again, not a complaint! 

It's streaming on Shudder right now so check it out - and make sure to watch to the end of the credits.

P2 (2007).

You know what I wish? I wish P2 was as awesome as its poster suggests.

That wonderful, gritty, hard-boiled eighties-ness. There's absolutely none of that in the film itself.

With an opening sequence jump-scare which genuinely got me, being set in one location (a within-the-genre favourite thing) and a nice colour motif running through the movie, this certainly seemed like it should be a winner...?

Despite all this, there wasn't much of a kick to be gotten from P2. It suffers from poor characterisation and pacing and to be honest I lost count of the number of times I checked how much was left of the run time. Never a good sign!

Angela (Rachel Nichols) is a hard-working businesswoman. Before embarking on her drive home for the holidays, she stays late at the office and when she's finally done, finds her car won't start. Odd but seemingly harmless (wuh-oh) parking attendant Thomas (Wes Bentley, elevating himself from "creepy guy in American Beauty" to "creepy annoying guy in P2") tries to help. 

What Thomas does not offer.

She accepts but then decides to cut her losses and get a cab. Only, when the cab arrives and she tries to exit the building, she finds all the doors locked and the rest of security nowhere to be found. The cab drives off as she looks on helplessly. The lights go out and she's left to wander nervously through the garage. Suddenly Thomas appears behind, grabs and sedates her.

She wakes up to find herself chained to a chair in his office, sat at a Christmas dinner table and wearing a low cut, flimsy satin dress.

What follows... well, you can guess. A game of cat and mouse as Angela escapes and gets re-captured by Thomas, who becomes increasingly more batshit as the film rolls on.

One of my main problems with this film is Thomas, actually. He's not a good villain; he's derivative, manages to somehow be both hysterical and bland, and to add insult to injury he's portrayed as an Elvis fan!

As a huge fan of both the king and horror, I'd be okay with this if he were a decent psycho... but he's not. The scene where he watches Angela on the CCTV monitors whilst lip-synching to 'Blue Christmas' was cringeworthy where it should have been creepy - or at least funny. Just, no.

For a film with only really two characters in it, one has to wonder how they both ended up so depthless. As entertaining as it may be watching the transformation from prim office worker to this:

...we just don't spend enough time with Angela to get very attached. We're shown nothing of consequence to connect with or particularly like about her. It's hard to get too involved with the torment when you feel ambivalent toward the tormented, y'know? If she were a complete bitch at least we could find it in ourselves (some of us) to cheer for her fear. As it stands, however, it's all a bit "...Meh." As the finish line of the 98mins was in sight, I just wanted it over with and didn't care who had to die to make it happen - though I wish that poor rottweiler hadn't met such a gruesome end :'(

Still, there are a couple of moments of nice gore.

See how the red of the blood really "pops" out of the image, there? It does that throughout the entire film. A basic technique I am a sucker for.

 

So it's not an exploitation picture as the promo artwork promises. Instead, the pendulum swings the other way, toward style over substance.

 

I wouldn't go so far as to say the look of P2 saves it from mediocrity completely, but it certainly sugars this Christmas cookie a little bit.

Five Across The Eyes (2006).

Five high school girls get lost in the backwoods and are chased for the entirety of the film by a psychopathic killer (also female - here's a nice promo image of her).

Even though the DVD artwork hints at a higher budget, the moment I saw the Imagination Worldwide logo glowing on screen, I got flashbacks of The Hamiltons (review here) and knew exactly what was in store: not the worst movie ever but more than likely one which, a couple more drafts and edits down the line, could have been greatly improved upon.

To start with the good: the low budget look and feel does lend itself nicely to the more grisly moments. Watching someone getting their teeth bashed in on what looks like a home video is always going to have more impact.

Smaller scoped flicks like this are also prone to push the envelope with what type of atrocities are committed, and how. Five Across The Eyes has a rape by screwdriver in it, downplayed to the extent you almost miss it. You've got to respect that.

Now, the less good.

The running time of 95mins feels much longer and considering that the action in the movie amounts to watching these kids drive, cry, scream, get tortured, retaliate, repeat... a huge chunk of this should have been sheared off to make for a tighter, tauter story. This isn't rocket science and I don't know why it happens so bloody often.

By all means have much of the story take place in (and all of it shot from, apparently) the van, but realise that over an hour and a half of this is going to get a bit repetitive? Kill your babies in the edit people, c'mon!

There's also the fact that - and maybe I'm just speaking with my gender representation hard-on here - all of the characters are women, but nothing is ever really done with this. Yes okay, on the one hand that's cool, because why should it be an issue? Can't they just be characters in a narrative, women are people too, etc etc? And yet I still feel the tagline of this film should have been "An Opportunity Wasted".

I don't need something to write a thesis on, but a little more depth and a lot less screaming wouldn't have gone amiss.

There's a glint of something here, which makes it all the more frustrating. Although it may feel like it for the most part, not all characters are screamers. Within the group there is a spectrum of toughness and like the previously reviewed Eden Lake, as the ordeal becomes worse and more prolonged, the likelihood of vengeance wreaking from the good guys increases.

Indeed, a leveling shift in all of the girls at the end of the film means they've experienced enough to be able to fight back, setting upon their enemy like a pack of dogs.

And they really go to town on this bitch. Not stopping at beating her; they also repeatedly stab and... set her alight.

Intense! Yet the above doesn't happen until the final twenty minutes or so - AND another mistake is made of not ending with this bleak, cold sequence. Instead, everyone clambers back into the van, we're treated to more driving and a really lame joke before the credits finally roll.

The film feels like someone trying to pick up a ball but every time they get close to it, their big clumsy feet kick it away again.

"We've got a crazy on our hands!"

My first Final Girl Film Club attempt. I’ve tried to avoid car-related puns as much as possible. It was hard!

The DVD of The Car (1977) that I rented was very impatient for me to get watching. It started itself up without my say-so... Spooky eh? No? Okay then. So, just as a warning: the film itself doesn't get a whole lot spookier than that anecdote. This does not mean it isn't enjoyable, however!

As an opening sequence we have the first murder, in this town at least, that the vehicle commits. Two youthfully exuberant young cyclists are laughing and panting their way up a mountain road, when they have the misfortune to be caught in the orangey-red POV of the car in question. As the Jaws-esque "Duh duh DUH-DUH!" music builds… er, for quite some time... the car looms behind them menacingly. And soon enough, a pleasing smear of blood, a crumpled bike wheel and the triumphant honk of that damned car is all that is left of them.

This establishes what we are going to get over the next 96 minutes: the sometimes eerie, sometimes downright ridiculous plot of a huge black car menacing the population of a small Utah town. Prepare yourself for a lot of speeded up car footage.

James Brolin plays Wade Parent, a cop with two kids (Kim Richards I recognised from my Disney "thriller" days; Escape To Witch Mountain anyone?) and an incredibly annoying girlfriend. From the very first scene involving this woman, I was hoping to see her become a hood ornament at some point in the film.

Despite this poor choice of partner, Wade is cool. The evidence of this is thus: He has a great moustache, he likes gin, he has respect and admiration for his deceased cop father, he dotes on his daughters, he doesn't bother to wear a crash helmet on the motorbike he takes his children to school on - although does demand they both wear one. Cool!

After a confusing segment involving a French horn playing hitchhiker, where I was certain some kind of fatal "French horn or car horn?" confusion may take place (It didn't. What a random and completely wasteful use of a brass instrument), the demon car begins to cause so much bloody havoc that it drives formally on-the-wagon policemen to drink...

In case we haven't caught on to just how evil this car is yet, we have an old Native American lady witness one of the murders, and later explain that there is no driver in this car. Quite how she saw this with any certainty, as its windows were extremely heavily tinted and it was nighttime, is never fully explained. Still, we the viewer are now several shades more creeped out than before. What the hell is going on here, and how are they going to stop it?

Yelling won't help, stupid Wade's girlfriend! Nor will cussing in front of schoolchildren. You're just lucky there was a cemetery nearby in which you could all hide, when it drove through your band practice.
What with the ground being holy, the evil car cannot follow them, you see. And it is here the threat of the car kind of falls flat for a moment or two. Unable to enter the cemetery, it loiters around outside for a while, revving its engine threateningly and... doing donuts. I think I may have chuckled a little at this point. Finally, bored, frustrated and with no one to play with, the car speeds off, leaving the kiddies safe and Wade's daughters finally accepting of his girlfriend, aww. Must have been all that cussing.

Next comes the winner of the "You've just sealed your fate with that line, you idiot" award. An expendable cop - for a small sleepy town, their police department is huge - leads the possessed vehicle up a mountain... do you see where this is going? Oh yes. Shortly after cheerily radioing back to the guys with: "No way down but straight down!" he's, yes you guessed it, toppled over the edge in his squad car. This sequence, and others that follow it, illustrate the common theory that the very moment a car falls anywhere, or is touched in an aggressive way, it immediately explodes. I've played Xbox games with more robust cars than the ones in this flick.

Before the climax, Wade manages to get up close with the car. What starts out as sinister, in that no bullets seem to mark or harm the thing at all (Wade: "Two rounds in the tyres. One straight into the windshield. Not a scratch on him..."), soon becomes a little chucklesome again. As Wade is peering at it wondering what to do, the car pops open one of its doors. The cop walks quietly over, and he and the viewer get a teasing glimpse into the interior of the vehicle. At this point things are still tense as we strain to see if the drivers seat really is empty. Then, the door opens fully and quickly, pushing Wade over into a ditch. So the car basically shoves him over into the dirt, like a bully in the playground. He then passes out and wakes up in the hospital.

Understandably, Wade has had it with this shit. It's a little embarrassing for a town cop with an impressive moustache to get hospitalised by a push from a car door, so he starts planning a way to destroy this hunk of murderous metal. Although, not before the car catches up with his girlfriend at home! In one glorious moment of car meets annoying character's face, I rejoiced.

The climax then: in an overly complicated plan I didn't entirely follow, the remaining cops and the town wife-beater (no, really, they bring him out of jail to help them!) rig a batch of dynamite in a nearby canyon and lead the car to it. In the emerging flames and smoke of the – this time justifiably – exploded car, an hilarious representation of the evil spirit inside the vehicle is shown.

The car is no more. OR IS IT?! You decide if the pre and post credit honking hints at an eternal evil... or just an over enthusiastic use of the same sound clip.

This film was definitely watchable, despite my initial reservations. Moments of it were genuinely creepy; with the car lurking and silently emerging from the shadows, and the "open pipes" revving of the engine was threatening purely because it was such a loud, intense noise.

Depending on your mood, the fact that we are told the car is without a driver adds another level of menace or absurdity to the proceedings. It's either a case of "OMG no driver? *shudder*" or "No driver? Okay you've lost me, I'm out."

Hey, I like lists. Have one of the few aspects which prevented me from getting really into this flick:

• The segments of speeded up footage - was it really necessary to do that?

• Dropping the car POV shots after the first third of the film. I know there was only so much that could be done with such a thing, but I liked them.


• The sky-continuity during the climax. Is it night, sunrise, or daytime? Not a hard question!

It was a fun movie though, and I'm glad I made time to watch it. I'm thinking of making the laughable/scary "Honk… honkhonkHONNNK!" sound my new text alert noise...