Watching Pandorum has made me realize how anxiously i await Duncan Jones’ Moon (2009). How long has it been since we have had an interesting, grown-up and cerebral film about the emptiness and scariness of space without the film resorting to superfluous tricks and cheap thrills? Around 30 years since Outland (1981) and Alien (1979), 37 since Silent Running (1972) and Solaris (1972) and more than 40 since 2001 (1968), every effort since feels hesitant, disjointed and happy to compromise for the sake of reaching out to a wider audience. Event Horizon (1997) is perhaps one of the scariest films ever made but i remember the gore much more than i remember the psychological. Sunshine (2007) had a lot of potential but eventually disappointed by turning into ‘just another horror film’. And then there is Pitch Black, Red Planet, Dante 01, Mission to Farce, and countless others, films that range from the decent to the terribly bad and that use space as an excuse for superficial entertainment.

ATTENTION SPOILERS AHEAD
Pandorum reminds us of many such past efforts. On the positive side, its production design owes much to Alien with its sweaty, smoky, dark and claustrophobic corridors where what one does not see is more terrifying than what one does see. There is also, on a couple of occasions, a reasonable depiction of the madness that can ensue after too much time spent in cold-sleep (Pandorum is the name given to such a condition). Yet, we are very far from what Solaris showed us about madness in space and much closer to Event Horizon’s extrapolations. On a more negative side, the camera movements are obscenely fast and disorientating and i continue to wonder why an increasing number of directors and cinematographers endorse this type of film making. It always feels a bit like a cope-out to me, a method to avoid thinking harder about how to create tension or confusion or even rhythm. The result of combining such camera movements with lots of darkness, smoke and selected light sources is that one spends a large part of Pandorum seeing pretty much nothing. But the most disappointing aspect of the film for me were the mutants who looked straight out of I am Legend (2007) and The Descent (2005). First, for them to have evolved in such a manner in a few decades (at least i think it is a few decades - someone correct me if i am wrong as the time frame was not made exactly clear; i am assuming this is the time for Cam to age into Dennis plus a few additional years in cold sleep) makes absolutely no sense, especially not when you consider that they all seem to have a penchant for Mad Max fashion. And second, couldn’t the creators just come up with something a bit more original and plausible?

Pandorum feels to me a bit like Sunshine did. Lots of potential, a good premise that becomes weaker towards the end, and too much energy and focus spent on the wrong parts of the screenplay. If only there had been a bit less of a ‘i am going to eat your flesh’ angle and more time spent (with less crazy camera movements) on the symptoms and consequences of Pandorum in the humans, i would have liked this film a lot more.

Another film to be filed under the ever-popular Snow & Disturbing category. But in the case of Let the Right One In, the constant dreary and eerie atmosphere is not just a stylistic exercise applied to an already troubling story, but rather a simple reflection of certain aspects of everyday life in Scandinavia or in any other northern region of our planet. An entire winter in such as country as Sweden is not for everyone’s taste: only a few hours of sunlight per day, constant cold temperatures and few possibilities for social activities outside…unless you are a cold-blooded vampire, in which case it might in fact be just the perfect place…

But Let the Right One In is not just another vampire film. This is a very serious vampire film, not necessarily interested in scaring us as much as in showing the realities of what it might entail to be a vampire, especially if you are a 12 year old.  The film is a coming of age story with a provocative insight into the fragility of 12 year olds, an age at which various influences will decide the course of the years to come.

Minimalist, slow, disturbing, nicely shot. well acted, Let the Right One In is a stimulating and enjoyable film that does the vampire genre much justice.

The name M. Night Shyamalan is starting to sound very pretentious.

Although the name is a bit difficult to remember, people usually still manage to mumble something about M and Night followed by some uncomprehensible nonsense. But this confusion adds to its mysterious and intriguing aspect, as it did for the people of Eastwick who tried hard to remember the name Daryl Van Horne. The mystic increased as the director gained international fame with The 6th Sense (1999) and then with Unbreakable (2000). After these two films, M. Night Shyamalan could fully live up this his name by having it displayed in large print above the title of his films, with studio marketing people proudly displaying ‘a film by M. Night Shyamalan’ or ‘M. Night Shyamalan presents’ as if the director, after only less than a handful of films to his credit, could be compared to a Hitchcock or to other Hollywood directing legends.

Unfortunately, Shyamalan has failed to live up to the mystic of his name and to the hype of his reputation. While The 6th Sense was a good, not great, movie, Unbreakable started to show a few weaknesses while Signs (2002) clearly demonstrated that the director was either going through a really bad spell, or that, and this is more likely, the 6th Sense had been a fluke. His films since have proved the later and his most recent, The Happening, is just one more nail in the coffin of this so called new master of horror.

The Happening, about an unknown and never explained suicide-inducing toxin spreading across the North East of the US, has some good moments, especially in the first 30 minutes, and offers an interesting take on man vs nature. However, Shyamalan can not keep it up and proceeds to ruin the next 55 minutes by instering silly comic scenes whose purpose is a total mystery to me and by using so many cliches that one can not help but to feel that the director is trying very hard to scare us. The desire to scare overcomes to need to remain realistic with the result being that the viewer questions rather than feels. In addition, Mark Wahlberg, whom we know is capable of pulling some interesting performances as he did in The Departed (2006), feels totally lost and confused as a romantic scientist and the chemistry between him and Zooey Deschanel is equivalent to mixing bleach with vinegar.

A group of people in Hawaii recently decided to sue CERN over the potential dangers of the Large Hadron Collider Project. The project, located in Switzerland, is the largest scientific project ever undertaken by humanity and attempts to recreate the conditions of the early universe in a tunnel. This led to fears by a few skeptics that the project could potentially open up a black hole here on earth. While these fears have been dismissed by all scientists, they nonetheless help spark the imagination of a populace who is unfortunately more than willing to embrace worse case scenarios about science and about the future of our planet.

Such an implausible scenario is the foundation for Frank Darabont’s latest film (based on a story by Stephen King), The Mist, an old-fashioned monster flick that chills the spine and abounds with dark and pessimistic nihilism. Darabont, who is better known for directing sugar-coated fares such as The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999), shows us a very sinister side of his personality with this truly scary and grabbing film in which all kinds of monsters from another dimension are let loose on a quiet village in New England.

But The Mist is more than just a suburban Cloverfield (2008). It also takes a shot at religious fanatism, at the scientific and military establishments and at a right-wing conservative and small-minded America. In the tradition of many monster movies from the 50s, behind its layer of superficial but effective entertainment (if horror fulfills your entertainment needs that is) lies a social commentary that offers a reflection on the US’ post 9/11 malaise.

Planet Terror has over-indulgent geekiness written all over it. B-movies have always been made with a specific crowd in mind, the type that can easily look beyond the obvious cinematic limitations of the movie and instead can find in it an interesting form of entertainment, and in some cases, the epitome of coolness, whatever that may mean. With the passing of time, these movies also have the potential to attract additional viewers through the ‘nostalgia effect’. When watching such films, one is taken back to the 50s, 60s, or, as it relates to Planet Terror, to the 70s when the Grindhouse double bill developed its legions of followers. Personally, and obviously one can deduce from this that I am not an admirer of these Grindhouse films, I believe that it is the knowledge of going back to a specific point in time, to experience a piece of ‘culture’ from a certain decade and country, that makes some of these films watcheable, and, at times, enjoyable. Most of them were bad films, but they were not always made with the knowledge that they were bad, or if they were, time has taught us to look back on them with anthropological compassion and with some kind of tolerant understanding.
However, when Tarantino and Rodriguez had the bright idea to come up with a deliberately bad double feature called Grindhouse (Planet Terror and Death Proof, marketed separately in Europe), to honor the past, and in Tarantino’s words, to offer viewers something ‘fresh and original’, they either must have assumed that the entire world lives on the same geeky film planet as they do and would rush to the cinemas to see their films, or, as is most likely the case, they just decided that they wanted to please themselves and do something to pay homage to a form of cinema they both love. I can just picture the both of them sitting in some room, writing the script, and telling each other: ‘a machine gun instead of a leg? Right on!’, ‘let’s make the reel look old. Now that’s fresh’, ‘and then the head explodes…how cool is that?’
The problem is that none of this is in fact that fresh or original (unlike both director’s early work). It’s old. And it only works as new for about 15 minutes and then wears off quickly, leaving behind a profusion of mindless and silly gore, and, regrettably, not one iota of scariness…even worse: the film is not funny. What kind of a Zombie film does not make you either laugh or scream?
I said to a friend ‘it’s a bad movie’. To which he responded: ‘That’s the point’. But, no, I believe his answer is the one missing the point. The real point is: it’s a bad movie. The fact that it is an intentional bad movie does not turn it into a good movie. And let us not be deceived by an artsy-fartsy, Rodriguez/Tarantino-can-do-no-wrong-because-they-are-so-cool, you-either-get-it-or-you-don’t temptation to see something that isn’t there. Remove the names of the directors, and the appeal of the film drastically goes down.

Of course, the debate between B-movies lovers and bashers has been raging for decades and it will not be solved today. If Rodriguez and Tarantino were hoping to please the lovers, they probably succeeded. If, on the other hand, they were attempting to attract some of the skeptics, I believe they failed.

This British low budget mishmash of cyberpunk, horror and exploitation has become a bit of a cult classic in certain circles. The idea was apparently entirely stolen from a story called Shock! that appeared in the 80s in the comic book 2000AD, which is a bit of a shame since it takes away from one of the film’s main attributes: its originality (in spite of several commonalities with Terminator).
Nonetheless, equipped with a meagre budget of 100,000 dollars, Richard Stanley managed to create quite a dreadful, claustrophobic and apocalyptic atmosphere that effectively captured the spirit of decay, waste and techno-paranoia associated with Cyberpunk. The film also contains several musical references that many connoisseurs will enjoy.
Unfortunately, beyond the visual and musical aspects, and with the exception of a few cheap thrills and a couple of funny cheesy lines, the film has little to offer and feels quite amateurish and boring at times.

For a certain crowd only.

I will not argue: this is a very scary film. The tension builds up nicely and the last half hour can rival in intensity some of the best horror films. But the descent is unfortunately filled with many clichés, traditional plot devices and inconsistencies. We know immediately who will be the last woman standing, and we can only sigh when one of them announces that she didn’t take the maps and that no one before them has ever explored these caves. The Descent creates nothing new and does not take the genre to a new level. It simply does a good job within the existing boundaries of that genre.

Creepy at times, funny at others, The Tenant is hard film to pin down. It disturbs us a little, scares us occasionally, confuses us somewhat and even makes us laugh at times (perhaps, sadly, unintentionally). Such a combination is clearly not for everyone. And it is this combination that makes The Tenant a diluted and confused effort. Polanski’s own Repulsion is a far superior tale of madness and Rosemary’s Baby a great deal scarier.

In the tradition of The Happiness of the Katakuris, this film is a concoction of gore, suspense, comedy, action (but no singing)…Surreal, bizarre, engaging, quirky, it is not for everyone’s taste but should please all those craving for something different and exotic (and well put together).

I saw Dark Water as part of a Horror Film retrospective as the NFT. Mark Kermode was co-curator and introduced a few films, including Audition which i saw a few days before Dark Water. I found Dark Water to be a much better and scarier film than Audition. The claustrophobic cinematography and the constant dampness and sense of decay of the building in which the action takes place, provide the ideal stage for this grabbing and chilling ghost story about motherhood.

Tales of madness don’t come any better than this. Catherine Deneuve’s pure and flawless beauty offers the ideal canvas, the perfect opposing force, and thus, starting point, against which folly and psychosis can be depicted and exposed.

Supposedly ahead of its time due to the graphic nature of some of its content (the removal of a dead person’s face to be ‘grafted’ onto that of a living), this modern Frankenstein tale has its poetic moments but is far from captivating.

I wish i had seen Nakata’s film when it came out. Instead, i became the victim of hype and overblown expectations. Ring offers an interesting premise and quite an appealing mix of myths and supernatural ideas, all blended together in a somewhat scary film that seems remarkably appropriate for the modern age. The cinematography uses dark and bluish tones perfectly to create tension and the sparse dialogues reinforce the visual aspect of the film. However, they cannot hide a narrative and overall storyline that often feels forced and stitched up.

There appears to be a tendency out there to respect sick and twisted Asian films, because their appreciation carries a certain symbol of hippness and modern art connoisseur (the success of the Tartan Extreme DVD collection would seem to corroborate this). And i admit it, i love many of these films. But Battle Royale is not one of them. I was bored after the first 5 killings…

In 1951, Howard Hawks’ The Thing introduced audiences to horror science fiction. While the genre would prove quite popular with the public, it would also unfortunately be too often associated with cheap and amateurish B-movies.

British efforts, frequently more serious in intent than their American counterparts, provided a few solid entries into the genre, including The Quatermass Xperiment (55), Village of the Damned (60) and Unearthly Stranger (63).

But Ridley Scott’s Alien (79) marked the first time horror and science fiction were masterfully combined to create a realistic, serious, and truly scary film.

When the film came out in 1979, Ridley Scott was a relatively unknown director. With only the magnificently atmospheric film The Duelists (77) to his credit, Scott created The horror film in space, one whose premise and style continue to be an influence on many filmmakers, writers, production designers and audiences today.

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Unearthly Stranger (63) is a remarkable example of solid and intelligent science fiction, reminding us that low budget is not always synonymous with cheap and funny.

John Krish, whose past credits included episodes of The Avengers and The Saint, was fully aware of the limitations placed on him by a low budget, and decided to do what Val Guest did in The Day the Earth Caught Fire (61), that is, to make a sci-fi film that relies on rigorous direction, serious acting, and sharp and clever dialogues.

The result is one of the best British sci-fi films of the 60’s.

The film includes superb performances by John Neville, who continued to struggle as an actor until 1988 when Terry Gilliam cast him for the lead role in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (88), thereby revitalizing Neville’s career, and by Philip Stone who worked with Stanley Kubrick three times in a career that included mostly television.
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