Reviews

There are some movies, "Highlander 2" comes to mind, that are so bad you would seriously consider having your leg amputated in the wilderness without anesthetic before you would consider viewing them again. The mere act of watching becomes a trial, and one is genuinely afraid, not due to any efforts of the filmmakers, but for one's own life and sanity, pushed to the limits by the sheer awfulness of the production. The best thing I can say about AVPR, as we are now inanely forced to call it, is that it is not "quite" one of those movies. In some ways I wish it was; then at least it would be memorable.

I knew going in it would be bad, and that it would probably be yet another nail in the coffin of my favorite scifi franchise ("Alien" in my case, though I do enjoy the "Predator" films). I had seen the "redband" trailer, and stared in horror at its frenetic menagerie of 80s teen slasher clichés; I even watched the "exclusive" online clip of the film's first five minutes, and hoped that they had been edited down from a better-paced original (as it turned out, they had not). But even so, I gave the movie a shot. Why? I'm not sure. Perhaps because if a beloved artifice that one has admired for years is to be systematically dismantled and thrown on the trash heap, one should be there to watch it burn. At least, I thought, with my expectations this low, this movie's anonymous directors would have to try very hard to undercut them.

They did. I mean really, they must have tried hard. It takes some kind of effort to take two of the most durable mythologies in modern scifi and make them a backdrop to a pizza guy's coming of age. Seriously. That is the only discernible story-arc in this entire film. Truth be told I could forgive even that if the characters hadn't came pre-assembled right out of the teen movie stock barrel. Instead this film spends 40 minutes trying to make us care whether Smarmy Teen gets it off with Hot Blonde before Blond Bully Ex-Boyfriend finds out. Thank God he has Troubled Ex-Con Brother (who trumps in along with his buddy, Nice Cop) to help him out once the aliens (who arrive courtesy of "disturbing" evisceration of Happy Hunting Dad and his son, Curious Preteen) start to take out the population (such as Mumbling Bum Who No One Will Ever Believe and Stupid Cop Who Keeps Looking In The Dark After Everyone Else Has Left). They soon meet up with Screaming Bereft Mother and Military Chick, who saves her daughter Cute Little Girl after her husband Wussy New Man is vivisected in line with tradition.

Honestly, with this zoo of automated plot-bots to manage, how do the aliens and the predators (actually a Predator) get a look in? Well in truth, they don't. Very little time is spent developing either character (and let's face it, since neither character actually talks, that isn't surprising) and any tension built up between them is quickly dissipated as the film returns to the interminable "I Know What You Did Last Summer" slasher plot.

While many others on this page have done so, it's hard for me to criticize the flat pacing, the indiscernible closeup action sequences, the dark murky lighting and the nauseating jump-cuts, since these diseases appear to afflict every action film made today. Some have also argued this film destroyed its franchise(s). I disagree. Both franchises are strong enough and durable enough to survive even this. No, the cardinal sin committed by "AVPR" is that it is simply NOT SCARY. How could anyone forget that one vital component? Yes, it is gory, and yes, it has some elaborate death scenes, but none of them were particularly scary or even disturbing (the one scene that seems to have freaked everyone out, the "pregnant mothers" scene, was done better in the "Dawn of the Dead" remake). When people remember the original "Alien", doubtless what comes to mind is John Hurt's iconic chestburster sequence. What people may forget is that that was the ONLY instance of in-your-face, on screen carnage in the entire movie. Every other (human) death either occurred offscreen, or barely on it. The horrors were left to our imaginations. Although many remember "Aliens" as a nonstop action thriller, it too was fairly restrained in its use of gore, and was all the more effective for it. It seems odd that two directors with such lessons in patience and economy as their inspiration chose instead to go for all out gratuity with no tension at all.

This film exists in two very different versions. The original British version, which is about three minutes longer, and an edited version released in the United States. The edit, which removed the original's ending, was, in my opinion, akin to castration. The final three minutes of this film are a shattering visual kenning that elevates "The Descent" from what would otherwise have been a very well-crafted but still fairly clichéd monsters-in-the-dark movie into a great horror film. It alone added at least one star to my rating. I understand that the original edit is now available on US DVD. If you live in the US and have never seen "The Descent" before, demand that you receive that version.

"The Descent" is not without flaws. The story is an anachronism that has existed in some form or other since Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" and was given its first modern reworking by such films as "Deliverance" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." A group of headstrong individuals make their way to a lonely, isolated place, and are gradually picked off one by one by a malevolent, relentless force. In this case, the headstrong individuals are an all-female group of adrenaline junkies led by Juno (played by Australian rock star Natalie Jackson Mendoza), a slim, acrobatic Lara Croft-wannabe with guts of steel and an ego of titanium, and Sarah, (Shauna MacDonald) a fragile, haunted woman still recovering from a senseless personal tragedy. The isolated place is that ultimate of isolated places: a cave system somewhere under the Appalachians (one of several oblique nods to "Deliverance"). The force that ultimately forms their nemesis is a hungry tribe of carnivorous, batlike anthropoids waiting for them in the depths.

The group, all in the name of helping Sarah forget her pain, decide to take a day spelunking. Things start to get fishy when Juno very deliberately leaves the map of the system in the truck. When, miles beneath the Earth, they are trapped by a cave in, the girls soon realise that Juno has led them into an unknown system, and that they have no idea how to get out. Then the shrieks begin. At this point, suspension of a great deal of disbelief is required: genuine cavers will doubtless cringe at the characters' basic lack of knowledge of their supposed calling, and evolutionary biologists might puzzle over the creatures' plausibility. But these are nitpicks. The reason this film works (and works well) is because director Neil Marshall (who made the excellent "Dog Soldiers"), for all the lunacy of the concept, plays it absolutely, totally straight. There is not a knowing wink to be seen or a pithy catchphrase to be heard. These women are not superheroes, nor are they screaming claw-fodder. They are genuine people acting as people would in impossible and increasingly insane situation. The performances are committed, the setting as realistic as possible (the caves were entirely created in a studio set, but people have posted on this film's message board asking which system it was filmed in) and every chance is taken to evoke every possible human phobia (this movie plays the tension, grinding exertion, and sickening claustrophobia of its environment so effectively that the monsters are almost unnecessary).

This film's first act plays like a tragic domestic drama, as the girls meet and trade subsurface animosities during a night round the fireplace. Its second act plays like a subterranean version of "Touching the Void", as friendships break down and anger rises in the face of incredible physical hardship. The final act evokes all the best examples of this genre, from Chainsaw to Alien, and even Robert Wise's The Haunting. And like I said, the final scene elevates this movie to a higher level, and indeed, echoes the terrifyingly uncertain ending of the first of its kind, "Ten Little Indians".

"The Others" is a phenomenal ghost story brilliantly told by master filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar, who, since winning an Oscar for "The Sea Inside" a few years back, seems to have vanished into a ghostly netherworld.

Nicole Kidman, in what I consider her only enjoyable performance, plays Grace, a mentally frayed young mother driven to the edge of hysteria by her singularly impossible situation. It is the late 1940s on the isle of Jersey, one of the few regions of England to suffer under Nazi occupation during the war. Her husband, who went away to fight, has not returned, and she's been told to give him up for dead. She finds herself in lone charge of her vast, dusty old manor after the help suddenly disappear without warning. This is doubly difficult because her two children are photoallergic; they cannot tolerate any light brighter than that of a candle, or they blister, seize up and eventually die. No curtains can be left undrawn; no doors can be left open. The children's universe is a house-sized black cocoon. This has meant that Grace has spent most of her life alone; bringing them up in what she herself describes as a "prison of darkness." Not surprisingly, she suffers from migraines and cannot stand even the slightest sound.

With this ingenious setup, Amenabar creates an ideal horror atmosphere: an old house lit only by candles, kept in a state of near silence. It also allows him to orchestrate a series of situations governed by one of the all-time great suspense concepts: "Whatever you do... don't do that!" Usually in a horror film the darkness is to be feared; in this case it is sanctuary. It is the light, advancing like a predator, that is to be fled.

The children, brilliantly played by remarkable young actors, are left pale and ghostly by their lifetime of confinement. Their perpetual isolation has left them sullen, resentful and lonely, and the daughter in particular is beginning to rebel. Grace, realising that her control over them is slipping, literally puts the fear of God into them through her strict religious instruction. But the daughter has read her Bible, and can give as good as she gets.

If Amenabar had merely played this scenario as was, without a supernatural element, it still could have evolved into a superior Gothic domestic drama. But he's too in love with the fantastic to leave Grace's world unturned. At the film's beginning, a trio of housekeepers straight out of Emily Bronte show up her door, claiming to be answering an ad for help they could not have known about. Suspicious but desperate, Grace agrees to take them in. It becomes increasingly obvious that they have a hidden agenda, though what that agenda is is unclear. For a time, things go well. And then the Others arrive.

The children notice them first; the son claims to have spoken to them. They laugh invisibly in the halls, play the piano when the doors are locked, and, most disturbingly, draw the curtains and unlock the doors, leading Grace to conclude they are engaged in a war against her and her children. Under siege from a force she cannot locate, Grace begins to step over the edge she'd been skirting for years, and fall finally into madness.

This is an intricate tale, brilliantly constructed. Not a single scene or line of dialogue is wasted. Indeed, from a simple storytelling angle I would say it is superior to "The Sixth Sense," to which it shares many similarities, including a shocking, brilliant twist ending. However, although there are moments of pure terror and an overarching theme of dread and despair in this story, "The Others" isn't quite as scary as Shyamalan's masterpiece, mainly because Amenabar perpetually pulls the rug out from under the audience's expectations, so that the Others, unlike the Dead People stalking poor benighted Cole Sear, remain a complete mystery until the film's conclusion. Are they ghosts? Human intruders? Some plot by the new "help" to drive Grace mad? Or simply all in Grace's increasingly distracted mind? As such it is often difficult to know whether one is supposed to be frightened or not, and for the most part this film takes on the air of an old-fashioned Gothic mystery, rather than a horror film. But when the plot finally unfolds completely, nearly taking Grace's sanity with it, the audience is treated to a sustained climax of genuine fear that leads to a mind-bending conclusion.

They're different. As they should be. Most ghost stories (most real ones at any rate, rather than the ones conjured by Hollywood to manipulate us) are not frightening. They can be unnerving, but mostly they are sad; their actors are trapped by their times, by the constraints placed on them and their unwillingness to accept them, and then, in the cruelest of ironies, forced to live beyond that time, their lives undone, their tasks unfinished.

The Devil's Backbone is about such a ghost. The movie charts the events, domestic and historical, that led to his entrapment and unrest. We learn the dark history of the orphanage in which he lived, we watch as that history implodes into a vicious domestic spiral that winds toward seemingly inevitable catastrophe, fired by the surrounding nightmare of war. Like all good ghost stories, this one has a twist ending but (spoiler) this one is more understated than those of other recent supernatural blockbusters, and its full impact could very well be missed at first viewing. What it ultimately reveals is that the "star" ghost of "The Devil's Backbone" is not the ghost whose story this movie tells.