30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 8: EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977)

It's easy to imagine a potential sequel to The Exorcist taking the route of, say, Halloween II or countless manufactured sequels to successful horror films-turned-franchises.  Usually when a sequel is conceived, the producers demand more of the same: if it worked the first time, do it again.

The most comforting thing about Exorcist II: The Heretic is that it is not that.  After talks between the studio, writer William Peter Blatty, and director William Friedkin hit a stalemate, the studio brought in John Boorman to take the reins.  Boorman might have seemed like the natural choice, since his handling of brutal, realistic horror in Deliverance was not far off from Friedkin's approach to the first film.

Deliverance was so good that it must have been easy to ignore that Boorman at that point had also made Zardoz, the sublimely wacky dystopian sci-fi film in which a be-speedo'd Sean Connery drove a giant floating head.  That, unfortunately, appears to have been the mode Boorman was in when making Exorcist II.  It's a mess of overwrought symbolism and psychological mumbo-jumbo, ditching the grounded terror of the original for a loop-de-loop through Catholicland.  It's something.  It's not a good film, but it certainly is something.

We begin in a distant jungly part of South America, where Fr. Philip Lamont (Richard Burton) is performing an exorcism that doesn't go so well.  Right away the movie approaches silliness: while in the original film exorcism was a rare occurrence, so much so that there appeared to be really only one exorcist in the Church, here they're the norm.  Exorcist II spends precious little time in the real world, and thus is never scary in any believable way.

Wait--I forgot.  The movie jumps the silly shark even before the first scene.  Right around the time the opening credits get to Ennio Morricone as composer, atmospheric music swells, drums kick in and we hear a woman doing her best hyena impression.  Oh well: with 510 credits, I guess you don't hit the bulls-eye at every one.

Lamont is informed by The Cardinal (Paul Henreid) that the Church is considering the posthumous excommunication of Fr. Merrin (Max von Sydow), the eponymous exorcist of the first film, under the ludicrous premise that since he died at the hands of a demon, he may have been a Satanist at the time of death.  Lamont is dispatched to New York to question Regan (Linda Blair), the formerly possessed little girl, about just what happened that fateful night.

Then it gets weird.  Since Regan can't remember anything about her possession, her psychiatrist Dr. Tuskin (Louise Fletcher) hooks her up to a "synchronizer," which acts as a sort of dual-hypnosis machine, in which both doctor and patient can experience what's going on in the patient's head.  Dr. Tuskin, Regan, and Fr. Lamont hook up to the synchronizer to see if they can replay the events that happened just before Fr. Merrin's death.

Ho boy.  You can see that the unbending reality of the first film is gone.  What follows is a film that, however bad, I've never seen before.  The synchronizer scene, silly as it is, is mesmerizing in its loopiness.  Lamont further investigates Merrin's past, notably flashbacks of one exorcism he performed in Africa, which paves the way for the aforementioned drum-and-hyena score.  James Earl Jones turns up as a now-grown boy who survived an exorcism, in a scene that must be seen to be believed.

Meanwhile, Regan either has a relapse of her possession, or she gains angelic power.  It's hard to tell which.  There's a scene in which she convinces a young autistic girl (Dana Plato--yep, Dana Plato) to speak for the first time, which deserves a special place in film history alongside Evel Knievel inspiring a disabled kid to drop his crutches.


She also exhibits psychic powers, like when she draws a picture of Lamont surrounded by fire, which predicts a hospital scene in which Lamont tries to put out a flaming cardboard box with a wooden crutch.

The climax attempts to recreate the bed-thumping Bible-spewing exorcism from the first film, but it seems out of place in Boorman's film, which seems to want to head in a different path.  Boorman dives headfirst into the mythology of the demonic possession, caring less about the real-world characters and more about the demon itself. (Its name, by the way, is Pazuzu.)  Regan is the least interesting character in her own movie.

As for Burton, all that Shakespearean training did nothing to prepare him for lines like "Your machine has proved scientifically that there's an ancient demon locked within her." The dialogue in William Goodhart's monumentally goofy screenplay would sound better uttered by Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee than by the likes of Burton, Fletcher, Henreid, Jones, or any of its parade of Oscar-winners and acclaimed actors (Ned Beatty has a small role as well).  Oddly, the actor who fares best is Kitty Winn, who played Sharon, the live-in from the first film, and returns here in a role what was semi-obviously meant to be filled by Ellen Burstyn.

Exorcist II goes to so many odd places that I almost want to recommend it.  Somehow Boorman managed to out-Zardoz Zardoz and make one of the downright wackiest films ever made.  It's a film with clear intelligence behind it, and a respectable auteur with grand ambitions.  It's also completely ridiculous.

**** out of ****

No, no.  Mustn't get carried away.  In the real world:

* 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 7: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 (2012)

The Paranormal Activity series is by now running on fumes, as none of the sequels has been able to replicate the raw terror of the first.  But they've still all been well-made, diverting throwaway shockers, and the new Paranormal Activity 4 is not a disappointment in that vein.  It sticks to the formula, and stakes some new ground to avoid becoming stale.  Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, who made the third film in the series as well as the clever documentary Catfish, try enough inventive stuff with the premise that it's still fun to watch.

The first film stuck with a first-person single-camera point of view; the second expanded it to multiple security cameras; the third went back to the 1980s and mined some interesting thrills from the limits of VHS technology.  This fourth entry takes us head-on into the 2010s and tells its story through Skype, webcams, smartphones, and any other equipment that helps piece together a modern-day panopticon.

15-year-old Alex (Kathryn Newton) lives with her feuding parents (Alexondra Lee and Stephen Dunham) and little brother Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp).  Her boyfriend Ben (Matt Shively) is ubiquitous in their household, and the two are up at all hours of the night live-chatting.  Then a young mother moves in across the street with her son Robbie (Brady Allen), and there appears to be something wrong with the boy.  He stalks their house, and strikes a strange friendship with Wyatt.  It appears that Robbie may have brought something malevolent with him to the neighborhood.  Scared, Alex and Ben rig every computer in the house to automatically record whatever the webcam sees.

Newton is a likable lead, and Shively is often very funny as her awkward love interest.  Their human story is believable and allows us to identify with them the requisite tension, though the film has a much lighter tone than, say, Sinister.  Joost and Schulman appropriately toy with points of view, delivering plenty of shocks and laughs.  Their biggest discovery of the new film is the use of Xbox Kinect, which, when viewed through a nightvision lens, displays a blanket of infrared beams which captures the players' movements in real time.  It also might capture certain activity which can't be seen in the light.

Other haunting moments don't particularly work, like a bathtub scene which goes pretty much where you expect, or the countless scenes where the ghost apparently gives up on the whole spooky boogeyman game, just picks a character up and drags him or her away.  The ghost could have done this right at the beginning, but then there would be no movie.

Though the film doesn't build to the kind of nerve-ratcheting conclusion that the first did, it still takes us to clever and surprising places as it goes along.  The ending manages to be the best-handled of the sequels so far, striking just the right chord before the inevitable blackout.

** 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 6: HOUSE OF THE DEAD: DIRECTOR'S CUT (2003)

Uwe Boll's House of the Dead remains the most incompetent film to get a major release.  Yes, even after House at the End of the Street.  It's not the worst movie ever made, nor is it the most unpleasant time I've ever had watching a movie.  It's just put together with alarmingly little skill or regard for anyone who might be trying to follow its basic continuity.  I wrote a review of the theatrical version in 2004:

Strange how bad House of the Dead is, for a major studio horror film. There have been worse films made by better filmmakers, but usually this kind of cinematic incompetence is reserved for ultra-low-budget straight-to-video territory. It’s based on a video game, which is warning sign number one. Its director, Uwe Boll, has come out and admitted that the movie is pretty bad, claiming, "You can’t make a good movie from a bad script."

Well, actually, yes, you can, but that’s a whole other story. Either way, the script is the least of this movie’s problems. Boll has no understanding of how a horror movie works, though he appears to have seen many. He knows the notes but not the music.

Boll has also claimed that the movie is very faithful to the video game. I believe the game’s plot is something like the plot of Resident Evil: a group of government agents are sent into a house that is overrun by zombies. The movie is about a bunch of doofus college kids who travel to an island for a rave, only to find it overrun by zombies. Maybe Boll was referring to the little clips from the video game that he inserted into the film. He also films a death by having the camera circle a character before fading to red. You know, Woody Allen says he owes his filmmaking style to Ingmar Bergman; I think it’s the same with Uwe Boll and “Quake II.”

Once the kids meet the zombies, things progress rather like a video game would. Zombies jump out of the darkness, the kids shoot them. The kids are conveniently provided with guns by a grizzled but friendly arms dealer/fisherman named Captain Kirk (Jürgen Prochnow). The forced “Star Trek” reference isn’t funny, but I did laugh when one character referred to him as “the U-boat captain.” His creepy first mate is played by another old reliable, Clint Howard, who strongly advises against traveling to the “Isla del Morte,” for so the island is named. “Morte!” he admonishes. “That’s Spanish for dead!” Actually, it’s Italian for dead, but why argue?

Now, there is a special place in my heart for zombies that lurch around and bite people. In this movie, they lurch, they run, they do long-jumps, they swim, and they spit acid. Or at least one of them does. They’re led by a scar-faced hooded zombie (David Palffy) who, I guess, started the whole zombie plague. When one character asks him why he wanted to become immortal, the answer is so obvious that I am amazed I didn’t think of it myself.

But the action is so misguided that it’s hard to maintain interest. There’s one extended fight sequence between humans and zombies that’s so jumpy that I don’t believe there was any plan for it at all. It looks like the director supplied insufficient footage for the editor, who had to fill in the gaps with odd 360-degree image rotations and scenes from the video game.

The actors do more or less a passable job with their excuses for characters. All attempts at development seem to have been added after the fact. One character doesn’t stop to mourn her best friend’s death until twenty minutes after it happens; by then, we’d already forgotten. Ona Grauer is impressive as the female lead; she may one day be able to headline an action film. Will Sanderson, as the goofy best friend, is actually pretty funny. And God help him, Prochnow does what he can as the old sea salt.

House of the Dead is a failure, but it’s such a bizarre failure that it pretty much merits a viewing anyway. It’s more than just your average video-game-turned movie. It is incompetent, but it’s more fun to watch than some actual good movies. It is, unintentionally, sillier than any zombie movie ever made, and that includes Return of the Living Dead II.

Now comes the Director's Cut, or as it's labeled on the DVD case, "Funny Version." Boll, who realizes that he made a bad film but hasn't yet conceded that it's at least partially his fault, has recut his disappointing zombie film as a wacky comedy.  At first glance this doesn't sound like a bad idea: Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily?, which was a redubbed Japanese spy film, is one of the most consistently hilarious films ever made.  But Boll seems to have no sense of humor.  Every gag he inserts into his film is either a juvenile joke or a puerile jab at someone else.  Yes, the writing was bad and some of the acting was bad.  But the film was also poorly directed, and Boll can't escape that.

The main motif seems to have been to intersperse the film with "Pop-up Video"-style commentary that pops up occasionally in dialogue balloons.  The quality of this humor reaches about this level:

When Jurgen Prochnow appears: "Hey, isn't that the guy from Das Boot?"

When characters make questionable horror movie decisions: "Do you buy this?"

During a zombie fight scene: "Anyone feel like dancing?"

When entering a spooky house: "OK, where is Igor hiding?"

A surprising number of commentary balloons are made up of potshots at the actors, who are doing the best they can under the circumstances.  Will Sanderson, oddly enough, seems to take most of the abuse, which is odd since he's not only pretty good in the movie, but by all accounts is a friend of the director.  With friends like these...

In addition to the commentary, Boll also inserts fart noises, rimshots after bad comic dialogue, and ADR with different dialogue to make the scenes "funny." One scene is dubbed over so it sounds like a zombie is ordering a cappuccino (ho, ho).  A "Man O Meter" occasionally appears when a character is emasculated.  There are also repeated outtakes in which a dubbed-in Boll abusively screams at his actors.  Is he kidding his image?  Maybe, but he kids a lot of his collaborators on the way there: the majority of his inserted gags are targeted at "bad acting" and "bad writing," but never "bad directing."

There's no shame in trying to kid your mistakes, but House of the Dead would have been best left on its own.  Although Boll has been called a modern-day Ed Wood, the comparison is unfair to Wood.  Wood at least cared about making films, and never tried to distance himself from his failures.  He truly loved his work.  Boll would rather throw everyone else under the bus and pretend he had nothing to do with it.

As bad as House of the Dead was, I'd infinitely recommend it over House of the Dead: Funny Version.  The original is at least a pure and honest disaster, and a whole lot funnier.

House of the Dead: ** out of ****
House of the Dead: Director's Cut: 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 5: SINISTER (2012)

Sinister is the scariest movie I've seen since the first Paranormal Activity.  It's the kind of movie that leaves you walking out of the theater shaking.  It's well-made and taut, and nervewrackingly tense all the way through, but I think what truly elevates it is that the ghosts are real.  Not real in the "Based on a true story" sense (which I can say with pride that this film is not), but in the sense that the movie believes in them, and the characters eventually do.  Unlike many of its type, there's no Scooby-Doo ending to turn everything on its head and make the whole thing not worth it.  It's a truly scary movie that doesn't condescend to its material.

It opens with a startling image that sets the tone for the entire movie.  Then we meet Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), a popular true crime writer who's chasing one last big story, and moves his family into a town where a brutal murder took place: a family was found dead, and one daughter has gone missing.  The local sheriff (Fred Dalton Thompson, well-cast) doesn't welcome his snooping.  What's more, Ellison doesn't tell his wife (Juliet Rylance) or children (Clare Foley and Michael Hall D'Addario) that they've just moved closer to the crime than they think.  While exploring the attic, Ellison finds a box full of old 8mm films, labeled "Home Movies," which gives him a new point of view on the murder he's investigating, and much more.

It isn't difficult to see that writer-director Scott Derrickson is doing a wicked play on the now-tried-and-true found footage formula.  But he does one better on the genre by using the found footage to punctuate the film rather than leaning on it too heavily.  The clips feature some of the most brutal sequences I've seen in any horror film, and Derrickson is sure to avoid fetishizing the violence in, say, a Human Centipede style.  The film doesn't enjoy the brutality.  As Ellison watches the films, he becomes infected by them; his moral disgust increasingly conflicts with his need to write a new book.  He finds a supernatural element in the films.  Strange things begin to happen in his house and to his children.  By the time his conscience comes around, it may be too late.  The movie reaches a terrifying conclusion that is not so much predictable as it is inevitable; it has been looming for the entire film, and in the end it confirms what we have feared all along.

Derrickson's films have always had a conservative bent, and this film is not without it.  His The Exorcism of Emily Rose was a dull, moronic advocation for intelligent design.  His Day the Earth Stood Still remake was a well-intentioned but hamfisted cautionary tale about stewardship of the earth.  In Sinister, which I love as much as I hated Emily Rose, there is a bit of a warning about the culture of voyeurism and the perils of profiting from someone else's misfortune.

Hawke plays Ellison as a desperate but decent man.  This character could have easily been played as the kind of jerk who would intentionally endanger his family to get a book deal.  But Hawke finds the right note; Ellison is merely trying to support his family by doing what he knows how to do, though the promise of fame and fortune isn't far from his thoughts.  He's the perfect horror movie protagonist: a good man who is naturally corruptible.  Though he makes some questionable decisions, we always know why he does what he does.  Because his situation is believable, the scenes of family drama lend humanity to the terror.  I've grown sick of horror movies that bore us with their characters' marriage troubles, but here the family sub-plot gives us a reason to care about the horrors that are waiting.  There's also a nice performance from James Ransone as a none-too-bright but pure-hearted deputy who's a big fan of Ellison's work, and unwittingly signs on as his sidekick.

The film captures just the right atmosphere.  Derrickson never overplays his hand, keeping in mind that there are more scares to be mined from telegraphing terror than in simply showing it.  He and cinematographer Chris Noll envelop Ellison in darkness; note the frequent setting of his home office, which he keeps closed off from his family and the outside world, so that it seems like night even when it's day.  Much of the reason the film works so well lies in Christopher Young's discordant score, which always reminds us that something--we may not be sure what--is not right.  The introduction of a Boogeyman, which might have seemed silly in a less classy film, actually works here, because of what the filmmakers show us and don't show us.

Sinister is a masterwork of fright.  It's fine-tuned to twist every nerve possible.  It's from one of the producers of Paranormal Activity, and deserves to stand alongside that film as a modern classic of the genre.  You may not want to see it alone.

**** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 4: THE EXORCIST (1973)

The reason that The Exorcist stands alone as the best exorcism movie made to date—not to mention the scariest movie of all time—is that it takes place in a world where exorcism doesn’t exist. Very few filmmakers are able to maintain the credible presentation of demonic possession in a normal, everyday world without seeming silly. Some have tried, most notably Scott Derrickson’s blithely ignorant The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which was about how we should all ignore science because a girl had a seizure.

Most movies about demons tend to come from a religious point of view; the genius of The Exorcist is that its director, William Friedkin, and writer, William Peter Blatty, take on the story from a secular point of view and are never quite converted. The tension builds as they present the possession and then gradually strip away any logical scientific explanation before leaving us with nowhere to go but the supernatural.

Regan (Linda Blair) is a happy adolescent girl, not without troubles. Her parents have recently divorced, and she’s just moved to Georgetown with her mom Chris (Ellen Burstyn), an actress. She finds a Ouija board in the attic, claims to be using it to speak to a friend named “Captain Howdy,” and soon she’s exhibiting strange and destructive behavior. When furniture starts to move across the house by itself, Chris begins to look into a spiritual option.

The movie proceeds with terrifying logic.  The idea of possession is not even an option at first; Regan is a lonely girl who's disconnected from her family and has no friends as a result of being dragged around the country by her mother, and is thus prone to psychological damage.  We witness as her behavior slowly ratchets up from merely eccentric to dangerous. The scenes at the hospital, where young Regan is subjected to every painful test she can go through, are horrifying in a way that is completely realistic. By the time we get to the exorcism, we completely accept it as the only reasonable thing to do.

Another way in which The Exorcist stands out among films of its type is that the demon inside Regan becomes a believable, chilling character in itself.  This is not "the devil," but a troublemaker who takes delight in messing with people on earth.  Mercedes McCambridge gives the demon a voice somewhere between that of a wise old man and a petulant child; it speaks with the knowledge of someone who's been causing this sort of mayhem for ages, but with an eerily playful tone.

Its conversations with Fr. Karras (Jason Miller), the troubled priest whom Chris calls in, are a chess game of two clever souls, though we get the sense that the demon might actually be holding all the cards.  The Church eventually sends in a professional exorcist, Fr. Merrin (Max von Sydow), who's performed one before.  Merrin knows how the demon works, but he is flawed too.

The climactic exorcism, which might have been supremely silly, is dreadfully logical and quietly tense.  We see that the demon is clearly affected by the exorcism, but could it be luring the priests into false security?  We never quite know what it's up to.  The conclusion, a triumph of real human compassion over Biblical mumbo-jumbo, is inevitable and crushing.

Perhaps the reason he movie is so effective is that Friedkin doesn't treat it as a horror film.  What's scary about it is not the pea-soup vomit or the moving furniture, or even the masturbating with a cross, but rather the capturing and endangerment of a little girl.  We are scared because Regan is scared, and Friedkin never lets us lose her presence.

**** out of ****

Note: The more I watch the film, the more I want to praise the 1973 release over the now-more-prominent 2000 reissue.  The new footage added to the film--featuring an extended hospital scene, a stairway conversation between Merrin and Karras, frequent flashes of imagery from Merrin's expedition to Iraq, and the famous spider-walk scene--adds nothing of note to the film and only throws Friedkin's carefully built tension off kilter.  The extra footage doesn't really represent Friedkin's cut, but rather Blatty's vision of the film, since these scenes are straight out of his novel; in fact, the extended final sequence, between two secondary characters, serves no purpose but to set up his sequel, "Legion" (which he filmed in 1990 as The Exorcist III).

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 3: THE POSSESSION (2012)

The Possession is not the only recent horror movie to concern itself with a disenfranchised father's effort to save his child from demonic possession; for a much better example of that, we only need to look as far back as Intruders, or Insidious.  It's not even the first movie to boast a Jewish exorcism: David Goyer's laughable The Unborn got there first.  The Possession really isn't anything more than an mediocre take on familiar horror themes, with little new to enrich them except some noteworthy performances.

It does, however, have a pretty creepy box. The “possession” of the title refers not only to the demonic takeover of a person’s body, but also to an object. In this case it’s an ominous wooden box with obscure Hebrew writing on it, found at the yard sale of a paraplegic old woman. It catches the attention of young Em (Natasha Calis), who begs her father Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to buy it for her. After they take it home, Em becomes obsessed with the box; she has conversations with it, and attacks anyone who tries to take it away from her. Then she finds a way to open it, and becomes a different person altogether.

It doesn't take long for Clyde to figure out that Em has been possessed by a dybbuk, an ancient Jewish demon.  The trick is convincing Em's skeptical mother Stephanie (Kyra Sedgwick), from whom he has recently separated.  Stephanie is one of those wet blankets who insists that Clyde feed their kids boring old vegetables instead of pizza, and harangues him about spending too much time at work rather than with the kids.  It doesn't help that Stephanie's been dating a stiff-shirt dentist named Brett (Grant Show) who makes Mitt Romney look like one of the Sugarhill Gang.  Stephanie sees what's been happening to Em and of course blames Clyde, because the script requires her to.

Sedgwick is a fine actress, but she fails at convincing us that Stephanie is as dumb as she's written to be. (If you guessed that toward the end she sees the error of her ways, they patch things up, and everyone is reunited as one big happy family, a gold Star of David for you.)  Show, however, hits just the right note as the perpetually smiling, gratingly bland Brett, and his comeuppance is one of the movie's few standout scenes.

Director Ole Bornedal, who's been a successful director of thrillers in his home country of Denmark but hasn't quite made a hit stateside (his only other American film of note was the lackluster Nightwatch, starring Ewan McGregor and Nick Nolte), knows how to fill the film with a looming sense of abandonment.  He mines an effective mood out of the setting of Clyde's new house--he's one of the first to move into a new development in a seemingly deserted area--which helps to enhance the stakes of Em's possession, which could leave Clyde shunned by his family and all alone.

Morgan gives a decent, sympathetic performance as Clyde, and we sense that his dedication to Em is genuine.  Calis is superb as the possessee, taking a cue from Linda Blair and never letting us forget that there is a little girl behind the demon voice.  The quiet early scenes of her possession are actually very chilling and suspenseful, especially one in which Clyde attempts to read the Torah to her, which is not met well by the dybbuk.

Other, less subtle scenes aren't so effective.  The locust motif, in which characters occasionally enter rooms to find them filled with bugs, is labored.  By the time Hasidic rapper Matisyahu comes in as a young rabbi charged with exorcising the spirit, the movie has run out of ideas, never minding that Matisyahu's skills as an actor are limited.  The requisite cast-thee-out exorcism has been seen and done, albeit rarely in Hebrew.  The climactic hospital chase is a yawner.

The Possession is a classy thriller, but is content to be merely average.

** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 2: HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET (2012)

To see a horror movie get a wide theatrical release is a rarity, and I have little doubt that House at the End of the Street would have been sent directly to DVD were it not for the fortunate presence of Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence is the rising star who got an Oscar nomination (and should have won) for her breakout role in Winter’s Bone, and made a splash earlier this year with The Hunger Games.

Since House at the End of the Street was filmed before the release of Winter’s Bone, Lawrence’s recent success must have been a boon for the film’s producers, who otherwise would have been stuck with an unreleasable film on their hands.

Unreleasable, you say? When a trash heap like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen makes hundreds of millions of dollars, certainly the standard bar is low enough for pretty much anything to find an audience. But no: even on the Michael Bay scale, House at the End of the Street is unacceptable. To call it hastily edited would be to assume that it was in fact edited. It is barely assembled. If it were a dinner entrée, I would send it back. It’s not finished yet.

The notion that anyone would find this film interesting to watch is insulting. It was supposedly directed by Mark Tonderai and written by David Loucka, from a story by Jonathan Mostow which, with some work put into it, could have been a worthwhile shocker. Mostow is the director of some very good action movies, like Breakdown and U-571, as well as the surprisingly good Terminator 3. According to the IMDb, Mostow was originally slated to direct the film when it went into development in 2003, from a script by Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly. Now there’s a movie I’d like to see. At least they would have put in some effort.

Elissa (Lawrence) moves to a far-off house in the woods with her mom (Elisabeth Shue) after a divorce. In pure horror movie fashion, they get a great deal on the house because it’s next door to the site of a grisly murder. Four years earlier, a 13-year-old brain-damaged girl killed both her parents in the middle of the night. They’ve been told their former neighbors’ house is empty, but soon lights begin to come on in the middle of the night, and the estranged son of the dead couple, Ryan (Max Thieriot), is occasionally seen skulking around.

Though trailers have portrayed the film as either a haunted house movie or a Last House on the Left-style fable of human depravity, the film spends so much time dwelling on Elissa’s high school life, formulaic family drama, and budding friendship with Ryan that we begin to wonder if it’s pulled a fast one and reeled us into a made-for-ABC Family movie. The first half is filled with incredibly little substance, mostly dedicated to some completely inconsequential sub-plots about Elissa’s dealings with some stereotype high school douchebags and involvement in a Battle of the Bands contest.

Elissa’s early interest in Ryan, meant to signify that she is a bastion of empathy and compassion (her mom constantly chides her for wanting to “save everyone”), is rendered just plain weird by Loucka’s clumsy screenplay. She insists on prodding him about his past and has one scene in which she wanders about his parents’ house inquiring about things like the invasive old woman from Deathtrap. If I were Ryan, I’d give her my best and politely ask that she go home.

As poorly written as the character is, Lawrence at least takes it seriously and is able to latch on to something authentic most of the time. Her budding courtship with Ryan is completely ridiculous—and even contains one of those scenes where he leads her into the woods, points to a tree, and says “See the face?”—but Lawrence is committed all the way. Thieriot, however, falters in a role that is unplayable. He’s good at playing misunderstood teenagers who are withholding something sinister, as in the underrated My Soul to Take. There’s simply nothing for him to work with here.

Elisabeth Shue does what she can with the role of Mom, a doctor who works at a singularly unconvincing hospital (a red brick building with “HOSPITAL” over the entrance). Mom is usually seen leaving a phone message telling Elissa she’s “working the late shift” and conveniently won’t be home for dinner, and pops up occasionally to offer seldom-obeyed warnings about Ryan. Gil Bellows, usually a reliable character-actor, struggles to find a single genuine note as a friendly local policeman who’s literally too dumb to live.

By the time the bloodshed starts—too late into the overlong 100-minute film—the movie has indulged so heavily in its teen-drama framing device that it rushes through the allegedly suspenseful scenes with no thrills. Though there are a few unpredictable twists in the plot, they’re sloppily presented and fail to build into any tension. As a result of the poor writing, Lawrence is stuck with a scene near the end in which she’s required to figure out every single one of the plot twists at once. Not the most enviable task for an actress.

House at the End of the Street is presented with a clear disregard for anyone who might watch it. It has a point A and a point Z, but the letters in between are garbled beyond comprehension. Characters appear and disappear at a whim; your guess is as good as mine as to what happens to Elissa’s new best friend. Whole sections of the film dedicated to Elissa’s musical talent go nowhere. The big climax is one of the sloppiest I’ve ever seen, right down to the trapped-in-the-dark-basement final moment, which is kind of like the climactic scene in The Silence of the Lambs after a lobotomy.

Yes, House at the End of the Street is dumb, but that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is that nobody cared to assemble it into recognizable shape. This movie is incomplete, and should not have been released until it was finished.

1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 1: INTRUDERS (2011)

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intruders is a rare ghost story that is consistently surprising without being condescending.  Its surprises are genuine because they come not from a desire to turn the entire story on its head and flummox the audience, but from an honest identification with its characters.  Its ghosts are not spirits of the dead who wish to jump out from behind things at us, but spirits of lingering trauma and sadness that have remained for years.

It also recognizes the power of creativity when dealing with monsters, whether spiritual or real.  Many of its characters are writers, and tell stories as a way to deal with personal trauma.  And at least one character begins to believe that her creations are bringing something devious to life.

Intruders interweaves two stories, set at different time periods, with the implication that they will coincide somehow.  8-year-old Juan (Izan Corchero), an avid writer, finds himself haunted by the spirit of Hollowface, a tall shadowy figure who preys on children and their parents.  His mother (Pilar Lopez de Ayala) doesn't know if Juan's fears are real, all in his head, or both.  She contacts a young priest (Daniel Bruhl) to help her.

In the concurrent story set some years later, young Mia (Ella Purnell) finds a folded up piece of paper in a tree.  Written on it is the story of Hollowface.  She reads it and begins to expand on it, submitting it for a creative writing project as her own work.  Before long, she and her parents (Clive Owen and Carice Van Houten) begin to notice ghostly occurrences at night.

Without revealing too many of the film's secrets, I'll say that never once does Intruders venture into the direction of the silly.  Fresnadillo and his writers, Nicolas Casariego and Jaime Marques, always keep the ghost business just a shade on this side of believable, and we always identify with the characters who experience the hauntings.  Like The Exorcist, it's firmly planted in the real world.  It also contains the rare exorcism which is performed not as a puke-splattering, Latin-spewing kinetic mess, but as a sly psychological trick played by a crafty priest.

Owen gives a dynamic performance as a sensitive, protective, misunderstood father, who very gradually becomes obsessed with Hollowface, to the point where we fear he may hurt his family.  He perfectly portrays undying conviction, even as it dawns on him that the rest of the world may think he's crazy.  Purnell is also very good as the little girl, and a cryptic side to her performance may not be quite decipherable until the final twist is revealed.  Lopez de Ayala and Corchero are fine as the haunted mother and daughter, but Bruhl walks away with their storyline as the determined, smarter-than-average young priest.

Intruders carefully tiptoes on the line between supernatural and real horrors, and it's to its credit that it never quite falls on either side.  There are ghosts in it, but they extend from the horrors that the mind creates.  Hollowface may or may not actually exist, but he is real to Juan, and that much we believe.

*** 1/2 out of ****