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 ****

"MANOS": THE HANDS OF FATE (1966): One more visit to the Valley Lodge

Seeing as tickets have just gone on sale for the upcoming re-riff of "Manos": The Hands of Fate by Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy, I decided to dust off a review of "Manos" that I wrote a few years ago.



My intention in watching “Manos”: The Hands of Fate uncut, without any help from Joel Hodgson or the ‘bots or anyone, was to give a fair appraisal of a film that has so many times been kicked while it was down. Just recently Entertainment Weekly dubbed “Manos” the worst movie of all time. Surely, I figured, this cannot be true. A no-budget movie like “Manos” has a kind of charm to it that is absent from big-budget big-studio clunkers like, say, Corky Romano. There have to be at least five or ten movies that Hollywood has released this year that are worse. A movie like “Manos” has the deck stacked against it, which should invite our, or at least my, sympathy.

And it did, for a while. But in the end, I’m sorry to say that there’s not much good I can say about “Manos”: The Hands of Fate. It isn’t bad simply because it has no budget and no real talent behind the camera. It achieves badness the old-fashioned way: by being bad for its entire running time. It earns its badness.

Now, is “Manos” the worst movie ever made? Not really. It is not the most painful movie I’ve ever watched; I had much more trouble getting through Dr. T & the Women and An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. And there are good things about it. The opening few scenes, while they might seem to be contentless, are an appropriately eerie setup for what’s to come. The grainy look to the film, while purely unintentional, adds to the overall creepy tone. And I dig that oddball jazz score, man.

The story, with a little more effort, could be made workable. It’s the simple tale of a family—Mike (Harold P. Warren, who also wrote and directed) and Margaret (Diane Mahree), their daughter Debbie (Jackey Neyman), and their poodle Peppy—taking a vacation somewhere near El Paso, Texas. They get lost, and stumble upon an old house run by a creepy caretaker, Torgo (John Reynolds), who has some kind of handicap in his legs. It soon becomes apparent that Torgo is a member of an evil cult, led by the hibernating Master (Tom Neyman) and his many wives, who worship a devil-god called Manos.

With smarter writing, this could have been a nice, scary little homage to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit,” seeing as Mike and Margaret are two selfish oafs who pretty much deserve the hell they’re being put through. But the script is as ludicrous as they come, even incompetent at times. Perhaps the biggest glitch in the writing comes near the beginning, when the family arrives at Torgo’s house. Mike immediately declares that they’re spending the night there, and orders Torgo to fetch their bags from the trunk. Of course, Mike is set up as just the kind of jerk who would impose himself like that, but in this scene the movie doesn’t take a tone toward his attitude as he orders Torgo around like a bellboy. Only once, later on, do we get to see a fed-up reaction from Torgo, and it is hilarious.

There’s also a frustrating moment when Debbie goes missing, and Mike suggests she might have gone outside. “She couldn’t have gone outside. That door’s bolted!” Margaret exclaims. Mike asks Torgo if there’s another door; it’s in the kitchen, Torgo says. “That door’s bolted too!” he says, after checking. Then, not a minute later, Mike and Margaret are outside, looking. What happened there?

The sloppy editing doesn’t help matters. There are many scenes where the camera seems to just linger on its subject, long before and long after the action has obviously ended. My favorite is when Joyce Molleur, as the girl in the car at the beginning, fixes her hair and then says “Why won’t you guys leave us alone?” There are times when the movie is clearly put together out of order, such as when the Master arrives at his altar, then is immediately standing outside of Margaret’s window, then he’s at his altar again.

Other moments seem to have been written with no concept of how they would play out on film, like one where Torgo knocks Mike out and then ties him to a pole. With proper photography and editing, this should have taken only a few seconds to show, but Warren insists on showing every bit of it—Torgo knocking Mike out, carrying him over to a pole, taking off Mike’s belt and using it to tie him up—and it takes forever. Torgo, with his walking impediment, isn’t able to do this quickly, and it is to John Reynolds’ credit that he doesn’t get impatient; he takes just as long to do it as Torgo would.

It is Reynolds’s performance as Torgo that makes the film actually bearable for a while. Torgo is a technical failure as a monster; according to people involved with the film, he was supposed to be a satyr with horse’s legs, which accounts for why it looks like he just has humongous knees. But Reynolds actually holds our sympathy as the poor Torgo. He is something of a lecherous character—especially when it’s implied that he has molested several of the Master’s wives in their sleep—but we feel sorry for him.

But even Reynolds’ inspired performance can’t overcome the overall misogyny of the rest of the movie. I am not quick to give movies such labels, but Warren’s condescension to women is more than apparent. He goes for a cheap laugh by having the Master awaken his wives, and then cutting to a few moments later, when we see the wives doing nothing but bickering loudly, and the Master sitting there getting irritated. That’s fine, but a little while later the wives, after arguing about the same thing for what seems like hours, break out into a massive catfight. It’s hard to see what Warren is trying to accomplish here, other than the pure joy of watching women wrestle while bright jazzy music plays in the background. In what is supposed to be a disturbing horror film, here is something that wouldn’t be out of place in a Russ Meyer film.

Shortly afterward, we come to a scene where the Master’s oldest wife is tied up to be sacrificed for some reason, and the movie gets downright filthy. We are treated to a nice drawn-out scene where the Master angrily beats the woman, and I think sexually assaults her (the shots are not framed well enough that I could tell). In a movie that walks a fine line between real misogyny and silliness, this scene crosses the line. It’s at this scene, which was thankfully not included in the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” version of the film, that “Manos” stops being a fun bad movie and turns into a real bad movie.

I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised that there is a scene in “Manos” that’s too bad even for MST3K. But don’t be fooled by the film’s cheesiness, or how funny it appears to be on MST3K. MST3K’s Kevin Murphy has said himself that there is nothing funny about bad cinema, a statement which I have never really agreed with, but this time he is right. “Manos”: The Hands of Fate is a legitimately bad movie, and I will not be watching it without the help of Joel [or Mike] and the ‘bots again.

THE CINEMASOCHIST: Sucker Punch (2011)

The Cinemasochist takes a look at movies that have been notoriously rejected by the mass populace, and tells you if you might perchance be missing a classic. Or not. 



If The Artist really does fulfill its promise of bringing the silent picture back to the American cinema, Zack Snyder will be the first director I'll be eager to see make one.  Snyder is a master at telling a story with images.  His prologue and opening credits sequence for Watchmen were fascinating and set up everything we needed to know for the film, with very little dialogue.  The film became less compelling as the storytelling became hamfisted, but the first twenty minutes contains some of the most memorable film images in recent years.

The same can be said for Sucker Punch, which begins with a masterstroke of a prologue.  It tells a story in itself, completely free of dialogue, using only montage and images.  If it were released in the 1920s, it would be praised as an expressionist masterpiece.  This silent sequence proves that Snyder is a born silent film director.  The talkie film that follows, unfortunately, proves the same.

But still, what an opener.  We meet Babydoll (Emily Browning), a young girl who's just lost her mother.  Her wiley stepfather (Gerard Plunkett) is upset at not being included in the will, and after a series of unfortunate events he has Babydoll locked away in a mental institution.  At this early point in the film, Snyder has established character, status, and conflict as succinctly as the best directors of the silent era.

Once we get to the mental hospital, the movie goes off the rails and keeps chugging.  When Babydoll is committed, we learn that she's going to be lobotomized in five days.  She then retreats into a fantasy world in which the hospital is a high-class brothel where the female inmates dance and seduce rich people.  The psychiatrist (Carla Gugino) is the madam, the orderly (Oscar Isaac) is the pimp, and the fellow inmates (Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish, Jamie Chung, Vanessa Hudgens) are fellow prostitutes.  But that's not all: whenever Babydoll dances, she goes into a further sub-fantasy, where she and the girls dress as soldiers and fight dragons, under the command of a mysterious leader (Scott Glenn, aping David Carradine).

The '70s were rife with an exploitation subgenre known as the rape-revenge movie, in which formerly helpless girls took righteous revenge on the beastly men who attacked them, and the movie was generally just as interested in watching the poor girl get savaged as in depicting her rapists' retribution.

Sucker Punch is a step down from that: it's a rape-run-and-hide movie.  Though it's toned down to a PG-13 level, it's still morbidly fascinated with watching its team of girls get emotionally and physically abused by men, whether it be by the stepfather, the lecherous pimp, or a lobotomist (Jon Hamm, in a desperate cameo).  But rather than glorious bloody revenge, the characters' triumph is in retreating into their minds.

I have always had a problem with movies that find their victory in the magic of imagination.  Though one or two have done it right (Tarsem Singh's brilliant The Fall is an example), most are condescending and insulting (Marc Forster's insipid yet somehow Best Picture-nominated Finding Neverland being the most insidious culprit).  Sucker Punch is a few steps more tragic: the idea that any victim of abuse should find any sort of victory by retreating into fantasy is absurd and, when you think about it, extremely sexist.  Though it fancies itself a girl-power flick, what with its battle scenes of chicks decked out in army gear and kicking ass, Sucker Punch is firmly on the side of the attacker: when you're abused, the thing to do is deal with it yourself, in your own mind, without bothering anyone.

Even aside from that distressing implication, Sucker Punch is a story poorly told.  The fantasy-within-fantasy motif, which must have been modeled on Inception, might just as well have been ditched.  If the brothel scenes are predictable and dull, the battle scenes are completely devoid of any stakes or any connection to the story.  There are a lot of explosions, but what's being achieved is never quite clear.  Compare it to Inception, in which each level of reality has an effect on the other, and a bullet fired in one reality creates the stakes for the next.

The cast of girls is interchangeable.  They're a talented group of actors, especially Cornish, who starred as Fanny Brawne in the fine John Keats biopic Bright Star, and deserves better.  Browning, so good in the underrated ghost flick The Uninvited, is given little to do as the movie explodes around her.  The only actor allowed to make an impression is Isaac, who as the film's primary villain eats up the scenery and spits it out violently.  Jon Hamm, who doubles as the hospital's lobotomist and (in Jiminy Glick makeup) a rich customer at the brothel, must be on a quest to prove that he can cameo in everything.

It doesn't help that the film is plastered with wall-to-wall bad covers of classic rock songs.  The most egregious is Yoav's gutting of the Pixies' "Where is My Mind," though the eardrum-bursting rendition of "White Rabbit" that plays through one battle scene is formidable competition.  For a saving grace, Browning does a quite nice version of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" which plays over the prologue.  And as a nice touch, the movie prominently uses Bjork's "Army of Me," which makes for a great revenge anthem.

This is Snyder's first film based on an original script (which he wrote with Steve Shibuya).  He struggles with coming up with his own conceits; he's excelled mainly with finding ways to translate other works to the screen.  Building stories into images is his talent; here he comes up empty.  If the film had only consisted of the first ten minutes, it would have been a masterpiece.  As it is, Sucker Punch is a discouragement to abuse victims everywhere, disguised as a pointless, endless, loud mess.




* out of ****

Is it really that bad?: It's worse.

Pain level: Excepting the first ten minutes, high.