30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 4: UNFRIENDED (2015)

Unfriended may not be the scariest piece of first-person-shot candy corn out there, but it is, especially for a low-budget 82-minute Blum House entry, ingeniously constructed.  It uses a premise that's almost unworkable, taking place completely within one person's computer screen and telling its story in real time via Skype, iMessage, Facebook, Spotify, and all manner of variations on the millennial self-contained social network center.  Less ambitious movies tend either to fail to make this sort of thing interesting, or to cheat and take the point of view elsewhere.  Give Unfriended credit: it never strays from the computer screen, and it held my interest long enough that I never felt like checking Facebook myself.

The first sequence is remarkable in its simplicity: an unseen computer user idly wanders toward a LiveLeak (read: banned from YouTube) link called "Laura Barns Suicide." Then, like every good Wikipedia user, we click through to what is labeled as the video that caused her suicide.  It's aptly named "LAURA BARNS KILL URSELF." We see the first few seconds--footage of the titular Laura, very drunk, talking trash about someone at a party--before a boyfriend's Skype call butts in and we're forced to pause.

This shot sets the premise for the rest of the film, which we see from the point of view of a short-attention-spanned teenager named Blaire (Shelley Hennig).  The first-person storytelling is handled brilliantly as Blaire clicks back and forth among Skype conversations, instant messages, songs, websites, et cetera, which in the hands of director Leo Gabriadze never feels inauthentic.  Blaire is joined remotely by boyfriend Mitch (Moses Storm) as well as friends Adam (Will Peltz), Jess (Renee Olstead), Ken (Jacob Wysocki), and Val (Courtney Halverson), as well as a mysterious seventh person who somehow butts into their Skype conversation, won't hang up, and taunts them with otherworldly threats.

It isn't particularly scary--the characters are crudely drawn and the plot is ridiculous--but it's surprisingly a lot of fun. The actors wisely play the whole thing straight; any winking at the audience would ruin the movie entirely. Rather than take an ironic position themselves, the filmmakers let the kids' ironic detachment play into the story, as we occasionally see first-person user Blaire type something honest, pause to think about it, then delete it and type "LOL."

In the end it doesn't quite come together, as the manifestation of the ghost is just too silly and the characters are just too unlikable. But there's real skill at work here: the makers of Unfriended tried something risky, and it paid off. 

** 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 3: THE HARVEST (2013)

John McNaughton doesn't make films so often anymore, so any release of his is usually worth more than a cursory glance, especially since he's one of those directors like Alan Parker or James Mangold who refuse to be pigeonholed into one genre.  He started with possibly the most brutal serial killer film ever made (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), went on to make a wacky splatter comedy in which an alien occupies human bodies and makes their heads explode (The Borrower), then followed with a dark comedy (Mad Dog and Glory) and a twisty-turny noir thriller (Wild Things).  Other than some selected TV work, that's about it.

With The Harvest he returns to horror, but not the ruthless terror of Henry or the goofiness of The Borrower; rather, he shoots for a more sentimental, tragic horror.  It is a story about two monsters who have become monsters out of necessity.  It should be no surprise that one of them is played by Michael Shannon, who is able to exude a single-minded amoral determination and utter helplessness at the same time.

Shannon is Richard and Samantha Morton is his wife Katherine.  She is a doctor and he has quit his job to spend more time with their son Andy (Charlie Tahan), who is ailing of an unspecified but debilitating disease which renders him barely able to walk.  It's getting worse.

Meanwhile, Maryann (Natasha Calis, of Possession) moves in next door with her grandparents and swiftly befriends Andy.  Trouble is that his parents--mostly Katherine--are suspicious about letting anyone get too close to Andy, and it becomes apparent that they're hiding something.

The first half of the film is brilliant.  The relationship between the two kids is charming and believable.  Morton takes a cue from Bette Davis and plays Katherine as a woman who might seem irrational and shrewish, but is hiding a desperation.  Shannon is her complement, a man who is sincerely devoted to his son but sadly doubtful that his efforts will save him.  There's a great Hitchcock-like sequence in which Maryann tries to sneak Andy out for a game of catch, the ending of which is somehow both surprising and inevitable.

Once the entire plot is revealed, the movie loses its way, especially when Morton stops being the overprotective mother and becomes a typical psychopath.  The transition is not quite as seamless as it should be.  Even though the movie never becomes nihilistic, it leaves us wishing it had gone a more thoughtful route.  It may have made a more effective one-hour TV episode than a full-length movie, but it's still worth a look for its two likable leads, and for Shannon.

** 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 2: AREA 51 (2015)

I was really hoping Oren Peli wouldn't be a one-trick pony, but Area 51, the director's second feature after his explosive Paranormal Activity, is so similar to that previous film that it barely has any real reason for existence.  It's skillfully made and entertaining, but it hits too many of the same notes.

The basic premise is the same: overly curious people tread where they shouldn't, gravely overestimate their intelligence, and film themselves facing the consequences.  This time instead of a haunting, it's possible alien activity and government conspiracies.  When Reid (Reid Warner) disappears from a party one night and reappears a few hours later without any idea where he's been, he and his two buddies launch an investigation into the titular government facility, leading up to an attempted break-in during which the three friends find more than they bargained for.

Because Peli is a good filmmaker, much of the break-in itself and its aftermath are appropriately tense, with a few well-placed surprises.  But the film doesn't have the slow-burn build to inevitability that Paranormal had, and it doesn't help that none of the three male protagonists is all that likable.  The ending does have one very well-executed first-person shot that I admittedly hadn't seen before, but where the closing scene of Paranormal still resonates even now, this one barely buzzes.

** 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 1: THE NIGHTMARE (2015)

The Nightmare is both a documentary and a horror film.  That double-identity is difficult to pull off, and many have tried.  I've grown tired of "true story" horror films which try to have their cake and eat it too, assuring the audience of their veracity while fudging real events to make them spookier (see The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Deliver Us from Evil, The Conjuring, The Amityville Horror).

The Nightmare does not do that.  It's not about scary ghosts but scary experiences.  Its people are haunted not by spirits but by something in their own minds that is beyond their understanding.

We meet eight people who suffer from sleep paralysis.  Each has had, with varying frequency, crippling vivid nightmares in which he or she finds himself or herself unable to move as frightening things happen around them.  They are as real as real life, so real that some have trouble telling the difference.

Director Rodney Ascher portrays each nightmare in gut-wrenching first person.  As in his first film, the Shining conspiracy-fan-theory exploration Room 237, there is no explicit directorial voice.  Every word we hear (save for some reenactments) comes from the dreamers.  We experience each dream as it is being narrated to us by its victim.  On a conventional level, it's scary, but the sincerity of the narrator makes it all the more brutal.

I can imagine a decent fictional horror film based around this affliction.  In fact, there was one: Insidious, which is cited by one of the film's subjects as a fairly accurate depiction of the disorder.  It's a naturally terrifying concept.  But Ascher goes a few steps further than merely depicting the subjects' nightmares; he explores the effect the nightmares have on their lives. The questions they raise.  The conclusions they lead to.  The struggles they cause.

I don't know what kind of research has been done on sleep paralysis.  Neither do the afflicted.  They're left to figure it out for themselves.  Most have been told by family and friends that they are "just bad dreams," and nothing to worry about, echoing common unenlightened assumptions about mental illnesses.  We notice that many of the images and sensations in these dreams are consistent among sufferers.  The tall, thin shadow men.  The tingling sensation in their nerves.  The dull, ambient voices.  The small black creature on their chest which could be seen as a cat (an image which dates back at least as far as 1787, in Henry Fuseli's painting "The Nightmare").

But then there are the differences.  Some are overtly threatening, like a mysterious phone call in which an attacker demands to be let into the house.  Others are more ambiguous.  One subject reports a childhood dream in which he sees a bright light and is kidnapped by two tall thin figures.  As an adult, he watches the film Communion and discovers that Whitley Streiber's version of the conventional alien figure looks very similar.  Maybe those who purport to have been abducted by aliens are simply misinterpreting a case of sleep paralysis?  Maybe.

Ascher wisely doesn't provide an answer.  He stays with his eight subjects as they make sense of their own situation.  Some are inspired, as one woman finds her faith when reciting the name "Jesus" brings her out of her dream.  Some feel doomed, as one man is convinced that he will one day die in his sleep because of his paralysis.  He falls asleep every night thinking it might be the night.  And another takes some comfort when she first learns of the concept of sleep paralysis and discovers she's not the only one who suffers from it.  Or as she puts it, quite appropriately, "It's a thing!"

**** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 8: HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982)

Halloween III: Season of the Witch, an unexpectedly brutal but satisfyingly outrageous film, sits perpendicular to the rest of the Halloween series. It’s the only entry not to feature the ubiquitous Michael Myers, save for a few glimpses of the original film on a TV screen. That’s because John Carpenter, who reportedly disliked the traditional sequel Halloween II, said he’d only be involved in a third film if it were a completely different story. The idea was that Carpenter and crew would make Halloween into an anthology series, with a new story centered on Halloween each sequel.

The idea didn’t last long. Halloween III premiered to general distaste, and with the fourth entry a few years later, Michael was back and stabbing away. But although it certainly isn’t in line with what a Halloween audience would expect, Halloween III is actually pretty good, and unjustly overlooked.

Still, attaching it to the Halloween franchise may have been a mistake. Though Carpenter succeeds in doing something different from the two previous films, his and writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace’s approach is extremely different. Far from the spare, stark, quiet terror of the original, Halloween III is big, loud, and downright loopy, with a plot that is brazenly ridiculous. Yet it still works, because Wallace and crew play it straight, and don’t balk even when the movie is at its most ludicrous.

An old man (Al Berry) turns up in a California town, afraid for his life, apparently being chased. He’s found catatonic, clutching a Halloween mask in his hand. When a commercial for the mask company, Silver Shamrock, comes on the hospital TV, he shouts, “They’re gonna kill us all!” This prompts his doctor, Dan Chaliss (Tom Atkins), and his daughter Ellie (Stacey Nelkin) to travel to the Silver Shamrock factory to investigate just what he means.

What they discover I will leave for you to see, but I’ll just say that I was surprised. Most horror movies don’t work when they’re this plotty, but Halloween III has the courage of its convictions. Like many of Dario Argento’s ridiculous but spellbinding films, it takes itself seriously and still manages to build true suspense. Wallace takes a cue from Carpenter and builds tension from atmosphere. The film actually works in a bit of capitalist satire as the town of Santa Mira, home to the Silver Shamrock factory, is a believably barren hamlet whose laws are determined by the only company that brings it business.

Silver Shamrock’s owner, Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy, who went on to play a similar role in the Robocop series), is just the right kind of heavy: ruthless, amoral, and just silly enough to explain his diabolical plan like a Bond villain before he sends the hero to be killed (he even slow-claps at one point).

I just plain like the stonefaced goofiness of this movie. I like the mask company’s loyal army of henchmen in cheap suits. The simple, retro image of a computer-generated pumpkin, and how Wallace and Carpenter use it to build tension. The eventual emergence of snakes, bugs, and all sorts of creepy-crawlies. The involvement of Stonehenge, somehow. The ambient Carpenter synth score, which is legitimately one of the director/composer’s best.

The ending doesn’t quite work, as if Wallace and crew didn’t have a conclusion and just decided to stop, but, well, how was it supposed to end anyway? Movies like this can only be viewed on their own terms. The plot of Halloween III may be a bit out there, but if you accept it on its own logic, it works.

*** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 7: MANIAC (2012)

William Lustig's 1980 slasher Maniac is not a film that needed a remake, or to be made in the first place, for that matter.  It was one of those hack-em-up pictures that were a dime a dozen in the early '80s, in which insecure men with mommy issues carved up innocent women for our enjoyment.  All that set that one apart were the gore effects, decently done by Tom Savini, of Living Dead series fame.  I remember a ridiculous scene in which Savini played both a victim and the stand-in for the killer, and technically shot himself in the face.

This slick remake stars Elijah Wood as the killer, Frank, a mannequin shop owner who stalks and murders women by night, and adds them to his collection.  Though it's about as perfunctory as the original, director Franck Khalfoun and writers Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur handle the characters with surprising sensitivity and sympathy.  The murders here are just as grisly, the victims also mostly women, but while the first film objectified women, this one is about the objectification of women.

The gimmick that this remake throws in is that the entire movie is seen from Frank's point of view.  We see each murder through his eyes as he commits it.  We rarely see him except in mirrors, and in a few carefully placed shots in which the point of view seems to drift away and observe him, as seemingly does his own mind.

This motif works because Khalfoun commits to it and never cheats.  He also never shies away from any of the graphic murder scenes; as Frank watches his own actions, we must as well.  The gore, created by "The Walking Dead's" Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger, are astonishingly real and effective.

There is an overarching story in which Frank meets and falls in love with an artist (Nora Arnezeder), whom he believes might be more than just another mannequin.  Otherwise, the film is mostly a series of vignettes in which Frank seeks to satisfy his homicidal urges.  There's a silly sub-plot about the Oedipal origin of Frank's obsession, a holdover from the original film that's unnecessary here.  It runs out of steam after a while, as the murders grow a bit repetitive.

Still, Maniac is substantially better than the kind of brutal slasher from which it draws its inspiration.  Wood is flawed and appealingly pathetic as the killer.  The women he obsesses over aren't merely knife fodder, but appear to lead lives that exist off screen.  This is a movie about a man who stalks and kills women, but its women surprisingly are not there merely to be killed.

** 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 6: THE SHINING (1980)

I've just rewatched The Shining for the first time in about ten years.  The first time I saw it I was a kid, and I didn't quite get it; it was my first Stanley Kubrick film, and I hadn't quite learned how to watch one yet.  I gave it another go as a teenager, after having seen and loved Kubrick's other work, and warmed to it more.  Now I've seen it a third time, and I'm ready to say it's one of the most terrifying films I've ever seen.

It's also the first time I've seen it after reading Stephen King's novel on which it's based.  King is one of the film's toughest critics, had disagreements with Kubrick while it was being made, still insists that it does not represent his own vision, and scripted his own version (a TV miniseries starring Steven Weber) in 1998.

I've now read the book, seen the miniseries, and seen the Kubrick film fresh, and I've reached the conclusion that King is wrong.  It's not that Kubrick has better ideas than King does, but the Kubrick film is a much more accurate representation of his book than the miniseries is.  Kubrick does change certain plot details of the book, but it all adds up to the same thing.  It's the story of a deeply disturbed man who is driven mad over one horrible winter, and a vast, empty hotel that brings out the worst in him.

Where Kubrick and King have differed most vocally is in the portrayal of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a recovering alcoholic who's not far from falling off the wagon and into insanity.  King, I think, saw Jack as a flawed but generally good-natured man whose alcoholism and violent tendencies have made it impossible for him to be the good father he wants to be.  But what stands out about Jack is not his good intentions, but his failure and frustration.  At the beginning of the film and book we learn that Jack has had many violent outbursts, the most notable of which is an "accident" which resulted in the breaking of his four-year-old son's arm.  Well-intentioned or not, Jack is a dangerous force, and Kubrick seizes upon that as the crux of his film.

When Jack and his family move as caretakers into the haunted Overlook Hotel, a gargantuan castle abandoned for the winter months, the setting only exacerbates Jack's disease.  It's not the story of a good man being driven bad by ghosts, but a dangerous man who's given permission to act on his most destructive instincts.

It's why Nicholson is perfect for the role.  King has long criticized the casting of Nicholson, claiming that we know he's going to go berserk right at the beginning.  But his performance is much more subtle than that; his restraint in early scenes depicts someone trying extremely hard to be nice and to avoid lashing out.  As the film goes on, the hotel gradually unravels his facade and drives him to murder.

Shelley Duvall, as Jack's wife Wendy, is the picture of wifely support.  She's unwaveringly positive until she begins to realize that her husband is fading fast.  A scene in which she explains an act of domestic violence to a pediatrician is frightfully eerie: not because of the act she describes, but because of her optimistic dismissal of it.

The extrasensory ability of their son Danny (Danny Lloyd) is played obliquely by Kubrick, as it should be.  His conversations with his "imaginary" friend Tony, who warns him to stay away from the Overlook, are just strange enough to be worrying.  We have the occasional glimpse into Danny's mind: we hear a brief connection between him and Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), the hotel cook, and we see bits of a horrific precognition early in the film, but for the most part we only see what an outsider sees.  This is a better translation of King's book than the one he spells out in the miniseries, in which Tony is portrayed as a benign teenage ghost rather than the unexplained, possibly malevolent force that he is in the book and Kubrick's film.

What sets the film apart is the empty space.  The running time is 146 minutes, long for a horror film, but not a moment of it is wasted.  It's allowed to occupy its setting and take its time.  Seemingly contentless scenes, like one in which Jack bounces a tennis ball off the wall in a huge lobby, set up a quietly maddening tension.  The sounds, like the echo of Danny's big wheel rolling through a part-carpeted, part-hardwood hallway, enhance the isolation.

Slowly but surely Kubrick allows the tension to build.  Jack hallucinates (maybe) a hotel bartender who gives him a drink.  He has a terrible vision in the infamous Room 237.  By the time he picks up an axe, we see how he has gotten there.  Danny telepathically contacts Dick for help, in a scene that might have been impossible to film, but Kubrick does it, in one long shot of Crothers's face that is unforgettable.

I can see why King was dissatisfied with Kubrick's film.  It doesn't bother with many of the elements of his novel.  Much of the checkered history of the hotel isn't dealt with, though a scene of roaring-twenties excess is enough to give an idea.  In the novel, King had the hotel guarded by large animal-shaped topiaries which moved, or maybe didn't; Kubrick replaces them with a labyrinthine hedge maze which is just as forbidding (in King's miniseries, the giant animals look a lot sillier than they seem when described in the book).  The cathartic, easy ending of King's novel is also absent; Kubrick opts for something more ambiguous.

Much of King's work to date has been extremely cinematic, not terribly difficult to translate to film.  But The Shining is the exception, since much of its action occurs within the characters' heads, in memories, in introspection, in conversations with ghosts who may or may not actually be there.  That's why King's more literal adaptation is less effective, while Kubrick finds a way to translate it into the language of film.  Look closely and you realize that Kubrick hasn't changed the novel much at all; he has merely converted it.  Of the two screen adaptations of the novel, Kubrick's is actually the more faithful, in essence if not literally.  King may know his own work, but Kubrick knows film better.

**** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 5: THE HOWLING: NEW MOON RISING (1995)

The seventh in a long, fairly stale series of werewolf films, The Howling: New Moon Rising is certainly the strangest of the bunch.  Maybe one of the strangest movies ever made.  I can't imagine how it was conceived, if it was conceived, if the end result in fact represents the director's intention.  I think it does.  It's mostly the work of one man: Clive Turner, an Aussie who wrote and produced entries 4 and 5 in the Howling series, and has produced a few other noteworthy films, like the dumb-but-fun The Lawnmower Man.

If you remember, Stephen King sued Turner and company to have his name taken off of that film, which bears no resemblance to his short story of the same name.  Similarly, a werewolf might want to sue Turner for this film, which features several peripheral references to werewolves but isn't really about them, nor is a werewolf ever visible on screen.

Turner writes, directs, produces, edits, and stars as Ted, a drifter whose motorcycle pulls into a small desert town in California.  He takes a job and befriends the townspeople, but he may have some secrets, possibly connected to a series of grisly murders that have been happening in the desert.

Earlier films in the series prided themselves on depicting bloody deaths and gory werewolf transformations in graphic, occasionally goofy detail.  This one, apparently made on the budget of an Applebee's dinner, can't afford to do so.  It instead gives us sloppy first-person attack scenes, seen through a red tint so we know it's a werewolf.  To give us an idea of what a werewolf looks like, the movie has to use archive footage from earlier films in the series.  The one time we get to see a werewolf for real, the effect is shoddy enough to make "Manos": The Hands of Fate look like Avatar.

But never mind that the film is awful.  This we know from the beginning.  Though Turner has failed at making a Howling movie, he's certainly made something.  I don't know what it is, but it's something.

In certain scenes it looks as if Turner is trying to make the Nashville of werewolf movies.  He devotes a heavy percentage of the running time to establishing the atmosphere of the setting.  We get to know the local characters, most of whom are played by actual local non-actors (it shows).  They drink, line-dance, crack silly dad-jokes, and sing country music.  A lot.

It's not long before we realize that this isn't a werewolf movie with musical interludes, but a musical with werewolf interludes.  Some of the music, dare I say, is pretty good, most of it written by the actors in the film.  There's even room for a campfire melody about the dangers of drug use (though it still extols the pleasures of beer-drinkin').  The acting is bad but the people in the film seem genuine, like ensemble players in a community production of Oklahoma!.  Werewolf or no werewolf, the town seems like a pleasant place to live.  Turner, brazenly casting himself as the movie's anchor, is no great actor himself, but he has a certain goofy charm.

The movie alternates between the drinkin' and dancin' of the town and a nearby police station, where a priest (John Huff) explains the plot of the film to a detective (John Ramsden) for what appears to be several days straight (the continuity of the film is not flawless).  It's here that Turner attempts valiantly to connect the plot of this film to that of Howlings 4 and 5: no small task, since the previous two films weren't made with any connection in mind.  The way in which he ties them together is positively labyrinthine, and it culminates in a last-minute connecting-the-dots scene that Keyser Soze would find too complex.

This movie is awful, yes.  But it is awful in a truly fascinating way.  Many directors make bad werewolf movies, but this one is a beauty.  It's as if Turner started to make a werewolf movie, hired some locals on the cheap to act in it, then was so charmed by them that he decided to make them the focus of the movie instead.  What a strange, unique occurrence The Howling: New Moon Rising is.  As bad as it is, I hadn't seen it before and I doubt I'll see anything like it again.

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 4 / THIS WEEK IN CINEMASOCHISM: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2011)

Fans instantly chirped at the news that Jackie Earle Haley had been cast as Freddy Krueger, that irreplaceable haunter of dreams, in the new redux of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Some, having seen Haley’s exceptional work in Little Children and Watchmen, eagerly awaited his take on the well-known villain. Others poo-poohed the casting, insisting that the only real Freddy is the original, Robert Englund.

It has been interesting seeing Englund’s performance of Freddy evolve over the many sequels: from a powerful evil presence in the first film, to a jokester in the third film, then just a joke in later efforts. Casting another actor stops Freddy in his tracks, and only works if the filmmakers have a new direction to take the character in. In this case, they do not.

Not only does the casting of Haley—who’s far too talented an actor to be involved in the first place—bring nothing to the film, but the new Nightmare is poorly written, badly acted, and amateurishly directed to boot. I remember making movies like this with my VHS camcorder when I was 12. The Be Kind Rewind guys would have made a more professional-looking film than this.

It follows the plot of the original film fairly closely. Teenagers in Springwood have been having graphic nightmares in which a man with a burnt face, a striped sweater, and knives on his fingers stalks them. Soon they begin to notice that when they’re cut in their dreams, they bleed in real life. The parents seem to have some idea of what’s going on, but stay suspiciously silent. It all ties back to Fred Krueger.

Freddy’s backstory is well-known at this point, but this movie dwells on it as if it’s a surprise. Each detail is spelled out as if the movie aspires to be an encyclopedia of movie monsters for nerds. The 2009 Friday the 13th remake was no classic, but it at least began knowingly, with a prologue that assumed we knew who Jason was and then moved on quickly.

Everything that the new Nightmare tells us about Freddy is something we know from the original film. The only new step the movie takes is to focus uncomfortably on Freddy’s pedophilia, so that we’re rewarded with several flashback scenes of Mr. Krueger asking young girls if they want to know a secret. Barf.

The casting of Jackie Earle Haley might have easily led the film in a new direction. Haley was no doubt cast because of his excellent Oscar-nominated performance in Little Children, in which he played a convicted pedophile who was sick and afflicted, and garnered our sympathy. Are we ready for a sadder, resigned Freddy Krueger, who’s a monster simply because there’s nothing else he can be? Apparently not; Haley’s take on Freddy is pretty much the same old stuff, and at times he even seems to be parroting Englund. Even Englund’s snappy jokey dialogue from the later sequels would have been welcomed here. Instead we get this:

Teenager: “You’re not real.”
Freddy: “I’m real.” 

There are other actors in the film going through the motions. One is the delightful Rooney Mara, whose work in The Social Network had already lifted her above junk like this. Connie Britton appears as one of the moms, but her performance as a standard plot-deliverer only reminds us of Ronee Blakley’s brilliant off-the-wall portrayal of the same character in the original.

So much more could have been done with this plot. With the steep takeoff of ADD drugs in recent years, something might have been done with the fact that kids actually are awake all night nowadays. There’s one scene involving a video blogger that might have been expanded upon, but is quickly dismissed. There are ways to update A Nightmare on Elm Street for the times without simply rehashing it.

What an incredible bore this movie is. There’s not one legitimate scare in it. Not one. It carbon-copies the original but sucks out everything that made it work. The characters are turned into lame teen soap stars, the plot is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, and Freddy is made inert. One of the writers is Wesley Strick, who has written some very good thrillers over the past twenty years: Arachnophobia, Wolf, Return to Paradise, Doom, the Martin Scorsese Cape Fear. His draft for A Nightmare on Elm Street should never have left the bottom drawer.

* out of ****

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

Pain level: Advanced. 

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 3: PUPPETMASTER (1989)

I had the unfortunate experience of journeying into a Wal-Mart around 10pm on a Sunday night (all the other grocery stores were closed) and found this in a $5 discount bin.

I didn't even know that the cheapie Full Moon-produced series had half that many sequels.  And this is not even all of them, as the collection excludes 2004's Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys and last year's Puppet Master X: Axis Rising, in which it looks like the puppets are fighting Nazis.  Or maybe they're on the Nazis' side, I dunno.  This, I thought, is not a bargain.  This is a challenge.

The first Puppetmaster, directed by Full Moon regular David Schmoeller, is a challenge indeed.  For a movie in which a bunch of puppets come alive and kill people, it's unimaginatively directed and distinctly poorly acted.  And in a movie called Puppetmaster, for the acting to be noticeably bad is no small feat.

The plot, so far as there is one: a bunch of psychics, led by Alex (Paul Le Mat, who lists American Graffiti among his credits but here proves about as effective a leading man as Arnold Stang), visit a mansion where Toulon (William Hickey), an old puppeteer (Hickey was only 62 when this film was made), killed himself 50 years earlier.  Soon his puppets come to life and attack them all.

The puppets were created by David Allen, responsible for some wonderful Harryhausen-esque stop-motion animation on films like Q: The Winged Serpent and The Howling, and they're pretty good.  I especially like the ringleader, a white-faced ghost with a wide-brimmed hat and very large knife.  There's also a lady puppet who vomits giant leeches, and a tiny-headed one whose big strong arms prove none too helpful when characters just pick him up and toss him across the room.

The puppets would make for an interesting premise, if the movie around them weren't so stiff and boring.  Schmoeller points and shoots without much care, and lets dialogue scenes drone on and on.  He even botches the final shot, which might have been clever but feels like a joke where the punchline is revealed too soon.

* 1/2 out of ****

COMING SOON: Puppet Master 2, directed by Allen himself and hopefully featuring a lot more of his creations and a lot less filibustering.

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 2: TWIXT (2012)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt is a small gem of a ghost story, an ode to the director’s roots in horror. Though he’s made some of the best films of all time, Coppola has always had an appreciation for all things spooky and creepy and crawly. He produced the Jeepers Creepers series (the third of which has been unforgivably long delayed), and his first film, Dementia 13, was a micro-budgeted shocker that hinted at what he was to become. Twixt, which he wrote and directed, has a preposterous and convoluted story that I wasn’t quite sure I’d grasped at the end, but I was surprised at how much it didn’t matter.

This is a movie about atmosphere, and Coppola creates a living, breathing setting in the small ghost town of Swan Valley. Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), a semi-successful horror author who’s forever lived in the shadow of Stephen King, drives into town for a book signing which attracts distressingly little attention. The exception is the sheriff, Bobby LaGrange (Bruce Dern), who’s interested in partnering with Baltimore on a book about the mysterious deaths of 13 young girls, and their connection to a group of devil-worshipers that have set up shop at the outskirts of town.

As Baltimore walks through the town at night, it begins to take a different shape from the boring, nearly abandoned town he sees during the day. He speaks with several inhabitants, some of whom may no longer be alive. It provides a pensive escape from the daytime, when he battles with his estranged wife (Joanne Whalley, Kilmer’s real-life ex-wife) over money, fends off the sheriff’s ambitious advances, and investigates the strange occurrences in the town’s history.

The story is difficult to follow. I’m not even sure that Coppola intends for us to do so. The past blends with the present, and characters seem to weave back and forth in time, and neither Baltimore nor we are quite sure what year it is. The film inhabits Baltimore’s mind as he explores the town and sees it through the filter of a ghost story. He meets a young girl (Elle Fanning) who by all accounts existed in the 19th century but appears to know who he is. And in the film’s weakest sub-plot, he carries on conversations with a dour, humorless spectre of Edgar Allan Poe (Ben Chaplin).

But never mind the plot. Look at the joy Coppola takes in visiting classic horror traditions. The heptagonal clock tower that for some reason broadcasts seven different times. The oddball clock repairman (Don Novello—yes, Don Novello) who seems to exist at all times in history. The body in the morgue with the stake driven through its heart. The small-town strangeness of Dern’s performance as the opportunistic sheriff, and his relationship with the Renfieldesque deputy, as well as the kid who hangs out at the station and plays games.

Kilmer’s strong performance is an anchor for the film’s traverses. He’s believable as the down-and-out author, and provides something to follow even when the film goes off the rails. (He also finds occasion to revisit the impressive Brando impression he showcased in The Island of Dr. Moreau.)

Twixt is overcrowded and goes overboard a little too often, but it’s also made with the subtle attention to detail that inhabited Val Lewton’s films. Most ghost stories nowadays throw in more gimmicks than they need. This one is what it is.

*** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 1: V/H/S/2

V/H/S/2, the followup to last year's uneven but occasionally brilliant horror anthology, is in some ways a more satisfying collection of short films than its predecessor.  It's shorter, leaner, and less self-indulgent than the previous film, and the directors are always having fun with the film's gimmick.  The premise--a collection of five found-footage films from different directors--was strained in the original, but here is kept fresh in each entry.

Each of the four films finds an interesting way to tell its first-person story. Adam Wingard’s (You're Next) is shown through a bionic eye that records a little more than it should. Gregg Hale and Eduardo Sánchez, the producer and co-director of The Blair Witch Project, use a GoPro helmet camera in a way that I’d never seen before. Jason Eisener’s (Hobo with a Shotgun) segment, a very funny Goonies-like account of a sleepover gone wrong, is told partially from the point of view of the family dog.

The best segment belongs to Timo Tjahjanto (who made the notorious "L is for Libido" segment of The ABCs of Death) and Gareth Huw Evans (The Raid: Redemption), about an Indonesian religious cult that agrees to let a camera crew into its compound for the first time. This is the most suspenseful and the looniest of the series, and the off-the-wall performance from Epy Kusnandar as the pompous cult leader is a standout.

The only weak link in the film is the wraparound story by Simon Barrett, which strains to be spooky but doesn’t leave much of an impression. Still, the opening scene, in which a peeping tom gets a surprise, is clever, and the gory punchline is good for a laugh.

*** out of ****

NOTE: It might be silly, but I really enjoy the song that plays over the end credits. 

 

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 ****