Splice - dir. by Vincenzo Natali (2009)

It's somewhat hard to believe a studio executive saw the film Splice (2009) and thought it would make a good wide-release film, a possible summer-alternative money-maker. Don't get me wrong--the movie is good; damn good. It's just . . . well, a weird sci-fi horror movie, featuring adults in all major roles, that doesn't have a necessarily happy ending, and generally doesn't have much of anything that you'd normally think would appeal to a major studio.

So, thank you to Warner Bros for distributing this crazy film, and more importantly, Joel Silver and Dark Castle Productions, for picking it up after its festival premier last year. Dark Castle has had a weird history, starting their company off with the releases of House On Haunted Hill (1999) and Thirteen Ghosts (2001), both decent remakes of William Castle films. After that, it gets a little sketchy, with nonsense like Ghost Ship (2002), Ninja Assassin (2009), with some good ones (last year's The Orphan was quite good and went basically unnoticed) here and there.

Splice is like nothing I've seen from the company yet (I can't comment on it in relation to the rest of director Vincenzo Natali's ouvre, as I have not yet seen any of his previous films), combining realistic (seeming) science fiction with some worthwhile questions of morality--and how's this? Zero fake scares or jumps. When's the last time you went to see a horror film and there wasn't a single moment wherein someone is startled by a cat, their friend, an ice machine turning on, etc; or there weren't at least seven or eight soundtrack shrieks, in order to get a cheap jump from the audience?

As much as I liked this year's The Wolfman, the first half contained more silly soundtrack jumps than anything I've ever seen. It's nice when you know the author of your horror entertainment is aware of the difference between a genuinely scary moment and a gimmick used to cause someone to jump in their seat.

I think bypassing that kinda thing, which doesn't always hurt a movie but can sometimes be fairly annoying, Splice actually creates a pretty believable atmosphere. It isn't jokey sci-fi, but it isn't confusing hard sci-fi, and it doesn't get hung up on overexplaining anything, which is kind of a feat considering the gene-splicing subject matter.

And overexplaining is also something critics should be wary of when reviewing a film of this type. And by that I mean one that contains seriously strange plot developments in the second half, developments that aren't even hinted at in the trailer.

It really isn't fair to say much more about the film's plot than what you see in that two-minute preview. Two scientists, romantically involved, do some off-the-record research on gene splicing and end up creating a creature that is part human, part animal, and growing quickly.
I've seen some comments online from folks who got a Species (1996) vibe from the trailer. It's not Species, though; it's nothing like that fun, if silly, action-sci-fi-erotic-thriller mash-up. But it is very, very good, and probably not too similar to anything you've seen before.

Cropsey - dir. by Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman (2009)

Cropsey was a maniac, an escaped patient of a mental institution, a bogeyman who scared children sitting around campfires up and down the Hudson Valley of New York state. Like all folklore, no matter how fantastic, the Cropsey legend arises from real fear and guilt, from a dark element of the culture that is so pervasive it shows up in the subconscious of the most innocent and uneducated members of society. The American mental health system throughout the first three quarters of the 20th century was a disgraceful network of overcrowded, understaffed institutions with some of the largest, most disfunctional hospitals located on Staten Island and Long Island. Enter Geraldo Rivera and his crusade to make a change (and get famous).

In their 2009 documentary film Cropsey Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman explore the real life Cropsey tale of a Staten Island derelict, Andre Rand, accused of kidnapping and murdering at least five children on the island in the 70s and 80s. Most famously Rand was convicted of the murder of Jennifer Schweiger, a 13-year-old with Down syndrome. The directors manage to weave an intricate narrative out of a very cloudy, sensitive story, using newsreel footage, interviews with Staten Islanders involved with the case, and an eerie NYPD missing persons detective who seems to think the serial disappearances are all the work of Satanists.

It’s hard to create horror out of real life, especially in the age of hyper-saturated media, but the lore of Staten Island and the testimonies of the families and community members affected by these crimes helps to deepen the mystery surrounding Rand’s guilt or innocence, while at the same time revealing a lynch mob mentality in a society unwilling to admit its own culpability in creating a monster. In the end, the question is not whether Rand murdered these children because he felt they were better off dead than at the disposal of a cruel and destructive mental health system, or if a group of Satanists sacrificed them for some greater glory. The question is how and why we created these guilty monsters and scapegoats. How can we dump our trash and our human refuse on the Staten Islands of the world and still be surprised when out of the filth arise such demons?

Check out the film's website here.

Here's some more info about the Cropsey legend.

The Wolfen by Whitley Strieber (1978)

I was a little disappointed with the police procedural fixation of Whitley Strieber’s 1978 novel The Wolfen from the get-go, even when it was relatively clean and somewhat evocative of the urban landscape in the earlier chapters of the novel. The setting and time period, New York City in the 1970s, could play host to an awesome story of mass hysteria, urban decay, and perhaps hedonism, not to mention werewolves, the way Spike Lee manages in Summer of Sam, with a real life serial killer. I can't think of a novel, offhand, that achieves this sort of 70s paranoia and delirium, but I'm sure they're out there. It seemed that Strieber completely forgot about his city after the cops were killed in the auto pound in the first section of the book. We get a decent description of the desolation in the Bronx, and a few upper Manhattan scenes (the fountain and the museum) that are bland and generic. The love triangle bit was useless and made the two cops much less interesting. I would’ve liked to see a bit more about Dick, our main character’s husband. He seems like a misunderstood guy who has been chewed up by the system, though Strieber pulls the heartstrings a bit too heavily when he has Dick spend the extorted money on taking care of his sick father. Come on. I could imagine someone, someone who wears Druid garb at conventions, reading this novel as a defense of the Wolfen. They are nobler beasts than we. They only kill the sick, old and weak. They live in harmony with their ecosystem. That’s baloney and not supported by the text (though knowing a bit about Strieber’s wacko ideas, he may have been aiming in that direction).

Strieber also seemed a little proud of himself concerning the idea about vampires being normal humans who leach off of the Wolfen. He made the guy at the Natural History Museum a little too credulous. All it took to convince him of the existence of sapient wolf-beings was an old etching in a silly book.

There is a 1981 film starring Albert Finney very loosely based on this novel, and I’d definitely recommend the film over the book in this case.

You can learn a bit more about Strieber's latest obsessions here.

The Beast Within - Dir. by Philippe Mora (1982)

. . . and here's a not-so-great adaptation of that fun, scary novel. B-film director Philippe Mora (The Howling II and III [1985 and 1987, disrespectfully]) starts out well enough, with Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch driving through a suitably creepy wooded area. She is attacked by an unseen, but clearly non-human, entity, and when the scene fades out and the words "seventeen years later" appear on-screen, it's a good bet the teenager in the next shot wasn't fathered by Ronny Cox.

Ronny Cox gets the job done. He's like Steve Buscemi or Michael Moriarty, always fun to watch, no matter the quality of the film. Bibi Besch is all right, does what she's supposed to, and Paul Celemens, the actor who plays their afflicted son, well . . . he isn't given an awful lot to work with, so maybe that's why his character comes off as somewhat flat. The inner torment this guy experiences in the book only comes across about halfway in this film version.

Not that the movie has much of anything to do with the novel, aside from the very basic premise. The book was adapted by Tom Holland, who wrote several screenplays, including this one (and Psycho II [1983]) before his directing debut, the magnificent Fright Night (1985)--which, by the way, is one of the latest horror films of the 80's to be lined up for an unnecessary remake. Holland is a good writer, but this adaptation is weak. The story consists of some nonsense about a dead man coming to life through Ronny Cox's poor son, and what they come up with isn't all that interesting. There are no werewolves to speak of, psychological or physical, but strangely, the filmmakers do come up with a fairly interesting monster towards the end, one that is aided by some pretty gnarly early 80's fx, and that is nothing like a wolf.

I'm not the kind of person who cares at all if a film adaptation stays close to the source material, or if it gives it a big middle finger--but this one's confusing. See, just as the film is wrapping up, the lead characters come out with some exposition that goes right back to Edward Levy's original novel--taking some of the most interesting aspects of that story, the first few chapters, and jamming them into the end of this one.

It's a somewhat interesting move, but is completely botched. For my money, I can't figure any good reason for keeping that information until the conclusion of the film, and wasting all this time unravelling a truly uninteresting mystery. And by the time the true source of the boy's affliction is revealed in the film's final minutes, I just didn't care.

It isn't bad overall, just very flawed. Worth seeing for Tom Holland fans--and with this guy's reasonably impressive body of work (dir. Child's Play [1988], The Langoliers [1995]), I'm sure they're out there.

The Beast Within by Edward Levy (1981)

The three acts of Edward Levy’s 1981 novel, The Beast Within are well-defined and each serves a distinct flavor of horror to the reader. In the first section, Levy creates a sense of gothic rural isolationism in the deep south of the 1930s, much akin to Cormac McCarthy’s early Appalachian novels. The second section drifts into a working class nightmare of misfortune that struck me as more Stephen King’s New England of the 1970s than the 1940s rural south Levy means it to be. Finally, the third act brings us into the 1950s, where the heart of this story of lycanthropy spreads open in a glossy and prosperous America innocent of the sins of the body.

Our werewolf, who is created in the first act by a religious zealot who locks him in a basement for over a decade and feeds him human flesh, makes this novel a bit of a science fiction experiment, as well as a horror novel. What if how we treat each other altered our genes? What if we passed down acquired tastes and predilections to our children? Michael, the offspring of this werewolf raping a woman (though this remains unknown to the woman and her husband) struggles against the demons of his genetic makeup. As a teenager he sees flesh all around him, and he is aroused violently and sexually by it.

There's a certain equation here of sexual freedom with violence and loss of control. The novel can be understood as an indictment of civilization, but it could easily be flipped on its head and interpreted as a conservative horror story the same way Friday the 13th or other 1980s slasher films seem to be telling us that the wicked, and more importantly the wicked children, will be punished for their licentiousness.

Levy’s prose is clean and unadorned, with the welcome exception of some of his descriptions of his rural southern landscape, making The Beast Within an entertaining modern werewolf tale.

The Vanishing (1988) - Dir. by George Sluizer The Vanishing (1993) - Dir. by George Sluizer

If you come across a copy of a movie called The Vanishing, make sure it doesn’t have the names Jeff Bridges, Keifer Sutherland, or Sandra Bullock anywhere near the title. Not that these actors, are bad—I like them all quite a lot, particularly Sutherland—but I can’t recommend the version of this film in which they star.

That one was made in 1993, with the same title, story, and director as the original Dutch production. As far as acting goes, the stars of the American remake are more than up to the task; and technically, the film is well-made. The only difference—or anyway, the one glaring, enormous difference—is the ending. In George Sluizer’s original production, the ending is dark, bleak, and makes sense. The ending of his remake is silly, unrealistic, and disappointing.

I don’t think I felt that way when I saw the remake of The Vanishing (the first version I saw) in . . . oh, I don’t know, ninety-ninety-something . . . but that probably had a lot to do with my teenage naivete and the fact that the ninety minutes leading up to the ending are completely engrossing, top-notch suspense material.

In both versions, a man and woman are on a cross-country trip and stop at a gas station off the highway. She goes in to buy some things, and he never sees her again. This begins a three-year-long quest to find the missing woman. Simultaneously we follow the man who likely kidnapped her. Somehow the fact of knowing his identity early on does not detract from the film’s suspense.

The ending of Sluizer’s original film will disturb the viewer. Indeed, I put on something very light-hearted and easily digested, when the film had finished, as I did not want this to be the last thing I saw before shutting my eyes for the night.

The American version will likely leave an unsuspecting viewer feeling like they’ve just watched a well-made American thriller. They might not even notice how cheap the ending is.

The Collector - Dir. by William Wyler (1965)

William Wyler supposedly turned down The Sound of Music in order to direct this creepy little thriller. Probably not a great career decision, though one can see why he might have been attracted to this small-scale, two-person story about a demented man who kidnaps the woman he desires, in a misguided attempt at making her fall for him.

I’m far from an expert on Wyler’s films, but from what I’ve seen, The Collector has more in common stylistically with The Children’s Hour (1961) and the claustrophobic Desperate Hours (1955) than his higher-budgeted films like Ben-Hur (1959) and The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946). The basic plot alone might remind one of horror films which came later (Misery [1990], Captivity [2007]), and so for that reason, the story may seem too familiar. But the performances and Wyler’s masterful atmosphere draw the viewer in, and while the film goes on perhaps ten, fifteen minutes too long, the tension is solid, and builds, from the beginning to the end.

I also found myself quite surprised by the ending—one which, if the film had been made a few years earlier—wouldn’t have been allowed, I’m sure. While not strictly a horror film, The Collector has its share of creepy moments, along with a perfectly bizarre villain played by Terence Stamp.

As with films studying similar themes, the dynamic between captor and prisoner is strange and unsettling—but documented in real-life cases. This movie is worth checking out; the suspense slowly builds to an expected, satisfying conclusion.