Horror Episode Review: Bates Motel, Episode 2

Episode 2: Nice Town You Picked, Norma

Overall: B-

Acting: C+

Writing: C+

Story: B-

Technical aspects: C

Effects: B

IMDB

Directed by:

Tucker Gates

Starring:

Freddie Highmore

Vera Farmiga

Max Thieriot

Nicola Peltz

Olivia Cooke

Mike Vogel

Particular trigger warnings: creepy incest vibes

Passes the Bechdel test? Yes, barely.

Episode 2 is an episode mostly devoted to thickening the plot, it seems. Norman’s (Freddie Highmore) older half-brother, Dylan (Max Thieriot) shows up to stay, despite his obvious hatred for Norma (Vera Farmiga). One of Norman’s friends, Bradley (Nicola Peltz) witnesses her father crash his car, after he’d been burned alive. The authorities are more deeply investigating Keith Summers’ disappearance. Deputy Zack Shelby (Mike Vogel) starts to reveal to Norma that there are some… odd and less-than-legal practices common in the town, beneath its “small-town charm.” And when Norman starts a project with another friend, Emma (Olivia Cooke), she finds the sketchbook he’d found in the house, and investigates the drawings of tortured women, and she comes to believe that the drawings describe real events. Later, Norman and Emma stumble upon a field of weed in the woods, after which they’re pursued by armed men. And apparently the “eye for an eye” justice that Deputy Shelby described has led to another man being burned.

I liked this episode more than I liked the first one. There’s at least some sense of an ongoing plot forming. We get to see how Norman himself is already a little unhinged, especially regarding how other people may treat his mother, yet how naïve he seems in other regards, like with Emma when she kisses him. Norma still switches back and forth between “good mother” mode and “oh-so-creepy” quite well. (I definitely laughed at the “It’s not like it’s weird!” line.)

I’m not sure yet how I feel about the characters we’ve been introduced to. The addition of a brother seems odd, though his absence from prior canon can probably be easily explained by how unwelcome he seems in the family. I’m wondering if we’re going to be stuck with an obnoxious love triangle plot in the future with Bradley, Norman, and Emma, but I suppose we’ll see. (It’s fairly obvious that nothing will really work out in the long run, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try to drag it out.) I'm also skeptical about their skill in handling Emma's cystic fibrosis; this episode already seemed inconsistent regarding it. One scene she's gasping for breath walking up the hill, but then she's able to run away from the men chasing them without too much visible trouble.

            The hints so far about whatever underbelly the town’s economy is based on are interesting enough, though it's apparently pot, which was maybe revealed a little too quickly. (Dropping hints about the town's dark side is well and good, but they could have gotten a little more tension out of it.) I do wonder just how “small” this “small town” is supposed to be. It seemed like it was supposed to be pretty small, both to fit Norma’s idea of a new life with Norman, and from comments made about how everyone knows everyone… yet much of it feels larger to me.

            The technical aspects are all still pretty good. The effects have been good, too, even if it’s not an effects-heavy show.

            I probably liked this episode a little better than the first one, so we’ll see if the trend continues.

Horror Movie Review: Forget Me Not (2009)

Overall: C

Acting: C

Writing: C-

Story: C+

Technical aspects: C

Effects: D

IMDB

Directed by:

Tyler Oliver

Starring:

Carly Schroeder

Cody Linley

Micha Alberti

Brie Gabrielle

Jillian Murray

Zachary Abel

Sean Wing

Chloe Bridges

Brittany Renee Finamore

Passes the Bechdel test? Yes

Particular triggers: nothing I can really think of

In this review, the summary and my reactions and opinions are all lumped together. So spoilers abound through it all.

Forget Me Not jumps right in, showing us our cast of 20-and-30-somethings playing unlikable teens doing unlikable things. This movie suffers incredibly from the problem of having too many characters introduced that are more or less physically and characteristically indistinguishable from each other. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it took me almost to the halfway mark to even learn all of their names.

So we have Sandy (Carly Schroeder) the class president, who is dating supposedly bad-boy Jake (Micha Alberti), though he’s never shown to do anything more “bad” than the rest of them. There’s Sandy’s brother Eli (Cody Linley), the valedictorian who just wants to be a pirate. There’s Jake’s sister Lex (Jillian Murray) the supposedly bad-girl who is dating TJ (Sean Wing). There’s Chad (Zachary Abel) who is stringing along two women, cheating on both because he is our Even More Unlikable Douche character. The two women he’s screwing are Layla (Chloe Bridges) and Hannah (Brie Gabrielle). For additional drama, Eli also has a thing for Hannah. And our whole group has just graduated high school, and are planning on going on a vacation together.

The strain on my suspension of disbelief starts in right away. A) None of these people look even remotely like recent high school graduates. That’s not uncommon in horror, or even film in general, but this is pretty egregious. B) None of these people act like high schoolers either, and not just because of the truly endless alcohol, weed, and sex they seem to have available. C) I know this is nit-picky, but how many people do you know that have had the identical large friend group since they were young kids? For that matter, how many friend groups have not one, but two sets of siblings that have the exact same social circle? And how many people do you know that maintain childhood friendships, and then only manage to date within that same circle? One or two of these issues could be pretty easily ignored, but there was just nothing about this batch of people that made me believe they were their characters, or that those characters could be real people.

So our group is hanging out and they decide to go to the local graveyard to play a game they played there as kids. It’s a “ghost in the graveyard” game like hide and seek, where the “ghost” has to find the other players and turns them into ghosts until only one person is left “alive.” As they get ready to play, a mysterious girl shows up and asks if she can play too. This is Angela (Brittany Renee Finamore.) At the end of the game, she jumps off a cliff (who builds a graveyard next to a cliff? Erosion is a real thing, people), claiming that soon Sandy will remember her. The police can’t find a body when they investigate.

As the friend group goes about their business the following day, Sandy remembers her childhood friend Angela, the girl who taught her the ghost in the graveyard game. Then people start getting offed… and Sandy suddenly realizes that she’s the only one who remembers the people who’ve been killed. The others don’t have any memory of them at all. And reality seems to be changing around them, as if they didn’t ever exist. (For instance someone’s tattoo of a now-dead character’s name disappears, their plans to go to the beach have changed to plans to go to the mountains, etc.)

In some ways I liked this. It sort of subverts the usual plotline, where everyone realizes that their group is being killed off, and is aware that they’re in danger, but then acts stupidly anyway. At least this time, they don’t even realize that their friends are missing. If you cared about the characters, it could even be psychologically hard-hitting to realize that they won’t even remember their significant others or siblings. Honestly, I like this as a plot line, and think it could have been really well utilized in a more suspenseful movie, but unfortunately it seemed to be somewhat wasted in this film.

The plot goes on, more of them are offed, everyone assumes Sandy is crazy, blah blah. Sandy tries to find out what Angela has to do with the murders, while no one will help her. The resolution isn’t really surprising… the motivations are pretty standard for this kind of “pick a group off one by one” deal, though that’s usually a slasher trope, and this doesn’t really feel like a slasher. I suppose you could argue that it is one, but without an actual physical slasher-who-does-the-slashing.

I had so many problems with the believability of this movie that I feel kind of bad even giving it a C. In terms of tech it’s okay – the sound and cinematography are nothing special, but they’re fine. The effects are laughable. I DID literally laugh at the ghosts several times. A mix of bad Halloween costume masks and bad CGI. But ugh… the unbelievable characters. Not that badly acted, all things considered, just horribly miscast and poorly written. The plot isn’t outstandingly original, but I mentioned that I liked this take on it, at least to some extent. Sadly, it’s the characters themselves really ruin it for me. One saving grace may be turning it around and viewing the villain as the protagonist, which could reframe the story in an interesting way. I didn’t really want to watch the film again with this in mind just to find out, though. Despite my issues, I did find the movie to be very watchable, and I enjoyed it at times. It just has too many glaring flaws for me to consider it “good.”

Horror Movie Review: Hyenas (2011)

Overall: C-

Acting: C

Writing: D

Story: C-

Technical aspects: C

Effects: D

IMDB

Directed by:

Eric Weston

Starring:

Costas Mandylor

Meshach Taylor

Joshua Alba

Christina Murphy

Derrick Kosinski

Andrew James Allen

Christa Campbell

Particular trigger warnings: Mexican racial slurs

Passes the Bechdel test? Yes, but barely.

If you are hoping for a horror film that brings mostly unintentional comedy, this could be the choice for you. Because this was bad, but mostly silly-bad, with much of the camp probably deliberate.

Hyenas has several plot threads going, none of them especially compelling. First we have the story of Gannon (Costas Mandylor), a man whose wife and infant child were killed by a breed of “were-hyenas” brought to North America by slave traders. He’s initially unbelieving when it comes to the existence of these werehyenas, but a man named “Crazy Briggs” (Meshach Taylor), a hunter of these creatures, convinces him. Crazy Briggs takes Gannon on as something of an apprentice hunter.

Then suddenly that part of the movie just kind of… ends for a while, and we’re taken to an apparent gang war in the local small town between the obnoxious white kids and the Hispanic kids. Bobby (Derrick Kosinski) leads the white kids against Marco (Joshua Alba), the leader of the Hispanic kids. Complicating things, Bobby is hazing/recruiting Jasper (Andrew James Allen), whose older sister Gina (Christina Murphy) is dating Marco. Drama!

Meanwhile, it’s revealed that the leader of the matriarchal hyena clan is dying, and so the disparate packs are meeting in the mines outside the town to pick a new leader. Wilda (Christa Campbell) seems poised to take over.

Back with Gannon, they rescue a girl from some of the hyenas, leading to an incredibly contrived plot twist that I doubt anyone was fooled by if they were paying any attention.

Eventually the plots converge somewhat by coincidence, as Gannon and Crazy Briggs head to the caves to kill Wilda and the rest, while Bobby and Marco go there to fight out their issues, and Gina follows them in order to stop them.

[Spoilers] There’s a silly action-y ending, that again I doubt will come as much of a surprise to anyone: Bobby and Marco are suddenly friends, most of the good guys escape (minus a dramatic self-sacrifice,) and most of the bad guys get blown up. [End spoilers.]

This movie is just so damn silly. It’s often entertainingly so, but much of the badness also comes just from sloppy writing and inconsistencies. I joked that when it cut to a scene about the white kids/Mexican kids’ rivalry that they’d never be referred to again and that they would have nothing to do with the rest of the film… and I wasn’t really that far off. Most of the movie seems to be about the struggle Gina has with her brother being drafted into the white kids’ gang, and yet that’s ultimately inconsequential to the rest of the film and the hyena plot. It causes some additional tension between Bobby and Marco, but it was established that they hated each other whether Jasper and Gina were in the picture or not. Eventually, despite taking up a whole lot of screen time in the first half, Jasper’s character is pretty much dropped from the movie and has nothing to do with the resolution. I kept expecting the douchey white kid gang to have something to do with the hyenas, but there was no connection between the pack and either gang; the storylines only cross by coincidence when the characters wind up in the same place, rendering the “dramatic” gang plotline absolutely unnecessary.

There are a lot of times where it seems like there were a few scenes missing or something, where there are unexplained character changes or passages of time. For instance, it seems that Gannon and Crazy Briggs are the only two people to know about the were-hyenas, but then at one point Gannon is getting a report from another hunter that was never mentioned or introduced. At another point there’s a brief bit of narration by Briggs that tells us how he started training Gannon (rather than showing us any of said training) but it’s unclear how much time has passed. We later find out that it was three years since Gannon’s family was killed, but nothing in the narration made it clear that we’d skipped so far ahead until he mentions it. Toward the very end, [spoilers,] Bobby and Marco are ready to kill each other, and yet thirty seconds later they decide they’re BFFs. Granted they were faced with a cave full of werehyenas, but it goes beyond temporary truce and into the unrealistic “now we’ve overcome our differences!” resolution. [End spoilers.]

The effects are laughable mixes of bad costuming and bad CG hyenas. The “transformations” prompted snorts and giggles. Of course, your experience may be helped or hindered by the fact that Wilda has to take off her clothes every time she’s going to transform (a trait not apparently shared by any of the not-as-hot-as-Christa Campbell-werehyenas.) The nudity is still relatively lacking (nipple-less boobs!) but hey, it’s there should that be a draw for you. (Though would people find her as hot if she, like real female hyenas, had basically a pseudo penis? Just wondering. Maybe she does; we don’t see it.)

If you’re a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, you may recognize most of the mythology about the hyenas as being very similar to what was mentioned in the episode “The Pack” from the first season, where Xander and some other kids were possessed by hyena spirits. And honestly, I think I’d rather watch that episode a few more times than this movie. Still, the film is entertaining and campy and easy to laugh at.

Horror Movie Review: 100 Feet (2008)

Overall: B

Acting: B

Writing: B

Story: B

Technical aspects: B

Effects: C

IMDB

Directed by:

Eric Red

Starring:

Famke Janssen

Bobby Cannavale

Ed Westwick

Michael Pare

Particular triggers: domestic violence

Passes the Bechdel test? yes, but barely

            100 Feet is the story of a woman named Marnie Watson (Famke Janssen), who is placed under house arrest after being found guilty of the murder of her husband, Mike (Michael Pare). Mike was abusive, and the murder was in self-defense; Marnie had reported him several times to the police, but as Mike himself was a cop, little was done and the investigations were generally dropped. Complicating things, the cop in charge of Marnie, named Shanks (Bobby Cannavale), was Mike’s partner.

            “100 Feet” refers to the distance that Marnie is allowed to travel – any farther, and the anklet she wears will send a signal to the police, and she’ll be sent back to prison.

            It quickly becomes clear that Mike’s ghost is haunting the house, and he continues to attack her. Unwilling to leave or be sent back to prison, Marnie attempts exorcisms, attempts to force Mike’s spirit out of the house by getting rid of his possessions, etc. but nothing works. Some of the assaults against her are investigated by Shanks, who is beginning to believe that someone else is beating Marnie, and that this other person may be the one actually responsible for killing Mike.

            It’s hard to say much else without being too spoiler-heavy.

I actually really like this movie. I find Marnie’s character interesting and sympathetic, not quite the same as the average female horror movie protagonist. She seems genuinely conflicted, not feeling guilty for killing her husband because of the circumstances, but regretting that it happened. She’s imperfect, but her actions are consistent with her character.

The small cast helps the film feel very self-contained, and emphasizes the feeling of isolation that Marnie experiences in the house.

I enjoy the premise of being literally trapped in a house with something malevolent, and by something more than a broken-down car or a silly dare. (And yes, I remember that Disturbia also used the “house arrest” premise, but I like its use in this movie far more, and that’s about the only way the films are at all comparable.) Also in the category of at least kind of subverting common tropes, while she does refuse to seek outside help, this also makes sense for her character. After her experiences, of course she’s not going to ask Shanks or any other cops for help.

The biggest detractor in my opinion is the ending, which is tied together a little too neatly and rapidly. The ultimate way they get rid of Mike’s ghost works, I suppose, but seems like something that would have occurred to her earlier. The effects are also a bit hit-or-miss. They aren’t the most ridiculous, but a few times the ghost modeling is quite fake looking (when he’s heavily active) and one scene in particular has pretty laughable blood effects.

Occasionally this one runs on Syfy, and I’d certainly recommend the watch if it does come up. It’s also had a DVD release, and it’s one that I enjoyed enough that I’m considering purchasing it.

Horror Movie Quick Review: Case 39 (2009)

Overall: B

IMDB

Directed by:

Christian Alvart

Starring:

Renee Zellweger

Jodelle Ferland

Case 39 is about a social worker named Emily Jenkins (Renee Zellweger) who is beyond overworked, but takes on the case of a girl named Lilith Sullivan (Jodelle Ferland.) There seems to be a severe case of abuse towards the girl, seemingly confirmed when Lilith’s parents try to murder her. The parents are found not guilty by reason of insanity as they claim that Lilith is a demon and they had no choice but to kill her. Emily ends up taking Lilith in until a better foster home can be found, but then as people in Emily’s life begin to die under mysterious circumstances, she realizes that Lilith’s parents may have been right.

I’m a fan of evil child movies, so I liked Case 39. It does a pretty good job of setting Lilith up as the innocent victim (though somewhat unfortunately because of the expectations of it being a horror movie, and especially after reading a summary of it, the audience will still realize that she’s evil, so there’s not much opportunity for surprise.) It’s well-acted (and I really like Jodelle Ferland, as far as child actresses go) and the characters are pretty good as well. Emily’s conflict over proper professional behavior vs. legitimate worry for Lilith is believably handled. In a few ways it felt like the ending and resolution were a little bit rushed, and I can’t suspend my disbelief enough to not realize that Emily is probably going to wind up spending a good chunk of her life in prison after the credits roll. The film isn’t the most groundbreaking or original offering, and it felt to me like there was just something kind of missing, but it’s a well put together film that is largely successful in telling its story.

Horror Movie Reviews: The Descent Part 2 (2009)

Overall: C

Acting: B

Writing: C

Story: C

Technical aspects: B

Effects: B-

IMDB

Directed by:

Jon Harris

Starring:

Shauna Macdonald

Gavan O’Herlihy

Natalie Jackson Mendoza

Krysten Cummings

Particular trigger warnings: none I recall

Passes the Bechdel test? Yes.

This movie felt pretty “meh” to me. In all honesty, I was pretty bored through most of it.

            The Descent Part 2 is a sequel to the 2005 film The Descent. HEAVY SPOILERS FOR THE DESCENT FOLLOW: The basic plot of the first film is that six friends (all female) go on a caving trip together in the Appalachian mountains. There’s a cave-in, trapping them in the unexplored cave system where there’s no hope of rescue. Turns out that the cave system is occupied by a humanoid species referred to as “crawlers” who violently kill the girls one by one. Finally, two girls remain, Juno and Sarah. Some drama has happened, with Juno being responsible for one of the other girls’ deaths, plus being the one at fault for tricking them into going to an unexplored cave system, and it’s also been revealed that Juno had an affair with Sarah’s late husband, so Sarah attacks and wounds her and leaves. It’s implied that Juno dies off-camera, with an abruptly silenced scream, and we see Sarah escape. But then her escape is revealed to have been a hallucination, and the movie ends with her sitting oblivious below ground and the crawlers getting closer. I actually liked the first movie pretty well, and it's been on my re-watch list for some time.

            The sequel picks up with it being revealed that actually Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) has somehow made it out, and she stumbles into the road and is picked up by a motorist who takes her to a hospital. Sheriff Vaines (Gavan O’Herlihy) has the blood on her clothing tested. Upon finding that some of it belonged to Juno (Natalie Jackson Mendoza) he insists that Sarah take them back through the caves to find the other girls.

            The sheriff puts together a team consisting of himself, his deputy Elen Rios (Krysten Cummings), and three (pretty non-descript) “specialists” – Dan (Douglas Hodge), Greg (Joshua Dallas), and Cath (Anna Skellern). They go through a newly discovered entrance to the cave system through a mineshaft operated by a man named Ed Oswald (Michael J. Reynolds).

            Once down in the caves, Sarah has a flashback and strikes out at the others before fleeing. Sheriff Vaines chases after her, but encounters a crawler, which he fires at, and he causes a cave-in. Cath is separated from the rest. The three still together – Elen, Dan, and Greg – find a video camera from one of the girls in the first movie, and they see that the girls really were attacked by the crawler creatures. Then they themselves are attacked by crawlers, and are separated.

            Sarah and Elen meet up, and witness a crawler killing Dan. Cath and Greg reunite elsewhere and keep going, but are both eventually offed. Vaines is still going deeper into the caves, and he is almost killed before he is rescued by Juno, who somehow has survived, and in the few days since the previous movie has become particularly skilled in killing the crawlers. The four survivors meet up, and while Juno and Sarah start fighting, then they decide that maybe they should save it for later and just try to escape now. Juno says she can lead them to the exit, and Vaines handcuffs himself to Sarah so she can’t abandon them like he claims she did Juno. On their journey, he falls over a cliff, and Elen cuts off his hand letting him fall and die in order to save Sarah.

            Finally, the three remaining women are within reach of the exit, but as they try to sneak past a group of crawlers, Greg is revealed to be barely alive and he grabs Juno. She screams, he dies, the crawlers attack. Juno ends up wounded, and dies in Sarah’s arms. Elen and Sarah are horribly outnumbered, but Sarah sacrifices herself so Elen can escape.

            Elen gets out, but then Ed, the man who was operating the mineshaft elevator, attacks her and drags her back to be food for the crawlers. The movie ends with a crawler leaping at her.

            It’s hard to really pick out what exactly was BAD about this movie, except that I found it boring and it didn’t really hold my interest at all. I had to keep forcing myself to stay awake. The acting is all right, but the story was just dull. The three “specialist” characters felt unnecessary, and like they were only there for padding the length of the movie with their respective death scenes. I don’t have any lasting impression of their characters or any development they got, and can’t really think of anything that made them necessary to the story. I guess it’s better that this is called “part 2” rather than being billed as a real sequel. It seems to be trying to repeat the success of the first film by doing the same things, but that really is just more repetitive than anything else; predictable death scenes spaced out by boring stretches of travel devoid of tension because we’ve already been here and done this.

I also had a hard time getting past how clumsily it fits with the original. Both Juno and Sarah die in the end of the first movie, and it’s never explained how either of them actually escaped and survived. Despite the fact that Sarah was shown to be hallucinating images of her dead daughter, too far into the cave to possibly get out, while she was being surrounded by crawlers, she still managed to escape? Somehow, despite being horribly wounded and constantly hunted by creatures that hunt partially by scenting blood, Juno has survived for days and in that short time has become an expert at hunting and killing the crawlers? And she knows where the exit is, but hasn’t tried to get out herself? This didn’t feel well explained at all. (I realize that there were apparently alternate endings to the first film, and my review is based on the ending that I saw, which was the standard version on the DVD I watched.)

            The cinematography is good, and it feels dark and closed in like being in the caves. The effects weren’t bad, but the creature design of the crawlers was changed from the first movie. The change wasn’t good, in my opinion. The first movie had them looking like creepy, pale, slimy, eyeless things that had evolved underground… exactly what they were supposed to be. For the sequel, according to the designer, “Jon [the director] wanted them more viciously feral, inbred, scarred and deformed, with rows of sharklike teeth for ripping flesh.” The result to me looks… gargoyle-like. Less like a real species that could exist (and is therefore creepy or scary,) and more like a Halloween monster mask (which is not so creepy.) Their faces are wrinkled with broad noses and pointed ears. They have eyes and can clearly see. The wikipedia article on the first movie has a good comparison of the two designs, which I’ll copy-paste here: 

(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Descent#Creature_design.)

            I would definitely recommend the first film (which wasn’t perfect, but probably would get a B+ from me) more than the second. If you really like the first one, and find yourself desperately wanting more, the second may provide that. But in my opinion it does so clumsily, and doesn’t add anything new to an interesting scenario.