Life, Animated (USA 2016: Dir Roger Ross Williams)

The viewing remit of DEoL continues to expand in the new year with this stunning documentary by Roger Ross Williams, who previously made the Oscar winning Music by Prudence (2010).

Life, Animated is the extraordinary story of Owen Suskind. Until three years of age Owen was a healthy baby (if a little overdistracted by his surroundings) but in his third year he withdrew from life and gave up talking - he was subsequently diagnosed with autism. Owen's despairing parents Ron and Cornelia (whose presence in the film shows just how much they have lived and breathed the ups and downs of their son's development) feared the worst for their son, but a seemingly gibberish utterance by him turned out to be a line from one of the many Disney films which he watched obsessively. Quoting whole blocks of dialogue from these movies became his communication lifeline and way back from silence to language. By using characters and situations from Disney films to help illustrate his feelings, he was able to navigate through a sea of confusion in a world where he was previously unable to relate to those around him. It must have been an extraordinary revelation for his family, all desperate for Owen to regain his essential humanity.

The Owen Suskind we see for much of the film is a confident, articulate young man who runs a class at his school for other kids whose disabilities limit communication. At one point in the film he's even invited to guest speak at at Autism convention in France (one can only guess at the challenge involved in learning enough French to deliver his halting introduction, in that the task of putting his own thoughts together for the address seem insurmountable in their own right). Disney hasn't 'cured' him but it has helped, along with armies of largely unseen support teams, to give him a chance of an independent life and eventually even a job - in a cinema, natch.

As always with documentaries like this there's a thin line between exploiting Owen and simply setting up the camera to observe him (Williams seems to favour a non interventionist approach - for example when Owen, newly moved into his independent living space towards the end of the film, pleads with the film makers to help him access his mail box, they fail to act).

Aside from the Owen's parents, whose fear for their son's continued independence after their death is understandable, perhaps the most interesting relationship is with his older brother Walt. They have a solid bond but the spectre of what will happen to Owen in the long run, and how that will impact on Walt's life choices, is well defined and very poignant. Walt clearly wants a brother he can relate to as an equal - at one point he has a 'birds and bees' conversation with Owen which possibly fires up the younger sibling and results in him coming on too strongly to his girlfriend (who is very sweet but seemingly quite immature) and who subsequently finishes with him; the break up is carefully managed by care workers looking after either side like solicitors in a divorce settlement.

Telling a story of a quarter century of living in just an hour and a half inevitably leaves more questions than answers. We see how Owen uses Disney characters to voice his concerns, hopes and fears (and the extent of how much these characters mean to him is clearly shown when two of the Disney voice artists turn up at his school), but that angle is only surely part of his development - other assistance is skirted around because it doesn't serve the central conceit of the film. But this is a minor quibble in an outstanding documentary which resists over Disneyfying the idea of Owen as a Peter Pan figure but does go some way to suggesting a greater value to the Disney stories than the schmaltz they are often seen to be.

VooDoo (US 2016: Dir Tom Costabile) plus a short interview with the director

Like wow, as Scooby Doo’s Shaggy used to say. Tom Costabile’s debut feature is a low budget messed up gem.

New Orleans country hick Dani visits LA to stay with her slightly more streetwise cousin Stacy. Dani’s here to escape the car crash of her recent past – mother dying, split with an ex she found out was already married – but now she’s here in La La Land to party and forget. Over drinks Dani confesses that her ex’s wife Serafine was into voodoo (in a pre-credits sequence we've already seen what she's capable of), and when Serafine heard about hubby’s carrying on with Stacy’s cousin, put a curse on her. But that stuff’s a load of rubbish, right? And now she’s in sunny LA, all bikini lines and valley speak, where life is good!

Wrong. Seems that the curse has followed Dani to California, and Serafine’s about to up the ante on how miserable life can become for the girl from New Orleans.

What follows is a literal descent into hell; unspeakable acts, cackling demons, branding, sacrifice and all. The first half of the movie is filmed in traditional found footage style (Dani excitedly wants to document all of her west coast adventure) but in the last portion of the film, once Dani is taken prisoner and lined up for her own private room in eternal damnation, you really don’t want to know who’s behind the lens documenting the depravity in front of it.

VooDoo is truly nuts. It’s an audacious movie which knows it’s filmed on a shoestring but fails to give a toss. Costabile’s vision of Hades might only have cost a few thousand dollars, but it remains truly nightmarish. It may want to emulate Nobuo Nakagawa’s similarly themed 1960 movie Jigoku, or maybe the hell sequence from José Mojica Marins' 1967 'Coffin Joe' flick This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse, but it’s far closer to the zero budget chancer movies made by the late great Ray Dennis Steckler around the same time; films like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964), where partying teens run into monsters on a California beach.

Well done to Samantha Stewart as Dani, who as a wide eyed country girl undergoes a convincing transformation into terrified victim, and spends a good half hour doing nothing but screaming her head off. Constance Strickland as the voodoo priestess Serafine is also truly scary. I'm sure Ms Strickland is a very nice lady in real life but here she's truly nightmarish. And well done too to the cast of ‘hell’ – straight faces all round, which can’t have been easy.

Serafine L'Amour (Constance Strickland)

VooDoo is a recommended slice of devil may care genre filmmaking, the like of which I’d long lost hope of ever seeing again. So, rather blown away by this extraordinary film, I tracked down the director Tommy Costabile and asked him a few questions:

DEoL: Firstly, congratulations on the movie. I was bowled over. Are you happy with it?

TC: Thank you very much! I'm so glad you liked it. I show your review to everybody, it's awesome!! I am happy with it. Like any film there's a few things I would've liked to have changed or see differently, but in the end you let things go that won't dramatically affect the overall audience reaction to the picture. I'll always cringe in certain parts but it's only a couple things so I'm very happy about that. I've been working on the film since 2013 so it's definitely become a labor of love. 

DEoL: So can you tell my readers how you got into the murky world of film making?

TC: I was always enthralled with film making - writing, directing, producing, etc. Since I was a little kid watching all the Spielberg/Lucas fantasy films of the 70's and 80's (and all the films of that time that have them to thank) I was just amazed at how incredible an impact a film could have on me. Then horror came a little later and I was hooked for life. My mother loved Halloween and horror films and she really instilled that into me at an early age. The Exorcist, Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Phantasm, An American Werewolf in London, The Omen, The Amityville Horror, it was just a great time for horror, and horror is so fun to watch. You can literally jump out of your seat, scream, laugh, etc. When a horror film is done right, the audience can experience a whirlwind of emotions in a couple of hours, and to be able to create that is what we all strive for in any film.

DEoL: According to IMDB (not always the most accurate of reference sources, but hey...) VooDoo is your first feature - what shorts etc have you done before this?

TC: This is my first feature, IMDb was right! It took a long time to knock that out. I was very heavily into Real Estate when I was younger, in my 20's, and the financial crash of the late 2000's really put me behind schedule in getting my first feature done (I do Real Estate to fund my pictures). But there's a certain subjectivity to that as I don't think I had enough knowledge or patience back then to have pulled it off as I do now. Lo and behold, I'm very proud that VooDoo is my debut feature.

I did complete a few shorts in and out of film school that are on IMDb as well. One of my first ones got a lot of attention at my school which was called The First Time and was a music video to Phil Collins's 'In the Air Tonight' about a MySpace stalker who finds a date, kills her, and buries her. Black and White, pretty gruesome stuff. Dominic Matteucci, who's also in VooDoo, was actually the lead in that. Then I did a comedic take on the gay mafia with my friend Frankie called Al Cabone. That was hysterical. Very dirty and raunchy. We're actually trying to raise the money for this to be a feature.  If and when we accomplish that this may be one of my next pictures. The last short I did I served as Executive Producer on a project with Shia LaBeouf called The Smallest River in Almirante.  This was a story about a boy going back to his native country (Trinidad) after moving to the States and realizing Trinidad was his home. 

DEoL: To the movie itself. You've written, produced and directed it. How did VooDoo come about?

The nightmare begins in VooDoo

TC: VooDoo came about after the financial crash and me and some friends had nothing going on. We were essentially broke, unemployed, and I was able to focus on movies for the first time in my life. Something good always comes out of something bad. I wrote a script called 'SERE' which is a fast paced action film about aliens, kind of James Bond meets Close Encounters. I submitted that to the Nichol when it was finally finished and went right into VooDoo. 'SERE' I couldn't fund. It's way too big of a budget. So to be able to write, direct, and fund a film, it had to be a small budget. For the first time in my life I actually wrote the script with budget in mind and knocked out the script fairly quickly in just a few months. We were on set not much long after that. 

DEoL: How did you prepare your cast (particularly Samantha Stewart) for what was to come in the film? Did they know what they were letting themselves in for?

TC: We actually made a point of this.  The first person I cast to be Dani was actually from New Orleans. I really wanted someone from that city to play the part. I flew her out to LA so she could audition and it was apparent she didn't have it, and it became clear that Sam and Ruth (Reynolds, who plays Stacy) were perfect for it. We sat down with them after auditioning literally hundreds of girls and explained what happened in the story, namely in Hell. Sam was kind of taken back a little bit, I think. I don't think she ever did anything like this before. But in the end they were both down for everything and anything and we got the greatest leads we possibly could. The rest was history!

DEoL: Tell me how you created the 'hell' scenes in the movie. Also, how did you recruit the demon extras, considering what they had to do?

TC: Dominic (Matteucci) was working at a haunted house called 'Blackout' which is a very dark, intense experience. It isn't your standard haunted house by any means. While he was doing that it became apparent that the world was ready for the extreme kind of horror I always wanted to tell.  We began recruiting actors from 'Blackout' and 'Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights' (friends and co-workers of Dom) before the script was even done. So essentially almost every actor in Hell is a real life haunted house actor of some kind. It made a lot of sense to me for this to be our demon cast. 

When it came down to Hell in general, almost 100% of the budget was going to be spent there, and I didn't want to even shoot it if the first "half" of the film didn't come out ok. The first 6 days of shooting was essentially the entire movie but Hell. We wrapped the first 6 days and put everyone on stand by for Hell. We edited for a couple weeks and I loved it. Sam and Ruth were so incredible.  Their acting was natural, their improv. was great, I loved it. So we called everyone and told them Hell was on, including Adam Rettino who really was the architect for the whole thing. He was the Art Director, propmaster, set builder, you name it. Adam and his crew worked literally night and day for a month. They slept at the warehouse where we built the set. I was there everyday with them helping but without them, and especially without Adam, this never would've happened. Adam's been working in the business for years and he had all the connections and knowledge to pull it off and he did. He's a legend.

Ron Jeremy cameos in VooDoo with Dani (Samantha Stewart)

DEoL: Ron Jeremy. Nice walk on role - how did that happen and has he seen the finished movie? If so I wonder if it's given him any ideas for future, er 'action' movies of his own.

TC: Ron's an incredible guy.  He's a sweetheart. We were at the Rainbow on Sunset one night and I asked him to do it. It just made sense because he goes there almost as much as Lemmy did, and he had a reputation for being there. If the girls were going to run into a celeb at the Rainbow it really would've been him! He agreed and played the part.  He hasn't seen the film yet, he wasn't able to attend the cast and crew screening. Hopefully he'll be able to be at the Premiere...

DEoL: What are your plans for the film. Festivals, streaming etc. When might we see a UK release?

TC: So far we'll be in theaters and VOD on the same day - 24 February 2017. We may open in theaters a week prior, the theater booker is still working it. We'll be in at least 10 cities in the US, possibly more. For VOD it should be everywhere. ITunes, Vudu, Amazon, Cable Networks, Playstation, XBox, Youtube, etc. We don't have a foreign sales agency yet but we are wanting to take it to Cannes this May. Foreign Distribution should come right after that. Hopefully it'll be a theatrical release in the UK as well!

DEoL: And what's next for you. How do you top VooDoo?

TC: How do you top VooDoo, what an awesome question! I'm working diligently on a story called 'Killing Sam' about the Chicago Outfit in the 60's that centres around a gangster named Mad Sam Destefano. It's very unique. This man was like Hannibal Lecter, but in the mafia. It's a very interesting story and it ties into a lot of very famous historical events such as the death of JFK and Marilyn Monroe, as well as the Outift taking over casinos in Las Vegas, etc. I'm working with Frank Cullotta on the script who will also be co-producing. Frank was the story behind Scorcese's Casino and he personally knew a lot of the players in our story. I'm very excited about the project. 

I'm also working on another horror called 'Uninvited'. The protagonist is a filmmaker whose last picture opened a door to the supernatural. His house becomes haunted and his wife and child are in physical danger. The story centres around how his personal needs and wants attributed to this and it becomes more of It's a Wonderful Life but in a horror setting. I'm hoping to shoot 'Uninvited' this year as we wrap up the script and pre-production on 'Killing Sam', in addition to beginning shopping 'SERE' and 'Cabone'.

DEoL: Thanks very much for taking the time to answer my questions - good luck with VooDoo and your other projects!  

(A version of the film review above appeared in www.bloody-flicks.co.uk)

New Films Round Up #6 - Reviews of Beyond the Gates (USA 2016), Carnage Park (USA 2016), Pet (USA 2016), SiREN (USA 2016), The Disappointments Room (USA 2016) and The Monster (USA 2016)

Beyond the Gates (USA 2016: Dir Jackson Stewart) It's 1992 and estranged brothers Gordon and John are back in their home town to clear out the video store owned by their missing presumed dead father. Together with Gordon's girlfriend Margot they slowly package up the cavernous shop's seemingly endless numbers of bulky video cassettes. Stumbling across one of those interactive VHS/Board games popular a few decades ago (this one's called 'Beyond the Gates') and with the video tape still in their dad's VCR, they decide to play. The trio are immediately plunged into a fight for their lives where successive playing levels must be unlocked - with deadly and bloody consequences - before they can make their escape out of the game and the nightmare world it has created.

Although Beyond the Gates doesn't fetishise the VHS phenomenon in the way that, for example, 2008's Be Kind Rewind or 2013's curio doc Rewind This! have done (or even aim for cassette accuracy - the inclusion of 1996 flick Fargo on the shelves is clearly a mistake), the movie is otherwise consciously in love with its era. From the opening neon titles and Wojciech Golczewski’s spot-on synth score, to the use of former scream queen Barbara Crampton as Evelyn, the video guide to the game, this is an affectionately mounted homage, rather than a send up of 1980s creature features (the title even evokes the 1987 kids-meddling-with-the-unknown movie The Gate). Cleverly Jackson Stewart's debut directorial feature takes its time getting to the good stuff - and the characterisation of Gordon, John and Margot shows a lot of film-making confidence. But the gore, when it arrives, is definitely of the non CGI type that used to feature in the pages of 'Fangoria' magazine back in the day - and there's plenty of it. Pretty entertaining stuff.

Carnage Park (USA 2016: Dir Mickey Keating) Apparently based on a true story, Mickey Keating's latest movie mixes Tarantinoesque botched robbery stylings, a killer with gas mask straight out of My Bloody Valentine, and a heroine that could have passed as Tina Fey's sister, although not nearly as funny.

'Scorpion' Joe and Lenny, a couple of washed up herb-heads, hold up a bank, whose only customer seems to be winsome Vivian (played by skinny scream queen Ashley (The Last Exorcism and The Last Exorcism Part II) Bell), busy negotiating with the manager not to foreclose on her father's house. Joe and Lenny abduct Vivian but as they drive away from the scene of the crime, one of the robbers is picked off by a hidden sniper. Vivian makes her escape into a local mine where a cat and mouse game ensues between unwilling heroine and crazed gunman.

This is about as good as it sounds. The first half aims for a sub Tarantino merging of crazy camera angles, 'cool' music (including 'Big Bad John' - please) and narrative time shifts, although lacking any of the sizzling dialogue one might expect. Once Carnage Park becomes a chase movie, any stylistic pretensions are abandoned, and the focus moves to the overall bonkersness of the killer, one Wyatt Moss, and whether Vivian will get out alive. I don't know if the fact that the film was based on true events hampered the director's choices here, but this is a derivative, uninspiring film which can't settle on one style and just emerges, like a number of Moss's victims, as a bit of a mess.

Pet (Spain/USA 2016: Dir Carles Torrens) Judging by Pet's premise - twisted guy abducts woman and holds her captive in a secret room for pleasure rather than ransom - one would be forgiven for assuming that this was just another adaptation of John Fowles' 1963 novel 'The Collector.' Originally and memorably filmed in 1965 with twitchy Terence Stamp, the theme has been re-used down the years, including the underrated 1981 movie Tattoo, with Bruce Dern as a tortured artist and Maud Adams his captured muse, and 2007's Captivity, where Eliza Cuthbert is exposed to all sorts of indignities by her crazed abductor.

Pet starts slickly if unpromisingly: nervous kennel assistant Seth bumps into beautiful but glacial and aloof Holly on a bus, claiming they were at school together. Holly denies knowledge of him, leading to Seth finding out her likes and dislikes via social media and stalking her at the restaurant where she works. When he is again rejected Seth drugs and abducts her to the kennels, where he keeps her prisoner in a cage. So far so formula, but without giving anything more away the tables are slowly and cleverly turned, with the imprisoned Holly slowly waging a war of nerves with the distinctly unbalanced Seth.

Basically a two hander, Pet grips throughout its tense hour and a half - it has the same air of claustrophobia that director Carles Torrens brought to his 2011 spookfest Apartment 143. Strong performances from Dominic (TV's Lost) Monaghan as the just-the-right-side-of-bonkers Seth and Ksenia (Black Swan) Solo as Holly are aided by a Jeremy Slater's literate script and a nerve jangling score by Zacarías M. de la Riva (who also produced the haunting music for Evolution, one of my favourite films of last year). Pet was a big hit at festivals last year and will hopefully do well in the home market.

SiREN (USA 2016: Dir Gregg Bishop) Jonah, about to get married, is whisked off to a stag weekend by his effervescent brother and best mates. Disappointed in the choice of lap dancing joint picked for the start of their festivities, the group are persuaded to head out to a remote house where they're promised something a little raunchier. But when Jonah falls for a young girl who dances for him in a locked room, he decides to do the gallant thing and free her, little knowing that she is Lilith, the siren of the title whose benign exterior masks an ancient monster within.

I watched this fully aware that it was a feature length development of the 'Amateur Night' segment from the 2012 movie V/H/S. 'Amateur Night' was directed by David Bruckner (responsible for the excellent 2015 movie Southbound). SiREN was directed by Gregg Bishop, whose was responsible for the 'Dante the Great' segment of 2014's V/H/S Viral. Symmetry cries out for the feature length development of 'Dante the Great' to be directed by David Bruckner. But I digress.

SiREN is, surprisingly, a lot of fun. It has some genuinely laugh out loud moments and wears its horror lightly enough, but it's not short on tension. It has a decidedly old school feel (when I started watching it I though possibly that I'd acquired the 2010 film of the same name instead - is seven years ago 'old school'?).Hannah Fierman as Lily reprises her performance in the V/H/S segment and joins a relatively small list of actors whose claim to fame is spending an entire movie in the altogether. It's normal here to describe such a performance as 'brave' but Fierman inhabits the siren character with an astounding physicality not usually seen in Trowbridge, Wilts (from where she emanates). Far better than its origins suggest, then.

The Disappointments Room (USA 2016: Dir D.J. Caruso) If you're old enough to remember I-Spy books, well by the time you've got through this one I'm betting your page of  'things you always see in haunted house movies' will be fully ticked. Really, what terrible generic nonsense this is.

Kate Beckinsale (sleepwalking - how surprising that she turned in her brilliant performance as Lady Susan Vernon in Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship the same year as this - maybe it means she's 'versatile') plays Dana, an architect who with her husband David and son Lucas movie to a real fixer-upper in the countryside, to make a new start after the accidental death of their baby daughter. So get those pencils out and get ready to tick some boxes: on their first night Dana hears a baby crying; there's a locked room in the attic that she's drawn to; Lucas starts talking to an imaginary person; the house has a terrible history; Dana has had psychiatric treatment following the baby's death and David thinks she's going bonkers again; the steadicam prowls around the house constantly: a kooky local librarian provides all the information Dana and we need to understand what's going on.

There are so many films like this that have been made in the past few years, and I bet there's a load in production - astonishingly there does seem to be a market for them; this one is prolific TV director D J (The Shield) Caruso's first attempt. As you'd expect from his credentials The Disappointments Room is very well made, but I do wonder what film historians will make of this almost fin de siecle outpouring of the supernatural onto our screens in, say, twenty or thirty years' time? Will this ever be seen as good?

The Monster (USA 2016: Dir Bryan Bertino) Back last year the only criticism I levelled at the otherwise very good South Korean movie Train to Busan was the arguably exploitative way that the young actor Kim Su-An was made to cry her eyes out for the last twenty minutes of the film. Well there are child's tears aplenty in writer/producer/director Bryan Bertino's stifling modern fairytale The Monster. Oh and rain. A lot of rain.

Lizzy (an astonishing Ella Ballentine) is a young girl living with her dysfunctional booze and drugs addicted mother Kathy (Sarah Michelle Geller lookalike Zoe Kazan). Kathy can no longer parent Lizzie, who is to be shipped off to her grandmother's house. But en route their car is involved in a night time collision with a dog. Mother and daughter must await roadside services, but there's something in the woods that's large, hungry and has very big teeth.

The Monster wears its fairytale elements a little heavily (Lizzy mistakes the injured dog for a wolf; the visit to granny's house etc) but there's no doubting the integrity of the two central performances. I may be getting older and a bit over-protective, but I wasn't sure that having long scenes of Lizzy getting soaked to the skin in the rain while crying her eyes out was a particularly healthy way to add drama to the piece. And the simplicity of The Monster very nearly kills it. At times the setup feels like an extended homage to a scene from Jurassic Park but its metaphoric power, never overstated but always obvious, lets us know what this film is really about. It's powerful stuff, carried by strong performances, some very effective monster sequences, and such a bleak world view that it's only at the end you'll realise how tense the whole thing has been.

We Are the Flesh (Mexico/France 2016: Dir Emiliano Rocha Minter)

Mariano, a lone man living in a squalid apartment (in a possibly post-apocalyptic near future, but nothing is explained), invites a young brother and sister to live with him, in return for helping him turn the flat into some kind of cave like dwelling. Mariano, who has manipulative, Charles Manson like tendencies, encourages the pair to lose their inhibitions (starting with that outmoded idea that siblings should never do the nasty with each other) and go through various degradations for him. Mariano is killed, only to be reborn for no specific reason, and the brother and sister pair eventually turn to murder as they cast off any remaining vestiges of morality.

“There’s no such thing as love. Only demonstrations of love” says Mariano at one point. Well we get quite a few (real) demonstrations of this in the course of We Are the Flesh (aka Tenemos La Carne), the debut feature from Mexican director Emiliano Rocha Minter, as well as ponderous dialogue, copious nudity, and a lot of primal screaming.

I have no idea what most of it’s about. My guess would have been that the whole thing is some impenetrable social satire on Mexican society (although the 26-year-old Minter has rejected this idea during interviews – in fact even he doesn’t really profess to know what’s going on).

The closest thematic comparison I could offer to assist any appreciation of We Are the Flesh would be Claude Faraldo’s dialogue free 1973 movie Themroc, in which a middle aged worker smashes up his flat, howls at his neighbours and has a relationship with his sister. And indeed there is a strong comparison between Michel Piccoli’s completely unhinged performance in that film and Noé Hernández’s as Mariano; he also reminded me of the Mexican director José Mojica Marins’ Coffin Joe character (especially the 2008 film Embodiment of Evil, where Joe aka Zé do Caixão encourages his disciples to give in to their wildest urges). 

But if Hernández could be described as brave in his acting, the performances of Diego Gamaliel and particularly Maria Evoli, as the brother and sister, have to be seen to be believed. Not only are they frequently naked, but they indulge in real sex acts (one wonder whether Minter has possibly seen any Gaspar Noé movies), a lot of slimy clambering about, and in one scene Evoli pees direct to camera. 

While this does feel like a now rather outdated attempt to shock the audience, it is directed with some flair and the art direction, with the flat gradually becoming a beautifully lit womb-like cavern, is very impressive for a film presumably with a limited budget. But while the movie starts off reasonably coherently, by the end, with its baffling final scenes, this writer was totally lost. I’m sure the director would be happy with that reaction, but unfortunately I found it an opaque, quite tiresome viewing experience which isn’t as shocking as it would like to be.

New Films Round Up #5 - reviews of Downhill (Chile/Canada/France 2016), Holidays (USA 2016), I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House (USA/Canada 2016), Hush (USA 2016), The Autopsy of Jane Doe (UK 2016) and Broken (UK 2016)

Last round-up of the year fright fans - 6 more movies made or released this year which have caught my eye (and sometimes left bits of grit in it):

Downhill (Chile/Canada/France 2016: Dir Patricio Valladeres) Another example of the 'chuck-a-whole-lot-of-genre-stuff-in-and-see-what-sticks' school of horror movie making, this is a breakneck speed movie bringing us the story of 'retired' competition cyclist Joe, summoned to Chile by a mate for one last tournament. Joe and his girlfriend Stephanie meet up with Pablo and Magdalena, but soon after arriving at Santiago airport they're deep in the countryside rescuing a total stranger from a car crash and being set upon by the local toughs. Just when you thought this might just all be a bit Eden Lake the rescued guy develops a weird infection (Cabin Fever) which makes him sprout growths (very The Thing) and there's also a local cult which feeds their victims long snake like things that seem to come from from the stomach of victims of the virus (all sorts of films).

The makers of Downhill cleverly disguise the low budget with some fast moving action sequences (headcams on bikes with a pumping score) and purposefully disjointed editing. This film really shouldn't work but the energy of its cast make and some quite disturbing WTF moments make this a stand out example of horror-on-a-shoestring. The Chilean countryside is also shown off to great effect, and gives a real sense of vastness in which all manner of head scratchy oddness is allowed to take place. Silly but accomplished, this film is anything but downhill all the way.

Holidays (USA 2016: various directors) Anthology or portmanteau films seem to be in the ascendancy again. Unlike their 1960s/1970s precedents which were made by one director, the new batch are clearly a good way to show off the talents of a variety of contemporary film makers, most of whom seem to cut their teeth on short films anyway so it's not much of an effort to string a few together and call it a feature in its own right. To be fair many of the contributors to the zippy Holidays are well established film makers already, which perhaps explains why the segments - each of which is a different take on seasonal holidays eg Valentine's Day, Christmas, Hallowe'en etc - manage to be consistently good, and much less hit and miss than many similar movies doing the rounds in the last few years.

Standouts of the eight 'vignettes' are Gary (Dracula Untold) Shore's 'Happy St Patrick's Day' where spunky Ruth Bradley (great in 2012's Grabbers) is an eccentric schoolteacher who ends up pregnant with a something, Nicholas (The Pact) McCarthy's short and sharp 'Easter' where a little girl's fear of the annual visit from the Easter bunny turns into murderous reality, and Sarah Adina Smith's 'Mother's Day,' about a woman seeking medical help because she gets pregnant every time she has sex.

Having mentioned all this, Holidays is a rather gentle form of this type of movie. There's none of the over-the-topness of the V/H/S or ABCs of Death movies, but each story is well done, moderately diverting, and, oh yes, good fun.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (USA/Canada 2016: Dir: Oz Perkins) Perkins - yep, that is Tony's son - has two films streaming in the UK at the moment. February aka The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015) is a ponderous tale of evil stalking a girl's school. But this is a thrill ride next to his most recent offering, which is currently streaming on (UK at least) Netflix.

Ruth Wilson, who was so good as Jane Eyre in the eponymous 2006 BBC/PBS mini series - but who has taken some very strange roles since - adopts the same terrible US accent she deployed in the insipid Showtime TV production The Affair to play Lily, a young nurse sent a remote gothic house to care for elderly Iris Blum, a former author. Lily is a cynical young woman who is clearly only in it for the paypacket, but when she begins to read Blum's books out of boredom, she gets sucked into a world that may either be her own wild imaginings or the supernatural at work, featuring a character called Polly, which is also the name that Iris uses to address Lily.

IATPTTLiTH (whew, even the letters take ages to type) takes the bold step of trying to create a film where image is subservient to language. Its images are often little more than illustrations of the moribund voiceovers from Lily and Iris as her younger self. There's an almost Bergman-esque feel in the overlaying of characters here, and the movie - if that's not too grand a word - stretches ambiguity to breaking point. The attempt to make this a film that's read to the audience of course removes any frights and ultimately makes it a turgid chore. Like trying to read Henry James, when you really want to read M R James. I appreciate that Perkins is trying something different, but his succession of tableaux vivants left me completely cold.

Hush (USA 2016: Dir Mike Flanagan) Terence Young's 1967 movie Wait Until Dark and the 1971 film Blind Terror directed by Richard Fleischer both featured sightless women being menaced at home. Mike Flanagan's Hush maintains the same setup, but adds more violence and replaces the heroine's visual disability with hearing loss. Flanagan has scored highly with a run of fright hits this year. Ouija - Origin of Evil and Before I Wake are both competent horror movies (the former particularly good, rescuing the original movie from deserved obscurity) and Hush is similarly effective (it's probably no coincidence that the director has 'borrowed' the title from arguably the most frightening episode of TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

Kate Siegel (Flanagan's wife) plays Maddie, a deaf writer who lives on her own. She is a successful author and has adjusted to her disability after contracting meningitis as a child and going deaf as a result. However Kate's peaceful existence is shattered when a masked intruder kills a neighbour, then mounts a sustained cat-and-mouse style attack on her home. But unlike the heroines of the previously mentioned films Kate is resourceful and knows how to fight back, and it's this toughness that wrongfoots the viewing audience, who may have thought they were about to endure another helpless woman-in-peril flick.

Flanagan skilfully sets up scene after scene that in a weaker director's hands could have lead to second reel ennui. After all the setup - one man, one woman, one house - is quite limited.  Hush is an effective thriller with a strong central performance from Siegel, and it's good to settle down and be entertained by a director comfortable working in this field, and who knows how to skillfully manipulate an audience. Recommended.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe (UK 2016: Dir André Øvredal) A very effective low budget chiller about a

father and son autopsy team who, faced with the corpse of an attractive young girl with an unknown identity, gradually unleash an evil force as they go about their work.

UK made and co-produced, this is a far cry from Øvredal's previous feature, the well respected (which means I didn't like it) found footage monster movie Trollhunter back in 2010. The sense of fun that inhabited that film strays into TAoJD too. Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch, playing the father and son team Tommy and Austin Tilden, have an easy camaraderie which makes their characters believable despite only the slightest of backstory brushstrokes. The director boldly restricts all the action to a couple of rooms in the team's mortuary, and when the scares arrive Øvredal is careful not to resort to an over the top firework display, but rather continues the 'onion skin' approach to telling the story, revealing more and more details as the autopsy progresses. Again it's a risky step to have so much of the movie's content centred on an inanimate body, but it works.

As some other critics have commented, this is little more than a (pun intended) fleshed out TV episode, but it's a never less than watchable offering from a director who should by all rights be making films more often, and whose next project, Mortal (about a young man discovering he has Norse god like powers) sounds like one to watch. 

Broken (UK 2016: Dir Shaun Robert Smith) This is an extremely odd and sadly only partly successful film by a UK director whose background is in horror. Broken isn't a horror film per se but it has the feel of an urban fright flick.

John is a former rock star who is now a tetraplegic following a chemically enhanced jump off a tall building, and unable to do anything for himself - at the film's start he calls out for assistance, having just soiled his bed. He is angry and egotistical, requiring 24 hour care. Evie, one of his carers, has come to the UK leaving a dark past behind, but the level of abuse she suffers from John, and also John's ex band member and all round nogoodnik Dougie, leaves the audience wondering how bad her past experiences must have been for her to tolerate the present situation. John's nihilism, fed by booze and drugs supplied by Dougie, turns the house into a 24 hour party zone in which Evie tries her best to do her job. But her past will not leave her, and Evie's need to remain professional approaches breaking point. 

This is a powerful, angry film, low on budget but high on raw performances. Mel Raido as John and Morjana Alaoui (who electrified as Anna in Pascal Laugier's 2008 film Martyrs) as Evie deliver very different but equally strong performances. John's drab, squalid house, now taken up with all the accoutrements of 24 hour medical care, is a dismal battleground for the war of will between patient and carer (although I did have a little trouble accepting that this was the home of a former successful rock star). 

Broken's conclusion is well signposted and, to be honest, something of a letdown, coming at the end of an otherwise very tense but authentic film. There was, arguably, nowhere else to go with the story and I don't blame Smith for his decision. This film is a cry of rage although an internally directed one - Broken isn't an indictment of this country's care system, but it sure is a movie that makes you think very carefully about ever working in it.

Delusion (USA 2016: Dir Christopher Di Nunzio) plus short interview with the director

Anyone worried about 'the state of cinema' would do well to look past the popcorn fodder that fills the multiplexes, which represents only a percentage of total film output, and search out the plethora of independent movies currently available to view, although not necessarily on cinema screens. Christopher Di Nunzio's Delusion is a fine example of a movie that knows the limitations of its budget and instead works on creating a sombre downbeat mood which harks back to the regional indie US movies of the 1970s.

Frank Parillo is a lost soul. In grief over the loss of his wife Isabella, he's torn between cherishing her memory but wanting to feel a woman's love again. Belatedly receiving a letter from Isabella some three years after her death (a strange scene which shows, in his passive acceptance, how mired in grief he remains), which implores him to live life to the full, he encounters a strange and much younger woman, Mary. She quickly seduces him, despite a warning from a fortune teller that she is not what she seems. Frank's life begins to fall apart as he realises that the fortune teller is right and Mary may well be supernatural in origin. But by then it's too late.

Di Nunzio's short and full length film output has oscillated between supernaturally and crime themed movies, but all have been more character than narrative driven. 2009's Livestock mixed Sopranos-style gangsters with occult horror. His second feature, last year's A Life Not to Follow, was a fractured neo-noir tale of drug dealers and more gangsters. Frank Parillo, a tough, grizzled type with a New England drawl, could equally have stepped out of a crime movie. But rather than showing us a violent side, Parillo's actually a software developer (although we never see him at the day job). He's amiable but aimless, a man wandering through a life now without purpose, seeking an end to his grief.

David Graziano as Frank Parillo

Delusion takes its time in unveiling the supernatural elements of the story - when they arrive, they're delivered as matter-of-factly as the rest of the film, although we're not really sure what we're seeing. We learn that Mary has been spending some time 'in Mexico' and from various clues around the house it is assumed that she is connected in some way with the country's festival of the dead - but does she really exist, or is Mary simply a manifestation of Frank's grief? Delusion is leisurely and contemplative, but never boring - only the infrequent and bizarre dream sequences break the movie's overall pacing. I was reminded of early 1970s independent quasi-supernatural output like George Romero's Season of the Witch (1973) and the 1971 movie Let's Scare Jessica to Death, but also, via the roving camera of Nolan Yee and the naturalistic performances, Nick Cassavetes' slow, intimate dramas like Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence (1970 and 1974 respectively).

As Parillo, relatively unknown actor David Grazanio is a revelation, with a natural style and soporific world-weariness that makes him totally believable. His hangdog expression and yearning for a female connection make it quite understandable that he should fall for Mary's (Jami Tannille) chilly charms, even though the audience can see that she's T-R-O-U-B-L-E (her encouraging of Frank to live life to the full is of course a repetition of the advice of his dead wife, albeit with disastrous consequences). There are a number of supporting actors who don't do much but are crucial to establishing the movie's small town feel (Delusion was filmed on location across Massachusetts): Carlyne Fournier, as Isabella, is a standout, having the difficult job of conjuring up a believable character seen only in flashback.

Jami Tannille as Mary

I was sufficiently intrigued by Di Nunzio's output to seek him out and ask a few questions. The director was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts and attended film classes at Massachusetts College of Art, School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston:

DEoL: What was the genesis of the idea for Delusion?

CDN: It's hard to say because it evolved from an older script. I knew I wanted to make a film with more controlled camera movements and tell a more obscure story then I did with my last film. For me it was really about trying to control the emotional arch. 

DEoL: Your 2009 film Livestock and this one both have supernatural/occult themes but nothing is really made specific in either. What is it about this theme that appeals to you?

CDN: I've always been into the occult since I was a teenager. I remember staying up late researching all these different organizations and theories. I love the imagery and movies with that theme. I guess I have always been fascinated with the concept of hidden knowledge. I also like the idea that something supernatural could happen and you don't have an answer for it. It's refreshing and weird, things really do happen no matter what you believe in. It leaves a lot of room for interpretation. 

DEoL: Delusion reminded me of a lot of 1970s US indie low budget flicks. Were there any films (or TV, books etc) that you had in mind when filming Delusion?

CDN: I am a big fan of Let's Scare Jessica to Death and 1970s crime and horror films. It was a good decade for occult films but I didn't have any specific film in mind. Me and our Director of Photography Nolan Yee watched a few scenes from the films of Bella Tarr to get an idea of where we wanted to go with camera movement. Not that we're trying to do anything like those films but it's a fun way to get the conversation going about cinematography. I do like to help create organic and natural performances. I always preach subtlety as well. Not to sound clichéd but I feel like when you take that approach you find the truth in the character. I think the audience can sense that and helps them connect to the performance better, and that's always a good thing for a film. 

Christopher Di Nunzio

DEoL: The acting was uniformly good but David Graziano was a revelation - the way he combined grief, desire and overall world weariness was fantastic - also he could have stepped out of The Sopranos or a crime movie, except he's a software designer! Tell me about the actor and the character of Frank.

CDN: Funny you say crime film because David and I first started working together on a crime film I co-wrote and directed called A Life Not To Follow. He was recommended by a friend of ours, Skip Shea, and I thought he looked like a detective from a 70s film which made me want to cast him. I quickly learned he gives 110% and is very professional. He is always game to try something new. For Frank I wanted to create an average every day type of guy. Someone you can picture as an uncle, someone's dad or even a neighbour. I felt by making him relateable that way his journey would be that much more tragic. David and I talked a lot about the psychology of the character and what is going to happen to him and in concentrating on creating a natural, real performance we would add a lot of depth to Frank. I also gave David a piece of music that was 19 minutes of this weird pulsating sound, and at certain moments in the film I wanted him to play that song in his head over and over again. Almost like the powers were calling to him. 

DEoL: Could you tell me about some of the other casting choices and did any of the characters change from the original scripting when cast? 

CDN: Nothing really changed from the original script but of course some things naturally do change when making a film, like suddenly you want to have a character with an edge. Maybe you randomly thought up some sort of new trait or tick. Maybe you explore a different angle last minute. Something seems to always develop or changes but nothing too drastic to mention.

Jami Tannille who plays Mary was someone I saw in a film and really liked her look and thought she had amazing timing and screen presence. It would've been really hard to recast her. She has a lot of range. 

Carlyne Fournier, who plays Isabella, is someone I've seen in a few films and known for a while. I just thought she would be a great fit with David plus she's talented and professional. Also a lot of fun to have on set!

DEoL: My readers always like a few shoot details - could you tell me a bit about how long the shoot was, budget, location choices, any compromises etc.

CDN: It took us nine days to shoot the whole film. We had a lot of long days and one sleepover. There was also a month or so break in between. The house we used was in Cape Cod and belonged to our sound recordist Laura Grose's girlfriend's Dad. We were lucky to get the house since it fit the character Frank so well. We also shot all over Massachusetts and in Rhode Island. We shot at a diner in Gardner, MA that was also used for the film School Ties [1992 movie with Matt Damon and Brendan Fraser]. We also shot the little car chase scene in Ashburnham, MA which I had no idea was even a real town until right before we shot there. Pretty place but nothing around. 

DEoL: The film is streaming on Amazon Prime in the UK. Did it ever get a theatrical release? Also what are the future distribution plans for the film?

CDN: Unfortunately, it didn't make it into the theaters. As of right now it's just on Amazon Prime in the US, Canada, and UK. I'm not sure the exact strategy yet but our distributor will be releasing it on more platforms soon. They like to release it on Amazon first.

DEoL: What's next for you?

CDN: I'm trying to get a name actor attached and find funding for new feature crime film. It's about a hitman who had second thoughts about doing what he does and trying to walk away from it all. I have my fingers crossed! 

DEoL: Thanks Christopher and best of luck with Delusion and your future projects!

New Films Round Up #4 - Reviews of Abattoir (USA 2016), The Darkest Dawn (UK 2016), Antibirth (Canada/USA 2016), Satanic (USA 2016), Fear Inc (USA 2016) and The Devil Lives Here (Brazil 2016)

Abattoir (USA 2016: Dir Darren Lynn Bousman)  Bousman's movie, about a seemingly immortal man, Jebediah Crone, who feeds off the souls of murdered people by entrapping them in a constructed house made up of the murder rooms of each of the victims (a very cool idea), is based on a series of comic books also created by the director. A planned web series, turning Abbatoir into a multi-media spectacle, hasn't happened, but the whole concept is really interesting.

Jessica Lowndes plays Julia Talben, a reporter whose family are slaughtered in their home, and who, in investigating the deaths further with her detective accomplice Grady, finds a pattern emerging. Over the years houses which are the scene of murderous acts are quickly bought and then re-sold, with the rooms in which the deaths occurred removed first. Talben connects the dots which take her to the remote town of New English, which turns out to be her own birthplace too. Talben and Grady gradually piece the story together, encountering the evil Crone and his band of followers, and attempt to foil Jebediah's master plan. 

So yes, I liked this. It's packed full of ideas, some of which work and some don't (the initial faux forties look and dialogue is quickly and advisedly dropped - I'm sure it worked better in the comic strips - and some of the ghost effects at the end tip over into plain silliness) but it's wonderfully atmospheric with some well used Louisiana locations and a brooding score by Mark Sayfritz. Abattoir also fails to deliver the obligatory redemptive ending, hinting at the possibility of a sequel. Bousman's earlier work - including three installments of the Saw franchise and the over the top Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008) - have suggested a talented low budget film maker learning his craft. Abattoir, by no means a perfect movie, demonstrates skill with a small budget and a desire to try something new in a crowded genre market.


The Darkest Dawn (UK 2016: Dir Drew Casson) Impossibly young and possibly talented Drew Casson brought out the micro budgeted, derivative but still impressive Hungerford back in 2014. Tasteless title aside (Hungerford was the town where crazed inhabitant Michael Ryan killed and wounded more than 30 people in a gun spree back in 1987), the movie concerned an alien invasion straight out of Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, with alien beings attaching themselves to residents of the town and controlling their brains. The Darkest Dawn is set in London, and also deals with an alien attack across the UK and the efforts of a small band of survivors to escape from the Capital and head to Manchester.

The very impressive opening, with its post production scenes of mayhem - including an extremely believable plane crash - bodes well, but once Casson draws you in, the remainder of the film is an extended hike around Blighty with our bickering survivors. Central to this group is the plucky but irritating Chloe Murdock (Bethan Mary Leadley) who has captured everything we see on a digital camera, a present for her 16th birthday. So yes, we're in 'found footage' territory once again, which provides plenty of opportunities for Chloe to speak direct to camera, with messages for her (presumably now dead) family about how brave she's being in the face of all this alien adversity.

It's difficult to know quite what Drew Casson was attempting to achieve with The Darkest Dawn. There's nothing that audiences haven't seen many times before; it's perfectly serviceable but terribly drawn out, with only a few scenes of CGI mayhem to leaven the endless footage of people tramping around shouting at each other.

Antibirth (Canada/USA 2016: Dir Danny Perez) Oh lordy, this one's nuts.

Natasha Lyonne (yes, that Natasha Lyonne) plays Lou, a wild child who following an evening out in the company of a marine, passes out and wakes up the morning after, well, sort of pregnant, despite maintaining that they didn't do the nasty. Her friend and fellow substance hooverer-upper Sadie (played by Chloë Sevigny, yes that Chloë Sevigny) is little help, and when a pregnancy test confirms the chain-smoking, bong bashing Lou is definitely in the family way, she encounters the weird Lorna (played by Meg Tilly - yes that Meg Tilly) who may have an explanation for the weird thing growing inside Lou's stomach, involving secret experimentation on young soldiers.

If I mention that writer/director Danny Perez's first spell in the director's chair was 2010's Oddsac, a 54 minute non narrative film which was basically an extended video for wackjob Baltimore band 'Animal Collective' with whom he regularly collaborates, you'll get some idea that Antibirth is a film best viewed through, er, artistic lenses. Both storyline and the collected contents of Lou's stomach are metaphorically and literally all over the place. I loved the ending - there is a birth and it's twins...after a fashion - but a lot of this film is like a cross between a Frank Henenlotter movie and Jed Johnson's 1977 flick Andy Warhol's Bad. If you think that's a recommendation, well then it is.

Satanic (USA 2016: Dir Jeffrey G Hunt) Ah, PG rated horror films - they're great, aren't they? Well some are. This isn't. Jeffrey Hunt is best known for his work behind the camera on a plethora of US TV programmes, including several CSI spinoffs. This becomes painfully apparent in the endless drone and pan shots of the LA skyline at night, and the slick but flat TV style of his direction. The story is the opposite of a tidily concluded 40 minute drama that he would be used to making, and, let's be quite clear about this, makes absolutely no sense in its final stages.

A group of young people are taking a school break. Enroute to a music festival, they decide to turn dark tourist and travel to LA to check out the death scenes of victims of (real life) satanist Anton le Vey. Snooping around these sites they come across an actual black magic mass and help a young girl, Alice, to escape the coven's clutches. Instead of thanking them the girl utters some enigmatic phrases and then cuts her own throat. Now under police surveillance strange things begin to happen to the group - it looks like Alice was the conduit for the forces of evil which now threaten our heroes. I'll stop there, because at this point I lost any understanding of what was happening. There's some poltergeist activity, a turgid power ballad, a lot of screaming and one of those 'self reflexive' endings deployed when there's nowhere else to go plot wise.

I'll make one confession: I was kind of fascinated with Sarah Hyland, who plays goody goody Chloe (and is therefore destined to make it to the final reel). Hyland is a great comedy actress - her prissy, narcissistic turn as Haley Dunphy in TV's Modern Family is a delight. But as a yelling machine, she's just awful. With her large saucer shaped head and bulging eyes she's like a live-action version of one of Tim Burton's puppetoons. And while she and the rest of the cast use the F-Bomb like it's going out of fashion, they manage to drum up not one iota of drama. A bad bad film, and while I have a strict no spoiler policy on this site, don't look at the movie's poster unless you want to find out how Ms Hyland ends up.

Fear Inc (USA 2016: Dir Vincent Masciale) Here's an enjoyable horror comedy that out post moderns Scream and all its sequels. It's Hallowe'en and we meet Joe, who's the kind of guy you need on your pub quiz team if the bonus round is 'US horror movies of the last twenty years.' He's a walking movie guide, always out for a seasonal thrill. So when he finds out about 'Fear Inc,' a company who specialise in custom made pranks for punters who think they're hard enough, he's disappointed when, after making the call, he's told that they're 'sold out' and can't help him. Well that's their story. Shortly afterwards, relaxing at his Australian girlfriend's luxury house with his other mates, the terror begins, and the group are stalked and despatched in the manner of famous scenes from horror movies. Perversely Joe is delighted, but when his girlfriend is kidnapped and he's forced into some Saw-like decisions he changes his mind.

Fear Inc doesn't start very well, but the second half is a rather clever update of the 'do you like scary movies?' school of film making, which ups the pace and manages a good deal of tension as well as knowing humour. There's nothing particularly new in this, but there's some good performances and a couple of laugh out loud sight gags. There's clearly a moral here about the negative impact of a life spent consuming horror culture and the subsequent inability to separate reality from fiction, and watching Joe communicating entirely via lines of movie dialogue made this reviewer think twice about how annoying he might be when talking about films. Not bad.

The Devil Lives Here (Brazil 2016: Dir Rodrigo Gasparini and Dante Vescio) Gasparini and Vescio's debut feature - previously titled The Fostering - is a decidedly baffling story about the sadistic slave owner of an apiary who calls himself, no, not the Honey Monster, but the Honey Baron, and who is mixed up in all kinds of violent goings on. Two centuries previously the Baron was murdered by one of his slaves, and the illegitimate child he fathered is also killed. Following his murder the Baron's vengeful spirit is kept in check by descendants of the slave, but when a group of young people arrive at the house where an annual ritual of driving a nail into the ground keeps the Baron away, they are caught up in a web of terror. Or something. I had quite some difficulty working out what was going on.

The movie draws on elements of Candyman and The Evil Dead but the promise of a violent denouement presaged by the heightened score doesn't actually appear, and the merging of youth in peril, some rather ill advised comedy with a smattering of folk horror didn't really work. Pacing is a massive issue in a film which just tips the hour and a quarter mark, and although ambitious in scope for the budget, The Devil Lives Here really does crawl along.

I did like Pedro Salles Santiago's creepy soundtrack, a symphony of discordant notes and insidious scratching, and I can applaud the attempt to make something of Brazil's rich folk heritage and its troubled past as the backdrop for the horror. But it's a bit of a mess really, a film that tries too hard to be intriguing, and could possibly have benefited from a simpler premise and, well, more scares.