You're Next

(2013, Dir. by Adam Wingard.)

The bar of expectations has been set pretty high for You're Next, a film that debuted on the festival circuit in 2011, was lauded as a great new horror film, and then was bought up by Lionsgate - who promptly put it on a shelf for nearly two years. But, now that the film has finally seen a release - a wide release, at that, which already makes this a huge win for independent horror - I'm ecstatic to confirm that there's definitely something special about You're Next.

From the writer/director team of Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard (who wowed me with the dramatic horror tale A Horrible Way to Die and had their hands in the anthology hit V/H/S), the film tells the story of a large family that meets in a secluded country home to celebrate an anniversary and be systematically killed off by a trio of invaders in animal masks. (They obviously didn't plan for the latter, but it wouldn't be a horror movie if the characters' plans went just right.)  When I saw A Horrible Way To Die I noted that these filmmakers managed to bring a fresh approach to the torture-centered horror formula that has been popular of late, thanks to their focus on character and desire to create characters before killing them, and You're Next definitely succeeds in the same way.

The cast is pretty fantastic within Barrett and Wingard's film. It's led, for all intents and purposes, by a young Austrailain actress named Sharni Vinson, who plays the girlfriend of one of the sons and proves to be more than just a pretty face in a crisis. She's surrounded by many friends and associates of the filmmakers, including the same trio that carried A Horrible Way to Die (AJ Bowen, Joe Swanberg, and Amy Seimetz, each of whom has been heavily involved in the independent horror community both in front of and behind the camera), plus two experienced talents as the parents of this clan, Rob Moran and horror icon Barbara Crampton.  The fact that so many of the characters have experience directing horror must have made the process easier for all involved, but it's also worth noting that the actors all seem comfortable in their roles and definitely don't take anything away from the film. Small roles by other directors (like The House of the Devil's Ti West and The Last Winter's Larry Fessenden) should make horror nuts smile, and one sequence discussing underground film festivals had me laughing out loud when the character played by Swanberg (who particularly stands out as a performer in the film) dismisses the indie scene at the dinner table.

You're Next isn't exactly a character piece, but it doesn't jump straight into the fire without giving us reasons to think about who these people are and why they're here. We learn little pieces about each character through the family interactions early in the film, and most of these little reveals have an effect on how things play out once the assailants make their move on this family. The initial onslaught from the killers is handled fantastically, and I was shocked or surprised several times once the attack began. There are a few surprising moments of brutality that I think will stand up next to some of the great shocks in horror history, and I even found that the film's "anything goes at any time" approach reminded me of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre.  There are at least four or five moments in the first half of the film that honestly caught me off guard, which four or five more than most horror movies I see can claim.

The intensity is so great throughout the first forty minutes of the film that it's almost a given that there's going to be a slight let down. I won't go in to plot details, but there's definitely a point where a revelation occurs and the tone of the film shifts strongly. That doesn't mean the film loses its edge, but the knowledge that the viewer gains at this point takes a little bit of the unpredictability out of the film. Wingard and Barrett still keep the film moving at a pace that had me on the edge of my seat and still offer plenty of brutal (and sometimes cathartic) violence, which means that the film doesn't really suffer too much. But I couldn't help thinking that the film explained away to much too early, and that there might have been a few more white-knuckle moments if the film hadn't given away a little information.

But the change in tone - which may have just occurred in my head, who am I to tell you what tone you'll get from the film? - is only a minor quibble with the film. The characters that we spend the most time with - particularly Vinson and Bowen - are wonderfully realized and You're Next always keeps us engaged in what's going on. After the early tension and the mid-film action it is a relief that the final scenes seem to sum up everything perfectly, which is just another reason to be impressed by the vision these filmmakers had for their film. Questions in our head get answered, but the film still manages to move on at a pace that kept me anticipating the bloody twist that was going to happen next.

I slept on the movie to collect my thoughts after the late night screening, and all day long I've been grinning about how much fun I had watching this bloody story unfold in front of me. Those who crave horror that is both brutal and intelligent should definitely see this one as soon as possible, and they should also be prepared to look over their shoulder a few times on the way home. You're Next might get under your skin, and if it doesn't I'm willing to bet it will at least give you a few good thrills.

 

Midnight Movie of the Week #190 - X-Ray

Whenever I think I have the slasher genre figured out, something like X-Ray comes along and reminds me what I reluctantly love about these little pieces of horror trash. It's a formula that was abused and recycled so much in the first half of the 1980s, and yet once in a while the pieces just come together right and something ridiculous just becomes that perfect diversion.  This one, originally titled Hospital Massacre, fits that description perfectly.

Playing off several of the slasher's staples - childhood trauma that sets up adult madness, focusing the events around a holiday or major event, characters who don't believe anything's wrong and die for their ignorance, etc. - X-Ray tells the story of a woman named Susan who goes to the hospital for a check up and becomes the target of a madman in surgical scrubs who is killing anyone who might let her leave the hospital.  It's a silly premise, even by slasher standards, but it really sets up some entertaining carnage.

 Like any good slasher film, we learn there's a killer long before the lead character does, which allows the film to mix splatter and plot development early on. The opening sequence, set around young Susan (played by little Elizabeth Hoy, who also starred in the sleazy MMOTW pick Bloody Birthday) and an angry/murderous classmate, lays some pretty big clues out regarding what will happen next and ends with one of the most unique deaths from the slasher movement. And, like most flashbacks to childhood that open slasher films of the early '80s (there are more of them than you think), it's forgotten for most of the film once time jumps forward.

The adult version of Susan is played by former Playboy Playmate and Hee Haw co-star Barbi Benton, who is a surprisingly adept final girl. I'm not saying Benton should win Oscars or even some of those less prestigious film festival awards for her performance, but the weight of the film is on her and she manages to look the part of a terrified victim throughout. She is given a character who makes some pretty bad decisions and is allowed to do some pretty stupid things - at one point she reveals her hiding place by obviously knocking a file off of a file cabinet and at another moment she frantically struggles with a door that reads "Please Open Slowly"- but this is a slasher film and thus such things are needed to push the plot forward. Nitpickers might find fault with the performance and the film's logic, but I'm not sure why such nitpickers would hunt down a film like X-Ray in the first place.

Keeping up with slasher standards also requires some blood splatter, and director Boaz Davidson (who would go on to become a pretty successful producer on films like The Expendables series, Drive Angry and The Iceman) doesn't disappoint. The film isn't a wall-to-wall bloodbath like some of its contemporaries, but it does have some well-timed kills and plenty of splatter. There are also a few too-graphic-for-The-Mike scenes involving needles - my personal cinematic kryptonite - including one during Susan's initial examination that almost made me throw up. If you're afraid of needles like I am, this film will give you fits.

X-Ray is far from being a great horror movie, but it's such a frantic and entertaining little film that I can't help but smile at it. Everyone is a potential victim - especially because every character seems to have no real personality - and the film manages to keep providing fresh ways to dispose of them while Benton runs through this hospital in fear. The hospital setting made me think a lot about Halloween II, and X-Ray's uptempo pace and over-the-top performances make it a cheesier alternative to that fine slasher sequel. Davidson knows how to provide pulpy entertainment to a viewer who just wants to have fun, and though X-Ray doesn't reach the ludicrous heights of something like Pieces it still manages to be a ridiculously fun slasher movie.

Midnight Movie of the Week #186 - Child's Play

It is impossible for anyone to be scared of Chucky like children of the early '80s are scared of Chucky. I'm not going to sit here and argue that the killer from the Child's Play series isn't universally creepy, because the idea of a happy-go-lucky looking doll who's a psychotic madman on the inside is pretty timeless. But those of you who didn't watch Saturday morning and/or after school cartoons at the time just don't know why us late '80s kids were so terrified when little Chucky started killing and swearing and being evil.  Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: My Buddy and Kid Sister.

If you were a kid of the era, the My Buddy/Kid Sister ad was the real world equivalent of the Silver Shamrock ad from Halloween III. That commercial was everywhere kids wanted to be, and the idea of owning a My Buddy doll that would be my best friend in the world was addictive in all the commercially wrong '80s ways.  Granted, the advertising was never enough to make me actually GET the My Buddy doll - Transformers and G.I. Joe figures were so much cheaper and awesomer! (Plus, us monster kids lucked out when we got My Pet Monster instead.) - but that didn't mean that I wouldn't see that ad three times an hour for what seemed like a lifetime and freak out about how awesome it would be to have a plush best friend in overalls. Every. Single. Time.

Which brings us to Chucky, and the realization that some sick bastard (in this case, Don Mancini) sat at home one day and said "I'm gonna turn that brainwashing commercial for kids into a giant nightmare" and cackled all the way to a hit horror franchise that has spanned nearly 30 years. Mancini actually has stated that his inspiration for Child's Play came from another doll of the '80s, the Cabbage Patch Kids, but it is still impossible for me to see an image of Chucky and not imagine My Buddy tenaciously chasing me around the house with a knife. (Because, as the jingle says, "wherever I go, heeeeee goes.")

Taking a look at the other side of the coin, you have to wonder how a movie could manage to make My Buddy scary - and the answer is the fantastic talent of Brad Dourif. I've seen Dourif in plenty of movies - both very good and very bad - but I only need two of them to convince myself that he's a talented man. This is obviously one of the two roles that defines him in my eyes, and the other is his turn as one of the patients in the true Hollywood classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It's a simplistic way of looking at things, but I'm convinced that any man who can go from bumbling mental patient with a heart of gold to cold-blooded killer in the body of a doll has to have some pretty incredible range as an actor.

Chucky is remembered as a wisecracking killer, much like Freddy Krueger, and like Krueger's films it's sometimes hard to remember that Chucky was birthed from a pretty serious horror film. There's a bit of humor that comes naturally throughout the movie - a lot of it due to the innocent performance by young Alex Vincent as the child who owns Chucky, a lot of it because it's hard to take a 3 foot doll in overalls too seriously - but Mancini and director/co-writer Tom Holland do good work to keep this film tense and serious. The change in tone for the sequels makes sense - less talent involved would lead to a heavier reliance on the simple charms of a killer doll who spews one-liners - but the original film focuses in on the voodoo origins of the possessed doll and lets the child's mother (Catherine Hicks) and the detective on the case (Chris Sarandon) push the movie forward as a (mostly) serious piece of murderous horror.

I'm not sure Child's Play really stands up as "scary" - I like to think of it as a fun-filled horror film that belongs with the likes of Tremors and Gremlins - but Holland and Mancini's film is consistently entertaining schlock. But the thing that's always pushed Child's Play to a special place in my mind is my memory of being indoctrinated by that darned My Buddy jingle, and I have a somewhat twisted respect for Mancini and company for turning out something like Chucky. One of the great skills any horror storyteller has to have is the ability to take the normal and make the audience reconsider it, and few movies have ever destroyed something peaceful in the name of killing as well as Child's Play does.

Midnight Movie of the Week #134 - Blood and Black Lace

Mixing some overbearing music, lighting that randomly covers every color in the rainbow and - at least to us Americans - some incredibly stiff dubbing, Blood and Black Lace might not seem like a must see piece of horror history.  Some might argue that the film is little more than a cheap detective picture that looks like it was shot in a whorehouse. And when I put it that way, it sounds like a crappy flick.  Luckily, I'm the crappy one here - because I'm not the guy who can put all those elements together and somehow make something that's insanely fascinating.

That guy would be Mario Bava, whose films (along with Dario Argento's) reside in my mind as Italy's most valuable export.  Bava's a director who made a living by combining beauty with death, but he's never pulled this off just as well as he does in Blood and Black Lace.  There's an unhealthy dose of sleaze pouring off the screen - you could probably guess as much from the title - but there's trickery in his work too.

The film's debauchery begins as it follows a bunch of models and a bunch of men as a faceless killer moves about their house of fashion.  The house is large and full of mannequins and pretty people, but also the whole place is lit up like that scene in Vertigo where we see Kim Novak's silhouette against a dark background while the green light from the hotel sign pours in through her windows.  (Yes, that was literally the best way I could describe the lighting in this film. If you haven't seen Vertigo I can't help you here.)  I look at the cast, and I look at the setting, and I sit there and I think to myself "My God, if Bava was young and working today he'd probably cast porn stars in his film."

Of course, this is 1964, so Bava's brand of pornographic horror is incredibly tame compared to our times.  Clothes are ripped and lace is exposed, but nothing more than that.  There's an element of sexuality throughout the film - the black lace part of the title wasn't about doilies - but its an undercurrent for most of the movie.  The final act picks up the frantic sensuality of what is going on in the film's mysterious plot, leading to some hammy overacting as the film reaches its finale.

While the plot and motivations behind Blood and Black Lace could also belong to a late-night Cinemax presentation, it's Bava's ability to make all of this sleaze seem so artistic that makes his film something special. I mean, I freakin' compared it to Hitchcock earlier! Do you have any idea how much it means for me to compare something to Hitchcock?  It's a shame that copies of Bava's films are so poorly preserved, because I can only imagine how great this thing would have felt on a fresh print and a big theater screen.

It's unfair to say that the visual component is Blood and Black Lace's only redeeming factor, because Bava also seems to have strong control over the pace and tone of his film.  It's hampered by some production values and age, but the nuts and bolts are all in place and the final coat of polish over what we see leaves the film looking like a winner.  Blood and Black Lace is a simple proto-slasher with some Scooby-like detective moments, but it's also a piece of seedy art that provides a fantastic horror viewing experience.

FMWL Indie Spotlight - Rites of Spring

(2011, Dir. by Padraig Reynolds.)

Ever have one of those moments where you can't decide if a film is really good or just doing stuff you've seen before well? That's kind of where I'm at with Rites of Spring.  There are elements of a lot of different movies wrapped up in one package here, which sent my mind going in two different directions.

Part of me was quite intrigued by the film, because it seemed to deftly move between different elements of the story several times.  The opening of the film explains the odd disappearance of several people in 1984, and tells us that more and more people have disappeared throughout the years.  We're introduced to an old man who is praying to something about a ritual and a young woman who encounters a surprising terror outside a bar. And then, without warning, we get caught up in the middle of a kidnapping film.

I'm a big fan of films that manage to braid genres into one thread, and Rites of Spring succeeds in this regard.  Criminals hiding out around killers isn't new - it's happened in movies like 1974's Axe to 2004's Malevolence and plenty of times elsewhere - but director Padraig Reynolds manages to really tap into two different worlds at times.  There are scenes with the kidnappers - headlined by one of those "everyone has a gun" standoffs that are always cool - that remind of '70s crime films and feel very authentic.  At the same time, the other side of the film takes off on its own path.

Anessa Ramsey stars as the young woman who finds herself at the mercy of "The Stranger" who intends to carry out some blood ritual - yeah, this is actually a double kidnapping film! - and her performance stands out because it feels genuine.  By frantically moving through the film, continuing to run despite the horrors she encounters and never seeming to break from her mental faculties - the actress reminds of Marilyn Burns in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre by showing fantastic resolve and making the viewer root for her.  The film also reunites Ramsey with her co-star from The Signal (and recent indie horror MVP) AJ Bowen, who gives another low key performance that fits the film perfectly.  Acting is often a sticking point in slasher films, especially independent ones, but Rites of Spring definitely gets more from its cast than most.

But there's still that other side of my mind - the one that wasn't sure if Rites of Spring was really breaking any new ground.  It's easy to see that there's a lot of talent involved in this film - it's one of the more polished independent films I've seen in a long time - but I couldn't help feeling that it was a little too basic as the plot moved on.  I'm not sure I was surprised by anything I saw in Rites of Spring, as there are some effective moments of suspense, but nothing in the plot that really pushes the film to a new or interesting place.  Those who have seen farm based horrors - think Texas Chain Saw Massacre or (on a much lesser note) Jeepers Creepers - will probably be pretty prepared for what they'll see in Rites of Spring.

I really want to like Rites of Spring, and I can't stop myself from suggesting that horror fans should at least give it a try.  I wish there were a few more twists and turns to keep it interesting in the final act, but Rites of Spring still presents some solid tension and moments that remind us why the best slasher films work.  Part of me thinks it's a much better film than I'm giving it credit for - I watched it twice in a few days because I wanted to believe it was something special - but I just can't get behind it entirely yet. But, I do get the feeling that I'll watch it again to see how much I like it then - so maybe it really is on to something.

Since I don't know whether I love Rites of Spring or am kind of disappointed by it, I leave the verdict up to you.  The film will be available in select theaters and on VOD services nationwide starting this Friday, July 27th via IFC Midnight.  In the meantime, head over to the film's official site and find out more about it.

(And when you do watch it, come back here and tell me what you thought! I'm interested to hear what others have to say about this one.)