FF09

Yes, Fantastic Fest ended almost two weeks ago (has it been that long already?), but just because the fest is over doesn't mean the HorrorSquad coverage has to end.

Salvage, Directed by Lawrence Gough, 2009
A shipping container has shown up on the shore of a small, isolated village on the UK coastline. Said village is under quarantine, which is a bit of a problem for Beth, a single mother who spends too much time at work and not enough time with her estranged daughter who got dropped off at her doorstep right before the quarantine was underway. Making matters worse, when a commando unit shows up to enforce the quarantine, it becomes clear that its not a virus that has the UK government so freaked, rather it's some kind of cognizant, escaped mutant.

Lawrence Gough's film has a decent premise and a less-than-stock dynamic between its characters, but Salvage is ultimately a rather generic horror movie hurt most by a monster at its core that is really not all that monstrous thanks to flat design and uninspired camera work to showcase it. Great performance by lead actress Neve McIntosh, but her gutsiness isn't enough to save the film from the clutches of mediocrity.

Ten years from now, 95% of the human population has been transformed into vampires, with those few uninfected survivors evading capture as best they can and those already captured being farmed for every last drop of their blood. However, supplies are dwindling, substitutes aren't working, and vampires who are driven by starvation to feed on one another tend to mutate for the worse.

This is the world of Daybreakers, a more ambitious and straight-faced follow-up than anyone might've expected from the Spierig Brothers in the wake of their cheeky low-budget aliens-and-zombies debut, Undead; better yet, it's a smarter and more refreshing take on the vampire genre than most of late, and a solid action flick in its own right.

Time for some rumor control. Contrary to what one would assume watching The House of the Devil, writer-director Ti West does not have the power to bend time and space to his will. Ti West is not a time lord, he is a mere mortal like the rest of us, he just happens to have the ability to make a film that lives and breathes as if it fell out of a wormhole from 1983. Plenty of horror directors attempt the throwback film, but few pull it off and even fewer pull it off as convincingly as West has with The House of the Devil.

Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is an impossibly cute college gal dying to escape her slovenly roommate. In order to afford the too-good-to-be-true rent on an apartment she's just discovered, Samantha has to, against her better judgment, answer a Babysitter Wanted flier pinned to the ad board on campus. The man on the phone (Tom Noonan) is a little creepy and a little too eager to find a babysitter on the night of a rare full lunar eclipse, but that's just something Samantha is going to have to put up with if she wants to move out. So the ill-fated coed asks her best friend to drive her out to the isolated house in the woods, where things eventually prove to be even worse than Samantha imagined.

What follows is a remarkably restrained, expertly-maintained atmosphere of tension and dread that is in no rush to evolve from its controlled burn to full-on Satanic panic. And if there's anything that House of the Devil has going against itself, it's the fact that very little happens for long stretches of the film. Granted, this is liable to only be a problem for those who like their horror movies fast, quick and drenched in red, but for those among us who can appreciate a 95-minute film that remains wholly fascinating without exploiting any of the aforementioned qualities, House of the Devil is a near-perfect film.

I like that the original [REC]'s real-time unraveling of an apartment building under quarantine for a mysterious virus that turns the infected into fluid spewing, flesh clawing maniacs is logistically conducive to a sequel. I really like that returning filmmakers Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza can pick up from the second they left off and tell another (almost real-time) story still shot entirely in the first-person perspective without being confined to a single camera's viewpoint thanks to our new story proxies by way of a doctor and his four SWAT-team escorts. And I absolutely love how [REC] 2 not only upgrades some aspects of the apartment, of the virus, and of the victims, but it completely overhauls the presentation of the proceedings. Yet I still have one nag.

[REC] 2 is not scary. Not one bit, actually. Even after 4 or 5 viewings (and the American remake, Quarantine), [REC] still turns my circulatory system into a NASCAR event, but none of that pulse dominating terror and anticipation is matched in the sequel. But what Balaguero and Plaza don't deliver in the fear department, they deliver in the idea department. [REC] 2 may not be scary, but it damn sure has more concept and convention re-toolings than you can shake a rail-thin, pale-white, string-haired woman wielding a claw hammer at.

When I was seventeen years old I saw a midnight screening of the The Blair Witch Project in Sarasota, Florida at a tiny indie theater downtown. After leaving the film I went home to a pitch-black, dead-silent house, terrified out of my mind. Although no doubt bolstered by my post-film living arrangements, much of the fear drawn from that film comes from the cinema verite style in which it is shot. Not only are the characters in the film, but you, the viewer are as well, acting as a part of the story by seeing the action unfold through their eyes. It is real horror, and it possesses all the elements to construct a truly terrifying story.

This is one of the many, many reasons writer/director/editor Oren Peli succeeds so admirably with his film Paranormal Activity. Completed in 2007 and rumored to possess several different endings, this film, although not flawless, is as close to perfect as you can get with a horror film. The concept of the film is simple: a young woman, Katie, has been experiencing some rather disturbing paranormal events lately – odd bumps, creepy vibes, and, strange whispers in the night -- and her boyfriend Micah sets up a camera in their living room in an attempt to record evidence of paranormal activity. Although she firmly believes that what is happening is real, he is skeptical. But the camera never lies.

More horror movies come out per month than I have numbers for. Plot that out over a year and the number of titles becomes sheer cacophony. There is so much mediocrity in the world that a film must be either bolt-of-lightning brilliant or sack-of-hammers stupid to stand out amongst the din. The year is 2009. We've seen all we're going to see, right?

Tom Shankland thinks otherwise. Tom Shankland proves otherwise.

I'm not prepared to declare The Children "bolt-of-lightning brilliant," but it certainly is the most invigorating piece of horror I've seen since [REC]. That may not seem like a ringing endorsement, considering Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's Spanish powerhouse is barely two years old, but if one considers the hundreds upon hundreds of horror movies that have risen and fallen between the two, I'd call that a pretty strong compliment.

From the title alone one can gleam the conceit behind Shankland's film. No one ever names a movie after the component of the story that goes smoothly. Something is wrong with the children. We don't know what, the movie doesn't know what, but something is going to go wrong with the children.

Trick 'r Treat is the holy grail of Halloween themed horror films. Not because of the notoriously long path writer-director Michael Dougherty's film has had to take to finally get released (a refresher: TrT was finished and first shown back in 2007 and, despite an overwhelming reaction to its first public exhibition, proceeded to be locked away in a vault at Warner Brothers for unspecified reasons), though that did turn it into a rare find to be coveted. No, Dougherty's film is such a treasure because it is Halloween. It just had the misfortune of being born a decade too late, of being born into a time when studios only care about remakes or sequels and certainly not about anthology films. Dougherty had, as far as a studio is concerned, the audacity to finely craft, gasp, an original, American horror film.

Wrong-decade misfortune that may be, however, it's great to be able to say that Trick 'r Treat will still be watched on Halloween for decades to come. Those who love it, like I, will still be watching it with great devotion. Those who merely liked it will not be able to help themselves from putting it on as background to their Halloween parties. And those who hated it, well, those who hated it don't exist. They can't exist. To hate Trick 'r Treat would be to hate the entire spirit of Halloween, a spirit Dougherty apparently has complete domain over.

Set a film in Tasmania in 1822 with prisoners on the run as characters and, as far as my frame of reference for the story is concerned, you may as well be making a movie on a different planet. And yet with nearly 200 years and half a globe of separation between myself and this true story of cannibalism among escaped convicts, Van Diemen's Land still clawed its way under my skin. There's one particularly haunting moment that I found nearly unbearable to watch; what's amazing about that, however, is that Van Diemen's Land is not a gory horror show, and the particular moment in question arrives without a single drop of blood.

Despite the integral plot element of cannibalism, there's no abundance of body parts or organs floating about in Van Diemen's Land. In fact, the film is remarkably light on the red, and yet there are nerve-crushing moments in which all semblance of humanity goes out the window. That loss of moral compass in the face of survival is the cornerstone of this fact-based story about a prison break that went horribly wrong: Eight prisoners in a Tasmanian penal colony overthrow their sole guard only to learn that the coast isn't as clear as they thought, that their only true course of action is to either wait to be recaptured (and almost certainly executed) or flee aimlessly into the wilderness.

What ensues is the fastest case of survivalist cannibalism ever recorded. The script, written by Jonathan Auf Der Heide and Oscar Redding, is faithfully based on several confessions from the last man standing. This is not another Wendigo film about men who eat other men and gain their strengths. It's not a plane-crash story about unfortunate athletes who must devour each other or die. Van Diemen's Land is a gritty, manly, teeth-baring look at what happens when a group of people must eat one of their own to survive. Then tension comes from the basic animalistic imperative to survive at all costs ... not from the innate "grossness" of man eating man.