Can't Sleep, Clowns Will Tell Me to Kill My Mother, Can't Sleep, Clowns Will--

According to IMDB, Shattered Lives earns all of 3.2 stars out of 10. I suppose that means I’m supposed to hate it. Perhaps the fact that it involves a stormtrooper-like killer, a clown little person that speaks like Marlena Evans when she possessed by Satan on Days of Our Lives, and the most monotone child actress since Birdemic solidifies this assumption.

You know what they say about assuming. It simply doesn’t work when Emily gets to watch a movie involving little clown people and killer kids.

Quick Plot: We open on a drunken teen party being crashed by aforementioned stormtrooper wielding an axe. Flash back a few years to young Rachel, as blond as The Bad Seed and as sour as a Lemon Luden’s Cough Drop. Rachel is the only child of a miserably married couple who constantly discuss the fact that they are sad.

Sad, for Mom, apparently justifies having an affair smack in front of your child and calling her a little bitch when the kid has the nerve to tell your nice guy husband that, you know, there was a naked man in the shower. What would possess a daddy’s girl to spill the beans? Why, her clown dolls coming to life of course!

Letting your child play with a pair of harlequins just seems like irresponsible parenting, but considering mom’s methods include dragging her daughter to the park to “go play on the swings or something” while she makes out with her lover, it’s not surprising. As Rachel gets more and more stressed about her parents’ unhappiness, dolls Leelo and Melo (I think?) evolve into ghostly apparitions that show up to dance, stare, and threaten the poor little girl with mouth removals.

It’s incredibly creepy. Or really funny. Or very silly. Or maybe terrifying. 

I kind of have no idea.

It’s a bizarre description of a key ingredient in the film, and I realize that. When the figures first appear, they’re eerie. Then they open their mouths and sound, plain and simple, rather stupid. But they keep talking, having a lighthearted ‘we’re your TOYS’ conversation that, mid-sentence, turns into a threat to remove Rachel’s mouth from her fudging face. I will understand if anybody that has seen this film found these villains hilarious. I will also defend their rights to be scary.

As you might guess, encouraging a tattle is just the warmup for Rachel’s playthings. Their real game involves the biggest knife that Rachel isn’t allowed to play with, lodged, naturally, inside Mom’s cheating chest. 

This part of Rachel’s childhood makes up the first hour of the 90 minute Shattered Lives, and while it shows its amateur-ity and low budget, it’s also fairly unique and even, at least to me, unsettling. An odd choice is made in moving the action forward 10 years or so, skirting over what happened after Dad came home to find his daughter stained in her mother’s blood. Nah, why explore the resolution of that plot when we could just give Rachel a new tragedy to deal with for her post-high school life?

Shattered Lives is a strange film, which actually works well towards its benefit. There are plenty of straight-to-DVD horror movies about pretty urbanites hunted by hillbillies or zombies feasting on frat boys. With Shattered Lives, we never really know what’s going on, even though we know (based on the introduction) where it will eventually end. It’s incredibly flawed in its storytelling, but the movie has more ambition than is required and makes some fairly interesting and possibly, scary choices.

High Points

There’s some genuinely strong attempts to get inside the marriage of Rachel’s parents, leading to a surprisingly believable moment where her mother acknowledges that she’s just not living the life she thought she wanted

Low Points

...but then again, it’s hard to even care when said character has done just about everything but beat her daughter with wire hangers and slap her in the face with a handful of Comet

Lessons Learned

You should always do at least one fun thing a day. This is some ace life advice from Rachel’s dad, who also theorizes that married people fight all the time because that’s what marriage is

Despite the visual limitations of a gas mask, wearing one offers few drawbacks when committing multiple homicide

When your clown dolls tell you to stop asking questions, stop...asking...questions

Rent/Bury/Buy

I rather liked Shattered Lives, even though the sane film fan inside me knows it’s not necessarily very good. Even so, I admired the weirdness of it all. Writer/director Carl Lindbergh definitely needs some more practice behind the camera, but he clearly has some interesting ideas and isn’t afraid to throw some wackiness our way. I’m genuinely curious to see where he goes from here. The film is streaming on Netflix (which is, quite frankly, as much effort as you should put into acquiring it) so give it a try if you want something different and don’t mind a lot of rough edges. 

Also, it’s a must for fans of clown dancing. Just sayin’

NERD ALERT! Shock Value

If you're even a ticket stub-size as movie nerdy as I am, then you're most likely always on the lookout for a good physical BOOK (remember those?) about genre film. There are the personal library shelf standards--Carol Clover’s Men Women & Chainsaws, Kim Newman's Nightmare Movies or the Joe Bob Briggs canon, to name a few--along with less impressive works, generally those that aim for unworthy self-importance or offer nothing more than tidbits gleamed from a director commentary track.

TLC Book Tours sent me, and many of my favorite fellow film bloggers Jason Zinoman’s new book, Shock Value, now available from Penguin Press. Focusing on a handful of auteurs who helped shape horror as we know it today, Zinoman explores how American horror of the late 1960s and 1970s evolved past its playful, mostly innocent roots into something realer, bleaker, and deeper.

Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Dan O'Bannon, George Romero, Roman Polanski, William Friedken and Brian De Palma get the most attention as Zinoman’s writing shapes just how they came to make their flagship films. Yes, some of the anecdotes have been heard before in interviews and DVD extras, but Zinoman lays it out in a manner that's both comprehensive and interesting, lending insight into how everything from Craven’s strained relationship with his Christian mother to Hooper’s experience documenting a shooting victim’s death in an ER led to such creations as Last House On the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Virtually every horror fan with a DVD player knows about William Shatner's connection to Michael Meyers, but most have never learned the decades-long saga of John Carpenter’s frenemy-like relationship with his one-time collaborator and pal, the late Dan O’Bannon. O’Bannon, the superbrain behind Alien and creator of Return of the Living Dead, might very well be one of horror and science fiction’s most important figures of all time, yet it’s rare that the writer/director gets his due. Unlike most of the other directors on profile, Zinoman follows a large chunk of O’Bannon’s career, including everything from his work on Dark Star to how his Crohn’s disease birthed (pun sorta intended) one of cinema’s scariest scenes of all time. It’s refreshing to get a fair and multi-faceted portrait of a criminally underrated talent, even if it means making Carpenter, long-time hero of genre fans, come off as, well, a bit of a jerk.

For the other filmmakers, Zinoman narrows his focus to their earlier work, using the common misconception of Hitchock’s grandfatherly status in the new wave of horror as a starting point. "As influential as he was, the notion that Hitchcock is the inventor of the modern horror genre is overstated," Zinoman claims, citing the explanatory nature of Psycho’s coda as the exact opposite of what the Shock Value subjects did with their own nihilistic spins. The Exorcist is commonly referenced as the key representative of this brand of horror, but I’d never quite heard how Friedken’s interest in the work of minimalist playwright Harold Pinter lent so much to general structure and ambiguity of the film (something author William Blatty fought against and lost until the special edition released 20 years later). 

Some territory has been well-tread, including a few morally dubious tricks Polanski used on Mia Farrow during Rosemary’s Baby and how Gunnar Hanson was so miserable while playing Leatherface that he actually found himself wanting to hurt Marilyn Burns’ Sally. What Zinoman does well with some commonly-known facts is put them in context. To explain the evolution of how Rosemary’s Baby went from a gimmick-ready William Castle film to the Oscar winning classic it became while following it up with an examination of Peter Bogdanovich’s controversial yet rarely discussed Boris Karloff vehicle Targets helps to create a dynamic timeline of the new horror cinema.

A writer for the New York Times, Jason Zinoman clearly knows and cares for genre films, and it’s refreshing to hear a balanced but passionate voice on the subject. Though  his closing chapters feel a tad too dismissive of modern horror, Zinoman does make a strong case for just why these titans of blood and guts will probably never quite be matched. It’s not that their films are perfect (in fact, even the author seems to objectively point out one issue or another with virtually all of the touchstones on display here) but the mere combination of U.S. culture and the newfound independent market simply gave way to a type of filmmaking that tapped into something deeper than ever before or, so far, since. “These are movies that want to confuse you, in part because getting lost focuses the attention on the terror of uncertainty,” writes Zinoman. “They endure, like great art does.”

Shock Value isn’t the end-all for genre studies, but those on the lookout for a good read on the subject will most certainly find some new nuggets worthy of exploration. While there's plenty of ground around and within the films that could still use some attention, the book provides an interesting thesis on the development of modern horror while also offering a few new perspectives on classic and underlooked films.  It may also give you plenty to argue with, so pack some post-its in your beach bag and enjoy some summer reading the right way.

A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother (but that doesn't necessarily go both ways)

One of the biggest compliments I can give a film is to say that it made me want to seek out more by the people it involved. This is how I felt after watching Simon Rumley’s brutal Red White & Blue. I had problems with the film, but was nevertheless fascinated by his storytelling both on the page and the screen. 

Hence, when Netflix flashed the naughty little red warning that Rumley’s previous feature, The Living and the Dead, was leaving Instant Watch, I hopped to it.

Quick Plot: James (28 Days Later and The Fall’s Leo Bill) is a sheltered young man coping with serious schizophrenia. He lives in an old school mansion with his wealthy, but soon-to-be bankrupt father, his bedridden mother, and a few pieces of furniture that barely fill out the floor. It's a sad, small family facing disaster on several fronts and when Pops goes out of town, James seizes the chance to prove his independence by locking out the hired nurse and tending to his ill mother on his own.

Things, as you might expect, do not go well. James doesn't really understand what it means to be a caretaker, as evidenced by his thought process that if taking your pills helps make you feel better, taking them ALL AT ONCE should be the cure. The second act of The Living and the Dead is excruciating in an incredibly raw way, as James, for all his good intentions, puts his poor helpless mother through true hell.

Rumley also explored the relationship between a son and his ailing mother in Red White & Blue, and much like that film, that is the ultimate strength of The Living and the Dead. James isn't a bad guy. "I like people!" he tells his father, who replies with something truly heartbreaking: "Yes son, but they don't like you." Like Marc Senter's Franki, James hurts his mother when trying his best to save her. It's as sad as it is terrifying to watch.

Where I fell a little out of the film (and it should be said, where other reviews seem to think it shines) is during James’ more extreme descent into madness. Rumley pulls out a batch of tricks to try to put us into the mind of a schizophrenic, and while I have no idea how accurately the condition is portrayed here, I personally felt it was a tad too artificially constructed. The sudden mix of aggressive sounds and shaky camera angles came off more as a filmmaking tool than character point of view and it frustratingly took me out of a story that I had previously been fully invested in.

This isn't to shortchange the film, as some of the other posts I've read about it praise Rumley's use of style. If you’ll allow me a Gene Siskel moment, the issue I had was that at a certain point, I just wanted Rumley to follow a different story than what he’d planned. It’s still a unique and deeply effective film well worth a serious watch, particularly for its strong performances and hauntingly unusual imagery.

High Points

The austere mansion goes far in honing the atmosphere of The Living and the Dead, as the family’s surroundings come off as a tragic old school aristocracy slowly eroding with their current state. Wide open rooms are littered with a random artifact and no real personality from the people that actually live there, creating an empty shell of a home for an empty shell of a family

Low Points

As explained earlier, the extreme camera tricks didn’t work for me, perhaps because the more human narrative was just fine on its own

Lessons Learned

Only one, and trust me, that’s enough: the importance of those “I’m Falling And I Can’t Get Up” button things simply cannot be overemphasized

Rent/Bury/Buy

The Living and the Dead just left Netflix Instant Watch, but I’d still recommend a rental if the premise sounds like something you’re interested in. It’s a sad watch, but one made with innovation and, odd to say, heart. Based on this and Red White & Blue, it seems that Simon Rumley is one of the genre’s more interesting new talents, a filmmaker with a strong eye, interesting handle on style, and most importantly, a lot to say and explore. 

Forest of (Boredom to) Death

We’ve all seen M. Night Shamalaongadong’s The Happening. We’ve all learned the wonders of SCIENCE! and the horror of DYING BEES! and non-importance of sharing TEERAMEESUE! and, perhaps most importantly, the absolute wonders of something called a HOT DOG. If The Happening has done anything of note in the 21st century, that something is make it far easier for any other film to feature evil flora and come off with at least one compliment:

It’s better than The Happening.

Marky Mark almost always agrees with that statement

Quick Plot: An unusual forest is becoming home to a gaggle of suicides and a vicious rape-murder. When an investigating detective dies of a heart attack under the trees, a flighty reporter named May launches an exploitive news series on the forest’s mystical hauntings, trying her darnest to rein in some help from her botanist boyfriend Shu-Hoi, an obsessive man who’d rather carry out experiments in his greenhouse. A dead-serious female detective named Ha (stop it, it’s not funny) jumps on the case with some help from Shu-Hoi, dragging the sleazy suspected rapist into the woods with a gang of reporters where the trees somehow drag out a hilarious, condom-eating confession.

That’s about the first hour of Forest of Death, though it feels akin to three weeks and half a Monday. This is a slowwwwwww film. And not an overly interesting one, despite the promise of evil forestry, ghosts, rape, and condom snacks. 

The idea of a botanist hero is fun. But Shu-Hoi is not. He’s a handsome enough scientist, but saddle the poor nerd with a shrewish Gale Weathers-lite girlfriend and it’s hard to really like him. As Detective Ha, Shu Qi is easily the most interesting character onscreen, but it’s a shame that the film feels the need to hint at a relationship that’s never actually there between her and Shu-Hoi. It’s like Forest of Death made a bold decision to feature a strong female center, then remembered she was attractive and hence warranted a tepid love triangle. It’s somewhat insulting.

There’s also the matters of storytelling and pacing, something Forest of Death seems to make up as it goes along. Once the main crime is resolved (rather hilariously, might I add), the film just kind of limps along for another half hour. It’s as if you entered a wave pool where the waves were REALLY rough, then it was time to turn it off and you hung out, eventually realizing the waves would never come back on because the person that pushes the wave button is taking a really long lunch. So you leave. And the credits roll. And Emily is left feeling very unhappy.

High Points

I like the idea of these three stories--Ha’s investigation, May’s sensationalist reporting and Shu-Hoi’s plant talking--and how they could interweave. It’s certainly not a bad starting point for a film...

Low Points

...except Forest of Death never does anything interesting at all with them

Lessons Learned

Hong Kong journalists are, on average, 17 years old

Post-coital secret sharing only works when you or your partner enjoy the coitus

Lab plants dig a good funky beat

Rent/Bury/Buy

Meh. I watched Forest of Death because it was expiring on Instant Watch and now that it’s gone, good riddance. This isn’t an awful or incompetent movie, but I personally kind of sorta really did hate it. Slow, plodding, aimless, and somehow unoriginal despite being about lie detecting plants. Hardcore Asian horror enthusiasts might still appreciate some of its aspects, but I’d much rather pop in Little Shop of Horrors and recall my childhood crush on Rick Moranis than sit through this one again. 

Then again, I kind of ALWAYS want to watch Little Shop of Horrors and moon over Rick Moranis’ adorableness, so perhaps that’s an unfair comparison. Here’s a better one: I’d rather watch William Friedken stumble all over a tree lover-themed horror film in The Guardian than rewatch Forest of Death. 

Heck, I’d rather watch William Friedken eat a condom than rewatch this movie. I’d rather--

I’ll stop before I say something illegal. We’ll leave the last word to Oscar nominee Marky Mark:

The Good, The Bad, The Weird, The Rogue Cinema, The Shirley

New stuff 1: Girls On Film
New episode time! My fellow movie-loving ladies and I gathered around our SKYPE-ready devices to discuss the New Zealand modern classic, Once Were Warriors (starring Jango Fett! and technically Boba Fett and every Stormtrooper on the Death Star if you think about it...) and Kim Jee-Woon's hit Korean western, The Good, The Bad, The Weird. It's two hours of movie talk for your ears and fear not: any dead air is carefully filled with discussions about bras. And occasionally, cats. Primarily because I realized that Korean actor Kang-Ho Song (Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance) is pretty much the human personification of Mookie, at least when he's playing the shlumphy chubby dude in films like The Host.

Trust me on this.

Head to iTunes to download the newest episode or stream it fresh over at http://girlsonfilm.podomatic.com

New Stuff 2: Rogue Cinema 
The new July issue is blazing through the Interwaves, so head over for lots of indie film talk, plus three of my own reviews for the short film Quick Shop, the collection of not-safe-for-vegetarians shorts, The Collective, and a tattooee's worst nightmare, Degenerates Ink.

New Stuff 3: Shirley
West Virginian flea markets are a world unto their own, a magical universe that can be filled with anything from hand-carved coffee tables to hand-made fireworks. I recently had the pleasure of spending the most important dollar of my life on the following:

I have dubbed her Shirley. No, I do not know her history, which includes who fathered her brewing baby or where her shoes went. But I do know that she now lives in the Doll's House with such other doll-esque luminaries as the Moscow-grown Yolki Polki Goldenberg...

Creepy Sister Selden Thrift

and the freakish thing purchased from a now deceased dollar store

Here's a closer thing at The Greatest Thing Ever

Unlike the others, I'm pretty sure I won't wake up to find Shirley hovering over my bed with a knife or mace in her hand. She's got more important things to worry about, right?

Horrible Non-Horror! Sunday School Musical

I see no shame in film studios doing their darnest to make a buck. It’s a business and for every artEEST’s creation so concerned with quality over commercialism, there are rightfully 23,894 more movies that I’ll willingly give some of my paycheck to, be they The Running Man or Grind.

College phase, what can I say.

Enter The Asylum, the 21st century’s answer to Roger Corman if Roger Corman simply took every successful film two weeks after its release to create a ripoff with a rhyming title. Rare is it that a studio is so proudly honest about its purpose in life, that purpose being spending less than a month putting together something that can kinda sorta be called a movie and releasing it upon a public that might be easily enough fooled into accidentally renting it.

To my limited knowledge, Sunday School Musical is The Asylum’s first entry into the apparently ripe-for-the-picking Christian music market. Add the tie-in of Disneyfied tweens looking for a quick fix and you should have an easy gift certificate of 90 minutes.

Of course, it would help if you cast human beings that actually had pulses.

Quick Plot: Zach is a choir star about to take his team to Regionals (or something; the movie may be pre-Glee but it’s much easier to translate it to New Directions’ terms). Disaster strikes when his mother informs him in the most casual and rushed manner ever that she has lost her job and must therefore IMMEDIATELY relocate the family a town (and church choir!) away. Note that this conversation is spoken in the calmest of manners, as if it’s not supposed to upset Zach in the slightest.

See, Dad’s oversees in the military which leaves us knowing one of the three subplots will eventually unfold:

1-He’s heroically killed in combat at a key point in the film

2-He’ll show up in a proud American uniform just in time for Zach’s big solo

3-He gets eaten by a giant octoshark

If only the DVD included a Choose Your Own Adventure/Final Destination special feature that allows you to alter the reality of the film with your own decisions. Sigh.

Zach ends up in Lameville High where the glee club/choir is very white and tone deaf. Led by Savannah, an Evangeline Lily lookalike without a soul, the group begs Zach to bring his slightly more interesting style to their harmony. Despite a mildly villainous choir nerd and a hard-nosed biblical studies teacher (which, I assume, is the worst sort of biblical studies teacher there is), Zach fits right in, much to the chagrin of his old ethnic pals.

Let’s talk, if you don’t mind, about those pals or more specifically, the non-Showgirls actress with the Showgirls name, Krystle Connor. Connor (not Gina Gershon) plays Dre, the ‘star’ belter of Zach’s old club. We can agree, of course, that cinema history has produced some low energy performances--you know, Kate Bosworth in Superman Returns or Marlon Brando or anything after 1985 that didn’t have a donut-and-cheese-stocked Craft Service Table. Connors makes these people look like they’ve just bathed in a fountain of Red Bull while snorting the leftover stash of Jesse Spano’s caffeine pills. It’s like director Rebecca Goldberg scouted her cast by visiting local school detention sessions and picking whichever delinquents’ parents were willing to sign the consent forms.

By now, you’ve realized that Sunday School Musical is not a very good movie. It proudly joins the ranks of such other Horrible Non-Horror! classics as Tiptoes, Cool As Ice, and another faith-heavy affront to the senses, The Blind Side. Let’s examine why:

-Scenes of dialogue as riveting as the following:

Zach: Hey, how’s it going?

Savannah: Fine

Zach: Is everything okay?

Savannah: Yeah...it’s okay.

End. Scene.

-Scenes that are randomly cut at beats that do absolutely nothing for anyone, leading me to wonder if Goldberg has ADD or narcolepsy

-The fact that not a single performer registers as ever caring about being in a movie. Not-Evangeline Lily does summon a liquid substance to secrete from her eyes during a sudden dramatic scene, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it was due to pepper spray or onion scented contact lenses. Lead Chris Chatman isn’t offensively bad, but this is an actor who should probably be cast as the best friend or pizza delivery guy henceforth. 

-The major save-the-rec-center drama is so tired, it literally yawns, falls asleep, snores, and wakes up forgetting what it is. See, Dre’s church is in danger of closing because not enough people are dropping their savings into the collection plate. Zach decides to unite the two choirs for the big competition--which apparently features a $10,000 first prize, something we discover (after it happens) is JUST enough money to keep the church doors open. The brainy quiet girl assures them that it’s perfectly okay in the handbook, but once the team arrives at the competition, the judges decry that it’s not. Rather than open the rule book to cite how IT’S PERFECTLY OKAY, AS WAS ESTABLISHED BY THE DIALOGUE, the choir sighs, quote scripture--

I know, I said it too. THE RULE BOOK SAID IT WAS PERFECTLY LEGAL SO WHY NOT OPEN THE BOOK AND SHOW THAT AS SUCH?

Here’s why, intelligent audience member: the screenwriters have a Thor ripoff to pen, so let’s pull a Footloose and call it a wrap, ‘kay?

The kids get to perform non-competitively, but they are so spectacular (not really) that the winning choir just HANDS THEM THE CHECK. Yes, the $10,000 check which saves the church, lets Zach tepidly kiss Savannah, and signifies the roll of credits.  

Come one people. At least High School Musical had prominent bedazzling. 

Rent/Bury/Buy

Your enjoyment of Sunday School Musical will depend on a few factors:

-Your opinion of lifeless musicals

-Your love of cheap teen drama

-Your level of alcohol consumption

It’s bad in a laughable way, but also rather dull for much of its running time. To me, the absolute blankness is incredibly entertaining in itself, but obviously, such emptiness might not suit your style. If it does, bless your heart and enjoy.